Macdonough was a simple, unpretentious man, modest and self-effacing, and it may be for these reasons that he has never come into his own with the American people. "Who was Macdonough?" will be asked by most middle-aged persons who will ·remember that his name was once somewhere in their school histories, but who now carry with them that dim and ·confused mental panorama of their country's naval history which is the possession of most people who have been through college and then have gone into business. They may know the names of Paul Jones, Decatur, and Perry; but Macdonough's picture has faded out, and so has the part that he played. Yet his actual features are not lost; for they were painted by Gilbert Stuart and J. W. Jarvis, and by an Italian artist in Italy. He was light-haired and blue-eyed, tall and thin, with a narrow face and sharp nose. We are told that he had an expressive but remarkably placid countenance. He sailed many seas, fought hand-to-hand fights for you and me, was Stephen Decatur's favorite midshipman and helped him destroy the American warship Philadelphia when in the hands of the enemy-did all these things when under twenty-one, and his young renown flamed into a final burst of glory in a battle on Lake Champlain, which he conducted himself when he was only thirty years old; after which he was caught in the grip of tuberculosis and slowly succumbed to it, dying at the age of forty-two.
His right and title to our interest and our gratitude is that he prevented the absorption of the upper half of New York state, and probably of the lower half too, into the Dominion of Canada. He accomplished this by the capture of a British fleet of four vessels on September 11, 1814. To the average person, the most striking characteristic of Macdonough, next to his youthfulness, is his religious temperament. Indeed, in the matter of youth, he had already been surpassed by Oliver Perry, who the year before had taken a British fleet of six vessels on Lake Erie, when he was only twenty-eight years old. Macdonough was a member of the Episcopal Church, becoming a communicant of it after his first busy years afloat had been followed by a period of inactivity, during which he had prepared himself for the privilege of sharing in the sacrament of the Lord's Supper. His interest in his church was shown, among many ways, by his intimate knowledge of the Bible, with an especial predilection for the Epistle of James. He made a hobby of this Epistle which, he said, was written for men who followed the sea. On the Sunday before the fight in Plattsburg Bay on Lake Champlain, he quoted to a friend who had come on board the Saratoga, his flagship, the following expressions from James: "He that wavereth is like a wave of the sea driven with the wind;" and, "Behold the ships, which though they be so great and are driven of fierce winds, yet are they turned about with a very small helm." This seems to us today a strange sort of conversation for a young naval officer.
The matter of public prayer before battle on a man-of-war does not nowadays come within the range of probabilities, but in those days it was provided for even if not often practiced. This is shown by the prayer book of the Episcopal church which contained then, as it does now, a "Prayer to be said before a fight at sea against an enemy." "In the British Navy," says Masefield, when describing sea life in Nelson's time, "in some ships even as late as the battle of the Nile it was the custom for the ship's company to muster to prayers before going to battle." I find no instance of the recital of prayer on the quarter-deck of any of our ships-of-war until the youthful Macdonough made use of it on the day of his great battle in 1814. Private prayer, as opposed to public, before a battle at sea, has of course been often turned to by naval commanders both then and now.
It would be an interesting search, and one of enrichment to the searcher, to trace through our early naval annals the evidences of religious feeling shown by our commodores of those times. It is certain that in the days of sails, when craft were frail and the crossing of an ocean took weeks and months, there existed a craving among sailors to consign their safety to the hands of an Almighty. Coming down to more recent times, how many people are aware that the late Admiral Mahan was the author of one of the most spiritual and devout treatises on personal religion, which he called The Harvest Within? And, also, how many naval officers today remember that at noon on April 26, 1862, Farragut ordered all the officers and crews of his big fleet to return thanks to God for their safe passage past the forts of the Mississippi?
We can be certain that the religious faith of young Macdonough brought him (like Nelson before the battle of Trafalgar) upon his knees before he emerged from the privacy of his cabin on the day of his fight with the British fleet. There is no record of this, however; but there is a record of the following unusual occurrence; about nine o'clock of the morning of that day Macdonough mustered his dozen officers on the quarter-deck of the Saratoga and he and they all got down upon their knees while he repeated the regular prayer of the church from the Episcopal prayer book, ending in these words:
“Stir up thy strength, O Lord, and come and help us; for thou givest not alway the battle to the strong, but canst save by many or by few. O let not our sins now cry against us for vengeance; but hear us thy poor servants, begging mercy and imploring thy help, and that thou wouldst be a defense unto us against the face of the enemy. Make it appear that thou art our Saviour and mighty Deliverer, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”
It was, of course, in strict accord with the temper of Macdonough's mind that, after two and a half hours of fighting, ending in the capture of four British ships and twelve gunboats, he should send the following dispatch to the Secretary of the Navy:
“Sir; The Almighty has been pleased to grant us a signal victory on Lake Champlain in the capture of one frigate, one brig, and two sloops of war of the enemy.”
With prayer to God before, and thanks to God after, a bloody battle, we can easily believe that Macdonough's religion made him aim his guns, as he did on that day with his own hand, with a surer aim than that of the ordinary Christian.
To the naval critic there is something more conspicuous in Macdonough's career than either his youth or his religion, and that is his professional ability. In the term "ability" I include the quality of personal courage. Macdonough anchored his fleet of four vessels in a line bearing north and south across the mouth of Plattsburg Bay, and there waited for the British fleet to advance and attack him. That his method of compelling the form of attack, and his subsequent conduct of the ensuing engagement were of a very high order of tactical ability can be ascertained by reading the clear and able narratives of the battle given by such diverse writers as Cooper, Roosevelt, Admiral Mahan, and Henry Adams. To the last author, the general reader, as well as the naval officer, is especially recommended. These historians agree that Macdonough had a force inferior to his enemy's, and that he, though only with great difficulty, won a victory solely by reason of superior skill and judgment backed by an obstinate quality of courage that never flagged. Twice was he knocked down on his decks, yet in the last quarter of a very bloody battle he executed the clever and difficult maneuver of turning his ship about and presenting a new battery to his enemy, thereby changing what had been sure to be his own defeat into his own complete victory. It is no ordinary picture in our naval history that was presented that day to the eyes of posterity, when four defeated British commanders came together in a small boat alongside the United States ship Saratoga to announce their formal surrender. After climbing on deck, they took their caps in their left hands, and holding their unsheathed swords by the blades in their right hands, the handles towards Macdonough, advanced with bows, and offered their swords to the smoke-stained young officer before them. "Gentlemen," said Macdonough, "return your swords into your scabbards and wear them. You are worthy of them." We are told by William James, the English naval historian, whose rancor against America and Macdonough rarely permits him to tell the whole truth, that at this moment Macdonough confessed to Lieutenant Robertson of H.M.S. Confiance that if the latter's gunboats and cutters had properly supported him, "In that case," said Macdonough, "You must have perceived that I could hold out no longer."
There must have been something in the manner. of Macdonough on this occasion, some touch of grace, which won his victims, for it is recorded that for a little while afterwards they stayed on board his ship and walked up and down the quarter-deck arm-in-arm. When reading of this sword scene, one asks why no historical painter has ever discovered that it took place?
To understand the importance of this victory, one must read how it made useless an army of no less than 14,000 of the veterans of the Duke of Wellington. This army was a few miles away on shore, threatening the village of Plattsburg, and only awaiting what it expected to be the certain victory of the British fleet, before starting south on the conquest of upper New York and perhaps of lower New York too. But now that it was no longer to have unhampered transportation by boat for a hundred miles on Lake Champlain towards Albany, the hardy veterans of Wellington were required by the first principles of military strategy to beat a retreat into Canada, and did so on the very night of Macdonough's victory. This victory, says Admiral Mahan, "more nearly than any other incident of the War of 1812 merits the word 'decisive' "; and by decisive he means "not merely in relation to immediate military results but in relation to political questions involved in the pending negotiations for peace."
It is, perhaps, because the spectacular triumph of young Perry on Lake Erie had taken place a whole year before, that the sober and quiet young Macdonough's similar deed on Lake Champlain did not stir the popular heart to the tumult of applause which had greeted the earlier victory. Yet to naval officers, Macdonough's victory, as shown by professional analysis, was a greater feat than that of Perry on Lake Erie. As time went on, Macdonough's lack of a ready pen and a glib tongue did not tend to change the relative appeal to the public of the two young heroes. Macdonough was not a pleasing or an easy writer. His autobiography, written chiefly for his family, is only ten printed pages long and is an inadequate, disappointing, almost dull account of his life in the Navy from 1800 to 1822. Few midshipmen went through more thrilling experiences than he off Tripoli, but, compared with Commodore Charles Morris's narrative of the same events, in his delightful autobiography, Macdonough's story is threadbare. His self-effacement was one of his marked characteristics. When called upon for a toast at a dinner given in his honor a few days after the battle of Lake Champlain, he rose and drank, "to the memory of Commodore Downie, our brave enemy." Downie had been the commodore of the British fleet and had been killed early in the battle. If we could lay aside our admiration for Macdonough the fighter, we might the more easily perceive that his efforts both as speech maker and as writer were not inspired.
When Macdonough was going to die, he relinquished command of the Mediterranean squadron and took passage homeward in a merchant ship; but it was not granted to his longing soul to pass away in his native land. He died at sea a few days before reaching it. This was in 1825, and it was not until 1909 that a full biography of him was written by a descendant. Even Fenimore Cooper, who had the highest opinion of his abilities as an officer - higher than that of most of the officers whose lives he wrote, except Preble - did not, for some unknown reason, include Macdonough in his two volumes of naval biography. Theodore Roosevelt probably expresses the judgment of most naval students when he says that "down to the time of the Civil War Macdonough is the greatest figure in our naval history." But it is outside of his professional life as well as within it, that it is a tonic to an American to examine the character of Macdonough. His sincerity, his purity, his modesty, his courage, show him a man almost without a flaw.