Stephen Decatur: American Naval Hero, 1779-1820

Afterword

216 Afterword T he two surviving navy commissioners reconvened on Saturday, March 25. Their only business was to cancel the board’s subscription to Niles Weekly Register. Rodgers and Porter found that morning’s account of “the late unhappy occurrence near this city” to be “so destitute of even the color of truth that the confidence hitherto felt” in the Register’s veracity “no longer exists.”1 In his account of the duel Hezekiah Niles falsely reported that Barron had “recently claimed the command of the Columbus 74, as the senior of com. Bainbridge, which claim was resisted by all the navy board,” particularly Decatur.2 This made the duel appear to be an official act rather than a private matter between Barron and Decatur. Decatur’s death was a tragedy for the navy. In the days that followed, speculation mounted that other duels were in the works: Rodgers versus Barron , Elliott versus Porter. Macdonough and other officers managed to quell these feuds, but the damage to the navy’s reputation had been done.3 Congress briefly considered a bill to prohibit dueling but took no action. Decatur and Barron were the last navy captains to fight a duel. Others had learned from their ghastly example and decided to duel no more.4 Niles did not retract his statement, but on April 8 he began printing the correspondence between Barron and Decatur that led to the duel. The correspondence made Barron, now recovering from his wounds, seem a more sympathetic character. In July 1821 the navy convened a court of inquiry to examine Decatur’s charges against Barron. The court could find no proof that Barron’s reported conversations at Pernambuco had ever taken place but was not satisfied with Barron’s explanation for his failure to return home during the war. After publishing the full record of Barron’s 1807 courtmartial , however, the navy reinstated Barron. He was given command of the navy yard in Decatur’s home port of Philadelphia in 1824. He had won a measure of vindication, but he never lived down the disgrace of the Chesapeake or the notoriety of having killed the navy’s greatest hero. Barron retired from active service in 1838, and died in 1851, the navy’s senior captain, but after striking the Chesapeake’s colors in 1807, he never commanded another ship in the U.S. Navy.5 Susan and most of the navy’s officers blamed Jesse Elliott for instigating the duel. The navy did not pursue its inquiry into the Lake Erie incident (inquiries into defeats move more quickly than inquiries into victories), but Susan began a public relations battle of her own in 1820–21 by publishing afterword 217 Perry’s account of Elliott’s cowardice. Elliott and his supporters responded— most powerfully in James Fenimore Cooper’s History of the Navy of the United States of America, which exonerated Elliott. Perry’s nephew, Commodore Mathew Calbraith Perry, issued his own pamphlet on the controversy charging Elliott with cowardice and duplicity. Barron could earn sympathy, but Elliott’s future in the navy was severely limited by the simple fact that the other officers hated him. He realized that their support was less essential than that of the secretary of the navy and the president. As commander of the Boston Navy Yard in the 1830s (he succeeded Bainbridge, who had finally won back the coveted position), Elliott demonstrated his fealty by ordering the Constitution ’s eagle figurehead replaced by an effigy of President Andrew Jackson. It did not win Elliott any friends in either the navy or Whiggish Boston (Samuel Dewey rowed out to the ship one night and cut off the top of Jackson’s head), but it helped Elliott survive in the navy.6 James Fenimore Cooper’s account of the battle of Lake Erie in his monumental History of the Navy downplayed Perry’s role.7 Naval officer Alexander Slidell Mackenzie, who witnessed Decatur’s dramatic entry into Gibraltar and had been able to supplement his military pay by writing well-received travel books, tried to correct Cooper’s interpretation with a two-volume biography of Perry. When Mackenzie followed this with a biography of John Paul Jones, Harvard president Jared Sparks approached him to write a short life of Decatur for his series of American biographies. Mackenzie promised a sketch of about 150 pages to be completed by January 1845.8 By December 1844 Mackenzie...