The Dawn of Innovation (5 page)

Chauncey finally enjoyed a crowning bit of luck. On his return to Sackets a week later, his squadron ran into a large British transport caravan,
guarded only by gunboats. The
Sylph
quickly rounded them up, costing the British a substantial shipment of military stores and 252 prisoners. The loss put Yeo in a rage, for as a British historian writes, he “had suffered a series of setbacks quite unlike anything in his career to date.”
²⁴

The truly momentous news of that fall, however, came from Lake Erie, for just before Chauncey and Yeo engaged in their September quasi-combat, news filtered in that Perry had cleared the British from the lake.

The opposing commanders on Erie, Oliver Hazard Perry and Robert Heriot Barclay, were both in their late twenties and both rising stars. Perry had been with Stephen Decatur, then a captain, at Tripoli during the Barbary War, and Barclay had lost an arm at Trafalgar. Both developed testy relationships with their respective superiors, Chauncey and Yeo, because they felt shortchanged on men and materials.

When Perry took command, he had the captured gunboat
Caledonia
(3), and a handful of other gunboats that Eckford and Elliott built at the village of Black Rock, on the Niagara River near the entrance to the lake. The British had three warships on the lake, with 38 guns between them. The American victory at Niagara in May, however, had chased the British from Ft. Erie, an artillery outpost that covered the lake entrance. With the fort in friendly hands, Perry could tow his little Black Rock armada onto Lake Erie. (The current flowing out from the lake, on its way to the falls, is very strong. The tow took several weeks with oxen and two hundred men pulling from the shoreline.) From there, it was a hundred-mile sail to a new American base at Presque Isle, near the present Erie, Pennsylvania. Barclay was prowling the lake to prevent just such a move, but dense fogs helped the Americans slip through.

Presque Isle was far from an ideal base. It was protected by a sandbar that allowed only five to eight feet of clearance: enough for a gunboat but not a warship. Perry chose it because it was the only protected harbor on the American side of the lake, but it meant that new warships would have to be lifted over the bar before they could get into action.

Barclay's position, despite his advantage in warships, was becoming untenable. He was dependent on uncertain supply lines that had been badly disrupted by Chauncey's raids on York. His supply problems were made much worse by Yeo's high state of nervousness, for he regularly preempted men and weapons that the Admiralty intended for Barclay.

Barclay maintained a watchful blockade much of the summer, while scrounging materials for a new 19-gun corvette, the
Detroit.
Perry stayed stuck behind his sandbar, building twin 20-gun corvettes, the
Lawrence
and the
Niagara
, armed almost entirely with carronades. For some reason, Barclay raised the blockade on July 29 and returned to his base at Amherstburg on the western end of the lake till August 4—just time enough for Perry to get his ships out. Crossing the bar was accomplished with “camels,” fifty-foot-long waterproof casks on each side of a ship's hull. The camels were filled with water and sunk; when they were pumped full of air, they raised the whole ship.

With Perry's fleet on the lake, Barclay was doomed. As shown in
Table 1.3
, even though the British had more guns, the Americans had twice the firepower, although concentrated in carronades.

 

Barclay retired to Amherstburg to finish the
Detroit
, while railing at Prevost and Yeo over his lack of men and supplies. The
Detroit
was armed mostly by cannibalizing guns from the Amherstburg fort; they were missing locks and had to be fired by flashing pistols next to their touch holes.
^e
Although Barclay also complained bitterly of the quality of his men, both forces acquitted themselves well. It was a close-run fight, one that Perry nearly lost and probably deserved to.

Perry maintained a loose blockade on Barclay's base at Amherstburg while the
Detroit
was being finished. Barclay finally brought his ships out for battle on September 9. Ready or not, Amherstburg was running out of food. The fleets spotted each other mid-morning the next day and cleared for battle. Barclay kept his ships in a tight line, while Perry, in the
Lawrence
, attacked with the weather gage, in a light wind, closing on a parallel line to get close enough to use his carronades.

Perry's line started with two gunboats with 3 heavy long guns between them, followed by the
Lawrence
, the
Caledonia
, the
Niagara
under Elliott, and then the rest of the gunboats. Perry's original line had the
Niagara
in second position, but he changed it at the last minute. The
Caledonia
, however, was a notoriously slow sailer: with Elliott keeping his third position, the
Lawrence
quickly pulled far ahead of the rest of the squadron.

Perry took a number of hits as he closed to carronade range. Then he stood broadside to broadside against the
Detroit
, the
Queen Charlotte
, and the
Hunter
for some two and a half hours
.
The long guns on the gunboats worked severe damage on the British warships—Roosevelt argues that they were decisive—but the British fire was concentrated solely on the
Lawrence
. Between the gunboats and the
Lawrence
's heavy carronades, the
Hunter
was put out of the battle and the
Detroit
and
Queen Charlotte
severely battered. But the
Lawrence
was a complete wreck—its sailing master called it “a confused heap of horrid ruins.” All of its guns were out of action and 80 percent of the crew killed or wounded, although Perry himself was unharmed.

At the point when the
Lawrence
was clearly lost, Perry spotted Elliott finally coming up, his ship still virtually unscathed. He promptly had himself rowed to the
Niagara
, sending Elliott back to organize the rest of the gunboats. Perry turned the
Niagara
directly into the British line, unleashing broadsides from both sides. It was over in another half hour. The
Detroit
and the
Queen Charlotte
, with nearly all their masts already down, became tangled with each other. Wallowing helplessly, with the
Niagara
coming about for yet another murderous broadside, both struck their colors. Barclay's remaining arm was shattered in a wound the surgeons thought was mortal, but he stayed on deck almost to the end. His official report read in part: “The American Commander seeing that the day was against him ( . . . [the
Lawrence
] having struck as soon as he left her) and all the British boats badly shot up . . . made a noble, and alas, too successful an effort to regain it, for he [changed ships and] bore up and supported by his small Vessels passed within Pistol Shot and took a raking position
^f
on our Bow, nor could I prevent it, as the unfortunate situation of the
Queen Charlotte
prevented us from wearing, in attempting it we fell outboard her.” A junior lieutenant, George Inglis, the only officer still standing, completed the report: “Every brace cut away, the Mizen Topmast and Gaff down, all the other Masts badly wounded, not a Stay left forward.... I was under the painful necessity of answering the Enemy to say we had struck, the
Queen Charlotte
having previously done so.”
²⁵

With the warships gone, it was a simple matter for the Americans to round up the rest of the British squadron. From that point, Erie was an American lake.

The victory on Lake Erie effectively cut off supplies to the interior of Canada. The British infantry commander on the spot, Col. Henry Proctor, correctly called it “calamitous.”
²⁶
Low on supplies and cold weather gear, and unable to defend Amherstburg, he burnt the base and began a retreat northeastward, to the fury of Tecumseh. William Henry Harrison took a
large force of Ohio and Kentucky volunteers in pursuit. Proctor fought an orderly retreat, but Tecumseh attempted to make a stand at the Thames River, where he was shot in the heart and reportedly skinned by Harrison's frontiersmen. With him died the idea of a northwestern Indian alliance.

Perry's courage was widely celebrated. He embarked on a national tour of parades and speaking engagements, and his victory became a fabled episode in elementary school textbooks. But the fact remains that the
Lawrence
and the
Niagara
, fighting together, greatly outgunned the British and should have scored an easy win. A vast literature sprang up on the questions of why Elliott hung back, for his record had been one of great boldness. Whispers of cowardice dogged Elliott throughout a long career, and Roosevelt assailed him for “misconduct.” (Elliott's explanation was that he had initially held to his position as instructed and then lost his wind, which is plausible. Perry never criticized him but omitted the usual praise in his report.)

But Perry mismanaged the fleet. In the age of sail, light-wind battles were stately, slow-motion affairs, and Perry had ample opportunity to regroup his line. Barclay wasn't going anywhere. As it was, Elliott's diffidence and Perry's solo heroics almost lost the battle and may have needlessly sacrificed the
Lawrence
's crew and officers.
²⁷

The 1813 sailing season on Ontario ended with Yeo blockaded in Kingston. Chauncey ferried troops for yet another misconceived infantry action, putatively against Montreal, and with much the same near-disastrous outcomes as in the previous summer.

The most ominous developments for Americans, however, took place in Europe. After Napoleon's disaster in Russia, the European wars had turned decisively in favor of the British and their continental allies. As 1814 opened with Napoleon all but defeated, the British turned with some pleasure to the task of inflicting punishment on the jackal former colony whose conduct had been “so black, so loathsome, so hateful,” as the London
Times
put it.
²⁸
There were large transfers of veteran ground troops
and ships and seamen from the European theater. Naval forces up and down the American coast mounted punitive search-and-destroy missions up rivers and inlets, culminating in the burning of Washington in the late summer.

On the lakes, British war policy expressly shifted to the offensive, with the objective of moving the Canadian border southward and eastward. Much of the current state of Maine was already under British occupation. Yeo radically scaled up his building program, starting on two outsized frigates with 58 and 44 guns, four large new gunboats, and a massive ship of the line. During the winter of 1813–1814, in a rapid-strike campaign, the British army under Gen. George Drummond retook virtually the whole of the Niagara peninsula.

The Americans were determined to hold fast. In January, Chauncey got another carte-blanche general order from naval secretary Jones: “You are directed by the President of the United States . . . to make such requisitions, take such order and employ such means as shall appear to you best.”
²⁹
The near-totally blockaded coastal fleet was stripped of crews, guns, and other supplies for the lakes, and substantial raises were granted to lake seamen and officers.

Both Chauncey and Yeo maintained a steady flow of alarms to their political masters, although Yeo—perhaps smarting from the naval failures of 1813—was much the more strident, to the point where Prevost felt constrained to correct his exaggerations. In truth, since Yeo did not wait for permission to start his winter build, he was months ahead of Chauncey (see
Table 1.4
).
^g
30

Yeo's two new warships, the
Princess Charlotte
and the
Prince Regent
, decisively shifted the advantage. Bulked up by 68-pound carronades and 32-pound long guns, total British throw weight was now about 1.6 times that of the Americans, and they even had an edge in long-range firepower as well. At the same time, large transfers of Royal Navy veterans doubled Yeo's manning complement and ratcheted up their skill level. The big force increment intensified pressures for success. The semiofficial
Naval Chronicle
pointedly hoped that Britons would “not again be distressed at the recital of misfortune or failure from want of long guns” but would rather “soon be gratified with the glad tidings that his [Yeo's] efforts have been crowned with success.”
³¹