quite impossible that one of my descent could weigh the incidents and significance of the periods in question in an unprejudiced and judicial spirit. It would doubtless prove so here and now. Without, therefore, myself expressing any conclusion upon the influence on American national character and bearing of the foreign policy pursued by the United States between 1801 and 1812, I shall content myself with quoting on that head the recently uttered judgment of a distinguished naval commander. In a paper read only two months ago before the Massachusetts Historical Society, Rear-Admiral French Ensor Chadwick thus spoke :2

Notwithstanding the evident necessity of at least protecting our merchantmen from seizure by corsairs and the saving of their crews from slavery, a navy was anathema to President Jefferson. In 1802 he proposed in his annual message "to add to our navy yard here [Washington] a dock within which our vessels may be laid up dry and under cover from the sun." In 1807 he could write to Paine, several months after the outrage of the firing by the Leopard upon the Chesapeake, that a navy was "a ruinous folly." . . It was, except with reference to the Barbary Powers, an era of base submission to insult; our ships were being seized at the rate, for a long time, of three a day. All this would have been saved; and we should have escaped, too . . . the impressment from their ships of our seamen, at the rate of 1000 a year, the seizure of the ships themselves, and the brutal insult of the Chesapeake incident, if we had but followed the advice of Gallatin and Gouverneur Morris and built a fleet of battle-ships. And above all we should have saved our honor and self-respect. . . . I, for one, cannot read the story of the Jefferson and Madison administration without wrath in my heart and contempt in my mind for their so-called statesmanship . . . the twelve years of ignoble policy in the Jeffersonian period toward French spoliation and British arrogance.

Not without a secret consciousness at the time that all this was true, Americans during the period in question were accustomed to read of themselves in the columns of the English press as "spaniellike in character ", a people who "the more they were chastised the more obsequious they became "; and one, moreover, which "could not be kicked into a war". The frigates they had built under previous administrations were rotting at their moorings, being timorously regarded as mere incentives to an increased but ever more contemptuous spirit of foreign arrogance and aggression. They were scornfully referred to in the journals of the mother-country as "bundles of pine boards sailing under a bit of striped bunting". Submitting to it all, the confidence of the people in themselves was gone. They questioned their own man-to-man fighting capacity. By sufferance, they continued to exist.

Recalled through the century vista, the situation in 1812 was, 2 Proceedings of Massachusetts Historical Society, XLVI. 205–206.

withal, in every respect spectacular. Trafalgar was then seven years passed, and England during the period which followed Trafalgar was fairly drunk with consciousness of maritime power. Britannia did indeed then rule the wave. On the ocean, none questioned her supremacy; for, almost immemorially, hers had been a record of unbroken naval victory-victory on a scale both large and small. During twenty years of incessant conflict, numbering in them more than two hundred ship-to-ship encounters of approximately equal force, the cross of St. George had averaged but one defeat in every forty fights. Contemptuously ignoring all international rules of courtesy or conduct, she had made the United States gulp down the very dregs in the cup of humiliation; for, on June 22, 1807, in sight of the capes of Virginia, the unlucky Chesapeake, disgraced and degraded, had been compelled to drag her way, a battered, helpless hulk, back to the port from which she had the day before sailed with officers and crew smarting under a humiliation never either forgotten or forgiven. Unresistingly pounded into abject submission, her company had been mustered on her own deck by a British subaltern, and those whom he saw fit to designate had been taken forcibly from her.

That such an event could have occurred seems now incredible. The mere recollection of it a century later suffices to bring hot blood to the American face. It was as if an individual recalled, not a brutal blow once received but having been contemptuously dismissed with a kick or a cut from a horsewhip. And the curious and most ignominious feature of it, is to recall that at the time, in the places where men met in Boston, party spirit ran so strong and national pride had fallen so low that the outrage was excused and defended as within the right of the British admiral to order and a British captain to execute. An historic fact, such a statement challenges proof.3

The affair of the Chesapeake occurred in 1807. It was subsequently settled diplomatically after a fashion, and in a way little conducive to a restored American self-respect; and things then went on from bad to worse. The last dregs in the cup of humiliation. remained to be swallowed. We gulped them down. Then, four years later, in 1811, occurred the affair of the frigate President and the corvette Little Belt. Numerically the armed ships of the United States were to those of Great Britain as one to a hundred; morally, they were as nothing. As was said at the time: "No one act of the little navy of the United States had been at all calculated to gain the respect of the British. First was seen the Chesapeake allowing herself to be beaten with impunity by a British ship only nominally superior to her. Then the huge frigate President attacks Proceedings of Massachusetts Historical Society, XLV. 355.

3

and fights for nearly three quarters of an hour the British sloop Little Belt", of only eighteen guns, and, it was claimed, had been beaten off by her. It was asserted also that those in command of the President had mistaken the sloop Little Belt for the frigate Guerriere; and because thereof, Captain Dacres of the Guerriere and his crew" felt the full passion and duty of revenge". In future there was to be no possibility of mistake; and so the Guerriere wore her name writ large on her fore-topsail. She hungered for a meeting with the President.*

And the day came when the frigate Constitution took upon herself the quarrel of her sister ship, and in her turn hungered for a meeting with the Guerriere. On August 19, 1812-fifteen months after the affair of the Little Belt-that hunger was appeased. The story of what then occurred, and where it occurred, is familiar; but it will bear repetition. Suffice it to say that on the 18th of June preceding war had at last been declared with Great Britain. Then followed an unbroken series of military disasters, culminating, in August, with the disgraceful surrender of Detroit and the destruc-tion of Fort Dearborn, where Chicago now stands. Our entire Northwest was either in possession of the enemy or at his mercy. The cup of American humiliation, already it might have been thought drained, seemed inexhaustible-veritably another widow's cruse. The collapse was complete: and, where open panic did not prevail, utter discouragement was felt. In the midst of it all the Constitution, Captain Isaac Hull in command, on July 12 passed out of Chesapeake Bay, and into the midst of a British squadron. She eluded and out footed them, her escape a marvel of maritime skill and sustained physical endurance; but during a part of that threeday ordeal the Guerriere was at the front, and pitted against her; nor did that fact pass unnoticed by watchful eyes on the escaping frigate. They would not then have dared to hope it, but a day of reckoning was at hand. July 26 Hull reached Boston. He then had reason to believe he was about to be called upon to turn his command over to another; but, first, he was in search of a fight. He knew his ship; he had tested his crew; he craved the square issue of battle. So, reporting his arrival, he did not linger, awaiting orders; but on August 2, turned the Constitution's prow seaward. The very next day the anticipated order came. Hull was relieved of his command; but, with that command, he was out of the way, headed for mid-Atlantic, hunting for an opponent. His ship's company shared his eagerness; from the youngest powder-monkey to the executive Henry Adams, United States, VI. 36-37, 373; Paullin, Commodore John Rodgers, pp. 209-242.

officer they were in the hunt; and when, at last, on the afternoon of Wednesday, August 19, the drums beat to quarters and the grim order came to clear decks for action, it was met with a ringing cheer. This was at 4 P. M. Two hours and a half later the Guerriere was rolling in the trough of the summer sea, a battered, sparless, foundering hulk. The next day she sank. She is there in mid-ocean now; not far from the spot where, a century later, the Titanic foundered.

The action occurred on Wednesday, the 19th; twelve days later, the morning of Monday, August 31, the Boston papers announced the bitter Detroit humiliation sustained under another Hull two weeks before; but in a different column of the same issue announcement was also made of that naval action which "however small the affair might appear on the general scale of the world's battles, raised the United States in one half hour to the rank of a first-class power in the world". The jealousy of the navy which had until then characterized the more recent national policy vanished forever “in the flash of Hull's first broadside". The victory, moreover, was most dramatic-a naval duel. The adversaries-not only commanders, but ship's companies to a man-had sought each other out for a test of seamanship, discipline, and gunnery-arrogance and the confidence of prestige on the one side, a passionate sense of wrong on the other. They had met in mid-Atlantic-frigate to frigate. On that August afternoon the wind was blowing fresh; a summer sea was running. For about an hour the antagonists manoeuvred for position, the British ship wearing from time to time to fire a broadside; and the American yawing to avoid being raked, and discharging an occasional shot from her bow guns. Finding that nothing was accomplished in this way, Hull wore around, set the main-topgallantsail, and headed directly for his enemy, who bore up with the wind, to meet him at close quarters. Both wanted to have the affair out.

Up to this time the greater part of the American crew had remained stationed at their quarters, impassive spectators; and even while they were running up alongside of the Guerriere the gunners stood with locked strings in their hands in silence awaiting the order to fire. To the men, both those handling the sails and those idle at the guns, the situation was trying; for they had been thus brought under a repeated fire without the excitement of striking back. There were of them those who were then killed beside their guns; and his executive officer importuned the American commander to begin the fighting. Hull restrained him; but the order came at last. The Constitution had then been worked into the exact position in which her commander wanted to get her. This was a few minutes before

six o'clock; and the historian, writing since, has recorded that now the two opponents "came together side by side, within pistol-shot, the wind almost astern, and running before it they pounded each other with all their strength. As rapidly as the guns could be worked, the Constitution poured in broadside after broadside, double-shotted with round and grape,-and, without exaggeration, the echo of those guns startled the world." Of her first broadside in that action, the master of an American brig, then a captive on board the British frigate, afterward wrote: "About six o'clock. I heard a tremendous explosion from the opposing frigate. The effect of her shot seemed to make the Guerriere reel, and tremble as though she had received the shock of an earthquake." That one retained broadside settled the business of the Guerriere. "In less than thirty minutes from the time we got alongside of the enemy", Captain Hull afterward reported to the Secretary of the Navy, "she was left without a spar standing, and the hull cut to pieces in such a manner as to make it difficult to keep her above water."

The historian has truly said of that conflict: "Isaac Hull was nephew to the unhappy General [who, three days before the Constitution overcame the Guerriere, had capitulated at Detroit], and perhaps the shattered hulk of the Guerriere, which the nephew left at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean eight hundred miles east of Boston, was worth for the moment the whole province which the uncle had lost, eight hundred miles to the westward. . . . No experience of history ever went to the heart of New England more directly than this victory, so peculiarly its own; but the delight was not confined to New England, and extreme though it seemed it was still not extravagant."

The details of that memorable conflict are in every American history, and there is neither occasion nor time here to recount them. One incident is, however, less well known, and in these days of race. feeling and negro burnings at the stake may well be recalled. The African race is, fortunately, not as a rule resentful; but it so chanced that of the four men forcibly taken by the Leopard from the Chesapeake in June, 1807, two were negroes, and of these one at least had subsequently, by sentence of a court-martial held at Halifax, been flogged well nigh to death. Shipped at Annapolis, the Constitution numbered in its crew others of the blood-black men, with woolly hair. Referring afterward to this fact and the conduct of those men, Hull, a rough, seafaring sailor of the period remarked: “I never

Henry Adams, United States, VI. 373.

Hollis, The Friga e Constitution, p. 169. 7 Henry Adams, United States, VI. 375, 376.