Abstract
The United States and the US Navy faced a rising crisis in the West Indies and the Gulf of Mexico, and firm measures were called for. The celerity of action undertaken rested on the requirement of protecting American persons, property, and commerce, and had little to do with any imperial ambitions in that quarter. On the other hand, the turbulence that existed on the southern littoral of the North American continent was something the president, the secretary of state, and the secretary of the navy could only ignore at their peril. In the event, decisive action was taken.
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Notes
- 1.
Allen, 3–4.
- 2.
David Long, Sailor-Diplomat: A Biography of Commodore James Biddle, 1783–1848 (Boston: Northwestern University Press, 1983), 94.
- 3.
David Head, Privateers of the Americas: Spanish Privateering from the United States in the Early Republic (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2015).
- 4.
Allen, 9.
- 5.
Allen, 11.
- 6.
Allen, 10.
- 7.
Allen, 11–12.
- 8.
For these, and other aspects of Perry’s life, see David Curtis Skaggs, Oliver Hazard Perry: Honor, Courage and Patriotism in the Early U.S. Navy (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2006). For the expedition to Venezuela, see also, Evelyn M. Cherpak, “The Naval Officer as Diplomat: Oliver Hazard Perry’s Mission to Angostura, Venezuela, 1819,” Newport History, 57 (Winter 1984): 6–15.
- 9.
Skaggs, Oliver Hazard Perry, 206–09.
- 10.
Allen, 19.
- 11.
Allen, 20.
- 12.
Allen, 20–21.
- 13.
Allen, 21–22.
- 14.
Long, Sailor-Diplomat, 96.
- 15.
Samuel Eliot Morison, Old Bruin (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967), 60, 77, 79.
- 16.
Allen, 28.
- 17.
Allen, 38–39.
- 18.
See Hunter, Policing the Seas, 76–77, for more on Spence, his mission and his extended correspondence with Don Francisco González de Linares (correspondence is printed in Annals of Congress, 17th Cong., 2nd sess., app., 1230–44).
- 19.
Long, Sailor-Diplomat, 111.
- 20.
This action as reported in Lieutenant Gregory’s report to Commodore Biddle, 24 August 1822, is printed in BFSP, 9 (1821–22): 979–81.
- 21.
Niles, “Death of Lieut. Allen,” February 1823, 345.
- 22.
Niles, “Death of Lieut. Allen,” February 1823, 345.
- 23.
“Additional Force for the Suppression of Piracy,” No. 213, 17th Cong. 2d. Sess, ASP:NA, 1 (1836): 815 and 823, containing, respectively, James Monroe’s remarks of 9 December 1822, and Secretary of the Navy Smith Thompson’s statement of force needs, 11 December 1822.
- 24.
These instructions are printed herein as Appendix 3.
- 25.
The fundamental treatment is David F. Long, Nothing Too Daring: A Biography of David Porter, 1780–1843 (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1970).
- 26.
Allen, Our Navy and the West Indian Pirates, Appendix IV, 101.
- 27.
Allen, Appendix IX, 102.
- 28.
Allen, 42.
- 29.
Cedric Ridgely-Nevitt, American Steamships on the Atlantic (Wilmington: University of Delaware Press, 1981), 52–57.
- 30.
Allen, 45.
- 31.
This is drawn from “Capture of a Piratical Station in Cuba,” in History of the Lives and Bloody Exploits of the Most Noted Pirates, 279–80.
- 32.
Allen, Our Navy and the West Indian Pirates, 46.
- 33.
Allen, 50–51.
- 34.
Allen, 51.
- 35.
Court of Inquiry into 1823 action, Niles, 8 October 1825.
- 36.
Secretary of the Navy, Report for 1823.
- 37.
Allen, 56.
- 38.
Allen, 58–59.
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Gough, B., Borras, C. (2018). US Navy Operations. In: The War Against the Pirates. Britain and the World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-31414-7_6
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