Naval Historians and the War of 1812

More than 175 years after the War of 1812, three 19th century authors, James Fenimore Cooper, Theodore Roosevelt, and Alfred Thayer Mahan, are still the preeminent naval historians of that event. Between 1839 and 1905, each made lasting contributions to the field in his own way.

Naval wars in the days of sail involved a theory and practice of ship construction, rigging and sail technology, the science of maneuvering, and a maritime dialect that was difficult for landsmen to understand. These skills are now irretrievably lost to all but a handful of our population. Many history teachers would be hard put to explain to a class the skills essential to “seeking the weather gauge” before closing with the enemy.

Perhaps we have come to a time when the war cannot be taught because we have lost the means of communicating how it was fought. It will be a real challenge to bridge this gap.¹ When historians undertake this task, time and again they must have recourse to Cooper, Roosevelt, and Mahan.

James Fenimore Cooper was the first and in some ways the best of the 19th century historians of the U. S. Navy. Before him came some men who scribbled, cut, and pasted, but none before him had created a comprehensive and coherent portrait of the American Navy from 1775 to 1815.² When Cooper published his History of the Navy of the United States in 1839, he was already an established writer who took pains with his craft. As one of the first men of American letters, he had over a period of 20 years Published a critically acclaimed variety of fiction and essays.

After being expelled from Yale for using gunpowder to blow the lock off a dormitory door. Cooper signed as an ordinary seaman on board the merchant ship Sterling for a year, then served in the Navy from 1808 to 1811 as a midshipman. On Lake Ontario, Cooper helped to superpose the building of the brig Ontario. This task completed, the Navy Department sent Cooper to Lieutenant James Lawrence’s Wasp in New York. Lawrence assigned Cooper the frustrating task of recruiting seamen in New York City. Cooper resigned his commission in 1811 to ^administer his deceased father’s estate and to marry Susan LeLancey, who made it known she did not want an absentee husband.

As the years passed, Cooper kept his eyes toward the sea and created America’s first sea fiction.³ He kept in touch with his naval friends and finally set himself the task of researching and writing the history of the U. S. Navy. The result was very different from what one might expect from the storyteller of the Leatherstocking Tales.

For a man lacking historical training. Cooper had an advanced idea of the historian’s role. In research, he used Primary sources and oral history whenever possible. He sent questionnaires to naval officers he could not interview so as to reflect differing viewpoints. He was widely read in the secondary sources as well. He judiciously compared Published sources with eyewitness accounts and arrived at his own judgment of events by careful reasoning and analysis of these sources.

Though his history-writing style is occasionally prolix, he avoided the hyperbole that other writers of his day fondly used. In writing history, Cooper shunned the popular tendency to place naval heroes on a pedestal. On the other hand, he was a man of his age. His theme, when it emerges, is the high character of the American naval officer. Those he admired were to serve as models for emulation.

The works of Cooper, as both novelist and historian, have been undergoing reappraisal for the past 35 years. He had been neglected, since the late 19th century, as a relic of the romantic era. The historian Walter Muir Whitehill, writing in 1954, was of the opinion that “there can be no question about the importance of Cooper’s place as a naval historian. He was, after all, the first to make any systematic attempt to cover the whole field from the earliest colonial sea fights onward.” He praised Cooper’s “detached and abstract impartiality” and his “dignified disregard of that which attracted popular attention.”⁴

This is an impressive statement when one realizes Cooper’s own capacity for invective and his willingness to attack opponents in pamphlets and in the law courts. For example, in writing about the 1813 Battle of Lake Erie, he chose not to take up cudgels against Master Commandant Jesse D. Elliot, the commanding officer of the brig Niagara, whom many officers had criticized for failing to support Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry’s brig Lawrence at a critical time. Rather, Cooper based his description on Perry’s earliest reports that praised Elliot rather than those he wrote later that condemned him. He defended Commodore Isaac Chauncey’s failure to cooperate with the Army in 1814 on Lake Ontario. He was but mildly critical of British Rear Admiral Sir George Cockbum’s behavior in the Chesapeake Bay campaigns of 1813-14 and was also evenhanded in his treatment of Captain James Hillyar's attack on Captain David Porter’s frigate Essex in Chile’s territorial waters. In accounts by other American authors of the day, these matters were treated with bias and indignation.

Cooper’s approach to naval history was, first of all, episodic and narrative. He dwelled on sea actions, related the role of principal officers, explained the methods of rating ships, and appraised the balance of the forces engaged in battle. With his own naval background and in consulting his human sources. Cooper arrived at penetrating evaluations of decisions and tactics. Of the three historians under consideration, he paid the most attention to the human factor, including biographical detail, to enlighten the reader. Good examples are his annotation portraits of Captain James Lawrence of the frigate Chesapeake and Captain Johnston Blakeley of the Wasp who was lost at sea after a very successful cruise in 1814.⁵

Cooper’s last contribution to the history of the War of 1812 was Ned Myers, or A Life Before the Mast. In preparing this work, Cooper interviewed Edward Meyers who had assumed the name Ned Myers during a career as a foredeck hand in American naval and merchant ships during the years 1805-42. Cooper had met Myers on board the merchantman Sterling. Their memories of that voyage lingered. In retirement, Myers wrote to Cooper, who was delighted to meet his old shipmate. After months of interviews, he wrote the “as told to” autobiography of Ned Myers and published it in 1843. Myers’s account of the campaign of 1813 provides a unique view of the fighting from the enlisted man’s “lower-deck” perspective. Cooper allotted almost one-third of the book to Myers’s War of 1812 experiences. Had Cooper lived to revise his History of the Navy of the United States, he would most likely have included the relevant portion from Ned Myers.¹'

Theodore Roosevelt’s The Naval War of 1812, published in 1882, was a product of an energetic personality and a brilliant, eccentric mind.⁷ His study of the War of 1812 had nothing to do with his academic work at Harvard. Roosevelt’s book was not, as some have thought, an expansion of his senior thesis. Roosevelt’s interest, as an undergraduate, lay in the natural sciences. He was, however, a voluminous reader in every area and enjoyed rowing and sailing.

The writing was not easy, for like Cooper, Roosevelt was untrained as an historian. Unlike Cooper, he was not a literary man, used to organizing and editing vast amounts of written material. Still, he developed a method to go with his obsession. According to biographer David McCullough, he “forced himself to master every nuance and technical term of seamanship ... he plowed through everything in print on his subject, tracked down original documents, amassed volumes of statistics on fighting ships, armaments and crews. He had started out knowing no more on his subject than anyone else and with no experience or training in historical research.”⁸ Then, too, there were the natural interruptions of family life. He was hard at work one afternoon, in the library of the Roosevelt family’s New York townhouse, when his wife burst in on his study and cried out to her sister-in-law, “we’re dining out in twenty minutes and Teddy’s drawing little ships.”

There came a time in 1881 when Roosevelt felt overwhelmed by his subject, perhaps because of the vast amount of research he had done. He and his bride Alice were in Europe on their honeymoon, residing in The Hague when his worries emerged. “1 have plenty of information but I can’t get it into words; I wonder if I won’t find everything in life too big for my abilities. Well, time will tell.”⁹ But help was near at hand in the person of Teddy’s uncle, a former U. S. Navy and Confederate States Navy officer, James D. Bulloch. During the war, he had successfully arranged for the purchase and outfitting in Liverpool of several ships that became Confederate high seas cruisers, including the Florida, Alabama, and Shenandoah.

Roosevelt spent several weeks receiving advice and sympathy in Bulloch’s company. Much encouraged, Roosevelt soon completed his work and arranged for its publication through the firm of Colonel George H. Putnam, a family friend. Coincidentally, Roosevelt “invested” $10,000 in Putnam’s firm as a “silent partner” in 1883. Whether this was a shrewd move to assist publication of his book or simply a means of creating income is unknown.¹⁰

Roosevelt’s approach to the War of 1812 was combative. From the earliest pages, he made it clear that he was out to square accounts with English author William James, whose history of the war he held in contempt for its inaccuracy and pro-British bias.¹¹ Although Roosevelt’s study is not without errors, it is basically reliable. He gave the enemy its due and strove, without entire success, to establish a fair and dispassionate view. We see this in his evaluation of James: “an invaluable work, written with fulness and care; on the other hand, it is also a piece of special pleading by a bitter and not over-scrupulous partisan.

Roosevelt lashed out at Cooper, in a condemnation that carried through until recent years. He acknowledged his debt to Cooper, backhandedly. James’s work, he wrote- can be “partially supplemented by Fenimore Cooper's Naval History of the United States. The latter gives the American view of the cruises and battles; but it is much less of an authority than James’, both because it is written without regard for exactness and because all the figures fo^r the American side need to be supplied from Lieutenant (now Admiral) George E. [H. 1 Emmons’ statistical History of the United States Navy . . . ,¹²

Roosevelt’s study of the war is indispensable for anyone working on the subject, but his opinion of Cooper is both unfair and inaccurate. It is one of the few times when the question of Roosevelt’s maturity becomes relevant. It is as though he felt the necessity to denigrate his predecessor in order to promote his own accomplishment. He wrote that much of the material in the Navy Department has never been touched at all. In short, no full, accurate, and unprejudiced history of the war has ever been written.”¹³

If he meant that Cooper and others had not used Nav) Department dispatches and commanding officers’ action reports, he was wrong. Cooper had access to the printed versions in Niles’ Register and other periodicals and officers’ retained copies of letters to the Department. He wrote letters to survivors, interviewed them, and his notes on these matters are contained in Yale University’s Beinecke Library. Recently, Edward K. Eckert’s otherwise informative introduction to a new edition of The Naval War of 1812 failed to examine Roosevelt’s opinion of Cooper and mistakenly calls Cooper’s work “pro- American but no more credible [than James’s].”¹⁴

To draw out the comparison, Roosevelt became exasperated with James’s description of American sailors’ “fear” because they used helmets and multi-barreled guns [probably a Chambers gun]. Roosevelt wrote: “such a piece of writing as this is simply evidence of an unsound mind; it is not so much malicious as idiotic . . . any of James’s unsupported statements about the Americans ... are not worth the paper they are written on.”¹⁵ Roosevelt had earlier claimed Cooper was less exact and much less an authority than James. Are we now to infer that Cooper’s writings were more “unsound,” “idiotic,” and worthless than James’s? Roosevelt’s narration and presentation of facts are sound, but in matters of opinion he partially undermines his own history of the war.

On the other hand, Roosevelt’s history is valuable for its attention to minor as well as major naval actions. He based his research on original documents sent from the Navy Department to the Astor Library for his use. Roosevelt proceeded carefully, comparing the American and British versions of each action. He took issue with his sources on occasion and did not hesitate to express his judgment of officers’ actions. He was as critical of Perry for his tactics as of Elliot for his failure to support his commodore. Commodore Sir James Yeo was as culpable as Commodore Chauncey for avoiding a decisive fleet action on Lake Ontario in Roosevelt’s view, though Yeo was instructed by Governor General Prevost’s orders to fight defensively. Roosevelt spent much time comparing the throw-weights of ships’ batteries and numbers of crew at the time of certain battles in order to refute James’s arguments. He also deplored the tendency of American historians to avoid censuring Captain James Lawrence for his flawed handling of the Chesapeake in her fatal combat in June 1813 with the Shannon. Where the common view was one of Lawrence’s extraordinarily bad luck, Roosevelt wrote that it was simply a matter of the Shannon fighting better, regardless of the usual American excuses.¹⁶

The Naval War of 1812 was generally well-received, and it was soon adopted as a text by the Naval War College in Newport. Written at the nadir of post-Civil War American naval power, Roosevelt urged that the moral of the War of 1812 was lack of preparation. Had the nation been adequately prepared, the war might have been forestalled or would have been fought with greater success on land and sea. Roosevelt was acutely conscious of the U. S. Navy’s weakness in the early 1880s and this informs his presentation.¹⁷

According to his memoir (1925), Roosevelt wrote The Naval War of 1812 not just for its own sake but as a means of drawing attention to the need for a stronger navy, so the nation could play a significant role on the world’s stage. In this sense he was a precursor of Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, whose own history of the War of 1812 had not been conceived when Roosevelt’s appeared.

Mahan commenced work on Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 in 1902. By the time it was published in 1905, he had reached the pinnacle of his career. Although a capable sea officer, he had early shown a preference for writing on naval history and strategy to the usual routine of command at sea.

He began to mature as a writer in the late 1870s. His first work, The Gulf and Inland Waters, the last of Scribner’s histories of the Navy in the Civil War, was published in 1883. In this book, Mahan showed his abilities as a practical historian, by using original documentation and writing to survivors, much as Cooper did, in order to reconcile conflicting accounts. His book was commended by others, brought him favorable attention, and began his remarkable career as a man of naval letters.¹⁸

In the early 1890s, he wrote his most famous books. The Influence of Sea Power on History, 1660-1783 and The Influence of Sea Power upon the French Revolution and Empire as a series. Mahan had intended at that time to publish a work on the War of 1812 as the third in his sea power trilogy. For many varied reasons, he put off the task for almost ten years. During that time, his friendship with Theodore Roosevelt blossomed in the mutual admiration of one navalist for another.

Mahan was curiously reluctant to confront the War of 1812. His comment in the memoir From Sail to Steam was apt: “I had foreseen that the War of 1812, as a whole, must be flat in interest as well as laborious in execution; and upon the provocation of other duty, I readily turned from it in distaste.”¹⁹ When he did get started, it took three years to obtain the result, and he was diffident about the effort even then, as he wrote to his old friend Samuel Ashe: ‘‘I am at present at work on the War of 1812. It is a very old story, often told, and not a brilliant episode, nor one of which as a whole the United States can be very proud. It remains to be seen whether I can give any such novelty of presentation as to justify another telling.”²⁰ With this attitude, one is surprised he finished the work. Yet he kept at it, and when the two-volume work appeared, some readers were critical. Theodore Roosevelt, whose own work preceded Mahan’s by 33 years, wrote: “I was as disappointed as you with Mahan’s War of 1812. He is a curious fellow, for he cannot write in effective shape of the navy or of the fighting of his own country.”²¹

At the outset, in reading Mahan’s 1812 study, one realizes that he is not only rewriting the history of the war but also searching for justifications of his theories of sea power. Hindsight plays a major role in this method. He opens his study with a ponderous discussion of the legal precedents for impressment of seamen and the economic necessity of Britain’s interruption of the American neutral trade to Napoleonic Europe.

Viewed from this distance, it appears that Mahan, in writing this study, was considering the possibility that Britain could soon be at war with Germany.²² The United States might again play the neutral role, an event which he, as an Anglophile, hoped to discourage. The causes of the War of 1812, for Mahan, were entirely maritime, and he justified the declaration of war against Britain, considering the humiliations borne by the United States. His criticism was most harshly aimed at Presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Madison for their ineptness in handling j the diplomatic aspects of the Chesapeake-Leopard affair of 1807, their failure to prepare for war, and their policies of commercial retaliation.

Mahan’s descriptions of the frigate engagements were brief, in contrast to his treatment of the diplomatic entanglements before the war. One gains a much better appreciation of ship maneuvering and the balance of the opposing forces from Roosevelt and Cooper. Mahan admired Commodore John Rodgers’s cruising strategy which forced the British to concentrate their own relatively weak forces during the first months of the war. Yet he was puzzled that Rodgers’s combined squadron was relatively unsuccessful in capturing enemy prizes, as compared with the single cruising frigates Constitution and Essex.²³ Mahan’s correspondence with Rear Admiral Stephen B. Luce shows that Mahan despised what he considered the “useless” spilling of blood in the high seas frigate engagements because there was no positive strategic result for the United States.²⁴

Mahan was at his best in demonstrating the strategic interrelationship of land and sea operations on Lakes Ontario, Erie, and Champlain.²⁵ Had the planned combined military and naval operations been skillfully and consistently carried out, American objectives might have been attained. Mahan was least effective in his account of the British 1813 and 1814 campaigns in the Chesapeake and seems to have been diverted from his analysis by the American propensity to trade with the enemy.

He also briefly suggested, without explanation, that the campaign of Vice Admiral Sir John B. Warren and Rear Admiral Cockburn in the Chesapeake ‘‘cannot be regarded as successful.”²⁶ Although this view could be contested by inhabitants from tidewater Maryland and Virginia.        Mahan may have been suggesting that the British should have brought larger land forces to cut communications between Baltimore and Philadelphia and hence New York, perhaps even repeating the invasion and occupation of Philadelphia as in 1777. Admiring British naval flexibility, Mahan emphasized the virtues of preparation, the disproportionate effect a few American ships-of-the-line might have had on British policymakers, and the effectiveness of the British blockade in 1813-14 in undermining e; the American economy.

In appraising the value of these authors, one is bound to acknowledge the worth of all three to a comprehensive view of the naval war. Cooper’s account thrives on action, is rich in biographical detail, and strives for fairness to both sides at a time when objectivity was the exception rather than the rule in histories of the second Anglo-American war. He, like Roosevelt and Mahan, recognize the weakness of the American position before the war but blamed Congress as much as presidents for that situation.

Roosevelt, using Cooper and James as foils, concentrated all his efforts on the war, wasted little time on i^ts antecedents (spending only half a paragraph on the Chesapeake-Leopard incident), and provided as much detail as possible in recounting the ship-to-ship combats. These attributes make his work, perhaps more than Cooper’s, an essential reference for those working deeper in the subject. If Roosevelt’s study is flawed by his aggravation with William James’s history. Cooper is a good antidote in his dispassionate use of sources. He, too, was familiar with James’s inaccuracies but chose to answer them, vigorously, in a separate piece.²⁷

Roosevelt’s work has enduring value for the student of the War of 1812, and it probably also had a lasting influence on the U. S. Navy in that it permanently focused Roosevelt’s attention on the issue of preparedness.²⁸ This preoccupation surfaced during his terms as Civil Service Commissioner, as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, and as President of the United States.²⁹

Without question, the utility of Mahan’s War of 1812 study is his view of the conflict’s larger issues and its strategic aspects, absent from Cooper’s book, though present in some degree in Roosevelt’s. Mahan never acknowledged Roosevelt’s contribution as an inspiration for his own approach to the War of 1812, although he most certainly knew the work and Roosevelt’s strong views on the subject. Luce had invited Roosevelt to lecture at the Naval War College, which he did in August 1888.³⁰ Although Mahan mentioned The Naval War of 1812 in a letter to Luce, it is by way of explaining that he “purposely refrained from studying his [Roosevelt’s] reasons till I shall have my independent conclusions.”³¹ This is a curious admission, possibly reflecting Mahan’s desire to distance himself from Roosevelt’s interpretation of events.

Each of the historians considered has a great deal to offer the interested reader. Cooper, especially, is worthwhile because of his long view of events, beginning with the Continental Navy and his familiarity with the Navy of his day. Cooper has been in shadows since Roosevelt and Mahan wrote their works, and it is time for historians to rediscover his naval writings.³² This having been said, it is also time to go beyond Cooper, Roosevelt, and Mahan. Naval history writing today is moving away from purely operational accounts. Nowhere is the need more evident than in the lack of administrative, logistical, political, social, and technological aspects of the Navy in most recent histories of the War of 1812. On these subjects, landmark studies remain to be written for most of the U. S. Navy’s early history.