The War of 1812 figures more largely in American than in British history because it was during that conflict that the U. S. Navy came of age. Ignorance about it in England, even today, is illustrated by the story of the American officer who twitted an Englishman who had never heard of it. Didn’t he know that the English burned Washington? “Good God,” replied the Englishman, “did we burn him, too? I know we burned Joan of Arc.”
For the British in 1812, it was a distant and somewhat inglorious episode in the life and death struggle against Napoleonic Europe. The largest army ever sent abroad was fighting under Lord Wellington in Spain. The Royal Navy at its maximum strength was blockading most of the European coastline. The demand on the ablebodied strength of a nation numbering little more than 8 million souls had reached the point of desperation. The Navy alone numbered 142,000 men—a third more than its strength today.
This unprecedented shortage of manpower explains the uncompromising attitude over the right to search neutral vessels which was maintained in the face of Madison’s expostulations. The British government never claimed the right to press foreigners out of such ships, only to reclaim deserters of whom, after 20 years of war, there were a great many. The barrel had been scraped by the press gangs in Britain. Any foreigner who volunteered was welcome on board, and any found on shore was pressed without much scruple. By 1812, a fifth of some ships’ companies was composed of foreign seamen, many of them Americans. Twenty-three men who claimed the United States as their birthplace fought in the Victory at Trafalgar.
Exactly how many were serving in the Royal Navy at that date it is impossible to say—probably between two and three thousand. If a man was a genuine citizen of the United States he could (with difficulty) obtain his discharge through his consul. Two such men were discharged from the Victory a month before the battle.
The problem was to decide who was really an American, since the citizens of both countries spoke and looked alike. A New York lawyer named Reilly was selling forged citizenship papers at two dollars a head. When a man calling himself Oliver Cromwell was found in London a week after his papers stated that he was residing in New York, it was obvious that his papers were forged, since the age of jet propulsion had not yet arrived. Innumerable tricks of this sort were played by deserters, who naturally changed their names and if possible their nationalities when they “ran.”
New York abounded in crimps adept at seducing men from their allegience [sic]. According to an affidavit signed by three British seamen, a certain David Reed used to supply a jug of milk punch “as grog was too common to offer them.” The men “found it very strong, but finished it at the repeated solicitations of Reed, who immediately filled it again.” After emptying five jugs, they were taken on board the President totally intoxicated. Commodore John Rodgers ordered them to take the oath of allegiance. Having by now sobered up, and having met others who had been brought on board by the same means, they refused. The Commodore quite correctly sent them on shore again, where they were promptly arrested for money due to the said Reed.
Sailoring was a much more international profession in those days, so we shall never know the number of British deserters serving in American ships under assumed names. What is certain is that a large proportion of the crews of such warships had served in the Royal Navy. Some of the guns on board the United States were named after Nelson’s victories, and when she captured HMS Macedonian, many of the latter’s crew recognized old shipmates among her petty officers.
Much light is thrown on a complicated situation—simplified out of all recognition in modern textbooks—by reading the memoirs of Samuel Leech, a surgeon’s boy on board the Macedonian. His book, Thirty Years from Home, or a Voice from the Main Deck, was published in Boston in 1843. It is essential evidence in the problem of finding out what sort of man fought in those famous frigate actions. Leech’s value as a witness is limited by the fact that he was writing in his old age for an American audience, but the impression made on him as a boy was so strong that we may accept his account of the severity of discipline which he suffered and the sort of men he sailed with.
Samuel Leech was a gardener’s boy at Blenheim, the home of the Churchills, when he decided to go to sea at the age of twelve. As soon as he shipped on board the frigate Macedonian, he was painfully disillusioned. Though never flogged himself, on account of his age, he suffered all the pain and humiliation of being “started” or beaten with a cane rattan or a rope’s end. There were a few illegally impressed Americans on board and many others, like himself, who wished to desert.
On Christmas Day 1812, two frigates met at sea. Those Americans on board the Macedonian were “quite disconcerted” when, instead of running up French colors as expected, the stranger proved to be Decatur’s United States. One of them asked to be taken prisoner before action commenced. He was ordered back to his post under penalty of being shot; the poor fellow was later killed by a musket fired by his own countrymen.
No wonder Leech says that many guns were deliberately misaimed or not properly loaded: “Many of our hands were in the service against their will; some were Americans, wrongfully impressed, and inwardly longing for defeat; while nearly every man in the ship sympathised with the great principle for which the Americans so nobly contended.”
Yet the crew “fought like tigers” for two-and-a-half hours before the English frigate was dismasted. Having lost a third of her crew, further resistance became futile against a ship “larger in size, heavier in metal, more numerous in men, and stronger built.”
As prisoners, the “Macedonians” were well treated. “All idea that we had been trying to shoot each other’s brains out so shortly before, seemed forgotten. We ate together, drank together, joked, laughed, told yarns; in short, a perfect union of ideas, feelings and purposes seemed to exist among all hands. I soon felt perfectly at ease with the American seamen and chose to mess with them.” Many old shipmates were recognized on board. One man met his brother, who advised him to enlist in the U. S. Navy, where his experience would soon make him a petty officer. “If you are a damned rascal,” replied the Britisher, “that’s no reason why I should be one.”
Young Leech was not made of such patriotic stuff. Back in New York, he refused an offer to be exchanged with an American prisoner of war and enlisted without demur on board the U. S. brig Syren, which was captured without a fight by HMS Medusa off the African coast a year later. He rightly feared that he would be hanged as a traitor, but the coming of peace saved him.
He returned as quickly as he could to the United States, where he became an American citizen and signed on as an Ordinary Seaman on board the 14-gun brig, Boxer. There he was disappointed to find the discipline just as severe as in a British warship, so that he soon “. . . felt as unhappy as when in the Macedonian. A more complete school for the practice of iniquity never existed than on board our brig. It sickened me of a man-of-war’s life.”
He was still under 30 when he left the sea to become a Methodist preacher and a tailor at Hartford, Connecticut. In his old age at Worcester, Massachusetts, he set down the impressions which the British and American navies had made on him when a youth. They are vivid and truthful enough to earn him more respect than the ambiguous course of his career at sea warrants. At least we may approve of the conclusion this Anglo-American seaman drew from his experiences:
“So close are the alliances of blood between England and America that it is earnestly desired they may never meet in mortal strife again.”