The War of 1812 - Naval Battleships
In June 1812, the U.S. Navy was 18-years-old with a dozen ships. The British Royal Navy had been operating for centuries, with 500 warships, 85 sailing American waters when war broke out.
In the age of sail, oceangoing vessels were classified by structural characteristics: a sloop has one mast and one deck; a brig, two masts and one deck; a frigate three masts and two decks. A man-of-war, or ship of the line, has multiple masts and decks. The U.S. had no ships of the line, and just three frigates ready for action. The Royal Navy was paying 140,000 seamen, 31,000 of whom were well-trained marines. The U.S. Navy had about 5,000 seamen and 1,000 marines.
Most of America's seven million people lived in coastal states, and for more than a century, seafaring had been their livelihood in North America, threatened when the British established a blockade along the eastern seaboard, strangling American shipping and commerce.
In 1793,
Isaac Hull of Connecticut was commissioned fourth lieutenant in the U.S. Navy and assigned to the
USS Constitution. He saw action in the Caribbean and the Mediterranean, and sparred with the French navy and Barbary pirates. On June 17, 1810, at age 33, he was given official command of the USS Constitution, one of America's well constructed frigates, with a forty-four gun capacity and thick hulls of dense live oak. Hull crammed at least fifty guns on board in 1812. The ship gained fame when she outran a British squadron in a dramatic sea chase that lasted fifty-seven hours. And in August, 1812, the Constitution encountered and defeated the British
Guerriere in the Atlantic.
Both sides knew naval dominance of the Great Lakes was essential to victory, as the inland waterways were crucial for supplying the army. A race ensued to build lightweight warships for the lakes as quickly as possible. This is where the decisive naval battles would take place.
The U.S. Navy started building a squadron of gunboats and two frigates in Erie on the shores of Lake Erie. The area's dense forests provided the critical resource - tall straight timbers for planking and masts. Timber resources in North America were one of the several reasons that Britain wished to hold on to the Canadian provinces. Timber on the British Isles was all but gone. Any new ships for the Royal Navy would be fashioned out of New World wood. British shipwrights were also busy building ships on the Great Lakes, in Amherstburg and Kingston, Ontario.
Commander Robert Heriot Barclay was the British captain charged with control of Lake Erie. By 1813, his squadron was smaller in number and size than the American squadron in Erie. Barclay possessed 35 long guns, powerful cannon that could throw up to forty-two pound shot over distance. His opposite number,
Master Commander Oliver Hazzard Perry, had 20 carronade, a short stocky cannon with a limited range. Perry had more ships, but they were lightly built, with two-inch hulls that couldn't withstand a hit from Barclay's long guns.
On September 10, 1813 when Perry and Barclay faced off, Perry had nine vessels in total, but his second-in-command, Jesse Elliot, held his ship, the Niagara, and four smaller ships out of the battle. Barclay, at a mile's distance, concentrated his long guns on Perry and his
flagship Lawrence, shattering the hull into dozens of deadly splinters propelled across the deck, killing 60% of the crew.
Perry vacated the Lawrence and headed for the
Niagara in a rowboat, carrying with him a banner that read "Don't Give up the Ship." He had the carronades double-loaded, and continued to trade broadsides with the British, sailing directly into the British line, and firing broadsides from both port and starboard, raking four ships at once. Two British ships, the
Queen Charlotte and the Detroit, collided and locked together. Barclay struck his colors and
Perry penned his famous note: "We have met the enemy and they are ours. Two ships, two brigs, one schooner and a sloop."
(Source: PBS News)
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