If a contest had been staged to offer a prize for the most frustrated man in North America in the summer of 1813, United States Navy Master Commandant Oliver Hazard Perry would have won it hands down. In February the twenty-seven-year-old Rhode Islander had been ordered to the Northwest frontier to take command of a fleet that would hopefully give the United States control of Lake Erie. After a harrowing journey through the winter wilderness, he arrived at the tiny Pennsylvania town of Erie, then also known as Presque Isle, to discover that the fleet was nonexistent and not likely to appear anytime soon.

Subscribe Today

• Did you enjoy our article?
• Read more in MHQ magazine
• Subscribe online and save!
 

A patriotic local ship captain, Daniel Dobbins, had a few semifinished vessels on the stocks at an improvised shipyard. But his armament consisted of a single cannon. The only guards to protect these nautical skeletons against a British raid from across the frozen lake were a haphazard company of sixty dispirited militiamen without guns or ammunition. There was no rope for rigging, no canvas for sails. Perry had been told that fifty carpenters, caulkers, ship-joiners, and sawyers were awaiting him at Presque Isle. Not one had arrived. The town of seventy-six houses was semideserted. Many of its four hundred inhabitants had fled, fearful that the royal raiders from Canada would be accompanied by their Indian allies, scalping knives in hand.

Worsening Perry’s woes was the haphazard command situation. His immediate superior was Commodore Isaac Chauncey, who was more than two hundred miles away in Sacketts Harbor, at the eastern end of Lake Ontario. A worrier rather than a fighter, Chauncey claimed to have his hands full trying to retain control of Ontario. He had commandeered 150 sailors that Perry had brought with him from Rhode Island — all personally trained and passionately loyal to him. Chauncey reacted to Perry’s pleas for men, guns, and equipment with maddening silence.

Also in this dirty game was a fat, sloppy, Maryland-born navy officer named Jesse Duncan Elliott. Also a master commandant (the equivalent of a present-day commander), Elliot had won a victory of sorts at Fort Erie the previous fall, when he led a company of soldiers in a surprise attack on two ships guarding the British bastion at the southwestern end of the Niagara River. He captured both craft, but one became grounded and was burned. Elliott took not-so-silent umbrage when Perry was named commander on Lake Erie. Operating out of the Black Rock navy yard near Buffalo, the Marylander intercepted the few men Chauncey forwarded and sent the dregs to Perry.

All this made the thin-skinned Perry wonder if his naval career were not fatally jinxed. His father, Christopher Perry, had been a successful merchant ship captain who joined the U.S. Navy to fight in the Quasi-War against Revolutionary France that raged in the sea lanes off the Atlantic coast and in the Caribbean from 1798 to 1800. He had taken thirteen-year-old Oliver along as a midshipman. But the father’s naval career had been aborted by Thomas Jefferson’s election in 1800. The pacific new president saw no need for a large navy; he considered it likely to embroil the United States in foreign wars. The number of warships was cut from forty-three to thirteen, and only nine captains and thirty-six lieutenants were retained on the rolls. Midshipmen shrank from 354 to 150. By sheer chance, it would seem, one of those retained was young Perry.

For the next decade, Perry’s naval career was routine. He advanced in rank during cruises to the Mediterranean, where he took part in the spasmodic wars with the piratical Barbary states that eventually forced the Muslim dynasties along the North African seaboard to stop preying on American merchantmen. In 1809 he was given command of the schooner-rigged dispatch boat Revenge. The following year, during a night of heavy fog, Revenge grounded on Watch Hill Reef offshore from his native Rhode Island and was soon demolished by the pounding surf. Although Perry was exonerated in a court-martial (the pilot took the blame), losing his ship left a cloud over his name.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to