. Jarvis. In the City Hall, New York, owned by the
Corporation. Reproduced by courtesy of the Municipal Art Commission of
the City of New York.]

CHAPTER X

PEACE WITH HONOR

The raids of the British navy on the American sea-coast through the last
two years of the war were so many efforts to make effective the blockade
which began with the proclamation of December, 1812, closing Chesapeake
and Delaware bays. Successive orders in 1813 closed practically all the
seaports from New London, Connecticut, to the Florida boundary, and the
last sweeping proclamation of May, 1814, placed under strict blockade
"all the ports, harbors, bays, creeks, rivers, inlets, outlets, islands,
and seacoasts of the United States." It was the blockade of ports of the
Middle States which caused such widespread ruin among merchants and
shippers and which finally brought the Government itself to the verge of
bankruptcy.

The first serious alarm was caused in the spring of 1813 by the
appearance of a British fleet, under command of Admiral Sir John Borlase
Warren and Rear-Admiral George Cockburn, in the Chesapeake and Delaware
bays. Apparently it had not occurred to the people of the seaboard that
the war might make life unpleasant for them, and they had undertaken no
measures of defense. Unmolested, Cockburn cruised up Chesapeake Bay to
the mouth of the Susquehanna in the spring of 1813 and established a
pleasant camp on an island from which five hundred sailors and marines
harried the country at their pleasure, looting and burning such
prosperous little towns as Havre de Grace and Fredericktown. The men of
Maryland and Virginia proceeded to hide their chattels and to move their
families inland. Panic took hold of these proud and powerful
commonwealths. Cockburn had no scruples about setting the torch to
private houses, "to cause the proprietors who had deserted them and
formed part of the militia which had fled to the woods to understand and
feel what they were liable to bring upon themselves by building forts
and acting toward us with so much useless rancor." Though Cockburn was
an officer of the British navy, he was also an unmitigated ruffian in
his behavior toward non-combatants, and his own countrymen could not
regard his career with satisfaction.

Admiral Warren had more justification in attacking Norfolk, which had a
navy yard and forts and was therefore frankly belligerent. Unluckily for
him the most important battery was ma