20 The Guns of the Constitution
The winter passed, the spring came again, and the world bloomed afresh; spring yielded to summer, and on one of its early days I took Marian Pendleton walking in the grounds of the Capitol. I did not go far from the building itself and she seemed to wonder why.
“Why do you stick so close to those walls, Philip?” she asked. “There is nothing in there but a tiresome old Congress that talked the winter away, then talked the spring to death, and is now dooming summer to the same fate.”
But I remained near the walls and steps, nevertheless, and presently we heard a shout and the excited clamour of many voices. People rushed out of the building, and their faces bore great news. Among them was Courtenay, unable to restrain himself.
“It has been done at last, Philip!” he cried to me.
“What has been done? What is it?” asked Marian.
“War! War!” said Courtenay. “We have declared war at last against Great Britain! We have taken our grievances to the last court, all others failing!”
He spoke the truth, or what was as good as the truth, for the House had voted for war, and the Senate, two weeks later, passed the measure, with the President’s proclamation quickly following. After years of patient and impatient endurance we had chosen the sword at last, but without an army, without generals, without military stores, and with ships that a man could almost count on the fingers of his two hands against the thousand of our antagonist. Until the end the Administration had persisted in its policy of no preparations, and when war was voted none could fail to notice the ominous fact that New England was almost solidly against it, and the Middle States divided.
When that which I had long sought came, I felt weak and afraid, and for the moment was sorry that I had my wish, knowing so well our unready state and the slender resources that we had for preparations, even at this late hour. Men around me were shouting for the victories that they knew would come to-morrow, but I began to understand what an easy thing it is to cry for war when it is far off, and how different it looks when it stands before your face.
The war opened, and what the cautious had expected befell us. Hull, a senile imbecile, surrendered without firing a shot; the brave Kentucky militia, half armed, half equipped, and led by generals who were only talking lawyers, marched hundreds of miles through the wilderness and arrived at the Canadian border half dead with fatigue and scanty food, only to be beaten by inferior numbers on ground that they did not know. Thus, I say, the war, after being put off with disgrace, opened with disgrace and continued so for a while, until there came a glorious burst of sunlight from a quarter expected by few of us.
I was walking up Pennsylvania Avenue one day, despondent over the disasters and not allowed by Mr. Gallatin, my patron, whose right to my services could not be denied, to go to Kentucky, where I wished to join our forces, when I met Charlton, the young naval officer of my early acquaintance. I had supposed him off at sea somewhere dodging the English ships, and was astonished to see him there in Washington.
“You here!” I said.
“Yes, I’m here, Ten Broeck,” he replied, “and I bring great news, glorious news.”
I looked at him in doubt; one expected news those days, but not glorious news.
“I came from Boston,” he said, “and I’ve brought the flag of the Guerriere as a present to the President; it’s full of holes, but it will do, for we put them there.”
The Guerriere! The ship which I and all Americans had so much cause to hate!
“The Guerriere!” I cried. “What of her! What do you mean by saying that you bring her flag as a present to the President?”
“It’s all that was left to bring,” he said joyously. “The rest of her is floating somewhere between the top and bottom of the Atlantic, sent there by the guns of the Constitution. I saw it done, for I was there to help. I’m not in such a hurry that I can’t tell you all about it. Come with me.”
I went with him, and he told me the famous old story; how the slanders they had been pouring on us for years were hurled back at them from the mouths of the guns of the Constitution; how Dacres said the Constitution was coming down too boldly for a Yankee, and his surprise, from which he never recovered, when his ship was shot to pieces under him. Every American knows the tale now.
We had a great celebration of the Constitution’s victory, and then came the blood-stained flag of another British frigate, the Macedonian, taken off the coast of Africa by the United States, the combat, as before, being one-sided from beginning to end and never in doubt for a moment. The victories crowded on us, and the little ships as well as the big ones took a hand. Most glorious of all was the news of the Wasp, and how she fought the Frolic in a roaring sea with the waves tumbling over each other, the ships rising and falling on their sides, their guns going under water sometimes and then touching each other. Their ship was bigger than ours and had more and heavier guns, but it ended just the same, for our guns were manned by better men, and when the two ships locked and it came to boarding, at which the English claim to excel, it was our men who boarded and not theirs, and their ship was ours.
And now a most wonderful change came over the British Admiralty. Before the war any ship of theirs could whip any of ours double her size; they knew our ships, had visited them, dined aboard them, and ridiculed them; but lo! the British Admiralty issued a strict order to their captains that no thirty-eight-gun frigate of theirs should fight a forty-four of ours, and their Pique set the example by running away from the Constitution in the night in the West Indies. In six or eight months our little navy of twenty against their thousand had captured or sunk more ships of theirs than all the navies of France, Holland, Denmark, and Spain combined had been able to take from them in twenty years of incessant fighting. Can you wonder, can any one wonder that we rejoiced? We who had been called cowards, liars, cheats, and everything that is bad by them, rejoiced and still rejoice, and I know we had ample cause. Let me add, too, that the quality of our foe was another reason why we were so glad when we beat him. We have never cared much for any of our victories except those that we have won over the English.