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USS Constitution

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

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.

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When the British Bombarded Falmouth

When the War of 1812 came to Cape Cod, only a few towns such as Falmouth resisted the British. In response, the British bombarded Falmouth. The town still remembers the attack, and evidence of British cannonballs can be seen to this day.

The War of 1812

America entered the War of 1812 after the British began boarding U.S. ships and impressing sailors onto Royal Navy vessels.

Most New Englanders, heavily dependent on maritime trade, didn’t want to go to war. They knew the British could easily blockade the coast and stifle trade — as well as bombard their towns.

When the U.S. entered the war on June 18, 1812, the Massachusetts House of Representatives passed a resolution calling the declaration “an event awful, unexpected, hostile to your interests, menacing to your liberties, and revolting to your feelings.”

Massachusetts Gov. Caleb Strong refused to commit the state’s militia to the war effort. In response, President James Madison refused to send troops to defend Massachusetts.

By the end of the war, several New England states came close to seceding from the United States.

Naval battle during the War of 1812: The USS Constitution vs. HMS Guerriere.

War Hawks

Westerners and southerners, however, wanted war. They wanted to expand westward into the Northwest Territory, some of which was still under British control.

Falmouth, Mass., on Cape Cod’s southern shore, strongly supported the war. “Falmouth best upheld the honor of the Cape,” wrote Samuel Eliot Morison.

During the War of 1812, Cape Cod bore the brunt of British aggression. The British Navy blockaded all the Cape ports, raided the harbors and seized vessels with abandon. They came ashore to steal crops and livestock.

They extorted money from every Cape Cod town but Barnstable, Falmouth, Sandwich and Orleans. They cut off shipping to Nantucket, and the starving islanders voted neutrality during the war.

But Falmouth stood firm against the British. Not only did Falmouth refuse to bribe the Royal Navy, the Falmouth Artillery Company routinely fired guns at British ships that passed by. That made the town an especially appealing target.

On Jan. 20, 1814, David Nye wrote to Secretary of War John Armstrong about the vulnerability of Falmouth. Since the local government couldn’t help, they turned to the federal government. “We have nothing to expect, should we fall into their hands, but to be treated with all the insolence and barbarity which is so peculiar to the British and their savage allies,” he wrote.

The British Bombarded Falmouth

When the British bombarded Falmouth, illustration.

At about the time of David Nye’s letter, the H.M.S. Nimrod, an 18-gun cruiser that would capture or destroy 50 U.S. vessels during the war, anchored off Naushon Island nearby. The captain, Nathaniel Mitchell, heard about a U.S. sloop that ran aground off Woods Hole in Falmouth. He sent sailors in small boats to attack the vessel.

But the Falmouth Artillery Company got wind of the planned attack and hastened to Woods Hole. They arrived in time and fired on the British, killing one sailor and wounding another.

When he learned of the failed attack, Capt. Mitchell wanted revenge. So he sailed the Nimrod to Falmouth, raised a white flag and sent a boat ashore. When the landing party came onto the wharf, it demanded that Falmouth turn over two cannon and sloop.

The Artillery Company commander, Weston Jenkins, supposedly replied with words that echo today. “If ye want the cannon, come and get them, and we will give ye what’s in them first,” he said.

The British replied that the Nimrod would bomb Falmouth in an hour. Falmouth evacuated the women and children from the town. One woman stayed behind: Weston Jenkins’ wife Elizabeth, who cooked for the 200 men who stayed in town.

Then the cannonballs began to fly. The British bombarded Falmouth all afternoon and into the evening. Though the cannonballs damaged buildings they didn’t kill anyone. One of those buildings, for many years the Nimrod restaurant, has a hole made by a cannonball in its men’s room from the time the British bombarded Falmouth.

Wareham

The Nimrod finally gave up and sailed toward Rhode Island. In June, the Nimrod sailed into Buzzard’s Bay and anchored offshore Wareham, which borders Cape Cod.

Wareham had no use for the War of 1812. So when Capt. Mitchell sent 200 men ashore under a flag of truce, Wareham welcomed them. The British demanded to know which ships belonged to Falmouth. Wareham officials told them. The British then set afire 17 ships, mostly belonging to Falmouth.

The Nimrod then ignominiously ran aground in Buzzard’s Bay. Capt. Mitchell ordered the cannon thrown overboard to lighten its load.

Orleans

Admiral Lord Richard Howe

In the final Cape Cod engagement of the war, Admiral Lord Richard Howe demanded bribes from Brewster and Eastham to protect their saltworks. Orleans, however, refused. Howe ordered an attack on Orleans, but his vessel, the HMS Newcastle, couldn’t navigate the marshy coastal waters. The Newcastle’s cannonballs fell short of the town.

The local militia skirmished with the HMS Newcastle when it tried to land in Rock Harbor.

In 1987, a diving crew recovered five of the Nimrod’s artillery pieces. The Falmouth Historical Society now has one on display.

This story was updated in 2023.

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Six Historic Fourth of July Celebrations

The Fourth of July has been celebrated with feasting, fireworks and festivity since Boston shot off cannons on the first anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

The document wasn’t actually signed on the Fourth of July, as some of the signers weren’t even in Philadelphia that day. And John Adams thought the Second of July would be the day to remember, as that was when the Continental Congress voted for independence. The Fourth of July was the day the Congress adopted the document.

No matter. The first Fourth of July turned out to be cause for celebration year after year. Here are six of the oldest – and most historic – Fourth of July celebrations. If you know of another worth mentioning, please include it in the comments section below.

New Haven, Conn.

Yale College (left) and the State House.

In 1788, New Haven held a large and lavish Fourth of July celebration featuring a parade of working men grouped by their occupation. Cordwainers in a wagon made shoes as the parade wended its way from the long wharf to the Brick Meeting House. Blacksmiths made a hoe during the parade with anvil, hammer and bellows, while goldsmiths displayed a silver urn with 10 stars – one for each state that had adopted the Constitution.

According to a contemporary account, there were also sowers, reapers with sickles, thrashers with flails, butchers, barbers, distillers, bakers, tanners, curriers, leather dressers, stonecutters with chisels, cabinet makers, coppersmiths and braziers, watch and clock makers, coopers, painters, hatters with bows, weavers, tailors, boat builders, rope-makers wearing hempen girdles, shipwrights, a whaleboat with her crew, papermakers, printers, merchants, schoolmasters followed by their scholars, physicians, Yale College tutors, clergy, sheriffs, the common council, mayor, alderman, recorder, orator and high sheriff.

Roger Sherman, who signed the Declaration of Independence, attended the festivities. He heard Josiah Meigs, publisher of New Haven Gazette and Connecticut Magazine, read the Declaration of Independence and listened to a performance of a hymn composed by Barna Bidwell, a tutor at Yale College.

A feast was held at the Statehouse with at least one toast – to a model of the frigate USS Constitution. Patriotic toasts were probably drunk for George Washington and the veterans of the Revolution as well. After dinner came a ball. Outside, no doubt, there was plenty of noise. As a Yale student named Thomas Robbins wrote in his diary on July 4, 1796:

The students fired guns, etc., then came here and were very noisy, drinking toasts, etc.

New Haven over the years became the best place in the region to see fireworks on the Fourth of July.

Thomaston, Maine

Montpelier (Robert N. Dennis collection of stereoscopic views, New York Public Library).

Revolutionary War General Henry Knox led a Fourth of July celebration in 1795 that wasn’t the first in Maine, but it was certainly the grandest.

After the American Revolution, Knox relocated to Thomaston, Maine (then Massachusetts) where he built an estate and mansion, Montpelier.

Knox owned the better part of four counties in Maine, which he came by via his wife’s family. In 1795, with Montpelier finished, Knox came to Thomaston from Philadelphia. His mission was to develop the state. By 1795 he was busily building sawmills, kilns, quarries and brickyards to attract employees and tenants for his properties.

To promote the Maine endeavor, Knox opened Montpelier to any and all guests on the Fourth of July in 1795. The feast was legendary for its sheer size. Chicken, geese and an entire ox fed the crowds. More than 100 beds were made up for overnight guests. A delegation of Penobscot Indians, with whom Knox wanted peaceful relations, came and stayed more than a week. They finally left at Knox ‘s urging. He was annoyed by the length of their visit.

Knox would live barely 10 years after the celebration, and his plans for Maine met with limited success. Montpelier was torn down to make way for a railroad when the house fell into disrepair and no buyers could be found for it. Today no one will produce a feast for you, but you can visit a 1929 replica of Montpelier in Thomaston that operates as a museum.

Boston

The Old State House in Boston. The Declaration of Independence was read from the balcony.

Boston celebrated the first anniversary of the Declaration of Independence with joyful delirium.

The festivities began at dawn with a grand salute fired from cannon at Fort Independence and ships in the harbor. Gov. John Hancock proposed 13 toasts from the balcony of the Old State House, while cannons fired and Boston’s militia companies paraded, drilled and fired off their guns.

That day Boston established the tradition of Fourth of July oratory. It stemmed from the Boston Massacre speech delivered annually for 13 years commemorating that sad event. Rev. Dr. William Gordon of Roxbury preached a patriotic sermon to the General Court.

At night, a Col. Crafts illuminated the Boston Common. He ‘threw several shells, and exhibited a number of fireworks.’

Boston was the first municipality to officially designate the Fourth of July as a holiday, in 1783. And in 1929, Arthur Fiedler first took the podium to conduct the Boston Pops Orchestra’s performance of the 1812 Overture on the Esplanade. To this day, Boston celebrates with cannon, fireworks and church bells in one of the best attended Fourth of July celebrations in the country.

Portsmouth, N.H.

The Continental frigate Bonhomme Richard 9commanded by John Paul Jones) battling the HMS Serapis.

There is a legend about the first Fourth of July celebration in Portsmouth, N.H., that probably isn’t true.

The story has it that five young ladies of Portsmouth — Mary Langdon, Augusta Pierce, Caroline Chandler, Dorothy Hall and Helen Seavey — made an American flag from their best silk gowns, according to specification by John Paul Jones.

Jones supposedly sailed the USS Ranger from Boston to Portsmouth, where the Ranger had been built at what is now the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard. The ladies presented him the flag. He then hoisted it on the Ranger. The record suggests, however, that John Paul Jones wasn’t in Portsmouth that day.

What did happen was that a Captain Thompson invited people to lunch on board a Continental frigate. Salutes were probably fired, church bells probably rung, and a toast to George Washington was probably drunk. In 1805, for example, Portsmouth gave Washington the following toast to ‘The memory of George Washington, Greater than Caesar–he would wear no crown, but that of the people’s love. ‘

Bristol, R.I.

The Bristol, R.I., parade.

Fourth of July observances have waxed and waned over the centuries, but not in Bristol, R.I. The town proudly claims to be the birthplace of the Fourth of July celebration.

The Bristol Fourth of July Celebration started in 1785 by the Rev. Henry Wight, newly hired by the First Congregational Church.

Wight had served as a soldier in the American Revolution, and he determined that Bristol should observe Patriotic Exercises on the Fourth of July. He led the ceremonies in 1785 with a speech calling for reflection on the veterans who won the war and celebration of the new nation’s freedoms.

For 40 years, Wight would continue leading these ceremonies. The Fourth of July has been celebrated every year in Bristol since.

Sometime in the early 1800s the now-2.5-mile Military, Civic and Firemen’s Parade began. In 1975, Providence Mayor Buddy Cianci started fighting with parade organizers. Under the rules, he wasn’t entitled to walk in the parade, but he did anyway.

Parade organizers sent him a letter in 1979 telling him not to show up in 1980, and the Bristol police chief vowed to arrest anyone who made a disturbance. Cianci showed up in a helicopter. So many parade-goers cheered him the police had to let him march.

In 1984, Cianci pleaded “no contest” to a charge of assault and skipped the parade. A clown dressed in a prison uniform, carrying a ball and chain, marched in his place. In 1989 he marched ahead of the marshal, prompting the parade chairman to say Cianci was rude and shouldn’t be invited back. In 1997 and 1998, he brought along an entourage of law enforcement officers squirting the crowd with water rifles, which got him dis-invited in 1999. He returned in 2009 after serving jail time for racketeering.

Today Bristol’s Fourth of July celebration officially starts on June 14th, Flag Day, and ends with the parade on July 4th. In between are concerts, fireworks, a drum corps show, a firefighters muster and a Fourth of July ball.

Providence Mayor Buddy Cianci marched in the Bristol, R.I., Fourth of July parade in 2009 after his conviction.

Bristol, Vt.

Coincidentally, the parade committee in Bristol, Vt., boasts that the Bristol Vermont Fourth of July parade is the oldest continuous parade in Vermont.

The parade committee is silent on when the parade first started, simply saying it has been going on for ‘decades.’ Bristol did host a parade for the nation’s Bicentennial in 1976. Today Bristol’s fireworks are said to rival Burlington’s, and the parade runs for an hour and a half.

In 1980, the Bristol parade featured the first annual Outhouse Race. Contestants participate in teams, with two runners and one rider who sits inside the outhouse frame. The outhouse frame must have a door for privacy. The race runs from St. Ambrose Catholic Church to the finish line at the traffic light, and there are usually three or four outhouses in each of the four heats.

For a youtube video of the outhouse race, click here.

Images: Old State House, Boston, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=221678; Bristol, R.I., parade: By Kenneth C. Zirkel – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49912345; Buddy Cianci By Notyourbroom – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7211464; Bristol, RI, street scene By TwoSheds (talk) (Uploads) – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12287639

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John Adams Supports Toussaint Louverture, Horrifies Jefferson

From 1798 to 1801, President John Adams recognized a government led by Toussaint Louverture, a former slave, a self-educated black man and a fellow revolutionary. Thomas Jefferson, a slaveowner, found Adams’ action alarming.

Toussaint Louverture, as depicted in an 1802 French engraving

The Haitian Revolution, a series of conflicts, began on Aug. 22, 1791 and ended in 1804 with Haitian independence. Slaves burned sugar plantations, killed slave owners and then took over the cities.

In the midst of it in 1797, Toussaint Louverture became military commander of the insurrectionists in what was then known as the French colony of Saint-Domingue.

Two months earlier Adams took office as president of the United States.

Adams’ predecessor, George Washington, had no use for the black leaders of Saint-Domingue. Nor did Adams’ vice president, Thomas Jefferson. He dreaded the prospect of black sailors, supercargoes and missionaries spreading the message of freedom and revolution into the Southern states. “We have to fear it,” Jefferson wrote Adams.

Adams, who opposed slavery, saw Saint-Domingue as a useful ally. He viewed it as another new country trying to navigate a world dominated by hostile European powers. So Adams established diplomatic and trade relations with Saint-Domingue. From 1798 to 1801, the U.S. government treated leaders of African descent with the same respect accorded Europeans. That wouldn’t happen again until after the Civil War.

Toussaint Louverture

Saint-Domingue was the size of Maryland, but it created as much wealth for France as all 13 colonies did for England.

Its coffee and sugar plantations, worked by 500,000 enslaved workers, made Saint-Domingue the richest colony in the world. One reason France supported the rebel side in the American Revolution. was to protect its Caribbean colony. In 1779, several hundred free Saint-Dominguans of African descent — gens de couleur — joined the French military and took part in the siege of Savannah.

A naval battle in the Quasi War

Trade also flourished between the United States and Saint-Domingue. Ships from the continent brought lumber and food, primarily salt cod, to the French colony. Then they came home with molasses for New England refineries to turn into rum.

In February 1790, a Rhode Islander saw 50 American vessels in the harbor at Cap-Francois. More arrived every day. During the year 1797, 600 U.S. ships with 5,000 seamen traded with Saint-Domingue.

Jefferson had reason for alarm. About 15 percent of those sailors were of African descent, newsmongers to African-Americans at home. They carried news of the Haitian Revolution and the emancipation of slaves.

Then starting in 1798 came the Quasi-War between the United States and France. French privateers in the Caribbean were attacking U.S. ships, and Congress responded by passing an embargo against France. Trade with Saint-Domingue stopped abruptly. Soon the colony was in dire need of food.

Secret Dinner

John Adams

At 3 pm on Dec. 26, 1798, Joseph Bunel went to a private home in Philadelphia for a secret dinner with Secretary of State Timothy Pickering and a few friends.

Bunel was a white, French-born merchant married to a free-black Creole. He supported the Haitian Revollution and became Louverture’s trade envoy. Over dinner, Bunel told Pickering and his guests that Louverture offered to protect U.S. shipping against privateers. In exchange, he wanted trade and diplomatic support.

Timothy PIckering

Adams then got word of the offer and concluded he had to do something. Within six months, the United States and Saint-Domingue entered into a treaty that reopened trade.

But Adams did more than that. He had intelligence that the Dominguans had enough strength to win independence from France. So Adams supported Toussaint Louverture with economic aid, arms, munitions and the U.S. Navy.

Louverture then faced a mutiny from Andre Rigaud, his mixed-race rival who controlled the southern part of the island. In the spring of 1800, Adams sent five military vessels — the USS Constitution, USS Boston, USS Connecticut, USS General Greene and USS Norfolk — to Louverture’s aid. It was the U.S. Navy’s first military action on behalf of a foreign ally.

American commanders planned joint operations with their multiracial Dominguan counterparts. They guarded the southern coast and bombarded a port town held by Rigaud.

The Navy brass also did something unusual: placed U.S. ships and crews under Dominguan command. White U.S. Naval officers dined with black Dominguan officers, finding themselves in the racial minority.

What Might Have Been

Thomas Jefferson

Adams lost reelection to Thomas Jefferson, who took office in March of 1801. The next year, Napoleon’s forces invaded Saint-Domingue. Louverture was betrayed, arrested and sent to France, where he died in prison in 1803. But then Dominguan forces defeated the French and became an independent nation on Jan. 1, 1804.

After losing Saint-Domingue, Napoleon then sold the Louisiana Territory to the United States. Historian Douglas R. Egerton speculates that if Adams had been reelected, Louisiana might have been acquired as a Free Soil rather than a slave state. American history might then have turned out very, very differently.

This story was updated in 2023.

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The Mysterious Death of Tobias Lear

Tobias Lear meticulously recorded the details of George Washington’s death, but was strangely silent about the events leading to his own.

Tobias Lear in the 1780s

As Washington’s personal secretary and confidante, Lear scrupulously chronicled the events of his own remarkable life, and yet he left some things unexplained.

Perhaps there are clues to his strange death in the story of his life. He knew four presidents, failed at land speculation, lived well in Algiers, wrote the first history of Washington, D.C., took a honeymoon aboard the USS Constitution and paid tribute to pirates. He married two of Martha Washington’s nieces.

George Washington liked, trusted and respected him, and we owe much of what we know about his personal life to Tobias Lear.

Tobias Lear, Secretary

Tobias Lear was born in Portsmouth, N.H., on Sept. 19, 1762, the son of a shipmaster turned farmer (the farm was located at the present site of Wentworth By The Sea).

Tobias Lear House in Portsmouth, N.H., built by Tobias Lear, Sr., around 1750.

He graduated from Harvard in 1783 as the American Revolution ended. He traveled in Europe and throughout the British colonies. In 1784, a family friend of the Lears and the Washingtons, Gen. Benjamin Lincoln, recommended Tobias Lear as tutor to Martha’s grandchildren and secretary to George. Washington offered this job description:

Mr. Lear…will sit at my table, will live as I live, will mix with the company who resort to the house, will be treated in every respect with civility and proper attention. He will have his washing done in the family, and may have his stockings darned by the maids…

Site of Tobias Lear’s family farm

It was a big job. He had to catch up on Mount Vernon’s accounts, neglected after Washington spent a decade at war, and reply to a flood of correspondence.

After arriving in Virginia in 1786, Lear soon became Washington’s friend and right-hand man. When Washington was elected president in 1789, Lear moved with the family to New York, then to Philadelphia when the capital moved.

Lear married Mary Long in 1793. They had one child, Benjamin Lincoln Lear, and Washington acted as godfather. Mary died three years after their marriage.

Tobias Lear then married Frances Bassett Washington, George’s niece, in August 1795. Washington gave them a house and 360 acres of his Mount Vernon estate. The marriage lasted seven months, as Frances died of tuberculosis in March 1796. Lear was devastated.

Business Ventures

George Washington

He rejoined the Washington household, serving as the president’s secretary throughout his first term and submitting his expense reports to Congress. At the beginning of Washington’s second term, Lear left to start his own company and to work with Washington’s Potowmack Company to build a canal around the waterfalls in the Potomac River (now Great Falls Park). Lear lost money on the venture.

As his finances worsened he continued to work for Washington. He once collected rent from one of Washington’s tenants and kept the money himself. Washington was furious with Lear when he found out, but forgave him.

Lear also kept funds from a business partner for months and feigned illness to avoid repaying him. He eventually confessed, apologized and agreed to pay him back.

In late 1799, Lear visited Washington when the former president died. He recorded his famous diary entry:

About ten o’clock, Saturday December 14, 1799, Washington made several attempts to speak to me before he could effect it, at length he said,—”I am just going. Have me decently buried; and do not let my body be put into the Vault in less than two days after I am dead.” I bowed assent. He then looked at me again and said, “Do you understand me?” I replied “Yes.” “Tis well” said he.

Those were his last words. Lear followed Washington’s wishes to a T, even measuring his body at 6 feet 3.5 inches long and 1 foot 9 inches across the shoulders.

Washington left Tobias Lear a lifetime interest in Walnut Tree Farm. He spent the next year sorting through Washington’s papers, some of which went missing. Lear was accused of destroying the papers, including letters that could have damaged Thomas Jefferson.

To Africa and Back

Old Ironsides

Despite his bequest from Washington, Lear was still struggling financially. Jefferson did him a favor and appointed him to two potentially lucrative posts: American commercial agent in Haiti in 1802 and consul general to North Africa in 1804.

Before leaving for North Africa, Lear married Martha Washington’s niece, Francis Dandridge Henley. To the end of his life, he doted on Fanny.

While they sailed to Algiers on the USS Constitution, pirates seized another ship, the Philadelphia, and nearly 300 souls aboard. Lear negotiated their release in exchange for a substantial sum in the Treaty of Tripoli.

He was vilified for mishandling the negotiations.

The Lears spent nine profitable years in Algiers. Then Tobias fell out of favor with the dey, who had a habit of beheading people he didn’t like. Just as the War of 1812 broke out, the Lears fled to America.

James Madison

President James Madison gave Tobias a job as a secretary to the War Department, and he leased a house in Georgetown. He lived there with his beloved Fanny and his son Benjamin, now a lawyer.

He was apparently wealthy, happily married and well employed.

Or was he?

Lear suffered from headaches and depression. He was dogged by accusations about Washington’s papers and the Treaty of Tripoli. He had only reluctantly accepted his job as chief accountant for the U.S. War Department, having hoped for a Cabinet post.

On Oct. 11, 1816, Tobias Lear shot himself in the head with a pistol. His son Benjamin found him in his Georgetown home, the bloodied gun still in his hand. No note was found, nor did Lear leave an official will.

The mystery of his death remains to this day.

This story was updated in 2022.

Image: Tobias Lear House By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15203288.

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Old Ironsides Earns Her Nickname

On August 19, 1812, the crew of the USS Constitution caught sight of the British HMS Guerriere at sea off Nova Scotia. The American vessel would soon win its nickname, Old Ironsides.

Captain Isaac Hull of the Constitution and Captain James Dacres of the Guerriere were eager for a fight.

The battle between the USS Constitution vs HMS Guerriere, by Michel Felice Corne

Slo-Mo Chase

Hull, a native of Derby, Conn., had spent much of the prior month searching for a battle in which he could put the Constitution to work. His first encounter with a British squadron resulted in a slow-motion chase out of New York in light wind. The Constitution finally pulled from her pursuers by lowering her boats and having seamen pull the frigate by towing it. Hull also using kedging, a technique where a small boat carried the Constitution’s anchor ahead of it, dropped it and allowed the ship to pull itself forward by hauling in the anchor line.

With this escape from superior forces behind him, Hull was eager for a better match-up. And then he encountered Guerriere.

Old Ironsides

The two ships approached each other, and the Guerriere began firing at the Constitution while it largely sailed out of range. As one shot bounced off the hull of the Constitution, a seamen reportedly gave her the nickname that would last until this day. “Huzza,” he shouted, “her sides are made of iron!”

Isaac Hull

A relatively one-side fight followed. The Constitution, with a tougher hull, more and bigger guns and a better captain, quickly bested the Guerriere. During a 35-minute battle, Old Ironsides shot the Guerriere to pieces with her masts crashing on her decks.

With little choice, Dacres signaled surrender and struck his flag. With the British sailors transferred to the Constitution, Hull tried to keep the Guerriere afloat so that he could tow it home as a prize. But he had no hope of success. He ordered the vessel torched and he sailed toward Boston.

Hull had no practical reason to return to port, but he wanted the American public to learn of his victory. He thought it would shore up support for the war, which had proceeded badly for the American side. A defeat against the formidable Royal British Navy was welcome news.

The Constitution would go on to win four battles against British ships during the war. The battles had an immaterial effect on Britain, with its enormous navy. But the victories had a huge emotional impact, both in England and America. The Times of London summed it up after the defeat of the Guerriere:

It is not merely that an English frigate has been taken, after, what we are free to confess, may be called a brave resistance, but that it has been taken by a new enemy, an enemy unaccustomed to such triumphs, and likely to be rendered insolent and confident by them. … how important this triumph is in giving a tone and character to the war. Never before in the history of the world did an English frigate strike to an American.

No Surrender?

The newspaper went on to suggest that Dacres should have perhaps gone down with his ship rather than surrender.

The Times was using a bit of hyperbole, as British ships were lost to American’s during the Revolution. Technically, though, it was an unprecedented blow that did much to bolster American morale.

Dacres would go on to face court martial for the loss of his ship, and he was cleared of any wrong doing. Hull, facing family pressures, would request and receive a transfer to run the Washington Navy Yard.

This story was updated in 2022.

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