The Dawn of Innovation by Charles R. Morris Read Free Book Online Page A

Confiance reported that its men “declared that they would stand no longer to their Quarters”—a remarkable defiance for British seamen. 37 ) The Americans quickly finished off the Linnet and rounded up the smaller vessels. Only a few gunboats escaped.
    Prevost had not yet signaled the assault on the forts when he saw his navy surrender. He immediately broke off the action and ordered a retreat, infuriating the veterans and most of his officers, although he had been quite clear on his conditions for a siege. Even Wellington later conceded that it was a correct decision.
    With the failed invasion, the apparently permanent loss of both Erie and Champlain, and the standoffs on Ontario and the Niagara peninsula, Parliament’s avowed objective of punishing America began to look like a very expensive self-indulgence.

Denouement
    The last act of the 1814 sailing season, as imposing as it was inconsequential, came in October, when Yeo finally sailed out from Kingston in his new first-rater, the HMS St. Lawrence , “a behemoth of oceanic proportions, more powerful than Nelson’s flagship at Trafalgar.” 38 It bristled with 112 guns, almost all of them very heavy, arranged in three gun decks. At a stroke, the fleet’s throw weight of metal increased by 55 percent, and its long-range firepower was more than doubled. Chauncey duly took his own armada back to the shelter of Sackets, and for a few weeks before the ice set in, the lake was Yeo’s to sail in unopposed majesty.
    The Americans were determined to stay in the game. By late fall, Sackets was a beehive, laying down two first-raters and two large frigates, building a rope works, and constructing a second shipyard, including housing, shops, and other facilities. A British spy, “our friend Jones,” who also reported on his tête-à-tête dinners with top American generals, carefully paced off the measurements of the Sackets first-raters. (He also noted that “the great mass of the seamen appear to be coloured people.” 39 ) Yeo’s shipyard master, Capt. Richard O’Conor, in the meantime went off to London to warn the admirals of the “very considerable . . . exertions of the Enemy.” 40

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    The St. Lawrence , a true British “first-rater,” bristling with 112 gunports, was one of the largest ships in the world when it was launched down a Lake Ontario slipway in the fall of 1814. It was bigger and better-armed than Nelson’s flagship at Trafalgar, but never fired a shot in anger. When the peace treaty was signed a few months after its launch, it was left to rot on the beach until it was disposed of in 1832.

    But second thoughts abounded. Prevost complained in October that outfitting the St. Lawrence had “absorbed almost the whole of the Summer Transport Service from Montreal,” 41 superseding far more pressing supply issues. And even Jones pleaded to Madison for a rethink of what had “become a warfare of Dockyards.” “We are at War with the most potent Naval power in the world,” whose global network of supplies and ordnance meant it could easily meet any demand “in less time and at one fourth the expense” as the Americans. Jones estimated that the next summer’s lake fleet would require 7,000 seamen, which he saw no possibility of supplying. 42
    More practically, the American government was broke. Lake seamen and troops had not been paid for six months or more, and the militias,
Chauncey wrote, “desert by companies.” 43 Eckford and the Browns had signed personal notes for $110,000 to cover payments to critical suppliers. In early February, the three of them wrote that they were bearing a weekly expense of $8,000 and would “certainly be oblig’d to stop the whole business in ten or twelve days if we are not Supply’d with money.” 44
    The British were making their own calculations. The cabinet guessed that winning the war