(Editor’s Note:—While aware of Commodore Edward Preble’s influence on the early U.S. Navy, few people realize to what a tremendous degree Preble’s “Boys” and the Preble School dominated the Navy, not only throughout the War of 1812, but almost to the Civil War as well.
Although they constituted but a minor fraction of the U.S. Navy list at that time, the officers whom Preble trained under the guns of Tripoli were practically all victorious in the years to come, and they were practically the only ones who were victorious. Their widely varying backgrounds, other than their training under Preble, and the special quality or characteristic which distinguished each one apart, is evident from the following: “Isaac Hull, the Steadfast Farmer; Jacob Jones, the Delaware Squire; Stephen Decatur, the Hero of Romance; William Bainbridge, the Child of Misfortune; James Lawrence, the Soul of Honor; Isaac Chauncey, the Anomaly; David Porter, the Turbulent Yankee; William Burrows, the Eccentric; Johnston Blakeley, the Carolina Sea Raider; Lewis Warrington, the Virginia Aristocrat; James Biddle, the Philadelphia Millionaire; Charles Stewart, the Psychic Celt; Thomas Macdonough and Stephen Cassin, the Sterling Leaders; and Daniel T. Patterson, Keeper of the Sea Gate at New Orleans.”
The Proceedings herein prints the life story of one of the least-known of these naval leaders—Jacob Jones.)
Of all Preble’s “Boys” none remains more essentially mysterious than Captain Jacob Jones, the least boyish of that remarkable group. There was something about him that inspired other people to clichés; his contemporaries speak of him as brave, upright, temperate, benevolent, plain—a compendium of Sunday School virtues, in fact. The man himself has not left us much help. He was one of the most wordsparing individuals in the history of the U. S. Navy; private letters in his hand practically do not exist, he committed public documents only under press of urgent necessity, and those he did produce are perfectly correct (the cliché again) but about as colorful as a wornout sail.
This would hardly matter if he had lived an ordinary life, even the normal life of an extroverted naval officer, which could be described in terms of voyage, technique, and battle. He did nothing of the kind; and merely citing the record in the case of Jacob Jones leaves a great deal unexplained. Why did he spend so much time at sea, especially after reaching an age when most officers were quite willing to accept shore duty? What was there about him that made successive Secretaries of the Navy find sea commands for him when there were so few ships in commission that it was hard to find ships for anybody? Above all what was he doing in the Navy in the first place?
On the last question there is some background of information, but its real meaning cannot be the apparent one. The Navy was certainly not the career for which Jacob Jones was destined, either by his family or himself. He was born near Smyrna, Delaware, in 1768, on what is described as a small farm, but the family must have been reasonably well off, for there was money enough to give him a good classical education. In the meanwhile, his mother died while he was a tot, his father remarried and himself died when Jacob was only four, leaving the boy to be brought up by his stepmother, Penelope Hope Jones.
She appears to have made a good job of it. Jones always spoke of her later in terms of the most intense admiration and affection, and she surrounded the boy with a host of friends. One of these was a Dr. James Sykes of Dover; having opted for the medical profession, Jones did four years of practical interneship with this doctor, took a course at the University of Pennsylvania, married Dr. Sykes’ sister, and returned to his native Kent County, to set up in practice. As of those days he is reported as a big man with a long nose and a hammerhead chin, much seen in the Delaware society whose elegance was so like that of country-gentleman England, with riding to hounds and with hunt breakfasts on partridges and wild boar hams brought from the forests of Pennsylvania; apples, cheese and two or three bottles of port per man in the evening. There was not a better seat in Kent County than Dr. Jones, nor a better companion; but he was made remarkable in that hard-drinking group by his abstemiousness.
He seemed settled for life; but the trouble about this easy-going country gentleman existence was that Jones could not make enough money to live on. Whether the “benevolence” described of him means that he did too much work without pay, or whether his poverty was comparative and related to the social necessities of maintaining a stable and a kennel, is uncertain. The fixed point is that some time in the presidency of George Washington, Jones decided to improve his prospects by abandoning medicine for the study of law. He had not gone very deeply into it when Governor Joshua Clayton, a personal friend, appointed him clerk of the Superior Court, the highest in the state. Jones moved to Kent City and lived there until the death of his wife in 1799. Shortly after this he threw up everything and entered the Navy as a midshipman.
On the face of it, this looks like a case of the world lost for love, for it was about the most impossible step that could be taken by a man who had any thought of a career, or even of personal happiness. Jones was 31 at the time, and had never been to sea in his life. In the cockpit of a warship, he would be thrown with lads in the early teens; on deck he would be performing such drudgery tasks as mending signal flags and carrying messages. Completely ignorant of the profession, he could hardly expect to be advanced faster than these boys, so that when they reached the age of command, he would be eligible only for retirement. But the romantic explanation of Jones’ enlistment is rather damaged by the fact that when he returned from his second cruise, he promptly married another girl, who bore him a son and lived with him until her own death, nearly twenty years later.
No, a broken heart will hardly answer. Jones himself gave as a reason for signing on, that he wanted a more active life; but there are other possibilities. He had certainly been a failure as a doctor, and in spite of political friends, there is no evidence that he was considered a rising star of the legal profession. One could make out a case for the idea that he regarded himself as a failure and was willing to enter a business that offered him some economic security, even at a sacrifice in dignity.
The weight of the evidence is that his thinking was not done on so materialistic a level. Thomas Truxtun, the famous and brilliantly successful privateer captain of the Revolution, was living in Philadelphia, and had become a close friend of Jones and a frequent caller at his house. Himself on intimate terms with most of the government heads at the capital, Truxtun was an obvious choice for one of the six captaincies when the Navy was reestablished, and President Adams gave him the fifth place on the list, with command of the Constellation frigate. There would be a good deal of talk about French aggression and the prospect of war around Kent City; talk in the high tone, somewhat stiff and formal, that characterized the end of the 18th century—the duty of a citizen to his country, sirs.
Now, one of the few facts that shines through all the records concerning Jacob Jones is that his whole mind was irradiated with an emotion currently somewhat out of fashion, but which was a real force in the generation that saw the escape from English rule. It was an ardent personal identification with the United States of America, not as a state in the modern sense, but as an association of free men, born equal. Jones had the faces of three ancestral silver tankards melted down to erase from them the family coat of arms, and when his second wife asked what it had been, refused to tell her, with the remark, “I am a Welshman, and my coat of arms is the leek.”
Thus it can be taken that Jacob Jones did not join the Navy as a career. He waited till the guns were shooting, till American ships were at sea in search of enemies of the nation. Upon a mind oriented like his the fact of actual war would be decisive. He joined the Navy; and as he felt that his lack of experience did not justify him in asking for any higher station than that of midshipman, he persuaded his friend, Captain Truxtun, to obtain for him a warrant to that post. The same high-mindedness kept him from applying for a billet aboard the Constellation. Instead he entered the general list, and went out for a short cruise in the United States, 44 guns, which voyage was chiefly important in introducing Jones to the head of the midshipmen’s mess, with whom he formed an acquaintance of mutual liking—Stephen Decatur.
As soon as the United States reached port, Jones was transferred to the new corvette Delaware, 24. This cruise was a hard one. The Delaware captured one French privateer and recaptured a couple of American merchants, which meant prize-money for all hands, but after some six months in the West Indies, was ordered to the area of Curaçao, and there ran into trouble.
The Delaware was a purchased merchant craft, her length less than four times her beam, which made a sidewise drift her best point of sailing. She never came up with the French known to be operating in the region, but easily caught tropical fevers, which struck down the captain, Baker, and so many of the crew that the ship had to lie over in Curaçao harbor for nearly three months. There were barely enough men left to work the ropes when she sailed for home without orders.
When the ship reached port after more than a year at sea, Jones paused only for his second marriage, received his step to lieutenant, and put to sea again. This time it was the Ganges, 24 guns, a rebuilt merchantman that had been the first vessel of the new navy to leave harbor. She was destined for a cruise to Java on Preble’s track, but never made it, because she behaved so badly that a board of commissioners was called, which found her totally unseaworthy. Not long later the French treaty was ratified and the peace establishment came into force. Jacob Jones ranked at the very bottom of the list of 36 lieutenants who were not dismissed.
II
Here is another mild mystery, and no tools but conjecture to solve it with, for any documentation that existed has disappeared. It is easy enough to see why Mr. Lieutenant Jones was retained on the list when two- thirds of the lieutenants on the list were let out. His conduct had been correct, if not particularly distinguished, and Truxtun, who had become a national hero by virtue of his two victories during the war, would be sure to put in a good word for him. But it is a little harder to understand why the lieutenant should have accepted a post in a service that now had few attractions when he had a new bride at home, and the impulse to patriotism was somewhat dimmed by the peace.
Possibly economics had something to do with it this time. Jones’ friend Clayton was no longer governor, which meant no more political preferment. Without some such backing the prospect of making a fresh start in a stable and ordered community where small gains were the rule, cannot have been an exciting one. But in view of Jones’ later life, it seems quite as probable that the sea itself had already exercised upon him that pull which led so many younger Americans of his time to leave home for the life of a sailor. The attraction is somewhat difficult to analyze precisely—compounded in varying amounts of the spirit of adventure rampant in all men and nations when they are young, the quest of foreign lands in an age when travel was extremely difficult under ordinary circumstances, and the offering of the sea itself. Jones had it; not six months after he reached home, he asked for sea service and got it—as Fifth Lieutenant of the Constellation, 38, bound for the Mediterranean under Captain Alexander Murray.
That officer had seen a good deal of service in the rowdy navy of the Revolution, and was determined that there should be no similar lack of discipline aboard any ship he commanded in the revived marine. He was oldish for the service, arbitrary by habit of mind, rather deaf, and suffered a good deal from old wounds when rainy weather was toward. The result was a series of clashes of temperament with his juniors which made the Constellation a peculiarly unhappy ship.
Jones was involved twice, once being placed under arrest for acting as second in a duel, and shortly after in a more dangerous business. The ship had picked up a pilot and was coming into port with the Fifth Lieutenant in charge of the deck, when Captain Murray ducked out of the cabin and gave the order to shorten sail. Jones, who had not heard him, but saw the sails being clewed up contrary to any ideas of his, asked the pilot to have them shaken out; whereupon Murray flew at his lieutenant, using such language that Jones requested relief from the deck.
This sort of thing happens aboard warships frequently enough to make it no special cause for excitement. In the Navy of that day the usual end would have been a personal interview, followed by a note of apology on one side and a note of explanation on the other. But when Jones appeared before the captain, Murray began shouting again, answered his junior’s protest about the words he had used by ordering the lieutenant from the cabin, and sent him below, under orders of arrest for the voyage.
One of the other lieutenants had already been arrested for murder on the heels of the duel in which Jones was a second; another was sick, so the shape in which the Constellation reached port can be imagined. The rather odd part of the story is that when word of the occurrence reached Washington, the department backed the lieutenants against their captain, ordering the ship home and sending Murray ashore, where he remained for the rest of his life except one brief cruise against smugglers off the St. Mary’s. The fact that the Lieutenant’s first arrest was for duelling was a factor in this decision, since there was no law that authorized an arrest for murder on such grounds. But Jones’ own reputation for punctilious behavior certainly played its part, since he received a vote of official confidence in the form of an order to return to the Mediterranean at once, as one of the very junior officers assigned to Commodore Preble’s squadron.
His appointment was that of Second Lieutenant of the Philadelphia, 38, under William Bainbridge as captain. The latter, who took the unusual step of turning in written reports on his lieutenants, could find no terms for Jones but the familiar ones of cliché—“a brave, good officer and a correct man,” which would indicate that the captain was satisfied, but saw nothing remarkable in his lieutenant. Preble did; he had Jones aboard the flagship a couple of times for dinner, and talked things out with him extensively. There is no record of what the two reticent men said to each other, but a good portion of it must have been professional shop, since neither of them was given to the abstract. The contact was a brief one, for Preble was bound to Morocco and the overawing of the sullen Emperor there, while Jones had an appointment with an unhappy destiny on the rocks outside Tripoli harbor, where the Philadelphia grounded and was taken by the Turks.
Officers and crew spent over nineteen miserable months in captivity, the men being forced to work on the fortifications, the officers on short commons whenever anything aroused the peevish temper of Peter Lisle, a renegade Scotsman, who had made himself the Bashaw’s war minister under the style of Murad Reis. Jones functioned as prison doctor, and the mortality rate was less than might have been expected. There is very little else to say about this experience, except that it was followed by the longest period Jones had spent ashore since entering the Navy. But then everyone was ashore those days; it was the period when the ships were laid up and the government built gunboats to defend its harbors.
In the course of the period Jones was chosen to make personal presentation of the gold medal which Congress had voted to Preble, with whom he spent some time, finding him very ill; then sat as junior member of the court-martial which condemned James Barron for his conduct in the Leopard-Chesapeake affair. There followed a short period of shore duty at the New Orleans station under David Porter, who had been in Tripoli with him.
In 1810 seniority brought Jones to a Master Commandant’s rank, and the following year he was ordered north to place the sloop-of-war Wasp, 18 guns, in commission. She was a remarkable little ship, originally intended to be one of the brigs for inshore work against the Barbaries, but not completed in time because the work of design fell into the hands of one Josiah Fox. This Fox was an Englishman and a Quaker, trained in the shipbuilding art, who came to this country originally to buy ship-timber. In Philadelphia he met a fellow-Quaker and ship- designer, Joshua Humphreys, who had just received a commission to design six frigates for the reestablished U.S. Navy. Humphreys needed an assistant; the two Quakers hit it off at once, and Fox remained in America for all his life.
It is probable that he contributed to the combination a good deal in the way of sound methods and constructional details, but he certainly gained more than he gave, for Humphreys was one of the master-figures of the history of naval architecture, a profound and original thinker. “As our Navy for a considerable time will be inferior in numbers,” he wrote in answer to President Washington’s request for information about what ships to build, “we have to consider what size ships will be most formidable and be an overmatch for those of an enemy. Frigates will be the first object, and none ought to be built less than one hundred and fifty foot keel, to carry thirty 24-pounders on the gundeck. Ships of this construction have everything in their favor; their great length gives them an advantage in sailing,1 which is an object of the first magnitude. They are superior to any European frigate, and if others be in company, our frigates can always lead ahead and never be obliged to go into action but on their own terms.”
Now, as the normal heavy cruiser had a keel length of between 125 feet and 130, and mounted a main battery of 28 18-pounders, this was revolutionary. But Fox considered it heretical. So big a frigate would be as clumsy and hard to handle as a battleship, slow on every bearing except when the wind was dead astern. Humphreys had an answer for that; he would give his ships a hull-form modified from that developed through long years into the clipper schooners of Chesapeake Bay—great length in proportion to beam, the hull hollowed out aft to fish-tail shape, and with so much keel-drag that the draft under their counters was nearly a quarter again that at the bow.
Fox remained unconvinced. The two men were as near disagreement as Quakers can ever come, and being appointed to handle one of the new frigates, the Chesapeake, the man from England brought her out as a normal and very fine 38-gun, 18-pounder ship, instead of the American freak he was supposed to build. After the Humphreys- designed ships showed their wonderful sailing and fighting qualities in the West Indies and before Tripoli, Fox suffered a change of heart. Now that he had the chance, he decided to apply similar theories of construction to a sloop-of-war. The norm of the class was a brig of not over 90 feet length; he went to 115 feet for the Wasp and her sister, the Hornet, with the fine entry, clean running lines, cut-away deadwood, and deep keel aft of the Baltimore clipper. They were flush-deckers,
without the poop and forecastle found in the sloops of other nations.
They steered hard, but in every other respect were sensationally successful ships, fast as dolphins, handling sharply, steady gun platforms, and prodigiously weatherly. Master Commandant Jones must have been pleased with his new ship. She was armed with eighteen 32-pound carronades and two long 12’s; he worked his men hard.
III
By the date the Wasp put to sea, American naval policy had become that of sending the ships along the coast in training cruises, with instructions to do what they could in holding down British impressments, and the air was heavy with angers. Jones sailed along the coast of the middle states for some months without event; then putting in for stores, he was given the mission of carrying dispatches to our ministers in Europe. It was now 1812; before the Wasp left France on her homeward journey there was a rumor that President Madison would go to war with England, and as a matter of fact the declaration had already been issued, though no one in Europe knew it as yet.
The ship made a good passage; when she reached America, the orders were to put out again at once, for the incredible news of the Constitution's victory over the Guerrière had come, and there was no longer any disposition to use the American Navy for anything but fighting. Jones cruised up to the region broad off Boston, but made only one prize, a British merchant ship that had already been captured by a Yankee privateer and retaken by a British frigate.
Rough weather brought a necessity for small repairs; Jones ran into the Delaware, his normal home port at New York being under blockade. When he came out again, on October 13, he headed generally toward the Bermudas, reasoning that the English West India trade would keep wide of the American coast, though not so wide as to run east of this group of islands and so lose the help of the Gulf Stream in the voyage to Europe. His mission was primarily a raiding one.
Three days out, the ship found winds of hurricane force and lost her jib-boom during the night. The weather did not moderate till morning, when it left behind so heavy a swell that no spare spar could be rigged. That night, about 11, several sail were made out through night glasses on a sea still running high, but as two of them appeared to be large ships, Jones did not close them in the dark. He cleared for action and set his ship on the same course as the strangers, but under a little less canvas, so that he gradually dropped astern, but remained to windward. The Wasp's speed and weatheliness would allow him to work clear, even though the missing jib-boom deprived her of two-thirds of her headsails and made fast tacks impossible.
Morning revealed the chase as six ships, of which at least four were clearly big Indiamen and another a heavy brig-sloop. The Wasp made sail to close; the brig shortened in willingness to accept battle, and as the two drew together, it could be seen that she too had had a bout with the winds, for her mainyard was on deck.
She was H.M.S. Frolic, 18 guns, more powerful than the Wasp by about 10 per cent (274 pounds weight of broadside to 250), with the incomparable tradition of the British navy behind her. Her captain was Thomas Whinyates; he had drilled his men at the great guns until they could fire them as fast as any ship in the Royal Navy and maybe faster, for he was an ambitious man and wished much to make a good prize in battle. That was why he had signalled the Indiamen to stand on, though one of them carried as many guns as the American now coming down under his queer flag of fifteen stripes and wreath of stars.
The remains of the storm were still in the swell; upon it now worked a breeze both sharp and freshening, so that as the two ships slid down a broad reach on the starboard tack, they rolled violently. The dipping prows flung spray across the decks and the men worked barefoot, finding it hard to stand. Aboard the Wasp, the gun-breechings were doubled; the sponge and rammer men rubbed their hands in sand from the deck, and made obscene remarks about His Majesty’s jollies. Jones kept his ship a little more off the wind than his adversary, the tracks slanting together. He wanted broadside action, being in no shape to jockey for position without his jib. At half past 11 they were side by side; the Frolic opened fire at 60 yards, repeating so rapidly that she was .shooting three times to the Wasp’s two, which surprised the American officers, who had trained their own gunners long and well.
Nor was the British fire ineffective; five minutes from the first gun, the American sloop’s main-topmast was shot away and went crashing into the fore braces, making it impossible to work the yards on that mast. Three minutes later the gaff and mizzentopgallantmast followed. The Wasp, cut to pieces aloft, was so nearly unmanageable that she could only hold her course, but few of her crew had been hit and it was evident that the Britisher was firing from the trough of the sea, just as his starboard side began to rise on the swell, so that most of his rapidly- delivered shot were going high. Not so with the Wasp; as Captain Preble had taught in the old days before Tripoli, her guns were being fired from the wave-top as they began the descent that would presently carry their muzzles under—they were making splinters fly aboard the enemy.
Now the two were so close together that the American rammers struck the Frolic's side, but before the guns could be fired from that position, the British brig’s gaff-head braces went and her spanker came down on the run. With more sail still drawing, the Wasp pulled slightly ahead. The slant of her motion brought the Frolic’s bowsprit jabbing into the rigging just above Jones’ head, where it caught, dragging the Wasp into a raking position under her enemy’s bows.
The broadside let go with a crash; Jones shouted to hold her there and give the Frolic another. But aboard the Wasp there was a seaman named Jack Lang, who had once been impressed in the British navy. With a snarl, Lang swung himself onto the overhanging bowsprit, cutlass in hand to take his personal revenge. Lieutenant Biddle followed, crying for the rest to come on, and seeing that it was useless to restrain them, Captain Jones ordered his bugler to blow “Boarders away!” The smoke whipped down the wind; as the shouting Americans reached the foot of their opponent’s bowsprit, they paused in astonishment, for the only living persons on a deck slippery with blood were an old oak-hearted quartermaster, gripping the wheel, and three wounded officers, who threw their swords at the victors’ feet. The last raking broadside had completed the deadly work of Jones’ artillery; of the Frolic’s 107 men, 90 were dead or wounded and the survivors had fled below to escape that terrible rain of iron. The Wasp herself had 5 killed, 5 wounded.
IV
In a sense the victory was Pyrrhic. Biddle and a prize crew were placed aboard the Frolic, but she lost both her badly-wounded masts soon after the ships separated, and when the Wasp shook her own sails out, it was discovered that they had been cut to ribbons by the high fire of the Englishman. This was unfortunate, since two hours later, before repairs could be much more than begun, there hove over the horizon H.M.S. Poictiers, a 74-gun ship-of-the-line, which of course captured both the Wasp and her prize without any trouble.
They were carried into Bermuda, where the Frolic was found so smashed that she had to be condemned. The British naval men were much angered; they took away from Jones and his officers their watches and everything but the clothes they stood in. But the civilian Bermudans, with that sportsmanlike admiration for men who can beat them at their own game that Britons not infrequently show, entertained the prisoners with a series of balls and dinners.
Exchange was only a matter of a couple of weeks; all the Wasp’s were in New York before the end of November, being greeted with an enthusiasm which compared only with that for Hull’s triumph over the Guerrière. New York voted Jones a sword and a banquet and Philadelphia put on a public entertainment for officers and crew. Congress sent a gold medal to Jones, silver impressions of the same to his officers, and voted that $35,000 should be distributed among all hands as prize money for the Frolic. We may take it that Jones, always a great hand for minor social pleasures, enjoyed all this hugely; he made a kind of progress through Philadelphia and his old home in Delaware to Washington, where he was informed that as another reward, he had been promoted captain and placed in command of the Macedonian, 38.
In February, 1813, he joined his ship, which had recruited a full crew and was lying at New London, Conn. By this date the government had adopted a policy of sending out, or trying to send out, every available ship in small squadrons, strong enough to destroy any but the most heavily escorted convoys and to deal with their escorts as well. These groups were to sweep out generally in the direction of the gap between Africa and Brazil, along which line they would cut across the lines of British trade with both the East and West Indies. The Macedonian was one of a group headed by Stephen Decatur, who had the United States, 44, as his flagship, and the Hornet, 18, with him; but the difficulty was that by early 1813, the British had posted heavy blockading forces off all the American ports, and there was a big one at Nantucket to watch the exit of Long Island Sound.
Decatur took his ships down to New York (where there was another banquet) and tried the Sandy Hook outlet, but found it closed by watchful ships; took them back through Hell Gate to New London and tried the Sound again, but to no purpose. There were always at least four British frigates on guard, usually backed by a two-decker. A whole year went by in this frustration, the ships spending most of their time at wharves in the Thames under the guns of forts built to cover them against landing expeditions, with now and then a short jog out for drill.
The only relief for Jones was a call to New York. As one of the best-educated men in the service, he was placed on a board to report on the plans and model of a steam-propelled frigate designed by Mr. Fulton, the ingenious inventor. The ship was to be called Demologos; she was to be arranged as a catamaran, with the paddle-wheel between two enormous hulls so thick as to be impervious to any ordinary shot. The battery was to consist of thirty 32-pounders, battleship guns, on a single deck, and as long as she had fire aboard anyway, there was a furnace for heating the balls redhot, and a pump to squirt potential boarders with boiling water. There were to be no masts except a couple of light poles for signalling.
Jones did not think her a seagoing craft, but was otherwise wholly favorable. Her sides would be impregnable (he wrote) and “in a light breeze she can take her choice of position or distance from an enemy.” The only specification concerned her engines; if they were worth as much as four knots, the ship “can be rendered more formidable to an enemy than any kind of engine yet invented for the defence of ports, harbors, bays and sounds.” Build her, by all means, was the captain’s advice, and the government took it, though they did not complete her till the war was over, so that she became a marine curiosity instead of a new weapon of destructive effect and far-reaching influence.
At the break of spring in 1814 the government changed naval policy again. The heavy ships in harbors having sheltered approach waters that permitted the British to maintain blockade in all weathers were to be laid up and their crews sent overland to Lake Champlain and Lake Ontario, where campaigns of doubtful issue were in progress. The Macedonian was one of the ships laid up; Jones and his crew went up to Sackett’s Harbor, where they were detailed to the Mohawk, 48 guns, a heavy frigate of two decks, then still incomplete.
It was a distinctly odd campaign among the woods that came down on all sides to the shores of Lake Ontario. The two commanders, Isaac Chauncey on the American side, and Sir James Lucas Yeo on the other, were men much alike—good organizers, but cautious as fighting leaders. Moreover, each was filled with a vivid sense of the disaster that could come to the cause if his fleet were destroyed, like the British had been on Lake Erie during the previous year. There had been a couple of mild partial battles, a few cases of small craft cut off and destroyed, but the main contest was in the building yards.
The procedure was this: the commodore on each side remained in port until he had completed a new ship that gave him superiority; then he blockaded his adversary in turn and carried out whatever ulterior projects he had in mind, such as descents on the shore, the transport of supplies, the covering of military movements. The contest had begun with 16-gun brigs and little schooners; by the date of Jones’ arrival it had grown into one of quite respectable fleets.
At this time it was Yeo’s turn to hold the lake; he was off Sackett’s with a two-decked 58, a 42-gun frigate, two strong corvettes, and three brigs. Chauncey himself had a two-decker, slightly bigger than the British flagship, two corvettes, two heavy brigs and two light ones, but he liked the look of the British frigate so little that he would not sail until the Mohawk was ready. This was July 25; the squadron put out, caught one of the British brigs without a keeper and destroyed her, then turned back to maintain a blockade of the enemy base at Kingston until mid- October. Now Yeo appeared with a 110-gun ship of the line which could have taken on Chauncey’s whole squadron; the Americans returned to Sackett’s and stayed there till the freeze.
By spring news of the peace had come, and Jones was ordered back to the Macedonian with his men; objective, the Mediterranean, where some business had developed with Algiers, largest of the Barbary powers. The story of that expedition is Decatur’s, who was in command; Jones and his ship were merely among those present.
When he returned he was given three months’ leave, the first he had had since entering the navy, except for a few weeks at a time while waiting for a ship to be ready. It is possible that the period represents the illness and death of Jones’ second wife, a personage even more mysterious than the captain himself, in that surviving records do not even give her name. In 1821 Jones married for a third time and took his new bride on a three years’ honeymoon tour of the Mediterranean aboard the Constitution, 44, of which he had been made captain; it was a skipper’s privilege in those days to take his family aboard. They had a son who became an officer in the Marine Corps and followed Matthew Perry to Japan.
There followed various sea commands and a temporary seat on the board of Navy Commissioners, then a final cruise to the Pacific, with a commodore’s broad pennant, in the Brandywine, 44 guns—the famous “roaring Brandywine,” so celebrated for her speed, the toughness of her crews, and the hilarity of her officers. They caught rather a tartar in Jacob Jones, who reported from Callao that he had hung one sailor from the yardarm for fatally stabbing another while drunk. One of the accounts of his life contains a queer little item from this period: “He is a great promoter of temperance among his crew; and has been successful in reclaiming many a valuable seaman from the pernicious habits of intoxication.”
Return from the Pacific found him aged sixty-two, which was considered too old for sea work in sailing-ship days, but he never was retired from the service, holding various shore posts which ended with command of the Naval Asylum at Philadelphia, where he died.in 1850, eighty-two years old. He asked to be buried in his native Delaware, and his coffin was followed by “the largest and most interesting collection of military ever seen in the state,” not to mention such organizations as the Masons, the Odd Fellows, the Society of Cordwainers, and the Sons of Temperance.
The item about the funeral supplies a clue. Jones seems to have been a member of every one of this extraordinary array of fraternal bodies, which was a great deal more peculiar in his day than it would be now. That is, he was an early American “joiner”; he was a friendly man; he liked people, and was liked by them so thoroughly that when they came to praise him, they could do so only by seeing in him an intensification of the group virtues. Nobody ever claimed he was an intellectual giant, and his failure in the professions rather suggests that his capacities were not too high—though there is no reason to set him down as an incompetent doctor, or to reject his own explanation of sheer boredom with any task that did not keep him active.
To the last, there was that strain of intense drive in the man. On his final cruise, for instance, he could easily have had one of the new ships of the line and a comfortable trip to Europe, but he took the Brandywine and the lonely Pacific. He is also described as hardly knowing the meaning of the word fatigue, riding horseback while late in his seventies. But his contribution to the accumulating body of naval tradition lay not so much in this as in his influence on a view of duty that was in danger of becoming cheerless. He added a touch of geniality, worked on the principle that duty is for the hours of duty and may be performed without damage to normal human relations.
The great age he reached and his fifty-two years of service, nearly half of them at sea, added not a little to the influence he had among the younger officers. They could, and often did, look at this plain, kindly, sociable old man and reflect that he wore a gold medal for the most murderously effective singleship action of the War of 1812. That action was not without importance in confirming the verdict of the Constitution-Guerrière battle and in bolstering the confidence of the nation in the Navy and of the Navy in itself; but it was probably more important that the man who won it was an educated gentleman, a living exhibition of qualities that can make a successful naval officer.
*From the forthcoming book, Preble’s Boys, by Fletcher Pratt, to be published by William Sloane Associates, Inc. This material published in advance by special permission of the publishers and author.
1. It takes less power to drive a long, narrow ship through the water than a shorter one of the same beam; and on a long ship it would be possible to use taller masts, hence larger sails.
This is the first of a series of two articles by Fletcher Pratt describing the careers of young naval officers who served under Commodore Preble in the War against Tripoli.