Charlestown Navy Yard Archives - New England Historical Society

The past is a foreign country. Once upon a time I drove up through Maine and across the border into the wilds of Canada to take part in a bicentennial War of 1812 conference at the University of New Brunswick in Saint John. The event was great fun, in part because it was surreal to hear people who mainly look and talk like you refer to you as The Other, a once and—perhaps—future foe.

Old Ironsides

It’s hard to imagine what happened back then. For example, British Loyalists who fled the United States after the Revolution stormed back across the border to sack Bangor, Maine. U.S. Army forces burned York, which is now Toronto. Britain’s Royal Navy blockaded the East Coast, shutting down crucial seaports like Boston and Newport. Redcoats landed in the Chesapeake Bay and burned the executive mansion, which we now know as the White House.

In our lifetimes the United States has always been top dog in the world. Canada has always been a close friend. And we have always enjoyed a “special relationship” with Great Britain. But it wasn’t always that way.

War of 1812 Redux

I encountered the War of 1812 again in 2015, when I had the privilege to deliver bicentennial remarks at the Charlestown Navy Yard to commemorate the last battle of USS Constitution, when our nation’s most venerated sail frigate defeated two British warships, HMS Cyane and Levant. The story of Constitution’s 1815 “dual victory” is an inspiring one. It shows that ship crews can overcome certain timeless difficulties of naval war through seamanship, gunnery, and sheer entrepreneurship. To the extent that we remember the War of 1812, we tend to remember it as a victory. That’s because the U.S. Navy won a series of one-on-one victories over the Royal Navy during the early going.

Visit Constitution today and the tour guides will tell you the vessel is Boston’s only undefeated sports team, at 33-0! In fact, Royal Navy ships took to cruising in squadrons to avoid being outgunned by 44-gun frigates like Constitution and their excellent crews.

The capture of the Cyane and Levant.

Constitution skipper Capt. Charles Stewart defeated Cyane and Levant one by one rather than blast away at them at the same time. Defeating one fraction of an enemy force, then turning to defeat the other fraction, is a timeless way to prevail when you’re outnumbered. Captain Stewart maneuvered his ship skillfully while taking advantage of a U.S. Navy technical advantage. Namely, American guns had longer range than the British navy’s. British captains liked to get close and blaze away—much as we saw Captain Jack Aubrey, a.k.a. Russell Crowe, do in Master and Commander, the wonderful naval epic that appeared in 2003. Stewart capitalized on that British preference and was able to hurt the British ships at a distance.

Top Gun

Stewart was able to maneuver Constitution to avoid being raked across the bow and stern, where wooden warships were most vulnerable. Instead he crossed ahead of and behind his opponents, raking them from ahead and astern. In one instance he ordered Constitution’s topsails taken aback—taking all way off the ship in a hurry so he could prevent Levant from crossing astern and engage from a position of advantage. The maneuver was reminiscent of Top Gun, when Maverick and Goose hit the brakes so the Soviet MiG will “fly right by” and appear in Mav’s gunsight. The contestant that does something unexpected and unorthodox gains a tactical advantage.

Being nimble and adaptive helps as well. Constitution suffered damage to her mainmast while pursuing the foe, compelling Stewart to order makeshift repairs and change up his tactics on the fly. He improvised and overcame. Both enemy ships struck their colors after a couple of hours of battle.

Theodore Roosevelt

That’s a rousing story, but the bigger picture is not so uplifting. In fact, both Theodore Roosevelt, a one-time assistant secretary of the navy and later a great navy president, and Alfred Thayer Mahan, the second president of the Naval War College in Newport, R.I., and probably the most influential naval historian ever, wrote histories of the War of 1812 precisely to debunk the popular legend that a plucky young United States had thrashed the preeminent sea power of the age. When remembering the War of 1812, no one should wave the foamy We’re Number One finger the way New England fans do in good years.

TR’s ‘Naval War of 1812’

TR wrote his history of the Naval War of 1812 while a senior at Harvard during the 1880s. It remains in print to this day. Mahan followed up with his own chronicle in 1905. For them the War of 1812 wasn’t a parable showing what America ought to do when facing a war at sea; it was a parable about what not to do. They pointed out that the U.S. Navy had success in the early going because the Royal Navy and British Army were fighting Napoleon in Europe. Britain could spare only a small fraction of its military and naval power for a sideshow here in the New World.

Battle of San Domingo, 1806 naval engagement in the Napoleonic Wars

By 1814, when the Napoleonic Wars were winding down, it could send much more of the Royal Navy’s fleet. After that the United States saw its navy and its merchant fleet—and thus most of its economy—shut down by an overpowering British blockade. American frigates like Constitution had a hard time even getting out to sea. The United States had unwisely failed to build a battle fleet in peacetime. Americans improvised a navy at the outbreak of war and talked themselves into believing they had won, on the cheap, with that makeshift navy.

No More Blockades

Not so, said Roosevelt and Mahan. They implored Congress, presidential administrations, and the American people to construct a modern battle fleet in peacetime so that no hostile power could again blockade U.S. shores in wartime. The U.S. Navy didn’t need to be a “navy second to none”—that came much later, during World War I—but it did need to be big and strong enough to be the master of the western Atlantic, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Caribbean Sea.

A modest fleet of 74-gun capital ships—the aircraft carriers or battleships of their day—could control waters here in the Western Hemisphere, American home turf. The United States didn’t need to outbuild Great Britain or anyone else. Britain presided over an empire on which the sun never set, and had lots of demands on its navy. All the United States needed was enough to handle whatever the British were likely to send to the New World.

A Pick-up Navy Won’t Do

So the two historians concluded that America didn’t need to bankrupt itself maintaining a navy—but it did need to invest enough to safeguard its coastlines, and thus the maritime trade that flowed through seaports like Boston and Newport. A pick-up navy will not suffice.

Lord Palmerston

Some good news comes out of the War of 1812 to go with the bad. British prime minister Lord Palmerston once declared that nations have no permanent allies, only permanent interests. That may be true, but the former members of the British Empire—the United States, Canada, Australia, India, and Britain itself—come awfully close to being permanent friends and allies. English-speaking alliances certainly date to World War II, seventy-five years ago. They arguably date to 1917, when the United States joined the Allied Powers to beat imperial Germany in World War I.

John Quincy Adams by George Peter Alexander Healy

And these nations have been able to work together on matters of common purpose for even longer than that. Animosity lingered for awhile after the War of 1812, but not for long. For instance, President James Monroe’s 1823 message to Congress—the same document that announced the Monroe Doctrine, demanding that Europeans keep their hands off Latin American republics that had won their independence—also reported that the U.S. Navy and Royal Navy were jointly patrolling the Caribbean Sea to quash the slave trade. (The Monroe Doctrine was really the handiwork of Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, another eminent New Englander.) Monroe’s message came just eight years after the Peace of Ghent, which brought the War of 1812 to a close.

Lady Thatcher

Margaret Thatcher, one of Britain’s longest-serving prime ministers, spoke at Tufts University in Medford, Mass., in 1997. Lady Thatcher rued the “rough patch” Britain went through during the American Revolution and the War of 1812. Fortunately, the erstwhile combatants soon smoothed out that rough patch.

Margaret Thatcher visiting the Kennedy Space Center in 2001.

The past may be a foreign country, but exploring it shows that peoples need not remain captive to old enmities.

The author of this story, James Holmes, Ph.D., is the J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I. He is the author of two books, Maritime Strategy and Red Star Over the Pacific. You can read his blog, The Naval Diplomat, here. This story was updated in 2022.

In 1874, Jesse Pomeroy was sentenced to death for murdering at least two children. For the next 50 years America was fascinated by the ‘Boy Fiend’ from Boston.

Jesse Pomeroy

At the height of his notoriety, Jesse Pomeroy’s name was synonymous with evil. He had a statue at Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors, a special gallery in the world-famous wax museum featuring murderers and ghouls. It was an era when the public was fascinated by murder, the grislier the more interest — for a time Jesse Pomeroy was a top celebrity criminal.

Pomeroy’s early years were conventional enough. His father, from Massachusetts, married his mother, from Maine. After bouncing around a bit, they settled in South Boston to raise their family. Jesse and his older brother Charlie were fairly standard kids, according to Pomeroy’s autobiography. They occasionally quarreled and skipped school to hang out with their dad while he worked at the Navy Yard. (Other versions of his story suggest a less fortunate childhood.)

Though Pomeroy would admit to a certain mischievous streak – like the time he lit off fireworks in school and was punished – he later insisted he was largely a good boy in his early years. The story changed in 1872, when he was 13.

Jesse Pomeroy Shows A Mean Streak

Beginning in July of 1871, a series of horrific attacks took place on children in Boston. Though the details have undoubtedly been mangled in retelling, the sensational nature of the attacks terrified the city. Young children – as young as 3 and 4 – abducted, beaten, stripped and left bound outside in the elements of the marshlands. Disfiguring injuries inflicted with knives and pins seemed intended to leave the children marred, but alive. None died.

Though their memories varied, a picture of the attacker began to emerge. The attacker was a boy himself, but older. As an older boy, possibly with red hair. Jesse Pomeroy had, ‘til then, not been accused of any serious offenses. People would recall that he could be rough when playing with younger children. But it hardly seemed to make him a suspect.

But when police took one of the victims through the schools, looking at the older boys in search of a suspect, he identified Pomeroy. He knew him, he would testify, because Pomeroy had one eye that was nearly white, the unusual feature that made him stand out.

Under questioning, Pomeroy confessed. He would later claim he was duped into it. Nevertheless, Pomeroy was locked up in reform school. His behavior there was exemplary. He seemed to have rehabilitated himself. After less than a year and a half, Pomeroy was sent home.

Mayhem Turns To Murder

Poster offering a reward for the capture of Jesse Pomeroy

Reward poster for capture of Jesse Pomeroy. Source: Boston City Archives.

Then, barely one month after Pomeroy’s release, in March of 1874, 10-year-old Katie Curran disappeared. Next, the body of four-year-old Horace Mullin was found on a beach, beaten and nearly decapitated. The city fell into a frenzy of fear. It didn’t take long for police to zero in on Jesse Pomeroy. They arrested Pomeroy for the murder of Horace Mullin, but the evidence was flimsy. A witness had seen Pomeroy, or someone similar, and a boy headed toward the beach.

With renewed public anger at the Pomeroy family, Jesse’s mother, Ruth, had to close up her dressmaking shop, where her son Charlie also sold newspapers. When new tenants moved into the building on Broadway in South Boston, another gruesome discovery shocked the city. In the former Pomeroy basement, buried under a heap of ashes, lay the decomposing body of Katie Curran.

Locked in jail, Pomeroy again confessed. He would later say he only made the confession for fear his mother or brother would be charged with the crime. Nevertheless, he went to trial and his lawyers presented an insanity defense. Doctors testified about strange feelings Pomeroy had in his head, how he would slap his head to drive the feelings out and he sometimes blacked out and couldn’t remember what he had done.

The trial produced a jury verdict of guilty, setting the stage for a seesaw debate over what the proper punishment was for the ‘Boy Fiend,’ as the New York Herald dubbed him.

Jesse Pomeroy Execution Ordered

Though the jury did not accept Pomeroy’s insanity, it did recommend leniency because of his age. The judge disagreed, and recommended execution. The governor, meanwhile, refused to sign the order of execution. The governor’s council, however, refused to commute a death penalty sentence; twice the council refused.

The standoff ended with a compromise. The state spared Jesse Pomeroy, but would lock him up for life in solitary confinement in the state prison at Charlestown.

For more than 40 years Massachusetts kept Jesse Pomeroy locked away in solitary confinement, held at bay like a monster. He tried to escape at least a dozen times. In one instance he managed to trigger a gas explosion. He hoped it would blow open the door to his cell and he could somehow fight his way out. The door did, in fact, break open but the explosion also knocked Pomeroy silly. He couldn’t execute the rest of his plan.

The Lifer Reemerges

In 1917, the governor’s council finally allowed Pomeroy back into general prison population and he began spinning a narrative of a reformed man. He had mastered a half dozen languages while in solitary and dabbled in several more. He had begun writing poetry, some of which he would publish and read aloud at prison shows.

During World War I, Pomeroy had sold war bonds in jail. And in 1923 and ’24, he speculated in stocks, with much of the rest of America, but from his jail cell. He further tried rehabilitating his image in 1928, suing local political activist Alice Blackwell. In a letter arguing against his release, she had written that he had tortured animals in prison – a charge he vehemently denied.

In 1929, Pomeroy would set foot outside the walls of the Charlestown prison for the first time in 43 years. The state transferred him to the state hospital at Bridgewater, but a year later a story suggested that the old murderer had not fully reformed. Jailers found saw blades and tools in his possession, evidence that he planned one last escape attempt. He never made it.

Two years later, at 74, Jesse Pomeroy finally died of a heart attack in prison. He insisted on his innocence with no explanation for how he became the ‘boy fiend.’

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This story was updated in 2022.

Charlestown Navy Yard

The War of 1812 and How To Win When Outnumbered: Perspective