Rule, Britannia? Not In My House
This day in American History.
August 2, 1812
Do you like to invest in scrappy upstarts? Do you overweight emerging market economies? Perhaps you would be interested in taking down a slug of the United States of America, circa 1800.
The battle for economic supremacy between London and New York has captured the attention of the financial press over the past year, but this long-running story is older than any journalist or publicly-traded futures exchange.
In the early 1790’s England’s naval supremacy was undisputed. Britain ruled the world’s oceans. Although the United States was officially neutral in the conflict between the British and the French, its mercantile class of traders were being preyed on by both European superpowers on the high seas. And given the pathetic state of the Navy, America was powerless to stop the predations. Until the Federal Government decided it had seen enough.
By the spring of 1794 marine insurance premiums were soaring, and on March 10, 1794, an act to Provide Naval Armament passed the House by a margin of 50-39. Senate passage quickly followed, and it was signed into law on March 27, 1794. A sum of $688,888 was authorized for the construction of Six Frigates. These ships, including the famous USS Constitution, were to play a pivotal role in the emergence of a new world power.
On August 2, 1812 the USS Constitution set sail from Boston, MA. The crew was bound for destiny, and in a scant 17 days the ship would engage the HMS Guerriere in a naval engagement that went down in history, “raising the United States in one half hour to the rank of a first class power in the world” in the words of Henry Adams.
On August 19th we will commemorate the actual date of the battle by sitting down with Ian Toll, the author of Six Frigates, The Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy. You might know Ian from his time spent covering the enterprise software and e-commerce sectors at Credit Suisse, Thomas Weisel and Alex Brown & Sons. A jack of all Wall Street trades, he even paid his dues working at the Federal Reserve.
With vacation season starting in earnest, his book could provide a welcome break from reading solely about the financial markets. And while we will save the Constitution’s battle with the Guerriere for its August 19th anniversary, the following passage might give you a taste of what you are in for…
At dawn on Sunday, October 25th, when the frigate United States was about 500 miles south of the Azores, the lookout hailed the deck to report a large sail on the weather beam, about 12 miles north. Though the Americans did not yet know it, the strange ship was the HMS Macedonian, a 38-gun frigate commanded commanded by Captain John Surinam Carden.....
The crew of the Macedonian were turned out in their best clothes, as was their custom of the Sabbath, including “black, glossy hats, ornamented with black ribbons, and with the name of our ship painted on them”.....
At 8:30 a.m. as the two frigates were closing, Macedonian made the private English signals. United States, ignorant of the countercode, answered by hoisting an American ensign at each masthead. A few minutes later, Decatur made an unexpected maneuver. The United States wore round and turned away from the wind. It almost seemed as is she was attempting to flee. As the Macedonian attempted to close the distance between the two ships, the United States kept two points off the wind, and as a result, Carden later reported, “I was not enabled to get as close to her as I could have wished”. In fact, Decatur chose his tactics deliberately. Knowing that his 24-pounder long guns would be more effective at long range than the Englishman’s 18’s,he kept the United States in a position to rake the Macedonian as she steered down on the American frigate’s starboard quarter.
You will have to read the book to cover this particular encounter, but we will whet your appetite. Subprime issues might be getting ugly, but naval warfare can truly be called hell…
As the United States’s heavy shot smashed through the hull of the Macedonian, “torrents of blood” ran on the deck and “the cries of the wounded rang through all parts of the ship.” One of the men stationed at Leech’s gun was struck in the wrist by a round shot; his hand apparently vanished, with a jet of blood suddenly appearing in its place. A Portuguese boy assigned to carry gunpowder had the bad luck to have a cartridge ignite in his hands. The explosion “burnt the flesh almost off his face. In this pitiable situation, the agonized boy lifted both hands, as if imploring relief, when a passing shot instantly cut him in two.” Men who were killed outright-and at least one who was alive but thought unlikely to survive-were lifted from the deck and thrown overboard. It was deemed essential to keep the area around the guns clear of bodies......
The British ship’s remaining rigging hung uselessly from the shreds of her lower masts. She would no longer answer her helm. Her hull had been punctured nearly a hundred times, and many of her guns lay dismounted on the deck......
The United States was barely scratched. She had suffered superficial damage to her rigging and shrouds, and only nine shots in her hull. She had five men killed and seven wounded.
We will stop there, lest we offend our British readers.
Please join us on August 19th as we chat with Ian Toll about his remarkable account of the founding of the U.S. Navy.
Ian received his undergraduate degree in American History at Georgetown University (1989) and his Masters in Public Policy from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government (1995).
Ian has pursued an interest in the “age of fighting sail” since reading Patrick O’Brian’s series of historical novels in the early 1990’s. Since that time, and in the course of researching Six Frigates, Ian has read hundreds of books on the subject and has delved deeply into the original documentary history of the early American navy.
A lifelong sailor, Ian has raced Solings, J-24’s, Swans, and other designs; and he has skippered cruising yachts of various kinds throughout the coastal waters of New England and the Caribbean.
Ian, his wife, Kathryn, and their son, Henry, divide their time between San Francisco, California and Chatham, New York.
Additional excerpts from Six Frigates
Until someone commits this remarkable story to film, you will have to be satisfied with scenes from the incomparable movie Master and Commander-The Far Side of the World
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