By Joel Thurtell
“There’s lots of confusion about the War of 1812.”
And a recent book review in domemagazine.com complaining about the “confusion” further muddies the water.
Several distortions or misstatements in the review raised my hackles, and I’ll write about them later.
But there’s a lie that needs immediate correction.
According to reviewer Bill Castanier, “Don’t give up the ship!” was the rallying cry of a US Navy captain who, according to the reviewer, lost his ship, but won the battle.
I hope the book being reviewed isn’t the source for the reviewer’s nonsense. It’s Alec Gilpin’s The War of 1812 in the Old Northwest, a 1957 book re-published recently by Michigan State University Press. I don’t have a copy of the book, so can’t be sure.
But the falsehood is stated clearly in the review, which begins by referring to Oliver Hazard Perry’s victory on Lake Erie in which Perry left one ship to command another and beat the British at Put-In-Bay.
Here is what the reviewer wrote:
Another slogan emanating from a War of 1812 naval battle and often mistakenly attributed to Perry is “Don’t Give Up the Ship,” which was actually spoken by a U.S. naval commander in Boston Harbor – after he gave up the ship to the British but ultimately won the battle. In Lake Erie, Perry’s battle flag carried that slogan, and he carried on the tradition of winning after giving up the ship.
Flat-out wrong.
First, the battle took place at sea, not in Boston Harbor. Second, if this battle initiated a tradition, it was that US ships would thereafter NOT get themselves into one-on-one battles for glory with no strategic value.
The man who uttered that famous cry — “Don’t give up the ship!” was Captain James Lawrence, commanding the USS Chesapeake. The Chesapeake was an American frigate that engaged a Royal Navy frigate in violation of his orders to destroy British shipping bound for Quebec.
Lawrence lost his ship all right, but far from winning the battle, he died as a result of his folly.
In hopes of gaining the kind of glory his compatriot US Navy skippers and he himself earlier got when they battled British frigates and won their mano a mano fights, Lawrence accepted the challenge posed by a single British frigate looking for a fight as Lawrence and the Chesapeake departed Boston Harbor. The British captain was Sir Philip Broke of the HMS Shannon.
The ships were pretty evenly matched, though the Chesapeake had advantages. She had just been refitted, whereas the Shannon had been on blockade duty for several months. The Chesapeake could shoot 1,134 pounds of shot. The Shannon could get off 1,094 pounds. The Chesapeake had a crew of 379, the Shannon had 330. However, the Shannon’s crew had been trained at gunnery under a seasoned and capable captain. Many of the Chesapeake’s crew were unhappy that they hadn’t been paid; Lawrence had a core of trained men along with new recruits. The veterans had disliked the previous commander; Lawrence was a new skipper and this was to be his first sortie in the Chesapeake.
Lawrence’s orders were clear: President James Madison worried that the British were building up troops in Canada and directed Lawrence to concentrate on disrupting British shipping to Quebec.
Instead, Lawrence chose to fight it out with the Shannon. Even if he’d won, the damage that resulted from such battles would have sent the Chesapeake back to Boston harbor for repairs and would have delayed the ship’s deployment for the President’s avowed purpose of distressing British shipping.
The Chesapeake had an advantage in the beginning when the Shannon exposed her stern to what could have been a devastating raking fire from the Chesapeake. Lawrence declined to fire across the Shannon’s stern, either out of misconceived chivalry or stupidity. Lawrence instead lined his ship up with the Shannon for a broadside-to-broadside slug-fest.
The Shannon won the duel. In addition to bad judgment in declining an opportunity to rake the Shannon astern, Lawrence and the Chesapeake suffered from the Shannon’s gunnery. The Chesapeake lost control, first of her head sails and then of her rudder. She smashed into the Shannon. A British sharpshooter fired a bullet into Lawrence, whose words before dying were, “Don’t give up the ship!”
The Chesapeake’s next-in-command officer didn’t know he was the skipper. The crew became demoralized.
The British boarded the Chesapeake, which they captured and sailed to Halifax, Nova Scotia.
President Madison was angry at Lawrence for wagering and losing one of the Navy’s few warships in a duel, instead of following his orders to inflict shipping damage on the British.
As a result of Lawrence’s tragic bravado, the Navy secretary issued an order forbidding US vessels from engaging in one-on-one battles with the enemy.
If you want to read more about the Chesapeake-Shannon battle and this greatly misunderstood war, I recommend 1812: The Navy’s War, by George C. Daughan, Basic Books, New York, 2011.
Another good book about the naval war of 1812 is C.S. Forester’s The Age of Fighting Sail, Doubleday, New York, 1956.
