and Craig did not resign as governor-general of Canada until June, 1811, no evidence can be found that he filed any claim for services, but according to a letter of Ryland from London to Craig, Captain Henry had applied for the vacant office of sheriff of Montreal, but no reference to it was made by Craig in his letter of June 4th, written a week before he left Quebec. Captain Henry was in London in 1810 and 1811, and it is said applied to Lord Liverpool for a position, without result, and after waiting in vain until November, 1811, he offered the entire correspondence to the President of the United States, James Madison, for a sum variously estimated at $10,000 and upwards, which was paid. President Madison sent the papers in a special message to Congress in March, 1812, and they were referred to the committee on foreign affairs, and became the subject of a brief debate in Congress. Henry Clay of Kentucky declared in a speech before that body that there was "no doubt that the Indian tribes on the Wabash had been incited by the British, and what could be thought of an emissary having been sent to stir up civil war?" Publicity was thus given to an alleged attack upon the credit of the federal party which was accused of a design to destroy the Union, of which these papers were supposed to contain the proof, and the sensation produced was made use of to intensify the feeling of enmity towards Great Britain, until the true contents were made known, then the incident was soon closed, as according to the terms of agreement Captain Henry was not to appear before the committee and had sailed in the same month for a permanent residence in France. On the British side the subject was brought up in the House of Lords, and Lord Liverpool's defense of Sir James Craig was the sum and substance of parliamentary proceedings. In this atmosphere, thick with internal conflict clouding the dawn of the republic, wherein immoderate expressions of sectional, individual, state and national rights were tempered by the noble ardor of patriotism, and a ray or two of the liberty that has since "enlightened the world," Henry sold his papers, and Madison made the most of them. The battle of Tippecanoe, which Canadian historians deny was fomented by British influence on the Northwestern Indians, was claimed in the debates of Congress to be the commencement of the War of 1812. CHAPTER IX THE WAR OF 1812 THE STATE OF THE NAVY-THE SEA-FIGHT OF TRIPOLI-BATTLE OF LAKE ERIEBUILDING THE FLEET-THE VESSELS ENGAGED THE ACTION-THE SURRENDER— THE OPERATIONS OF THE ARMY—AFTER THE WAR—THE ERIE SQUADRON'S SLOW DECLINE-THE TREATY OF GHENT. The Twelfth Congress of the United States, which met the year eighteen hundred and eleven, in November, declared war against Great Britain on the 18th of the following June, three months after the secret correspondence had been divulged, and the next day a proclamation was issued against a solemn` protest by the federalist party, appeals being made to the patriotism of the people. Among the members who were determined upon war were Henry Clay of Kentucky and John C. Calhoun of South Carolina. The committee on foreign relations at once proposed an arraignment of Great Britain for persevering in the enforcement of the "orders in council," refusing to neutralize the right of trading from one hostile port to another such port until France should abandon her restrictions on the introduction of British goods. France had suspended her decrees, but the grievance of impressment was constantly renewed by Great Britain. The committee recommended the enrollment of the militia, an increase in the number of regiments, and a call for volunteers, and reported resolutions for repairing the navy and for authorizing the arming of merchantmen in self-defense. New frigates were voted, and a loan of $11,000,000. Over one thousand men went out from one small fishing port, that of Marblehead, Mass., to help man the frigates in defense of the seas. Resolves were passed in several of the legislatures, pledging the states to stand by the national government. THE STATE OF THE NAVY In the course of the year 1791, was completed the first census, or enumeration of the inhabitants of the United States. They amounted to 3,921,326, of which number 695,655 were slaves. The revenue, according to the report of the Secretary of the Treasury, amounted to $4,771,000, the exports to about nineteen, and the imports to about twenty millions. A movement for building a navy having been inaugurated by Congress in 1794, against great opposition, by the passage of an act for building "four forty-fours and two thirty-six's;" in 1798, and the following year, during the administra tion of President John Adams, it assumed proportions of considerable importance and consisted of "six forty-fours, three thirty-six's, seven thirty-two's, and four fifteen to twenty smaller vessels of war." Its rapid construction compelled the admiration of the great powers, who, unaware of our resources and natural energy, wondered at so sudden a development of naval force. In the words of Samuel L. Knapp, the American editor of an English history of the United States by John Howard Hinton, published in 1846: "It seemed a dream to all the world, that a navy could rise upon the bosom of the ocean by the power of an infant nation, in so sudden a manner. The fabled pines of Mount Ida, were not formed into ships for the fugitive Trojans more rapidly than the oaks of our pasture-grounds and forests were thrown into naval batteries for the protection of commerce and our national dignity." Under the act of March 3, 1801, all the ships and other vessels belonging to the navy of the United States were sold, with the exception of thirteen, and those were most of them frigates, yet from this remnant was taken, in the summer of that year a squadron of three frigates and a schooner, to which another was added early in the year following, to subdue the corsairs in the harbor of Tripoli, whose reigning bashaw had declared war against the United States, and blockaded American commerce in the Mediterranean, because of the refusal of the United States to purchase immunity from capture and slavery by the corsairs, from the sovereignties of Morocco and Algiers. The first battle settled the supremacy of the United States over their foreign foes, "showing," it is recorded, "our superiority in naval tactics and gunnery over anything those pirates could produce." Peace was made on the 3d of June, 1805, on favorable terms. "And then ended," says the historian Knapp, "a war which surprised the nations of Europe. They had often smiled to think the United States, a new-born nation, should be so presumptuous as to suppose that she could put down these predatory hordes, which had exacted tribute from all the commercial world from time immemorial, but it was done, and the lookers-on were astonished at the events as they transpired. The Pope, who had ever been deeply interested in all these pagan wars, or rather, all these wars against pagan powers, declared that the infant nation had done more in five years in checking the insolence of these infidels than all the nations of Europe for ages. The thunders of the Vatican had passed harmlessly over these pirates' heads through more than ten successors of St. Peter, until the United States had brought these infidels to terms by the absolute force of naval power. The head of the church saw that the people of a free nation had felt the degradation of paying tribute, and were determined to do so no longer than they could concentrate their energies, and direct them to bear upon the general foe of Christendom. The whole was indeed a wonder, that a nation that scarcely had risen into the great family of independent powers, should be able to grapple with, and in a measure subdue, these barbarians who had been for so long a time the scourge of mankind. We had not taken one power alone but all, from the Atlantic to the Red Sea. The Doge (of Venice) who had been wedded to the Adriatic, and promised for the dower of his bride the dominion of the seas from the Delta. of Egypt to the Straits of Gibraltar, had never in the pride of aristocratic strength claimed the honor of humbling the 'insolent Turk' to the extent that the United States had done in a few years. The aim of liberty, when properly directed, was always deadly to despotism. These exertions gave our flag a rank among the nations of Europe in these classical seas in which so great a proportion of all the sea-fights in the annals of man had taken place, from the early ages of fable and romance to modern times. The corsair, who had been the terror of the world, was now found a furious, but not unconquerable foe, and the barbarians, whose tremendous fierceness had been the tale of wonder in every age, seemed in our mode of warfare less dangerous than the aboriginals we had been contending with from the cradle of our nation." A SINGULAR PARALLEL In April, 1917, more than one hundred years after this mission was accomplished, a reluctant nation was persuaded to train its guns once more on the eastern hemisphere in order to hold fast the authority won in that "elder day" to guarantee to every citizen of the United States his rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" according to the Constitution of the United States on land and sea-close in shore, far out where the ocean liners plow their way through deep water, and where inland seas conceal the mine and submarine of the twentieth century pirate. This inherent force in a navy, so long inactive but now endowed with a century's ripeness, was fully roused to action by the atrocities of an irresponsible engine of destruction sent out in large numbers by the German government to prey upon commerce, and send to the bottom every vessel which dared to venture into its forbidden zones. They were called submarines and "U-boats" (undersea) with a number attached, and types were common to all countries, but in their use by the German navy were far outdoing in rapacity the corsairs of Morocco and Algiers. They, also, had become the "terror of the world," and their barbarity reflected in the halls of Congress, in time, "sparred" the ship of state off on obstructive policy and developed a determined belligerence in an habitually easygoing and peace-loving people. One of these freebooters, more malevolent than others, was an armed sailing ship, which, keeping pace with modern invention, decoyed many passing steamships by means of the distress signal, "S. O. S." (a signal of distress with no words attached) sent to every wireless station, the running up of false colors, and a stream of black smoke pouring out of her side as if on fire. The steamers left their course and hastened to her relief, only to be fired upon by hidden guns and sunk as fast as they appeared. Such dastardly deeds called for the punitive expedition of May, 1917, concerning which the ambassador of the United States in London, Dr. Walter Hines Page, is reported as having observed that "the only previous occasion on which the United States has intervened in war in the Old World, was at the time when they suppressed the Barbary pirates. It is singular that our present errand is so similar to that." THE BATTLE OF LAKE ERIE "Oh, for a son of bright-eyed glory, That sweeping o'er the chorded shell, -Ode by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Interminable discussions have arisen respecting every particular of this engagement, but only well-established facts are included in this sketch. When the United States Congress, in the autumn of 1811, authorized the building of new frigates, it became the initial movement in the action which for the first time placed an American squadron in opposition to the British in line of battle. Likewise, it was the first defeat Great Britain had suffered when all her force was either captured or destroyed. British domination was supreme on the Great Lakes, and it appeared to be the purpose of that government to assume control of the vast territory of the west, and divide its dominion from Canada to Mexico with the United States; the Ohio and Mississippi rivers forming at natural boundary. The capture of the far-reaching Territory of Michigan had given them the advantage of the command of Lake Erie, and a strategic position of which it was the United States' design to relieve them. Losses had been sustained on land, but at sea the men whose rights had been violated had gained victories which soothed the wounded pride of the republic, whose navy Great Britain arrogantly boasted would soon be "swept from the ocean," for the War of 1812 was fought wherever the frontiers of the two countries met. It was carried down to the Gulf of Mexico, so as to cut off the United States from the west, on the sea coast all along the Atlantic shore from Maine to Mexico, and on the coast of the gulf, ending at New Orleans. To lay waste the whole American coast, on which they were then waging predatory warfare, from Maine to Georgia, was the avowed intention of the British. July, 1813, the navy consisted of the war vessels contained in the following list: |