Oliver Hazard Perry

American naval officer

• Born: August 20, 1785
• Birthplace: Rocky Brook, South Kingston, Rhode Island
• Died: August 23, 1819
• Place of death: Near Port of Spain, Trinidad

The brother of Matthew C. Perry, Oliver Hazard Perry was one of the first naval heroes in American history. His skillful seamanship and tactical tenacity in the War of 1812 provided an example of leadership and courage to the officers and crews of the young republic’s fledgling navy.

Early Life

Oliver Hazard Perry was born into a family of Rhode Island seamen. His father, Christopher Raymond Perry, broke with the clan’s tradition of Quaker pacifism to fight in the American Revolution. Four of Christopher’s sons served in the United States Navy, one of whom was Matthew C. Perry, the famed naval commander and diplomat who opened Japan to Western commerce and thought.

Oliver Perry was reared in Newport, Rhode Island, and educated by his mother, Sarah Wallace Perry. At the age of fourteen, he signed on as a midshipman on his father’s vessel, USS General Greene. Four years later, he was a lieutenant on the twenty-eight-gun frigate USS Adams. Between 1803 and 1806, during the Tripolitan War, he served aboard the Constellation, captained the twelve-gun frigate Nautilus, and eventually transferred to the forty-four-gun frigate Constitution in Commodore John Rodgers’s squadron. During the next six years, he directed the construction of various gunboats and commanded a schooner in American waters.

In 1811, Perry married Elizabeth Champlin Mason of Newport. They eventually had five children, two of whom became military officers.

Life’s Work

The outbreak of war found Perry commanding a gunboat flotilla at Newport, but in early 1813 he reported to Presque Isle (modern Erie), Pennsylvania, where he immediately began constructing vessels and organizing a crew in the midst of a wilderness. Captain Perry found himself engaged in a naval arms race with Captain Robert H. Barclay of the Royal Navy, who was patrolling Lake Erie and building his own vessels at a rapid pace. Perry’s flotilla was under the overall command of Commodore Isaac Chauncey, stationed at Sackett’s Harbor, New York, on the southeastern shore of Lake Ontario.

While the ship construction proceeded at Presque Isle, Perry joined Chauncey and General Henry Dearborn and superintended the naval gunfire and amphibious landing support of the attack on Fort George at the mouth of the Niagara River, May 27, 1813. Perry’s conduct in this operation was a model of interservice cooperation. The success of the Fort George attack allowed Perry to move to Lake Erie five small vessels and fifty sailors.

At Presque Isle, Perry spent the spring and summer building, equipping, officering, and manning his small fleet of ten vessels, the largest of which were the USS Lawrence and the USS Niagara, each of 480 tons burden. To take his flotilla onto the lake, Perry had to cross the bar outside the harbor, a feat he could not accomplish in the presence of an enemy force since the shallow waters required that the guns and equipment of the vessels be removed before the ships could pass over. For inexplicable reasons, Captain Barclay relaxed his vigilance and allowed his foe the opportunity in early August to enter the lake unmolested. The battle for Lake Erie may well have been won at the Presque Isle bar, because crossing it allowed the Americans to achieve superior naval power on the lake.

Hoisting his flag on the Lawrence and with Lieutenant Jesse Duncan Elliott commanding the Niagara, Commodore Perry set out to fight Barclay’s force and to cooperate with General William Henry Harrison’s army, then encamped at Fort Meigs (west of modern Toledo, Ohio). Harrison could not advance toward Detroit unless Perry secured his lines of supply along the western shore of Lake Erie. After conferring with General Harrison, Perry located Barclay’s fleet at Fort Malden, near the mouth of the Detroit River, but confrontation was delayed because of contrary winds and illness among Perry’s crew. The Americans retired to Put-in-Bay in the Bass Islands, near modern Sandusky, where Perry received crew reinforcements from Harrison and awaited Barclay’s decision to leave the protection of Fort Malden. Though outgunned, Barclay had to risk an engagement because Perry’s dominance of the lake denied the British supplies for their troops in the Detroit vicinity.

The encounter, on September 10, 1813, should have been easily won by the Americans because Perry’s two twenty-gun vessels gave a decided weight of metal advantage over the single twenty-gun HMS Detroit commanded by Barclay. Moreover, the initial wind advantage enjoyed by the British was lost because of a change in direction that allowed the Americans the power of initiative. Perry intended the Lawrence to engage the Detroit and the Niagara to attack HMS Queen Charlotte, the second largest of the British vessels. Not only did Elliott not engage the Queen Charlotte, but he also allowed that vessel to support the Detroit against the Lawrence.

The result was that despite the heavy damage his flagship inflicted upon the Detroit, Perry found his vessel a wreck, its guns disabled, and most of its crew casualties. He transferred his flag to the undamaged Niagara, which he then took into action and quickly destroyed and captured the British vessels. His succinct message to General Harrison—“We have met the enemy and they are ours; two ships, two brigs, one schooner, and one sloop”—constitutes a model laconic after-action report. Elliott’s conduct in this battle remains controversial and left a legacy of dispute with Perry that lasted long after the latter’s death.

Perry’s victory dramatically changed the military situation in the Middle West. Harrison quickly retook Detroit and pursued the British-Canadian-Indian forces eastward. Perry’s vessels supported him, and when the two armies met at the Battle of the Thames on October 5, the naval captain acted as an aide to the general and assisted in the forming of the battle line.

Perry relinquished his command and made a triumphant tour to Newport. President James Madison promoted him to the permanent rank of captain, and Congress added five thousand dollars to the seventy-five hundred dollars in prize money that was his due and requested that the president give him a gold medal. In July, 1814, Perry took command of the newly commissioned USS Java at Baltimore but was unable to take the vessel to sea because of the British blockade and the ship’s still uncompleted state. While in this capacity, he commanded a battery of seamen who harassed the British fleet as it withdrew down the Potomac after the raid on Washington.

On the return of peace with Britain in 1815, Perry took a squadron into the Mediterranean to assist Commodore Stephen Decatur in redressing American grievances against Algiers and Tripoli, whose cruisers had captured numerous American vessels and seamen since 1812. During this cruise, he engaged in a number of diplomatic efforts. He also became involved in a dispute with Marine Captain John Heath, which grew so embittered that, in a fit of passion, Perry struck the Java’s marine detachment commander. The incident resulted in a court-martial and a mild reprimand. Still unsatisfied, Heath would eventually engage Perry in a duel that ended with both unhurt and Perry not firing his weapon.

In 1819, Perry undertook a diplomatic mission to Venezuela. He conducted the delicate venture successfully but died of yellow fever contracted during the trip. Perry was buried on Trinidad. In a token of respect for his military prowess and post-battle humanitarianism, his funeral procession received full British honors. Seven years later, his body was returned to Newport for reburial and was marked with a granite obelisk erected by the state of Rhode Island.

Significance

The key to Oliver Hazard Perry’s reputation is victory on Lake Erie. There, he demonstrated the elements of professionalism, presence, and determination that elicited the admiration of his officers and men. As he had done earlier at Fort George, in his support of General Harrison’s ground force, Perry exhibited a degree of interservice cooperation uncharacteristic of many subsequent army-navy efforts. One of the few heroes in a war that was divisive, his achievement of capturing a Royal Navy fleet was unprecedented in American history. However, Perry was more than a distinguished warrior and seaman. His diplomatic efforts in North Africa and South America were typical naval endeavors of his day, and they set the tone for his younger brother’s famous expedition to Japan. In the final analysis, his career, like that of John Paul Jones, Stephen Decatur, Thomas Macdonough, and James Lawrence, provided an example of valor, dedication, leadership, and patriotism that influenced American sailors for years to follow.

Bibliography

Dutton, Charles J. Oliver Hazard Perry. New York: Longmans, Green, 1935. The standard but undistinguished biographical study.

Forester, Cecil S. The Age of Fighting Sail: The Story of the Naval War of 1812. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1956. A popular history by the author of the Horatio Hornblower stories, this is a good introduction to the problems confronted by Perry and his contemporaries.

Hitsman, J. Mackay. The Incredible War of 1812: A Military History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965. Written from a Canadian perspective, this is a solid history with a strong focus on the war on the Great Lakes.

MacKenzie, Alexander Slidell. The Life of Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry. 2 vols. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1840. A highly laudatory account by a naval officer who served under Perry, this study is notable for the numerous personal recollections that MacKenzie collected and for its defensive tone in the Perry-Elliott and Perry-Heath controversies.

Mahan, Alfred Thayer. Sea Power in Its Relations to the War of 1812. 2 vols. Boston: Little, Brown, 1905. Volume 2 contains this distinguished naval historian’s account of the Battle of Lake Erie; Mahan stoutly defends Perry’s conduct.

Morison, Samuel Eliot.“Old Bruin”: Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry, 1794-1858: The American Naval Officer Who Helped Found Liberia. Boston: Little, Brown, 1967. This account by a famous naval historian of the career of Perry’s younger brother provides both family background and an analysis of the United States Navy during the early nineteenth century.

Skaggs, David Curtis, and Gerald T. Altoff. A Signal Victory: The Lake Erie Campaign, 1812-1813. Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1997. This history of the campaign describes how the United States and Great Britain sought to control the strategic Lake Erie frontier, with their struggle culminating in the decisive battle in 1813. Recounts the battle, analyzing the leadership of Perry and his British opponent, Commodore Robert H. Barclay.