The following is an extended version of the article that appears in our July 2023 issue.
An 1813 engraving depicts the battle of the HMS Guerriere and the USS Constitution, whose commander, Isaac Hull, is the namesake of Hull Street. (Image courtesy Naval History and Heritage Command)
The independent city of Manchester, across the James River from Richmond, joined the patriotic fervor sweeping the nation in June 1817 following the young republic’s victory against the British in the War of 1812. Most of America’s triumphs in the conflict occurred at sea.
Manchester, which consolidated with Richmond in 1910 and had a waterfront and a canal of its own, named streets after the heroes of the 1812 conflict, prior fights in North Africa and the “Quasi-War” against France. Though significant and important events in the early republic’s life, they are little remembered today.
Some 20 Manchester thoroughfares received memorial designations, including some that later reverted to mere numbers. None of those 1812 Navy men came from Virginia and all but two predate the Civil War.
One of the major roads perpetuates the name of Connecticut’s Commodore Isaac Hull (1773-1843), commander of the USS Constitution, in the successful Aug. 19, 1812, battle with the British frigate HMS Guerriere, the first victory of the kind for a U.S. warship. The vessel is today part of a Boston museum.
Three of the commanders memorialized by streets (and ships and cities) for their high seas feats of arms later became entangled in “an affair of honor.”
Commodore William Bainbridge (1789-1833), of Princeton, New Jersey, was commander of the USS Philadelphia when it ran aground in 1803 while enforcing a blockade to curb North African state-sponsored piracy. Bainbridge was taken hostage with 300 other Americans; President Thomas Jefferson sent U.S. Marines in 1805 to free them (hence the “shores of Tripoli” reference in the Marine Corps hymn). During Bainbridge’s 1812 command, the USS Constitution defeated the British frigate HMS Java. Bainbridge received two wounds during the fight, and President James Madison awarded him the Congressional Gold Medal.
McDonough Street erroneously pays tribute to Commodore Thomas Macdonough. (Image courtesy National Gallery of Art)
Commodore Thomas Macdonough (1783-1825), of Delaware, during the War of 1812 built a Great Lakes navy from scratch and used those vessels to achieve victory upon the waters of Lake Champlain on Sept. 11, 1814. The grace-under-pressure actions of this redheaded maritime warrior denied upstate New York to both Britain and Canada. Yet his name on the Manchester street sign then and now remains misspelled as “McDonough.”
Then there is Commodore Stephen Decatur Jr. (1779-1820) of Maryland.
On a bone-chilling morning in a frosty field in Bladensburg, Maryland, Decatur and Commodore James Barron leveled the muzzles of their flintlock pistols against each other.
The circumstances that brought the men to settle a long brooding dispute on March 22, 1820, involved personal rivalry, a likely misunderstanding but the macho unwillingness to back down and, as Decatur’s wife, Susan, afterward advocated, an outright conspiracy.
The Bladensburg venue made for a resonant choice; first as the battlefield where on Aug. 24, 1814, the U.S. suffered a humiliating defeat against the invading British who advanced onto Washington, D.C., where they burned the under-construction Capitol and the White House. Benjamin Henry Latrobe, who designed the Executive Mansion, also became the architect of Decatur’s three-story brick Lafayette Square mansion (now a historic house museum).
Because the city of Washington outlawed dueling, some 50 duels occurred on this Bladensburg site that bore the name “The Valley of Chance.”
Decatur asked Macdonough to stand as his second, but he didn’t approve of dueling and demurred. One estimate concludes that during 1798-1848, the U.S. Navy and Marines lost two-thirds as many officers from dueling as from combat.
This didn’t trouble Decatur’s colleague Bainbridge, who served as a second in the duel and who nursed some jealousy of the more famous Decatur.
Barron’s second, Capt. Jesse Elliot, seems to have thought Decatur held papers calling out Elliot’s misconduct during the War of 1812. He didn’t want them released.
As organized by Elliot and Bainbridge, the duelists stood facing eight paces, or 24 feet, from each other. Barron and Decatur consented to raising their pistols before the call to fire, rather than holding the weapons by their sides. The arrangement assured injury or death.
Bainbridge instructed: “I shall give the word quickly — ‘Present, one, two, three’ — You are neither to fire before the word ‘one’, nor after the word ‘three’.”
Bainbridge announced: “One!”
Commodore Stephen Decatur Jr. (Image courtesy National Portrait Gallery)
Neither man threw away their shot and both fired before “two.” Decatur’s bullet hit Barron in the lower abdomen and drilled into his thigh. Barron’s shot crashed into Decatur’s hip and sliced several arteries. The duelists collapsed. Decatur clutched his side and groaned, “Oh, Lord, I am a dead man.”
Barron, wounded, declared the fight fair, and that he forgave Decatur. Elliot, shocked by the result, attempted to flee the scene but onlookers restrained him.
Decatur was taken to his Lafayette Square house, where he and Susan in happier days enjoyed the company of Washington’s elite. Now he lingered in agony on the sofa in the front parlor. His suffering went on for 12 hours. Doctors and friends restrained Susan and their nieces from entering the room while a multitude, including military officers and members of James Monroe’s presidential cabinet, gathered around the house.
When word came of Decatur’s succumbing in his final battle, Reuben James, who as a boatswain served under Decatur from their days in the Barbary Wars, cried out: “The Navy has lost its mainmast!”
He was 41.
On March 24, 1820, some 10,000 people gathered for Decatur’s funeral. President Monroe, a Virginian, declared a day of mourning and the 16th Congress adjourned. Members wore black crepe on their left arms to symbolize mourning until the session ended.
Barron lived and underwent no legal consequences. No street in Manchester is named for him.
Image courtesy Library of Virginia
A Number, Not A Name
Manchester’s numbered cross streets first bore the names of prominent military leaders until the latter half of the 19th century. The 1876 Beers’ Atlas identifies them, for example, as “Third or Wadsworth.”
In descending order, they were for:
- General (later U.S. president, for one month) William Henry Harrison (14th)
- John Paul “I have not yet begun to fight” Jones (13th), who made this declaration, or something like it, while commanding the Bonhomme Richard in the desperate Sept. 23, 1779, clash with the Serapis — that ship’s commander, Richard Pearson, hailed Jones about whether Jones was ready to surrender.
- James Lawrence (12th), who exclaimed, “Don’t give up the ship!” in a duel by warship, killed in action aboard the Chesapeake, defeated by the British frigate Shannon.
- Williamsburg native Lewis Warrington (11th), a son born out of wedlock to the Comte de Rochambeau, a Revolutionary ally, and Rachel Warrington, and who, for his actions as master commander of the sloop of war Peacock against the British brig Espervier off Cape Canaveral, Florida, received a Congressional Gold Medal.
- The vaunted Johnston Blakely (10th), who went missing in August 1814 along with the crew of his ship, the Wasp.
- William Burrows (Ninth), fell mortally wounded while commanding the brig Enterprise in the Sept. 5, 1814, fight with the British brig Boxer, whose captain, Samuel Blyth, also died.
- Rhode Islander William Henry Allen (Eighth), commander of the Argus, who chose on Aug. 14, 1813, to engage the heavier-armed British ship Pelican and was killed in the engagement, buried in the foreign sod of Plymouth, England.
- Joshua Barney (Seventh), Marylander and Revolutionary and War of 1812 veteran, who commanded a last-ditch U.S. defense during the Battle of Bladensburg.
- Nicholas Biddle (Sixth), the adventurous Philadelphian who at 27 became the youngest among the first five U.S. Navy captains.
- Andrew Jackson (Fifth), general and U.S. president, with experience of both the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, and a suppressor of Red Stick, Creek and Seminole peoples.
- Richard Somers (Fourth, spelled Summers in Beers’ Atlas), the Barbary Wars commander who once fought six duels in one day, then on Sept. 4, 1804, after rigging up the Intrepid as a bomb to explode amid pirate ships in Tripoli harbor, he and crew members who didn’t get way in time died in the blast.
- William Wadsworth (Third), New York state’s War of 1812 brigadier general, captured by the British at the Battle of Queenstown Heights in Ontario, Canada.
- Augustus C. Ludlow (Second), second-in-command on Lawrence’s Chesapeake, died of wounds, buried in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
- Samuel Chester Reid (First), the captain whom General Jackson credited with delaying the arrival of British ships and saving New Orleans, and who designed the recognizable “Stars and Stripes” version of the U.S. flag. And the man rocked a top hat.
