THEODORE ROOSEVELT Boxed Set. Henry Cabot Lodge
States, had served in British war vessels, and that some had been with Lord Nelson in the Victory, and had even been bargemen to the great Admiral,—a pretty sure proof that the American sailors did not show a disadvantage when compared with others. 17
Good seaman as the impressed American proved to be, yet he seldom missed an opportunity to escape from the British service, by desertion or otherwise. In the first place, the life was very hard, and, in the second, the American seaman was very patriotic. He had an honest and deep affection for his own flag; while, on the contrary, he felt a curiously strong hatred for England, as distinguished from Englishmen. This hatred was partly an abstract feeling, cherished through a vague traditional respect for Bunker Hill, and partly something very real and vivid, owing to the injuries he, and others like him, had received. Whether he lived in Maryland or Massachusetts, he certainly knew men whose ships had been seized by British cruisers, their goods confiscated, and the vessels condemned. Some of his friends had fallen victims to the odious right of search, and had never been heard of afterward. He had suffered many an injury to friend, fortune, or person, and some day he hoped to repay them all; and when the war did come, he fought all the better because he knew it was in his own quarrel. But, as I have said, this hatred was against England, not against Englishmen. Then, as now, sailors were scattered about over the world without any great regard for nationality; and the resulting intermingling of natives and foreigners in every mercantile marine was especially great in those of Britain and America, whose people spoke the same tongue and wore the same aspect. When chance drifted the American into Liverpool or London, he was ready enough to ship in an Indiaman or whaler, caring little for the fact that he served under the British flag; and the Briton, in turn, who found himself in New York or Philadelphia, willingly sailed in one of the clipper-built barques, whether it floated the stars and stripes or not. When Captain Porter wrought such havoc among the British whalers in the South Seas, he found that no inconsiderable portion of their crews consisted of Americans, some of whom enlisted on board his own vessel; and among the crews of the American whalers were many British. In fact, though the skipper of each ship might brag loudly of his nationality, yet in practical life he knew well enough that there was very little to choose between a Yankee and a Briton. 18 Both were bold and hardy, cool and intelligent, quick with their hands, and showing at their best in an emergency. They looked alike and spoke alike; when they took the trouble to think, they thought alike; and when they got drunk, which was not an infrequent occurrence, they quarrelled alike.
Mingled with them were a few seamen of other nationalities. The Irishman, if he came from the old Dano-Irish towns of Waterford, Dublin, and Wexford, or from the Ulster coast, was very much like the two chief combatants; the Celto-Turanian kern of the west did not often appear on shipboard. The French, Danes, and Dutch were hemmed in at home; they had enough to do on their own seaboard, and could not send men into foreign fleets. A few Norse, however, did come in, and excellent sailors and fighters they made. With the Portuguese and Italians, of whom some were to be found serving under the union-jack, and others under the stars and stripes, it was different; although there were many excellent exceptions they did not, as a rule, make the best of seamen. They were treacherous, fond of the knife, less ready with their hands, and likely to lose either their wits or their courage when in a tight place.
In the American navy, unlike the British, there was no impressment; the sailor was a volunteer, and he shipped in whatever craft his fancy selected. Throughout the war there were no "picked crews" on the American side, 19 excepting on the last two cruises of the Constitution. In fact (as seen by the letter of Captains Stewart and Bainbridge to Secretary Hamilton), there was often much difficulty in getting enough men. 20 Many sailors preferred to serve in the innumerable privateers, and, the two above-mentioned officers, in urging the necessity of building line-of-battle ships, state that it was hard work to recruit men for vessels of an inferior grade, so long as the enemy had ships of the line.
One of the standard statements made by the British historians about this war is that our ships were mainly or largely manned by British sailors. This, if true, would not interfere with the lessons which it teaches; and, besides that, it is not true.
In this, as in every thing else, all the modern writers have merely followed James or Brenton, and I shall accordingly confine myself to examining their assertions. The former begins (vol. iv, p. 470) by diffidently stating that there is a "similarity" of language between the inhabitants of the two countries—an interesting philological discovery that but few will attempt to controvert. In vol. vi, p. 154, he mentions that a number of blanks occur in the American Navy List in the column "Where Born"; and in proof of the fact that these blanks are there because the men were not Americans, he says that their names "are all English and Irish." 21 They certainly are; and so are all the other names in the list. It could not well be otherwise, as the United States Navy was not officered by Indians. In looking over this same Navy List (of 1816) it will be seen that but a little over 5 per cent, of the officers were born abroad—a smaller proportion by far than would exist in the population of the country at large—and most of these had come to America when under ten years of age. On p. 155 James adds that the British sailors composed "one third in number and one half in point of effectiveness" of the American crews. Brenton in his "Naval History" writes: "It was said, and I have no reason to doubt the fact, that there were 200 British seamen aboard the Constitution." 22 These statements are mere assertions unsupported by proof, and of such a loose character as to be difficult to refute. As our navy was small, it may be best to take each ship in turn. The only ones of which the British could write authoritatively were, of course, those which they captured. The first one taken was the Wasp. James says many British were discovered among her crew, instancing especially one sailor named Jack Lang; now Jack Lang was born in the town of Brunswick, New Jersey, but had been impressed and forced to serve in the British Navy. The same was doubtless true of the rest of the "many British" seamen of her crew; at any rate, as the only instance James mentions (Jack Lang) was an American, he can hardly be trusted for those whom he does not name.
Of the 95 men composing the crew of the Nautilus when she was captured, "6 were detained and sent to England to await examination as being suspected of being British subjects." 23 Of the other small brigs, the Viper, Vixen, Rattlesnake, and Syren, James does not mention the composition of the crew, and I do not know that any were claimed as British. Of the crew of the Argus "about 10 or 12 were believed to be British subjects; the American officers swore the crew contained none" (James, "Naval Occurrences," p. 278). From 0 to 10 per cent can be allowed. When the Frolic was captured "her crew consisted of native Americans" (do, p. 340). James speaks ("History," p. 418) of "a portion of the British subjects on board the Essex," but without giving a word of proof or stating his grounds of belief. One man was claimed as a deserter by the British, but he turned out to be a New Yorker. There were certainly a certain number of British aboard, but the number probably did not exceed thirty. Of the President's crew he says ("Naval Occurrences," p. 448): "In the opinion of several British officers there were among them many British seamen" but Commodore Decatur, Lieutenant Gallagher, and the other officers swore that there were none. Of the crew of the Chesapeake, he says, "about 32" were British subjects, or about 10 per cent. One or two of these were afterward shot, and some 25, together with a Portuguese boatswain's mate, entered into the British service. So that of the vessels captured by the British, the Chesapeake had the largest number of British (about 10 per cent. of her crew) on board, the others ranging from that number down to none at all, as in the case of the Wasp. As these eleven ships would probably represent a fair average, this proportion, of 0 to 10 per cent., should be taken as the proper one. James, however, is of the opinion that those ships manned by Americans were more apt to be captured than those manned by the braver British; which calls for an examination of the crews of the remaining vessels. Of the American sloop Peacock, James says ("Naval Occurrences," p. 348) that "several of her men were recognized as British seamen"; even if this were true, "several" could not probably mean more than sixteen, or 10 per cent. Of the second Wasp he says, "Captain Blakely was a native of Dublin, and, along with some English and Scotch, did not, it may be certain, neglect to have in his crew a great many Irish." Now Captain Blakely left Ireland when he was but 16 months old, and the rest of James' statement is avowedly mere conjecture. It was asserted positively in the American newspapers that the Wasp, which sailed from Portsmouth,