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44 military operations “It Is Better to Make a Signal Than to Curse One’s Subordinates” Oliver Hazard Perry and the Battle of Lake Erie Michael A. Palmer At its bicentennial, the Battle of Lake Erie remains one of the most famous military engagements in American history. Oliver Hazard Perry’s message announcing his victory—“We have met the enemy, and they are ours”—has become an unforgettable passage, and the commodore, so often pictured being rowed, upright and fully exposed, from the battered Lawrence to the Niagara, is a recognized hero of a nearly forgotten war.1 Nevertheless, despite Perry’s victory, almost as soon as the battle ended it became a topic of controversy. The Americans had secured a total triumph, but Perry’s chief subordinate, Master Commandant Jesse Duncan Elliott, and several of his supporters questioned Perry’s handling of the squadron and, in a more subtle fashion, challenged the commodore’s personal behavior. James Fenimore Cooper, who served in the early navy himself (1807–11), knew many oftheindividualsengagedatLakeErieandwroteoneofthefirsthistoriesofthe U.S. Navy. Cooper, while he addressed many of the controversies surrounding the battle in his narrative, avoided direct criticism of Perry and concluded: “The personal deportment of Captain Perry, throughout the day, was worthy of all praise.”2 Nevertheless, Cooper had his private doubts, as he expressed in a letter to a friend in 1839: “The testimony, given in the shape of letters and affidavits, ten years after the affair, is so contradictory that I will defy any man to make head or tail of it. Without knowing the characters of the witnesses thoroughly, no man can say who ought to be believed and who not.”3 The record of the battle indicates that Perry, as Cooper wrote, was stead- – 44 – oliver hazard perry and the battle of lake erie 45 fast and heroic throughout a brutal engagement. He was fortunate to have survived the day given the devastation of his flagship, the brig Lawrence, by British fire. Postbattle suggestions to the contrary issued by Elliott and his supporters were groundless, reckless, and petty and undermined the more serious of their charges: Perry’s handling of the squadron, his service as commodore, had not equaled his handling of the Lawrence as its captain. When Perry took command of the American squadron on Lake Erie, he had the tools of victory thrust into his hands. His two brigs alone, the Lawrence and the Niagara, designed and constructed by Noah Brown, outgunned the entire British squadron on the lake by almost 50 percent.4 To win, Perry had to avoid a battle in which the British, who held a two-to-one superiority in long guns, would hold the wind gauge and be able to control the range of the engagement. If Perry could manage that and keep the two Brown-built brigs with their thirty-six 32-pounder carronades together in the battle line, he could not lose.5 A rather fortunate shift of wind handed Perry the wind gauge as the battle commenced, but he failed to keep his well-armed brigs together in line. The fault lay with Perry’s prebattle instructions, and their impact on the course of the engagement was marked. Captain Perry clearly fought his own ship very well, but Commodore Perry unnecessarily placed his squadron at risk before the battle began, and once it commenced he failed to direct the movements of his squadron, other than the Lawrence, during the engagement. Perry’s mishandling of the American flotilla turned an easy victory into a hard-fought contest that could have ended as easily in defeat as in victory. Command and control during the age of fighting sail took one of two basic forms. Most navies, including those of the United States and Great Britain, relied on centralized methods of numerary flag systems to manage communications between ships.6 Such systems were in their heyday in the early nineteenth century. There were problems with centralized signaling systems, however. Poor visibility, the smoke of battle, damage to the masts and rigging of the flagship, a change in the direction of the wind, or the physical extent of an engagement usually made communication problematic. A commander who could not see the entirety of the battlefield was hardly well placed to exercise control over it. This, and a variety of other problems, often made it impossible for a commander to bring his entire force into action. Admiral Richard Lord Howe, [3.138.175.180] Project MUSE...

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