The USS Chesapeake

The USS Chesapeake and HMS Leopard met off the coast of Norfolk, Virginia in 1807. Setting out for the Mediterranean, Chesapeake was still sorting through boxes and barrels and organizing armaments when the Leopard, looking for British deserters, hailed her and requested permission to come aboad and search. This situation -- boarding and searching by the English -- was not new. The United States, however, was getting increasingly exasperated by it, and the commander of the Chesapeake was under orders not to submit to such a request. He refused. BANG! The Leopard fired; the Chesapeake, caught with its pants down, couldn't defend herself and the captain surrendered the ship. Leopard, interested in deserters, didn't accept the surrender but only searched for and took four sailors -- only one of whom was British born.

Great public outcry followed, and was compared in intensity to the agitation at the time the British and the American militia met at Lexington. It's this comparison that interests The Historical Muse, for clearly the populace was comparing these boardings, searchings and seizures to acts of war. And now that the United States had a navy which had recently demonstrated its power by bringing the Barbary pirates under control, perhaps there was something the new nation could do about these acts.

As far as I can tell, the US Navy consisted of a dozen armed frigates. No one wanted to spend a lot of money on them, but the merchant marine needed to be protected from the pirates and, of course, Britain had relinquished that job in 1783. By 1800 the government had built six ships (not without a lot of opposition) and several more were built "by public subscription" (in Salem, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston (USS John Adams, not to be confused with the USS Adams, one of the original built by congress.) One other was a converted prize taken from the French.

Clearly the American public thought this was a sufficient force to take on the British Navy, and many people called for war then and there. Had the president, Thomas Jefferson, agreed, then it's likely the most notable aspect of the War of 1812 in New England, secession, would have been avoided. The nation, still a collection of individual states without a real sense of identity as a Union, seems to have coalesced at this juncture. Jefferson preferred economic war, probably thinking we weren't in a really good position to take on the most powerful navy in the world. He was probably right, but most definitely he was wrong in his declaration of economic war the following year, which is the next subject we will Muse about.