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The War Of 1812

Anglo-American relations had deteriorated steadily since 1803, the year Britain and France resumed their long struggle after the short-lived Peace of Amiens. Charged with conducting a blockade that eventually embraced the continent of Europe, the Royal Navy not only seized American ships but also impressed thousands of American seamen to fill its crews. The ill will these practices created was aggravated in 1811 by the discovery that British forces in Canada were supplying the Indian tribes resisting American settlement of the Ohio Valley. The obvious solution to that problem was congenial to the spirit of expansionism current in American society and politics, and on 18 June 1812 the United States declared war with the aim of expunging British power from North America.

Marine musketry contributed to two of the Navy's three opening victories. In the first, the Constitution's battle with the Guerriere (19 August 1812), the British captain and both his first and second lieutenants were hit by small arms fire. But the carnage was not wholly onesided. The commander of the Constitution's Leathernecks, 1st Lt. William S. Bush, had promised a friend, "Should an opportunity be afforded for boarding the enemy, I will be the first man on his deck. "'I As the two ships crashed together, he climbed to the Constitution's rail and shouted to the captain, "Shall I board her, sir?" An instant later, one of the Guerriere's Royal Marines drilled him through the head.

The war's second frigate action, between the United States and the Macedonian (25 October 1812), was won outside musket range. In the next, the Constitution against the Java (29 November), the antagonists again came to close quarters, and the Java's captain was mortally wounded by a musket shot. The fourth action broke the string of American victories, but there was none in which Marines displayed more valor.

The defeat occurred on 1 June 1813, when Capt. James Lawrence, only ten days in command, took the Chesapeake out of Boston harbor with an untried crew to engage HMS Shannon under Capt. Philip Vere Broke, probably the most formidable frigate in the Royal Navy. The battle lasted barely a quarter of an hour. By the time Broke led his boarders over the Chesapeake's bulwarks, British fire had made a bloody shambles of her deck. Every exposed officer had been shot at least once, and many seamen had fled below. The commander of the ship's Marine detachment, 1st Lt. James Broome, was down with a mortal wound, but the NCOs and men still on their feet put up the only organized resistance the British encountered. Fourteen of the Chesapeake's forty-four Leathernecks were killed outright or died of wounds, and twenty (including both sergeants) were wounded-a casualty rate of 77 percent, more than twice that of the ship's crew.

Subsequently, Marine guards played a conspicuous role in three of the U.S. Navy's ten remaining victories at sea. At the climax of the engagement between the sloop-of-war Wasp and the British brig Reindeer (28 June 1814), the Reindeer's captain, William Manners, already twice wounded, called away boarders and climbed into his ship's rigging, sword in hand, to lead them. As he did so, two Marines in the Wasp's maintop put bullets through the top of his skull. The Americans then boarded and captured the Reindeer. Neither side tried to board during the Constitution's double victory over the smaller frigate Cyane and sloop-of-war Levant (20 February 1815), but the battle opened at so close a range that the Constitution's Marines were engaged almost from the beginning. Afterward, the ship's captain commended them for their "lively and well-directed fire." In the action between the sloops-of-war USS Hornet and HMS Penguin (23 March 1815), the latter's captain was picked off as he closed with the intention of boarding. His first lieutenant succeeded in laying the Penguin alongside the Hornet, but the British seamen, apparently impressed by American musketry, ignored the call for boarders. The Penguin surrendered minutes later.

The War of 1812 also included the first - and to date the last - naval battle in which a Marine commanded the American ship engaged. In February 1813 Capt. David Porter took the frigate Essex around Cape Horn to attack the British whaling fleet in the South Pacific. Over the next few months the Essex took so many British vessels that Porter ran short of naval officers to use as prize captains, and in May he assigned his Marine officer, 1st Lt. James Marshall Gamble, to command the Greenwich, a whaler armed with ten guns. "[T]o make up for his want of nautical knowledge," Porter explained, "I put two expert seamen with him as mates." On 14 July the Greenwich defeated the fourteen-gun British whaler Seringapatam while within sight of the Essex - and a very nervous David Porter.

Not all naval actions took place on the high seas. The two of greatest strategic significance, both American victories, were fought on inland waters: the Battles of Lake Erie (10 September 1813) and Lake Champlain (11 September 1814). By winning control of Lake Erie, Commo. Oliver Hazard Perry frustrated British plans to block American expansion into the Ohio Valley; by defeating Britain's attempt to win control of Lake Champlain, Comtno. Thomas Macdonough repulsed the major enemy offensive of the war, an invasion from Canada by ten thousand veteran troops. Thirty-four Leathernecks served in Perry's ships at Lake Erie. Four were killed in action or died of wounds, and another fourteen were wounded. Among the dead was their commander, 2nd Lt. John Brooks. Mangled by a British cannonball, he begged for someone to put him out of his misery before succumbing to shock or loss of blood. There were no Marines in Macdonough's squadron at Lake Champlain, but the army detailed soldiers to perform their duties.

The invasion from Canada was only one element of the offensive that the wind-down of the war with France enabled Britain to mount against the United States in 1814. The other was the dispatch of an amphibious striking force-fifty-four hundred men under Maj. Gen. Robert Ross-to raid American cities with the aim of diverting troops from the invasion front and undermining support for the war. Convoyed by a squadron stronger than the entire U.S. Navy, Ross's army landed at the Patuxent River town of Benedict, Maryland, on 19 August and marched north toward Washington.

The forces available to Brig. Gen. William H. Winder to defend the capital consisted of approximately fifty-five hundred militia, a single regiment of regular infantry, and a naval brigade led by Commo. Joshua Barney. As commander of the Chesapeake gunboat flotilla, Barney had vainly contested the British advance up the Patuxent. Once the action passed him by, he struck out overland for Washington with the flotilla's 420 seamen and Marines and five guns, plus a detachment of 103 Marines that Wharton had sent from the Washington barracks under the Corps's adjutant and inspector, Capt. Samuel Miller, to support the flotilla's operations.

The armies made contact on the west bank of the Eastern Branch of the Potomac (today's Anacostia River) opposite the village of Bladensburg on 24 August. There were, in effect, two battles of Bladensburg. The first, and the only one the Americans had any possibility of winning, had already been lost by poor generalship and panicky militia before the naval brigade, which Winder had neglected to order forward, reached the field.

Barney formed a front along a ridge that crossed the Washington Turnpike approximately a mile behind the original American line. Two 18-pounders under Barney's personal command were sited to fire directly down the pike; the three 12-pounders, assigned to Captain Miller, were wheeled into a field to the right. The seamen and Marines not detailed to serve the guns deployed into a firing line. Other late-coming units aligned on the brigade's flanks: militia on the right, the regular infantry regiment and more militia, including a battery of five guns, on the left.

Flushed with their easy victory in the battle's opening round, the British attacked straight down the pike. The artillery and musket fire that slammed into their ranks from the ridgeline drove them back in surprise. Quickly re-forming, they came on again, only to suffer another repulse. A third assault, bravely mounted minutes later, met the same fate. Barney seized the moment to counterattack, and the bloodied British regiments to his front gave ground to the brigade's seamen (shouting, "Board 'em! Board 'em!") and Marines.

Hurrying to the scene with reinforcements, General Ross ordered his troops to work around the American flanks. He need not have bothered. Almost simultaneously General Winder, intent on saving whatever he could of his army, directed the units there to retire. Inexcusably, he omitted to notify Commodore Barney. Soon the naval brigade found itself under fire from three directions. Barney took a bad wound in the thigh. Captain Miller, himself handling a musket, was hit in the arm by a British soldier with whom he was exchanging shots. Seeing that the situation had become hopeless, Barney gave the order to spike the guns and retreat. Both he and Miller were captured.

On meeting Barney, General Ross complimented him on his command's gallant stand. The compliment was well deserved. Of the 249 British casualties at Bladensburg, nearly all occurred during the second phase of the action. The same was true of the approximately 150 American casualties, the Marines' share of which was eight dead and fourteen wounded. And in a sense, it had been for nothing. There was never any realistic chance that the naval brigade and the neighboring units could hold off Ross's army. Yet in a larger sense, the fight they put up achieved a great deal. It did not save the national capital, but it saved the national honor.

Lieutenant Colonel Wharton remained at the Marine barracks during the battle. When it became known that the redcoats were coming, he collected his headquarters detachment, the Marine Band, and the Corps's records and pay chest and marched to the Washington Navy Yard. Despite an order from the secretary of the Navy to withdraw to Frederick, Maryland, the fleeing government's designated refuge, Wharton volunteered to assist Commo. Thomas Tingey in the yard's defense or destruction. Tingey declined the offer, and Wharton proceeded to Frederick. He was, of course, only following orders; but a number of the Corps's fire-eating young officers found his failure to do something more inexcusable.

After burning Washington's public buildings (but not, for unknown reasons, the Marine barracks and the commandant's house), the British army returned to its ships. Its next objective was Baltimore. Among the ten thousand defenders-again, mostly militia-hurriedly concentrated in anticipation of the attack was a thousand-man naval brigade including the Marines who had fought at Bladensburg and detachments from several nearby ships and stations. The British landed southeast of the city on 12 September, but no new Bladensburg ensued. The militia they encountered stood firm; an American sniper killed General Ross; and the British ships' fire failed to subdue Fort McHenry at the entrance of the harbor. On 14 September the invaders withdrew.

Following this check, the British assembled an even more powerful amphibious force for their next operation. This time the target was New Orleans. The expedition anchored off the Louisiana coast on 8 December. Rather than sail upstream against the strong Mississippi River current, the British chose to approach the city via Lake Borgne, an arm of the Gulf of Mexico. Their passage was contested by five U.S. gunboats embarking 147 seamen and thirty-five Marines. On 14 December these vessels were carried in hand-to-hand fighting by British boat parties numbering nearly a thousand men, but Maj. Gen. Andrew Jackson used the time they had bought him to strengthen the defense of New Orleans.

Ashore, Major Carmick's Marines took part in each of the ensuing actions: Jackson's night attack on the British advance guard on 23 December; British exploratory attacks on 28 December and 1 January 1815; and the British grand assault, which was shot to pieces on 8 January. But after 28 December the Marines were no longer led by Daniel Carmick. Before the battle he had been placed at the head of a battalion of New Orleans volunteers. There, an observer recorded, "he was struck by a rocket, which tore his horse to pieces, and wounded the Major in the arm and head." The Leathernecks completed the campaign under the command of 1st Lt. F. B. De Bellevue. Carmick died in 1816, perhaps as a result of his wounds. At the time, he was the senior Marine officer after Wharton. Had he lived, he would no doubt have succeeded him as commandant, and thereby spared the Corps the embarrassment of Anthony Gale. Tragically, all the deaths resulting from the Battle of New Orleans were unnecessary. U.S. and British negotiators meeting in Belgium had signed a peace treaty restoring the prewar status quo on 24 December.

In the War of 1812, U.S. Marines cemented the reputation to which they had laid claim in earlier conflicts as first-class fighting men. If their overall casualties were not heavy - forty-six dead and thirty-three wounded - they were proportionate to those suffered by the seamen and soldiers with whom Marine detachments served. Congressional approval of the Corps's performance was evident in two acts passed in 1814. One raised its authorized strength to ninety-three officers and 2,622 men, an increase of more than 60 percent; the other made Marine officers eligible for brevet promotions for "gallant actions or meritorious conduct" or after having spent ten years in grade. The six officers who received brevets during or for the war included Capt. Samuel Miller, the hero of Bladensburg, and the commander of the Constitution's Marines during her action with the Cyane and Levant, Capt. Archibald Henderson.

Operationally, the years following the War of 1812 were relatively quiet for the Corps. Marine guards sailed in the two squadrons sent to the Mediterranean in 1815 to chastise the Barbary powers, which (Morocco excepted) had taken advantage of the Navy's wartime absence to begin misbehaving, but after four U.S. ships gobbled up an Algerine frigate, the offenders peaceably acceded to American demands. Nearer home, in Spanish East Florida, Marine detachments took part in expeditions that destroyed pirate lairs on the Apalachicola River in 1816 and Amelia Island in 1817. In March of the latter year Congress imposed the first of what would become routine postwar cutbacks on the Corps, passing a Peace Establishment Act that reduced its authorized strength to fifty officers and 865 NCOs and men.

Institutionally, the same years were anything but quiet. A number of Marine officers considered Lieutenant Colonel Commandant Wharton's failure to take the field against the British an act of rankest cowardice. None was more disgusted than Bvt. Maj. Archibald Henderson, who in 1817 preferred charges that brought Wharton before a court-martial. There were two specifications: neglect of duty and conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman, in that he had declined to take steps to silence criticism of his actions in 1814 "so highly injurious to his own character and of great disadvantage to the Corps." The court acquitted Wharton on both charges. But the commandant did not have long to savor his vindication. The following year he sickened, and on 1 September he died.

With Wharton's demise, thirty-six-year-old Bvt. Maj. Anthony Gale, became the Corps's senior officer. Irish by birth, Gale joined the Marine Corps in September 1798, served afloat in the Quasi-War and the War with Tripoli, commanded the Philadelphia barracks, and took part in the defense of Baltimore. His brevet rank had been awarded in 1814 in virtue of ten years in grade.

As seniority alone generally governed promotions and appointments in the U.S. armed forces, it might have been expected that Gale would be named to succeed Wharton as promptly as Wharton had been picked to succeed Burrows. Instead, six months passed, during which Archibald Henderson served as acting commandant. The delay was clearly caused by doubts raised by Henderson and Bvt. Maj. Samuel Miller regarding Gale's fitness to occupy the Corps's premier post, for which they considered themselves eminently qualified. Henderson stood second on the seniority list; if Gale was passed over, he would have the strongest claim to the appointment. Miller, whose efforts to promote his own candidacy permanently alienated Henderson, was sixth on the seniority list, but he had Bladensburg and at least one highly impressed congressman in his favor. The uncertainty culminated in a court of inquiry convened in February 1819 to investigate updates of two charges of which Gale had been cleared by a court of inquiry in 1816: misuse of government funds and "conduct unbecoming" by being drunk on duty. At the close of its hearings the court ruled that neither charge had been upheld, and on 3 March Anthony Gale was appointed commandant of the Marine Corps.

Lamentably, the accusation of intemperance was justified. In the summer of 1820 Gale came to crosspurposes with Secretary of the Navy Smith Thompson, who granted some Marines furloughs without consulting him. Gale thereupon wrote to the secretary seeking to clarify their command relationship. Thompson responded by countermanding two of the commandant's officer personnel assignments. This frustrating situation set Gale off on a colossal jag, during which he was arrested by the police. Another court-martial ensued, and on 18 October Gale was dismissed from the Corps. He died in obscurity in 1843. Today unhappy Anthony Gale is the only deceased commandant of the Marine Corps whose gravesite is unknown.

Merrill L. Bartlett & Jack Sweetman. The Early Years. The U.S. Marine Corps: An Illustrated History. Naval Institute Press. 2001.

BAT HIST US MARINES Subtitled: A Fellowship of Valor. A dynamic celebration of the great battles that stud the Marine battle colors, along the way covering the legends and leaders, the great traditions, and the inbred esprit that sets this gallant breed apart. Generous appendices feature battle honors, combat casualties, and profiles of colorful Marine heroes from Tripoli to Desert Storm. 'The best book ever written about the Corps.' Carlo D'Este. Hdbd., 8 1/2'x 11', 432 pgs., bandw ill.

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