Rough Waters. Rodney Carisle
will always be insecure, and our citizens exposed to the calamities from which numbers of them have but just been relieved.27
The debate over the funding of the Navy in 1798 was cast in terms of defense of national honor. Historian Martin Smelser argues convincingly that the XYZ affair of 1798 represented the turning point in U.S. support for a navy; he demonstrates how the public press at the time reacted to the demand from French officials for a bribe in order for U.S. delegates to meet with French authorities. The demand for a bribe was widely perceived as an insult to U.S. honor, a point also made by Paul Gilje in his recent study of the period.28 Democratic Republican opponents of a strong navy were thrown into disrepute on the grounds that they willingly accepted such French insults.29 Out of the refusal to pay the bribe to French officials in the XYZ affair came the famous line “Millions for defense, not a penny for tribute.”30
Thomas Jefferson had expressed some ambiguity on the issue of naval forces, and by the time of his presidency, he generally opposed an expansion of the Navy. Like John Jay, he warned that maritime incidents could be blown out of proportion or wrongly and rashly misconstrued. Nevertheless, the language he used in his 1803 State of the Union address (in those days written, not delivered orally) reflected exactly the same underlying values that we have observed among more hawkish writers of the time:
In the course of this conflict [between France and Britain], let it be our endeavor . . . to punish severely those persons, citizen or alien, who shall usurp the cover of our flag, for vessels not entitled to it, infecting thereby with suspicion those of real Americans, and committing us into controversies, for the redress of wrongs not our own; to exact from every nation the observance, toward our vessels and citizens, of those principles and practices which all civilized people acknowledge; to merit the character of a great nation and maintain that of an independent one, preferring every consequence to insult and habitual wrong.31
In his oblique fashion, Jefferson first warned that misuse of the flag by others could wrongly lead the United States into conflict. However, he also asserted that the United States should prefer “every consequence,” that is, armed confrontation, to accepting “insult.” Jefferson preferred economic sanction and diplomatic negotiation to war, but he, like his Federalist opponents, was sensitive to issues of national honor, and if it came to that, he preferred war to accepting an insult.
Official State Department correspondence of the era reflected the same language. Charles Pinckney (Thomas Jefferson’s minister to Spain, 1801–1805), writing to the Spanish minister of state in 1804, provided a list of complaints regarding Spanish mistreatment of U.S. shipping, indicating that the United States had shown forbearance even when the “honor of our flag” had been violated: “Under all these accumulated injuries and sufferings of our citizens, under the breach of solemn treaties, of the laws of nations, and in many instances, violations of the honor of our flag, what has been the conduct of the United States?”32
During the Jeffersonian period, the development of a naval force was seen as designed to “protect the flag from insult.” Although the principle could be expressed less symbolically by stating that the Navy would protect merchant shipping from abuse by foreign powers, the language used in a pronaval expansion editorial from 1805 was typical, reflecting the underlying honor code with terms such as “respect” and “insult”: “We may venture to predict, that the time is not far distant when America shall be respected as one of the most powerful of nations, and when her flag shall sail on the ocean, without any daring to insult it.”33
When reporting on specific episodes seen as insults to the flag, U.S. consular officials abroad used similar vocabulary. In 1805, when an American merchant sloop was attacked by a Spanish privateer schooner and personal goods were stolen from the crew, John Gavino, U.S. consul in Gibraltar, filed a report of the incident concluding with this phrasing: “The commander and crew of the said schooner privateer behaved in a most insulting and abusive manner and they seemed by their appearance, language, dress, and manners to have been Spaniards, wherefore [the officers of sloop Ranger] make this declaration and protest, not only the robbery committed, but also for the insult shown the flag under which they sailed.”34
Chesapeake Affair, 1807
In the Chesapeake affair, an overzealous British naval officer arrested four British deserters from a U.S. warship. The event was seen then, and in numerous historical treatments, as a broader insult to U.S. honor, as well as a specific and clear insult to the honor of the U.S. naval commander of the Chesapeake, James Barron. In the public debates over the incident (and other seizures by British officers of seamen from U.S.-flagged merchant ships), those seeking to engage the United States in retaliatory naval engagements construed the episode in terms reflecting honor. A wide variety of individuals used the same rhetoric whether they were speaking from commercial interest, patriotic fervor, or political motives seeking to bring into disrepute either pro-French Jeffersonians or pro-English Federalists. That is, the appeals for action very often took the form of seeking satisfaction for an insult or affront to the merchant flag as well as to the U.S. flag on board naval ships, both of which were taken to symbolize the nation’s honor. Those opposed to action, following John Jay’s thinking, believed that some merchant shippers unnecessarily exposed the flag to insult. Opponents and proponents shared the same rhetoric and used similar language to express opposing viewpoints.
The notion that national honor, like personal honor, had to be redeemed by obtaining satisfaction ran throughout the written editorial commentary on the Chesapeake incident. A physical and manly response to an insult to national honor, similar to the proper response to a personal insult, was deemed appropriate in the press at the time.35
A public meeting in Culpepper County, Virginia, succinctly resolved “that an insult to the American flag is an insult to the nation, and that until the former is treated with respect, the sword of vengeance ought not to be sheathed by the latter.”36 An insult to the flag was seen as an insult to the nation, and an insult to the nation should be taken personally by every man; a challenge to the national honor should be felt as a challenge to the individual’s honor. The sentiment was almost self-evident then. Similar sentiments were expressed in a wide variety of memorials and editorials.37
As an example of the rhetoric used in response to the Chesapeake incident, the National Intelligencer and Washington Advertiser reported “a respectable meeting of the inhabitants of Fairfax county, held at their court house, on the 11th of July, 1807, for the purpose of taking into consideration the late atrocious outrage committed on the U.S. frigate Chesapeake, by a British ship of war the Leopard.”38 The Niles Register and other periodicals of the era, both Federalist and Democratic Republican, provide numerous further examples of honor code rhetoric used in reporting on the Chesapeake incident and other maritime affairs.
Insults from Low-Status Opponents, 1810
Writers for the public press were often more explicit in their evocation of honor and the related concept that insults from the “lower orders” should be met with direct punishment without the benefit of a challenge and an evenly matched duel. For example, “An American” writing from the ship Aurora in St. Bartholomew in the West Indies in 1810 reported on an “insult offered to the flag” entirely separate from the growing conflict with Britain:
Being at this island on commercial pursuits, for a few days past, a circumstance has occurred, which excited my sensibility as an American, in the highest degree, and as I consider it the duty of every citizen to make notorious any insult offered to the flag of the United States, or any violence committed on the person of any of their fellow citizens in a foreign country. . . . [I seek to] make known to my fellow citizens the insult offered to the American flag and the unprecedented violence committed on the person of one of our fellow citizens by the government of this insignificant island.39
The insult consisted of a local official, accompanied by a “crew principally composed of negro slaves,” forcing the chief mate, Mr. Johnson, of the ship Mary Ann Eliza off the ship after the local official’s crew had beat him. Johnson was further beaten on order of the colony’s governor. The affront, it seemed, was considered