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Germany The Long Road West Volume 1 1789 1933
Heinrich August Winkler Digital Instant Download
Author(s): Heinrich August Winkler
ISBN(s): 9780199265978, 0199265976
Edition: ebook
File Details: PDF, 4.00 MB
Year: 2006
Language: english
GERMANY: THE LONG ROAD WEST

2
 Heinrich August
Winkler

Germany: The Long Road West

Volume 1: 1789–1933

Translated by
ALEXANDER J. SAGER

3
 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP
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 Database right Oxford University Press (maker)

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Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India

Printed in Great Britain
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Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn, Norfolk

5
ISBN 0–19–926597–6 978–0–19–926597–8

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

6
 Preface

I would like to thank Ms Teresa Löwe and Mr Sebastian Ullrich,

who worked on the titles for the subsections of the individual
chapters, corrected the proofs, and compiled the index of names.
Ms Gretchen Klein transformed my handwritten pages into a
manuscript ready for the press. This volume owes a great deal to
her care and patience. The book’s main editor at C. H. Beck, Dr
Ernst-Peter Wieckenburg, was an admirably thorough and critical
reader of the manuscript, as with earlier books of mine with this
publisher. My warm thanks to them both.
I dedicate this volume to my wife. It took shape in conversation
with her, from first outlines to final form. Without her support it
would not have been written.
H.A.W.
Berlin
November 1999

7
 Contents

Abbreviations

Introduction

1. Legacy of a Millennium

2. Hampered by Progress 1789–1830

3. Liberalism in Crisis 1830–1850

4. Unity before Liberty 1850–1871

5. The Transformation of Nationalism 1871–1890

6. World Policy and World War 1890–1918

7. The Impaired Republic 1918–1933

Looking Ahead

Notes

Index

8
 Abbreviations

Abl. Abendblatt (evening edition of NZ)

ADGB Allgemeiner Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund (General

German Trade Union Association)

AdR Akten der Reichskanzlei

AfS Archiv für Sozialgeschichte

APZ Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte

AStA Allgemeiner Studentenausschuss

BVG Berliner Verkehrs-Gesellschaft

BVP Bayerische Volkspartei (Bavarian People’s Party)

CEH Central European History

DDP Deutsche Demokratische Partei (German Democratic

Party)

DNVP Deutschnationale Volkspartei (German National

People’s Party)

DuM Dokumente und Materialien zur Geschichte der

deutschen Arbeiterbewegung

DVP Deutsche Volkspartei (German People’s Party)

GG Geschichte und Gesellschaft

GWU Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht

9
HPB Historische-politische Blätter für das katholische
Deutschland

HZ Historische Zeitschrift

Inprekorr Internationale Pressekorrespondenz

JMH Journal of Modern History

KPD Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (Communist

Party of Germany)

Mbl. Morgenblatt (midday edition of NZ)

MECW Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Complete Works

(New York: International Publishers, 1975–2004)

MEW Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Werke (Berlin:

Institute for Marxism/Leninism, Central Committee
of the SED, 1956–)

MGH Monumenta Germaniae Historica

MGM Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen

MSPD Mehrheitssozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands

(Majority Social Democratic Party of Germany)

NEKZ Neue Evangelische Kirchenzeitung

NF Neue Folge (new series)

NPL Neue Politische Literatur

NSDAP Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei

(National Socialist German Workers’ Party)

10
NZ National-Zeitung (Berlin)

OHL Oberste Heeresleitung (Army High Command)

PVS Politische Vierteljahresschrift

SA Sturmabteilungen (Storm Troopers)

SPD Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (Social

Democratic Party of Germany)

SS Schutzstaffeln (Security Force)

Sten. Stenographischer Bericht über die Verhandlungen des

Ber. Deutschen Reichstags

Sten. Stenographischer Bericht über die Verhandlungen des

Ber., LT Preussischen Abgeordnetenhauses

USPD Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei

Deutschlands (Independent Social Democratic Party
of Germany)

VfZ Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte

VSWG Vierteljahrsschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte

VZ Volkszeitung (Berlin)

11
 Introduction

Was there or was there not a German Sonderweg? Did Germany

develop along its own ‘unique path’ through history? This is one of
the most controversial questions in German historical scholarship.
For a long time, educated Germans answered it in the positive,
initially by laying claim to a special German mission, then, after
the collapse of 1945, by criticizing Germany’s deviation from the
West. Today, the negative view is predominant. Germany did not,
according to the now prevailing opinion, differ from the great
European nations to an extent that would justify speaking of a
‘unique German path’. And, in any case, no country on earth ever
took what can be described as the ‘normal’ path.
The question of whether the peculiarities of German history
justify speaking of a ‘unique German path’—or perhaps of several
‘unique German paths’—is the starting point of this two-volume
study. Consequently, the attempt to provide an answer can only be
made at the end, and this answer must reflect the problems
discussed along the way. I present here not a ‘total history’, but a
‘problem history’. At the centre of this history of Germany in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries stands the relationship between
democracy and nation. On the one hand, I enquire how it
happened that Germany was politically so far behind England and
France, developing a nation state only after 1866 and a democracy
later still, in the wake of Germany’s defeat in the First World War
and the revolution of 1918–19. On the other hand, I investigate the
consequences of this twofold historical belatedness, consequences

12
which are still with us today.
This is a political history, but not of the traditional kind. Affairs
of high diplomacy are treated mostly in passing, battles virtually
ignored. Events play an important role, but less for their own sake
than for the significance ascribed to them by contemporaries and
by those who came later. I focus special attention on
interpretations of history, how they influenced people, and how
they informed political decision-making. Such interpretations were
and still are controversial, the objects of discourses. Accordingly,
my study is also a discourse history.
To draw is to omit, as the painter Max Liebermann once said. I
will omit many things and concentrate on what seems important to
me in the light of the central question. It goes without saying that a
different central question would elicit a different set of problems
and a different evaluation of facts and opinions.
Historical narratives require a vanishing point. Vanishing points
change in the course of time. The years 1933 and 1945 are the
vanishing points towards which histories of modern Germany have
been written after the Second World War. There is now a new
vanishing point—the year 1990. We will not reach it until the
second volume, which deals with the period between the ‘Third
Reich’ and the reunification of Germany. Nonetheless, the
vanishing point of ‘1990’ is already at work in the first volume,
which takes us to the downfall of the first German democracy,
known as the Weimar Republic, and to the threshold of the ‘Third
Reich’.
How it happened that Hitler came to power is still the most

13
important question of nineteenth- and twentieth-century German
history, if not of all German history. Ever since 1990, however, it
has been joined by a new question: why did the German question
find its answer in reunification? Or, in other words, why is there no
longer a German question after 1990, and why only after this
particular year?
In selecting the year 1990 as our latest vanishing point, we will
be investigating many interpretations German history has
undergone between 1945 and 1990. Since there is now a German
nation state once again (albeit not a ‘classical’ nation state, but
rather a ‘post-classical’ one, firmly integrated into Europe), German
history can no longer be understood as the refutation of a German
nation state, or indeed of the nation state as such. The first German
national state, which came into being in 1871, belongs not only to
the prehistory of 1933, but also of 1990. It bears within itself both
the causes of its failure in the ‘German catastrophe’ of the years
1933–45 and, at the same time, much that went into the founding
of the second German nation state. Here I will name only the key
words: rule of law, constitutional state, federal state, social welfare
state, general suffrage, and parliamentary culture. And another
point, only seldom mentioned: the Two-Plus-Four Treaty of 1990
was a confirmation of Bismarck’s ‘Little Germany solution’, at least
to the extent that the latter rejected the ‘Greater Germany solution’
of the German problem, the solution with Austria.
Towards the end of the first volume it will become clear that, by
the eve of Hitler’s accession to power, the German people were not
only weary of the democracy of 1918–19, but also dissatisfied with
the ‘Little German’ national state of 1871. Educated Germans were

14
fascinated with the idea of an empire that included Austria and
controlled central Europe, a polity that sought to be different and
more than the typical nation state. The origins of the myth of the
‘Reich’ lie deep in the German past. The first chapter of the first
volume of this German history from the end of the old empire to
the reunification begins with an enquiry into the medieval
antecedents of this myth. In the second volume, I will discuss the
question of what replaced the mythology of the empire after it
vanished along with the German Reich in 1945. Was it a particular
‘post-national’ idea of Europe? Was it, in other words, the idea of a
new German mission—the supersession of the nation and the
nation state, as an example to all of Europe?
In the prologue to his book Die Geschichten der romanischen und
germanischen Völker von 1494 bis 1535*, Leopold von Ranke wrote
that the historian should ‘merely tell how it really was’. After
Hitler, this kind of history probably can no longer be written. For
us, the question should be: Why did it happen the way it did? The
readers I have in mind for this and the second volume are not only
other historians, but all those who would like to know the answer
to this question.
I have recourse to historical sources as much as possible (and
that is not the only respect in which Ranke is not yet obsolete). I
consider narrative not the opposite of explanation, but rather its
commensurate form. My notes at the end of the volume contain, in
addition to source citations for the quotes, references to selected
secondary literature. I include more of these for the central
questions of this study, but nowhere is my goal the utopian one of
providing an exhaustive list. Footnotes, added for this translation,

15
explain specialized terms and give translations for German poems,
titles, and quotations.

16
 1

Legacy of a Millennium

THE REICH AND ITS MYTHOLOGY

In the beginning was the Reich. Everything that divides German

history from the history of the great European nations had its
origin in the Holy Roman Empire. The parting of ways began in the
Middle Ages, when nation-states began to develop in England and
France, while in Germany the formation of the modern state
proceeded along lower, territorial lines. At the same time, a
political construct endured in Germany that claimed to be more
than simply one kingdom among many: the Holy Roman Empire.
We must go far back in history to understand why Germany
became a nation-state later than England and France—and a
democracy later still.1
Accordingly, the first part of this study concerns the old Reich
and the mythology that grew up around it. This is the first of three
basic phenomena that shaped the character of German history
throughout many centuries. The second is the confessional schism
of the sixteenth century, which contributed decisively to making
Germany the theatre of a thirty-year European war the century
following. The third phenomenon is the opposition between Austria
and Prussia. If in the second half of the eighteenth century the

17
Reich seemed to many people no more than an empty shell, the
Austro-Prussian antinomy was the reason.
The Reich had always been a myth. Medieval writers expended
a great deal of effort attempting to prove that the Roman imperium
had never actually ceased to exist. To be sure, it had been divided
in 395 into eastern and western halves; yet even after 476, when
the western empire had collapsed in the tumults of the tribal
migrations, the eastern empire still endured with its capital
Constantinople, formerly Greek Byzantium. However, the claim of
the eastern basileus to be the Roman Emperor was recognized ever
less in the west, especially after the accession of a woman, the
empress-widow Irene, to the throne at the end of the eighth
century. Then, in 800, Pope Leo III placed the imperial crown on
the head of Charlemagne, the king of the Franks and Lombards and
protector of the ecclesiastic state created by his father, Pippin. The
Romans rejoiced. Thereafter the imperial mantle passed from the
Greeks to the Franks (or, as it later came to be said, to the
Germans).
This was, at any rate, how the proponents of the medieval
theory of the translatio imperii, the transfer or ‘translation’ of
Roman imperial power, viewed things. Indeed, they had every
reason to emphasize the continuity of the empire. Following early
Christian tradition, which drew on the prophet Daniel, they
considered the Roman empire the fourth and last of the great world
empires, preceded by those of Babylon, Medea-Persia, and
Macedonia. This succession also implied a shift in geopolitical
focus from east to west, from the orient to the occident, with the
imperium Romanum (from the fourth century AD onwards referred

18
to as the imperium Christianum) the westernmost of them all. It was
generally believed that the Antichrist would not arise as long as the
Roman empire endured. According to the Book of Revelation, in its
medieval interpretation based on St Jerome, the Antichrist was a
tyrant, false prophet, Jew, and chief of heretics. The New
Testament prophecy considered his rule to represent the end of
world history. Thereafter Christ would return, destroy the self-
proclaimed ‘god’, and initiate the Heavenly Kingdom. The Roman
empire was to play the role of the catechon, the power holding back
the enemy of Christ and thus delaying the end of the world. It was
not until the era of modern theological scholarship that the Pauline
authorship of 2 Thessalonians, the source text (chapter 2) of the
catechon idea, was called into question. It is now generally
considered a fictitious ascription.2
The theory of imperial continuity played an important role in
the coronation of the Saxon king Otto the Great by Pope John XII
in 962. This event represented—or was made to represent—not the
foundation of a new empire, but the return of the imperium
Romanum. To be sure, the Treaty of Verdun had divided the
Frankish empire in 843, and there had been no emperor in the west
for nearly four decades, ever since the murder of the last emperor
from the imperial Frankish nobility in 924. However, the East
Franks had had a decisive voice in the royal election of Otto’s
father, Heinrich I, in 919. Looking back on Otto’s coronation in 962
from his vantage point in the mid-twelfth century, Bishop Otto of
Freising, the uncle and counsellor of the Hohenstaufen emperor
Frederick Barbarossa, spoke of a ‘retranslation’: after the Franks
and the Lombards, the Empire of the Romans was now being

19
‘transferred back’ (retranslatum est) to the Germans (ad teutonicos)
or, as others saw it, to the Franks, who had before ‘let it slip,’ so to
speak.3
In Otto’s day there was, as yet, no mention of ‘die Deutschen’.
Latinized terms such as teutonici and teutones only became common
around the turn of the millennium. By this time, of course, they no
longer referred to the old Teutonic tribes, but to the
contemporaneous ‘Germans’: people who spoke the same language
(deutsch) despite various tribal ancestry. Thus it makes little sense
to speak of ‘the German nation’ much before 1000. The second half
of the eleventh century witnessed the politicization of the concept
deutsch. During the struggle over the investiture of imperial
bishoprics, the first large-scale conflict between secular and
ecclesiastical powers, Pope Gregory VII referred to his opponent,
Emperor Henry IV of the Salian Frankish dynasty, as rex
Teutonicorum, ‘king of the Germans’. He wanted to make clear that
a German king who had not been vetted and crowned by the pope
could be, at most, a ruler over his own people, but not the Roman
emperor. The term was intended as a humiliation, and as such it
was fully in keeping withGregory’s attitude at Canossa, the fortress
on the northern slopes of the Apennines in front of which, in
January 1077, the pope compelled the emperor to wait three days
in the habiliments of a penitent before lifting the papal interdiction
against him. North of the Alps, however, the term regnum
Teutonicorum(‘kingdom of the Germans’) soon came to be used in a
more positive manner, signalling the developing sense of
community and growing self-awareness of the Germans.4

20
 Nonetheless, the German kings were not going to rest content
with a mere kingdom. The concept regnum Teutonicorum referred
only to the German part of their sovereign territories. It did not
apply to Burgundy, which had belonged to the Reich since 1034,
nor to the Italian lands under imperial control. The German kings
needed the imperial title in order to rule the Reich in its entirety
effectively. The terms imperium and imperator did not necessarily
imply a claim to suzerainty over polities that did not belong to the
Reich. However, the medieval emperors certainly did insist upon a
special dignitas and ceremonial pre-eminence over other occidental
kings. As long as they restricted themselves to this, they were not
challenged, not even in France and England. As protector of the
Christian church, the emperor merited a higher rank than other
sovereigns. But only in this capacity.5
During the reign of the Hohenstaufen dynasty, western
observers gained the impression that the German emperors were
indeed out for more that the prestige of the position of first among
equals. In 1160, at a church synod dominated by the imperial
episcopate, and thus in no way representative of the church as a
whole, Frederick I acknowledged as pope (or rather antipope) a
candidate whom, in the prior deliberations of the College of
Cardinals, only the minority fraction loyal to Frederick had
supported. One of the most famous churchmen of the age, John of
Salisbury, the bishop of Chartres, rose in protest: ‘Who is he that
subjugates the Universal Church to a particular church? Who has
appointed the Germans the judge of nations? [Quis Teutonicos
constituit iudices nationum?] Who has granted to such coarse and
violent folk the power to install a prince above the heads of

21
humanity?’6
The English critique from Chartres was a response to what we
might call Hohenstaufen ‘imperial ideology’, to use a modern
expression. In 1157, the chancery of Frederick I began to employ
the term Sacrum Imperium, ‘Holy Empire’. Hohenstaufen political
propagandists referred to the rulers of other kingdoms
condescendingly as ‘little kings’, reguli. Certain poems by the
Archpoet, a writer belonging to the circle of the imperial chancellor
Reinald von Dassel, and the Spiel vom Antichrist*, written in 1160 in
the monastery at Tegernsee, went so far as to thematize a German
‘world empire’. The anonymous author of the latter text considered
this pretension justified by the special vocation of the Germans
within the course of sacred history: as the nucleus of the people of
God, the Germans would be the last to resist the Antichrist, the
enemy of the fatherland.7
Such ideas played virtually no role in the practical politics of
Frederick I. Still, there is little doubt that his high-handed
brinkmanship vis-À-vis the papacy, indeed his entire Italian policy,
was unrealistic and catastrophic. And considering the achievements
and plans of his son, Emperor Henry VI (1190–7), one is perfectly
justified in talking about Hohenstaufen ‘world policy’. This prince,
having obtained a claim to rule Sicily through marriage, enforced it
with military power. He compelled the English king, Richard
Lionheart, whom he had taken prisoner after the latter’s return
from the Third Crusade, to receive England as an imperial fief. He
secured suzerainty over Armenia, Tunis, and Tripoli, obtained a
Hohenstaufen claim to the succession in Byzantium, and probably

22
contemplated the conquest of the whole eastern empire. He did not
succeed in subjecting France to imperial domination, but it is quite
possible that he would have extended his plans of conquest to the
west, once he had secured the east. In the event, his early death
consigns these matters to the realm of speculation. Had he lived
longer, he might also have realized yet another of his ambitious
goals: to establish the Reich as the hereditary princedom of the
Hohenstaufens. This question, too, must remain open.8
The short reign of Henry VI marks the turning point in the
history of the medieval Reich. Henry had tried to subjugate all of
Europe; now, after a seventeen-year interval plagued by competing
claims to the throne and civil war, it was left to the other European
powers to decide the issue of Henry’s succession by his son,
Frederick II. The dice fell in 1214 on the field of Bouvines in a
battle between the forces of English and French chivalry. The
military defeat of the English spelled the final political defeat of
their German ally, the Guelf emperor Otto IV, son of Frederick
Barbarossa’s inveterate enemy, Henry the Lion.
Frederick II of Hohenstaufen was crowned German king in 1215
at Aachen. The imperial coronation took place five years later in
Rome. But Frederick was much more a Sicilian than a German
prince. For Germany, the most important event of his rule was his
renunciation of royal authority in the German lands and his cession
of the rights to levy tolls and mint coins to the ecclesiastic and
secular princes. These statutes were codified in the Confoederatio
cum principibus ecclesiasticis (1220) and the Statutum in favorem
principum (1232). The latter document was directed primarily
against the cities and the urban bourgeoisie, who claimed

23
independence from feudal princes under the motto Stadtluft macht
frei, ‘city air liberates’.
The territorial princes had already gained considerably in power
during the struggle over lay investiture, during which they had
temporarily sided with the pope against the German king. They
now emerged as the true winners from the crisis of the high
medieval Reich. The documents of 1220 and 1232 consolidated the
development of Germany along the lines of the territorial state.
This development had actually begun in the previous century, not
so much through the transfer of royal privileges, but as a
consequence of the local princes’ efforts to settle and develop their
land and concentrate their power. This happened not only in the
old German territories of the west, south, and north, but also in the
regions east of the Elbe that had been ‘Germanized’ in the wake of
conquest, missionary activity among the Slavic peoples, and
colonization. In terms of general constitutional development, the
Battle of Bouvines, which had made Frederick II’s rule possible,
was merely one turning point among several.9
The battle had a greater impact on France and England. In
France, the defeat of the English and their ally Otto strengthened
the domestic position of the victorious French king. The hitherto
powerful vassals of the crown suffered a loss of influence vis-À-vis
a strongly centralizing monarchy. On the other side of the English
Channel the situation was much different. Magna Carta of 1215
forced the weakened English monarch to concede extensive rights
and privileges both to the nobility and to the bourgeoisie.
Furthermore, he had to submit monarchical authority to a certain
degree of review and control by a committee elected from among

24
the barons. These concessions laid the basis for the development of
England into a constitutional state.10
The later thirteenth century witnessed the zenith of medieval
imperial ideology, even though by this time the power of the
German emperors had long since begun to wane. In his influential
and widely read treatise Memoriale der prerogativa Romani imperii
(1289), Alexander von Roes, a canon lawyer from Cologne,
outlined the structure of what he considered a sensible and
necessary societal order in the following way: the Romans, being
the older people, ought to receive the office of the papacy
(sacerdotium) as their own; the imperial office (imperium) rightly
falls to the Germans or Franks (Germani vel Franci) as the younger
people; to the French or Gauls, noted for their mental acumen,
accrues the study of the sciences (studium).11 The author intended
this scheme of a division of labour among the nations as a
defensive manoeuvre against French attempts to establish a claim
to the emperorship. However, the idea found no resonance in
France. In a document for Philip the Fair from 1296, an anonymous
French lawyer repeated a claim that had already been made the
previous century on behalf of the French monarch: namely that in
his kingdom, he is emperor. ‘And because there was a king in
France before there was an emperor, the king may be counted the
worthier.’ This statement can almost be interpreted as a direct
response to the project of Alexander von Roes.12
In one area, however, there was agreement between the secular
rulers of the west, at least in theory: they all rejected the ‘papal
revolution’, to use the expression of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessey,

25
one of the last German universal historians of the twentieth
century, in his 1931 book about the revolutions in Europe. The
‘papal revolution’ found its manifesto in Pope Gregory VII’s 1075
bull Dictatus Papae. Gregory’s claim that the pope could depose the
emperor reversed only the practice of the emperors. His assertion
that only the pope could remove or relocate bishops, however, was
just as much a declaration of war against the kings of France and
England as against the emperor. If the pope had had his will in the
matter, the political system of all three lands would have collapsed,
since bishops not only exercised spiritual offices, but were also, in
personal union, the highest administrative officials of the crown. As
it happened, the curia achieved at best partial success. From the
early twelfth century onward (first in France, then in England, then
in Germany with the Concordat of Worms in 1122), bishops were
elected to their offices according to canon law, but in the presence
of the secular ruler, allowing the latter to continue to exert his
influence.
The Investiture Contest was only one stage in the struggle
between spiritual and secular authority. In 1302 Pope Boniface VIII
reasserted the curia’s stance that the papacy was above all other
rulers. The bull Unam Sanctam, directed at the French king Philip
the Fair, claimed that two swords lay in the hand of the pope, a
spiritual sword and a secular sword. Both were thus under the
power of the church, the only difference being that the spiritual
sword was wielded by the church, the secular sword for the
church.13
The developing nation states of France and England answered
the papal challenge by nationalizing their churches to a great

26
extent, beginning with a rigorous restriction of papal taxes from
church property. The Roman-German emperors could not go the
national route without calling into question their own universal
aspirations and provoking the German princes, many of whom
were striving to become ‘pope’ in their own territories by
consolidating their regional churches.14 The reaction of the
emperor’s ‘party’ to the secular pretensions of the church (and to
the instrumentalization of the church by France during the Avignon
papacy from 1309 to 1377) was initially ideological in nature. Two
literary advocates of Emperor Ludwig the Bavarian (1314–47), the
Italian political intellectual Marsilius of Padua and the English
Franciscan William of Ockham, argued that the transmission of the
Roman imperial mantle ‘from the Greeks to the Germans’ in the
year 800 derived from the will of the Roman people. Thus, they
placed a democratic doctrine against the curial interpretation of
the translatio imperii by means of the papal office, which had been
articulated ‘ex cathedra’ in 1202 by Innocent III in the bull
Venerabilem. Yet the reality of the Sacrum Imperium contradicted
the idea of the sovereignty of the people so radically that the
construct had little impact.15
The secularization of the church also provoked a response from
the German mystics, beginning with Eckhart (c.1250–1327). Unlike
the efforts of Ludwig’s political theorists, the ‘inward turn’ of the
mystics had a great impact on the development of the church in
Germany. In his 1929 book on the Sacrum Imperium, Alois Dempf
interpreted the struggle to deepen and enliven religious devotion in
Germany as the counterpart to the ‘political reformation’ in France

27
and England. Transforming ‘piety without priests into a widespread
pietistic movement’, German mysticism prepared the way for a
development of world-historical consequence: the Reformation. The
young Luther knew in what traditions he stood.16
The estrangement from Rome, implicit in mysticism but
restricted to the religious sphere, intensified to an early form of
German national consciousness in the course of the fifteenth
century. Both the emperor and the imperial estates could agree in
their rejection of the papacy’s financial demands. Gravamina
nationis Germanicae, the title of the document into which their
complaints were formally gathered (beginning c.1440), gives
expression to the consciousness of their commonality. The name
Römisches Reich Deutscher Nation was used for the first time in 1486
in an imperial law; the complete title Heiliges Römisches Reich
Deutscher Nation first appears in the recess of the Imperial Diet of
Cologne from 1512. The addendum ‘of the German Nation’ was not
at first intended to establish equivalence between the Roman
empire and Germany, but rather as a restriction indicating the
‘German territories’ of the Reich in contrast to the territories of the
welsch— that is, Italian—nation.
Yet even in the original spirit of the title, the German lands were
considered the core of the empire, and by means of this usage the
term ‘nation’ acquired a new significance. Whereas before it had
served as a practical means of distinguishing and organizing
national-ethnic groups at universities, church councils, and among
the foreign merchants in west European trading centres, in the
fifteenth century it broadened to a general way of looking at the
world. The defining factor in the German concept of ‘nation’ was

28
the commonality of language (Gezunge). It probably could not have
been otherwise, since, as we recall, the ‘German nation’ had no
political-administrative reality of any kind at this time. In France
and England, in contrast, the formation of the nation proceeded
from the monarchy, which lent a statist orientation to the idea of
the ‘nation’ that was not possible in Germany.
The emperor made use of the word ‘nation’ whenever he desired
the support of the imperial estates (Reichsstände) and their leaders,
the imperial electors, in matters of common interest. The seven
electors, however (the archbishops of Trier, Cologne, and Mainz,
the king of Bohemia, the count of the Rhenish Palatinate, the duke
of Saxony, and the count of Brandenburg) had reason to believe
that not everything the elected ‘Roman king’ considered necessary
was in the interest of the Reich and nation. The dynastic interests
of the Habsburgs, who had stood at the apex of the Reich since
1438, were by no means automatically the same as the interests of
the empire or the German nation.17
Conversely, the agenda of the electors—to the extent that they
could agree, which happened rarely enough—was also not
necessarily in harmony with the common good of the Reich. While
they were recognized as the co-bearers of imperial authority by the
Golden Bull, the foundational law of the Reich from 1356, the seven
electors did not alone constitute the ‘nation’. It also included the
princes and the other imperial estates, who had far less influence
on imperial policy and legislation, not to mention the cities, which
were most burdened by imperial taxation but had no voice in the
Imperial Diet (Reichstag) in the fifteenth century. Even at the
beginning of the 1400s, it was clear to many that the empire

29
needed to be thoroughly reorganized. The steps taken under
Emperors Frederick III (1440–93) and Maximilian I (1493–1519),
however, hardly merited the name of ‘imperial reform’. In
Germany, the real institutional development of the state took place
not at the level of the Reich, but in the territories, whose princes
increasingly took advantage of Roman law and employed the
services of well-educated officials trained in its application. The
princes of the larger territories were especially energetic in this
kind of regional reform and consolidation, and it was they who, in
their corresponding lack of interest in centralizing measures, stood
in the way of effective imperial reform.18
It was this rather dismal reality of the Reich that prompted the
German humanists, both before and after 1500, to call for the
restoration of the old imperial glory. The source of their hope and
inspiration was the remembrance of a distant past, the age of
Germania Magna, in which the nations of Germanic origin were still
undivided. Invoking Tacitus, whose Germania had been
rediscovered in 1455, the humanists drew an idealizing picture of
German virtue that contrasted advantageously with its distorted
counterpart: the Romans, who had long since lapsed into
decadence and debauchery. Republican Rome, not the Rome of the
Caesars, could teach the Germans the love of the fatherland. After
all, the Germans had inherited the succession to the Roman empire.
The greatness and dignity of the Reich derived from this legacy,
which was earned and legitimate. This belief did not, however,
prevent the humanists from appealing to Pope Innocent III’s bull
Venerabilem in order to prove that the empire had been transferred
from the Greeks to the Germans in the person of Charlemagne in

30
800. The aspirations arising from this view of things assumed, in
the writings of several authors, Hohenstaufen-like dimensions.19 In
his Narrenschiff*, Sebastian Brant, a member of the upper Rhenish
humanist circle, appeals to God to make the Roman empire so large

daz im all erd sy underthon

als es von recht und gsatz solt han.†

In this respect, too, Martin Luther was certainly no humanist.

According to his letter An den christlichen Adel deutscher Nation von
des christlichen Standes Besserung† (1520), the first Roman empire
had been destroyed by the Goths. And the Roman empire over
which the emperor presided at Constantinople should, by rights,
never have been transferred by the pope to the Germans. That the
pope did so was ‘violence and lawlessness’, and it turned the
Germans into the ‘knaves of the pope’. Still, even Luther recognized
the cunning of reason and the normative power of factual reality.
He regarded it as certain ‘that God used the papal wickedness in
this matter in order to give the German nation such an Empire, and
allowed them to build up another after the fall of the first Roman
empire, one that still stands today’. Thus, even Luther was
unwilling to recommend that

the same be renounced, but rather it ought to be ruled honestly in

the fear of God as long as it please Him. For as I have said, it
matters not to Him whence an Empire comes, he nonetheless
wishes to have it ruled. If the popes have dishonestly taken it from
others, still we have won it not dishonestly . . . It is all God’s order,

31
that came to pass too early for us to know about.20

THE CONFESSIONAL DIVIDE

We have arrived at the second of the basic phenomena that have

shaped German history, the Reformation. As Hegel wrote in his
Vorlesungen zur Philosophie der Geschichte* in 1830, ‘The old,
thoroughly tried and tested inwardness of the German people must
bring about this break with the past out of the simple, ingenuous
heart.’ For Hegel, the Reformation was the ‘sun that transfigures
everything’; the event through which the ‘subjective spirit in Truth’
became ‘free’ and ‘Christian freedom’ became ‘real’. Freedom was,
in Hegel’s view, the ‘essential content of the Reformation; man is in
his very nature destined to be free’.21
A radically different evaluation of the Reformation was
undertaken by Marx in his ‘Einleitung zur Kritik der Hegelischen
Rechtsphilosophie’,† written at the end of 1843 and the beginning
of 1844. As Marx saw it, Luther

destroyed faith in authority because he had restored the authority

of faith. He changed the priests into laymen because he had
changed the laymen into priests. He liberated man from external
religiosity because he made religiosity into the inner man. He
emancipated the body from its chains because he chained the
heart.22

Possibly even more radical was Nietzsche’s rejection of Hegel’s

interpretation in Der Antichrist† (1888): ‘The Germans have taken

32
from Europe the last great cultural harvest that Europe could have
gathered—the Renaissance.’ Cesare Borgia as pope: for Nietzsche,
this would have meant ‘victory’, the end of Christianity. Luther, on
the other hand, ‘this monk, with all of the failed priest’s instincts
for vengeance, rebelled in Rome against the Renaissance... And
Luther restored the Church. He attacked it... the Renaissance—an
event with no meaning, a grandiose futility.’23
The German Reformation was both: the liberation from
ecclesiastical coercion increasingly perceived as foreign rule and
the establishment of a new, interiorized, state-supporting regime of
coercion. Liberating and repressing at the same time, the
Reformation, as Marx noted, could only partially supersede the
Middle Ages. Engels was fundamentally in error when he called it
the ‘revolution no. 1 of the bourgeoisie’.24 In terms of social
history, especially in Switzerland and upper and middle Germany,
the Reformation represented the uprising of the ‘common man’ in
the country and city. The Peasants’ War of 1524–5 was the
culmination of this movement.25
In its political consequences, the Reformation is best described
as what Rosenstock-Huessey called a ‘princes’ revolution’:

The grand hierarchy of the Church Visible has lost its pathos. The
human soul is no longer where the clergy seeks it. The educational
efforts of the church can thus confidently be left to the bishops of
each locality and territory, and this bishop is the worldly authority.
Luther’s imperial elector replaces the supreme bishop ... Probably
in no other country in the world did two such different fields of
vision overlap as they did here. Above, prince and statesman fight

33
for their right and freedom of authority. Below, burghers and
peasants live and learn the pure doctrine as well as obedience to
authority within the narrow circle of their bondsman’s
understanding... the ‘unpolitical’ nature of the average German is
already implicit in the voluntary division of labour between Luther
and his sovereign.26

Territorial institutions of ecclesiastical authority had already

developed in pre-Reformation times, and Luther did not initiate his
movement in order to make (according to a venerable cliché) the
territorial prince ‘pope in his own country’. Rather, his starting
point was the idea of a general ‘lay priesthood’, both individualistic
and egalitarian. In the belief that the end of the world was near
and that the Antichrist had already arisen in Rome in the person of
the pope, Luther considered spiritual awakening to have priority
over the institutional consolidation of the new faith. After all, the
new faith was, correctly understood, the old faith. After the
German imperial electors had chosen Maximilian’s grandson
Charles V (and not the French king Francis I, who enjoyed the
support of the pope) in 1519, Luther, too, briefly hoped for large-
scale reforms through a national council. But these hopes were
soon dashed. Under Charles V, Germany was no longer the focus of
the Habsburg universal monarchy. Additionally, the new faith was
undermined by the activities of the iconoclasts and free sectarians
(Schwärmer), which Luther regarded as diabolic attacks on the
gospel. Faced with these problems, the movement shifted its
priorities. Now the goal was to gather the faithful together and to
strengthen the faith, which meant, above all, establishing new

34
pastoral communities and reforming schools and universities.
In all their efforts, Luther and the Lutherans needed the support
of the secular authorities, who had been ordained by God and who
wielded the sword and rod to punish the wicked and protect the
devout. Many princes had not merely a religious but also a material
interest in promoting the new faith. By means of the Reformation,
they gained access to church property, thereby increasing their
government revenue and reinforcing their lordship. For Luther, the
efforts the states and cities directed toward providing a lawful
order for the new faith represented a labour of love. In making
Luther’s cause their own, secular rulers could, but were not
obligated to, adopt his rationale.27
The development of the Evangelical church system in the
territories began in 1527 with the visitations of Luther’s territorial
sovereign, Elector John of Saxony, to church communities and
schools. The other princes who professed the new faith soon
followed the example of the Saxon elector. The result was a
coercive ecclesiastical system in which, in the words of the
Evangelical theologian and philosopher of religion Ernst Troeltsch,
the human element, hitherto of secondary importance, became the
main focus:

The territorial princes unified theology and streamlined dogma,

giving the symbolic books compulsory authority. With the help and
participation of the theologians, they created an ecclesiastical-state
bureaucracy that assumed the functions of the administration and
the ecclesiastical courts. They imposed the principles of Christian
faith and morals on the secular legal system and mandated civil-

35
legal consequences for spiritual punishments and measures. In
theory, the community was ruled by Christ and Holy Scripture; in
practice, it was ruled by the territorial sovereigns and the
theologians.28

Regardless of how sharply the former Augustinian monk Luther

distinguished, in the tradition of St Augustine, between the ‘two
kingdoms’, the earthy kingdom and the kingdom of God, in fact he
so narrowed the gap between secular and spiritual power, throne
and altar, that the state acquired ‘a certain quasi-divine quality’, to
use Troeltsch’s expression. Accordingly, the political consequences
of Lutheranism in Germany (and here only) were radically different
from those of the other main movement of the Reformation outside
of Germany, Calvinism. In Geneva, where Calvin lived and taught,
the imbrication of the community church with the republican
government favoured the eventual development of democratic
communities. In Germany, the alliance between territorial
sovereignty and episcopate fostered the development of
absolutism.29

To the Rome–Wittenberg antinomy was thus added the contrast

between German Lutheranism and the Calvinist-influenced north-
west, the strongest bastions of which were England and the
Netherlands. In consequence of the Reformation, Germany became
more ‘eastern’. In a study of Luther first published in English in
1944, then in a revised edition in German in 1947, Franz Borkenau
(an intellectual of wide erudition who had broken with party
communism in 1929 and was later driven into exile by Hitler)

36
argued that the Lutheran movement articulated in terms of dogma
a number of differences between the eastern church and the
western church that were only latent in the antagonism between
the two great ecclesiastical systems.

The Lutheran doctrine of justification, founded exclusively upon

Christology, distinguishing sharply between morality and religion,
dualistic in nature, and emphasizing a passive inner experience of
faith and salvation, was essentially that of the eastern church as it
came to be articulated in polemic confrontation with the western
church. Lutheranism appears here as a branch of the eastern style
of religious observance, grown up in protest against the religious
reform movement of the west. Behind the doctrinal opposition to
Rome yawns the cultural opposition to the occident.30

There is, to be sure, something problematic about such an exact

comparison of Lutheranism to Greek-Russian Orthodoxy.
Nonetheless, in Luther’s religious inwardness there was an element
that separated the Lutheran movement from the west and linked it
to the east. Luther’s inner distance from the political world makes
his vehement condemnation of the Peasants’ War and his
dependence on the princes seem logical. The ‘summepiscopate’ in
the Lutheran territories of Germany, the appropriation of the
functions of the regional bishopric by the territorial prince, nearly
eliminated one of the features of the historical occident
distinguishing it from the ‘caesaropapism’ of the orient: the
separation of powers between imperium (or regnum) and
sacerdotium, a theme that had pitted the popes against the

37
emperors and kings in a struggle that lasted centuries. Wherever
this separation was maintained, or could establish itself again, an
environment conducive to ideas of freedom was fostered. The
Anglican state church, introduced in England by Henry VIII in
1534, was from the beginning closely linked to the estates; in the
second half of the seventeenth century it was parliamentarized and
finally, in the nineteenth century, liberalized. In Germany, on the
other hand, the summepiscopate had, until 1918, an authoritarian
and governmental or—to put it in somewhat exaggerated terms—
caesaropapist orientation. Politically speaking, German
Lutheranism represented a step backward.
‘Lutheranism purchased spiritual liberation at the price of
earthly subjection.’ Borkenau’s verdict summarizes the
contradictory legacy of Martin Luther’s Reformation. Both sides,
the cultural and the political, must be seen in context.

The German spirit could unfold its wings by leaving practical

considerations behind, considerations that can never be set aside
whenever every action must be justified in this world [as in
Calvinism (H.A.W.)]. German music and German metaphysics
could never have arisen in a culture shaped by Calvinism. Of
course, a terrible danger lay in this soaring flight over the practical
... The political is the place where spirit and world, morality and
egotism, individualism and solidarity are brought together. The
Lutheran attitude lacks the essence of the political and thus is
partly responsible for making us into a people that always failed
politically, a people tossed about between the equally false
extremes of world-shy, good-natured inwardness and the most

38
brutal kind of megalomania.31

Even with Luther, only one step separated inwardness from

brutality. This is evident in the increasingly unbridled intensity of
his attacks on the pope, the Anabaptists, and the Jews. Luther’s
enmity towards the Jews is the aspect of his life and work that
confirms with especial forcefulness Marx’s verdict that the
Reformation only partially managed to overcome the Middle Ages.
In Luther’s later life, his earlier disappointment over the fact that
the Jews could not be converted to the Evangelical faith gave way
to a blind hatred. He saw only a malevolent stubbornness in the
refusal of the Jews, the blood relatives of Christ, to hearken to the
Good News. Expecting the end of the world in the near future,
Luther came to see the Jews as yet another manifestation of the
Antichrist, as he had done before with the pope and the Turks. His
1543 pamphlet Von den Juden und ihren Lügen* repeated old
charges, ones he knew full well could not be proven: the Jews
poison wells and abduct Christian children for ritual killing. He
exhorted the political authorities to burn the synagogues; to
destroy Jews’ houses; to forbid the rabbis to teach under pain of
corporal punishment or death; to take away the right of the Jews to
safe-conduct; to forbid them to use the streets or practice usury; to
compel them to perform manual labour; and, if necessary, to expel
them from the country. His advice to Christians was that they cross
themselves whenever they saw a real Jew and speak openly and
firmly the phrase: ‘There walks a devil in the flesh.’ This was,
indeed, the ‘darkness of the Middle Ages’, which not only
continued to live in Luther, but also in no small measure through

39
him.32
The Reformation forms one of the deepest epochal divisions in
German history. In the preface to his Deutsche Geschichte im Zeitalter
der Reformation* (1839), Leopold von Ranke spoke of ‘the most
important event of our fatherland’. The Reformation did not simply
divide the German nation; in certain respects it structured it anew.
The emperor himself, belonging as he did to one of the competing
religious parties, was less able to represent the whole of the Reich.
Not even the curia of the electors could claim to stand for the
whole, since it, too, was split into confessional factions. The same
was true of the Imperial Diet. The religious parties themselves,
however, were supra-territorial, indeed ‘national’ associations.
From the point of view of the followers of the new faith, the
German nation was the entity that came closest to embodying the
ideal entirety of the Protestant imperial estates, most—but not all
—of which had joined together in the Thuringian town of
Schmalkalden in 1531, forming a defensive alliance against the
ecclesiastical-political aspirations of Charles V. The common bond
was not political, but rather cultural: the Evangelical faith in the
sense of the ‘Augsburg Confession’, as it had been worked out in
doctrinally binding terms by Philip Melanchthon in consultation
with Luther (and not always to the satisfaction of the latter) at the
Imperial Diet of Augsburg in 1530. This was the first step toward
the ‘confessionalization’ of the new faith.
One of the most important factors for the spirit of solidarity and
community among German Protestants was Luther’s Bible
translation. This text created the supra-regional German standard

40
language, which in turn became the most important ‘national’
medium of communication and, as such, the prerequisite for the
possibility that even two centuries later, when there was still no
unified German state, educated Germans could consider themselves
members of a German cultural nation. The Evangelical segment
played such a crucial role in the formation of German national
identity that one must speak of a Protestant cultural hegemony. For
all that, however, Luther’s Volk remained surprisingly mute, as
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessey remarked. ‘The nation he awoke to life
became a nation of princes, professors, and pastors, and remained
so for a long time, all the way to the professors’ parliament at the
Paulskirche in 1848. This role of the German universities in
shaping the German nation develops in the fifteenth century.’33
Catholic Germany found little succour in the support of the
emperor. The wars between Charles V and Francis I of France, as
well as the Turkish danger, forced the emperor and the Catholic
estates repeatedly to compromise with the supporters of the new
faith, delaying the ultimate confrontation. This happened for the
first time at the Imperial Diet held at Speyer in 1526, which left it
for each imperial estate to decide whether or not to follow the
Edict of Worms, the ostracism of Luther and the condemnation of
his teachings in 1521. The second instance was the ‘Nuremberg
Standstill’ of 1532, which allowed Protestants the free exercise of
their religion for the time being. Only after the year of Luther’s
death in 1546, when Charles was no longer hampered by
involvement in foreign wars and had brought one of the most
important Protestant princes, Duke Moritz of Saxony, over to his
side (by promising him the electoral dignity, which was in the

41
hands of his cousin from another branch of the Saxon house, John
Frederick), could the emperor dare to strike against the
Schmalkaldic League.
However, the emperor did not manage to convert his military
triumph in the Schmalkaldic War (1546–7) into a political success,
since Moritz of Saxony, now an elector, allied himself to the
princely opposition, made common cause with the French king
Henry II(to whom he conceded the imperial curacy over Metz,
Toul, and Verdun), and took up arms against Charles V. The Treaty
of Passau, which the emperor found himself forced to conclude in
1552, again granted the Protestants freedom of worship until the
convention of a new Imperial Diet. This assembly, held in 1555 in
Augsburg, marks both the end of the age of the Reformation and
the conclusion of the struggle over imperial reform. From this
moment forward, all parties acknowledged the principle cuius regio,
eius religio (‘He who rules the land determines the religion’),
formulated later by a jurist. The Augsburg Confession (not the
‘reformed’ confession of Calvin and of Ulrich Zwingli, the popular
priest of Zurich) was now legally recognized in the Reich. The
Religious Peace of Augsburg did not consider the individual
believer; only the prince had the right to decide between the old
and new faiths. Dissidents had only the right to leave the country.
Imperial cities with mixed confessions were to be guided by the
principle of parity, and in ecclesiastically ruled territories a
controversial ‘clerical reservation’ was to apply: a bishop or abbot
of the Reich who converted from Catholicism to the Lutheran faith
was supposed to relinquish his office immediately; the cathedral or
cathedral chapter had the right to elect a Catholic successor. But

42
the Religious Peace of Augsburg did not compel this to be done.
The recess of the Augsburg Diet spelled the failure of two
competing solutions for a universal resolution to the crisis: on the
one hand, the restoration of Reich and church through the emperor
and in terms of the old faith, and, on the other hand, the
restoration of a unified church in terms of the new faith. The
possibility of a Reich ruled by the estates (Stände), a project
pursued in the early sixteenth century by a circle of reformers
under the patronage of Berthold of Henneberg, the elector of Mainz
and arch-chancellor of the Reich, also ultimately came to nothing.
In 1555, as Heinz Schilling wrote, the ‘estates and the crown finally
agreed that, in Germany, the princes and their territories would be
the bearers of a new conception of the state and that the Reich
would remain a pre-governmental, political union.’34
The Holy Roman empire was thus preserved. In fact, its
institutions grew even stronger. A great civil war, a war among the
princes, which as things stood would perforce have become a pan-
European war, was once again avoided. The compromise of 1555
sanctioned the right of the German territorial states to religious
particularity, though it did not yet permit the final consequence of
the increase in territorial liberty, namely full political sovereignty.
Yet even in 1555 it was clear that the government of princes would
have a greater chance than the emperor of claiming the loyalties of
the subjects in the event of conflict. Even if the Reich could offer
an ultimate organizational support and repeatedly managed,
especially in the face of external threats, to call forth waves of
‘imperial patriotism’, nonetheless a much stronger sense of
allegiance and solidarity developed at the territorial level. The idea

43
of a German nation remained an alternative empire, an empire of
faith and spirit, and one that required no emperor.
The Religious Peace of Augsburg was one of the main reasons
Protestant Germany was able to shield itself for over half a century
from the effects of the Catholic Counter-Reformation, which began
at the Council of Trent (1545–63). Countries in which the Counter-
Reformation triumphed were economically and intellectually so
lastingly set back that the effects persist to the present day. Spain,
at one time the great Catholic power due to its colonial possessions
in Latin America, succumbed to England, its most dangerous
enemy, in the second half of the sixteenth century. The defeat was
not merely military, that is, the destruction of the Armada in 1588.
Within a few decades, the Calvinist-spirited maritime trading
power of England had also economically eclipsed the countries of
the Iberian peninsula, Spain and Portugal. France, on the other
hand, successfully resisted the Counter-Reformation, remaining
true to its national ecclesiastical tradition after the bloody
Huguenot Wars of 1562–98. The conversion of King Henry IV (of
Navarre) from the Calvinist to the Catholic faith in 1593 was not
the prelude to a comprehensive re-Catholization of France; rather,
it ushered in the policy of religious tolerance that found its classic
expression in the Edict of Nantes of 1598.
Wherever it was rigorously implemented, the Counter-
Reformation almost completely destroyed any structures of modern
capitalism that had existed in the regions that remained Catholic.
In comparison, the Calvinist spirit of terrestrial asceticism and
merit promoted a dynamic spirit of enterprise in those lands where
it prevailed. An impulse of this kind was lacking in Lutheran

44
regions, which persisted in the traditional corporative order and its
correspondingly conservative economic practices. The principles of
traditional economic life were based not upon notions of individual
risk, enterprise, and continually increasing profit margins, but upon
the satisfaction of habitual, class-oriented needs and a just price. In
this respect, Lutherans differed less from the Catholics than from
the Calvinists.35
In questions of internal political order in Germany, the
confessional differences were rather minor. The governments of the
Calvinistic territories were as authoritarian as those of the Lutheran
and Catholic lands. However, the fact that the Religious Peace of
Augsburg did not recognize the Calvinists as a confession meant
that German Calvinism as a whole differed markedly in its political
profile from that of English or Dutch Calvinism. It was thus no
coincidence that the impulse to alter the confessional status quo for
the benefit of the Evangelicals in The Confessional Divide the first
decades after 1555 proceeded not from a Lutheran, but from a
Calvinist princedom, the Palatine electorate. The Palatinate thus
advanced to the position of adversary against the most energetic of
the Catholic imperial estates, Bavaria, where the Counter-
Reformation held sway.
The Calvinists began to gain ground when they were joined by a
few smaller territories and one larger one, Hesse-Kassel, in the
course of the so-called ‘Second Reformation’. The balance of power
in Protestant Germany shifted even more significantly in 1613,
when the elector of Brandenburg, John Sigismund, converted from
the Lutheran to the Reformed confession. This was an event with
long-term consequences to which we shall devote more attention

45
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
“Shannon’s” second and third broadsides, after the “Chesapeake”
ceased firing. The “Chesapeake’s” bowsprit received no injury, and
not a spar of any kind was shot away. The “Shannon” carried her
prize into Halifax with all its masts standing, and without anxiety for
its safety.
The news of Broke’s victory was received in England and by the
British navy with an outburst of pleasure that proved the smart of the
wound inflicted by Hull, Decatur, and Bainbridge. The two official
expressions of Broke’s naval and civil superiors probably reflected
the unexaggerated emotion of the service.

418
“At this critical moment,” wrote Admiral Warren by a
curious coincidence the day before his own somewhat less
creditable defeat at Craney Island, “you could not have restored
to the British naval service the pre-eminence it has always
preserved, or contradicted in a more forcible manner the foul
aspersions and calumnies of a conceited, boasting enemy, than
by the brilliant act you have performed.”

419
A few days later he wrote again: —

“The relation of such an event restores the history of ancient

times, and will do more good to the service than it is possible to
conceive.”

420
In Parliament, July 8, John Wilson Croker said:

“The action which he [Broke] fought with the ‘Chesapeake’

was in every respect unexampled. It was not—and he knew it
was a bold assertion which he made—to be surpassed by any
engagement which graced the naval annals of Great Britain.”

The Government made Broke a baronet, but gave him few other
rewards, and his wound was too serious to permit future hard
service. Lawrence died June 5, before the ships reached Halifax. His
first lieutenant, Ludlow, also died. Their bodies were brought to New
York and buried September 16, with formal services at Trinity
Church.
By the Americans the defeat was received at first with incredulity
and boundless anxiety, followed by extreme discouragement. The
news came at a dark moment, when every hope had been
disappointed and the outlook was gloomy beyond all that had been
thought possible.

“I remember,” wrote Richard Rush in later life,—“what

American does not!—the first rumor of it. I remember the
startling sensation. I remember at first the universal incredulity. I
remember how the post-offices were thronged for successive
days by anxious thousands; how collections of citizens rode out
for miles on the highway, accosting the mail to catch something
by anticipation. At last, when the certainty was known, I
remember the public gloom; funeral orations and badges of
mourning bespoke it. ‘Don’t give up the ship!’—the dying words
of Lawrence—were on every tongue.”

Six weeks afterward another American naval captain lost

another American vessel-of-war by reason of the same over-
confidence which caused Lawrence’s mistakes, and in a manner
equally discreditable to the crew. The “Argus” was a small brig, built
in 1803, rating sixteen guns. In the summer of 1813 she was
commanded by Captain W. H. Allen, of Rhode Island, who had been
third officer to Barron when he was attacked in the “Chesapeake” by
the “Leopard.” Allen was the officer who snatched a coal from the
galley and discharged the only gun that was fired that day. On
leaving the “Chesapeake,” Allen was promoted to be first officer in
the “United States.” To his exertions in training the men to the guns,
Decatur attributed his superiority in gunnery over the “Macedonian.”
To him fell one of the most distinguished honors that ever came to
the share of an American naval officer,—that of successfully bringing
the “Macedonian” to port. Promoted to the rank of captain, he was
put in command of the “Argus,” and ordered to take William Henry
Crawford to his post as Minister to France.
On that errand the “Argus” sailed, June 18, and after safely
landing Crawford, July 11, at Lorient in Brittany, Captain Allen put to
sea again, three days afterward, and in pursuance of his instructions
cruised off the mouth of the British Channel. During an entire month
he remained between the coast of Brittany and the coast of Ireland,
destroying a score of vessels and creating a panic among the ship-
owners and underwriters of London. Allen performed his task with as
much forbearance as the duty permitted, making no attempt to save
his prizes for the sake of prize-money, and permitting all passengers
to take what they claimed as their own without inspection or restraint.
The English whose property he destroyed spoke of him without
personal ill-feeling.
The anxiety and labor of such a service falling on a brig of three
hundred tons and a crew of a hundred men, and the impunity with
which he defied danger, seemed to make Allen reckless. On the
night of August 13 he captured a brig laden with wine from Oporto.
Within sight of the Welsh coast and within easy reach of Milford
Haven, he burned his prize, not before part of his crew got drunk on
the wine. The British brig “Pelican,” then cruising in search of the
“Argus,” guided by the light of the burning prize, at five o’clock on the
morning of August 14 came down on the American brig; and Captain
Allen, who had often declared that he would run from no two-masted
vessel, waited for his enemy.
According to British measurements, the “Argus” was ninety-five
and one-half feet long; the “Pelican,” one hundred. The “Argus” was
twenty-seven feet, seven and five-eighths inches in extreme breadth;
the “Pelican” was thirty feet, nine inches. The “Argus” carried
eighteen twenty-four-pound carronades, and two long twelve-
pounders; the “Pelican” carried sixteen thirty-two-pound carronades,
four long six-pounders, and a twelve-pound carronade. The number
of the “Argus’s” crew was disputed. According to British authority, it
421
was one hundred and twenty-seven, while the “Pelican” carried
422
one hundred and sixteen men and boys.
 At six o’clock in the morning, according to American
423
reckoning, —at half-past five according to the British report,—the
“Argus” wore, and fired a broadside within grape-distance, which
was returned with cannon and musketry. Within five minutes Captain
Allen was struck by a shot which carried away his left leg, mortally
wounding him; and five minutes afterward the first lieutenant was
wounded on the head by a grape-shot. Although the second
lieutenant fought the brig well, the guns were surprisingly inefficient.
During the first fifteen minutes the “Argus” had the advantage of
position, and at eighteen minutes after six raked the “Pelican” at
close range, but inflicted no great injury on the enemy’s hull or
rigging, and killed at the utmost but one man, wounding only five.
424
According to an English account, “the ‘Argus’ fought well while
the cannonading continued, but her guns were not levelled with
precision, and many shots passed through the ‘Pelican’s’ royals.”
The “Pelican,” at the end of twenty-five minutes, succeeded in
cutting up her opponent’s rigging so that the “Argus” lay helpless
under her guns. The “Pelican” then took a position on her enemy’s
starboard quarter, and raked her with eight thirty-two-pound
carronades for nearly twenty minutes at close range, without
receiving a shot in return except from musketry. According to the
report of the British captain, the action “was kept up with great spirit
on both sides forty-three minutes, when we lay her alongside, and
425
were in the act of boarding when she struck her colors.”
The “Argus” repeated the story of the “Chesapeake,” except that
the action lasted three quarters of an hour instead of fifteen minutes.
During that time, the “Pelican” should have fired all her broadside
eight or ten times into the “Argus” at a range so close that no shot
should have missed. Sixty thirty-two-pound shot fired into a small
brig less than one hundred feet long should have shivered it to
atoms. Nine thirty-two-pound shot from the “Hornet” seemed to
reduce the “Peacock” to a sinking condition in fifteen minutes; yet the
“Argus” was neither sunk nor dismasted. The British account of her
condition after the battle showed no more injury than was suffered by
the “Peacock,” even in killed and wounded, by one or at the utmost
two broadsides of the “Hornet.”

“The ‘Argus’ was tolerably cut up in her hull. Both her lower
masts were wounded, although not badly, and her fore-shrouds
on one side nearly all destroyed; but like the ‘Chesapeake,’ the
‘Argus’ had no spar shot away. Of her carronades several were
disabled. She lost in the action six seamen killed; her
commander, two midshipmen, the carpenter, and three seamen
mortally, her first lieutenant and five seamen severely, and eight
others slightly wounded,—total twenty-four; chiefly, if not wholly
426
by the cannon-shot of the ‘Pelican.’”

The “Pelican” lost seven men killed or wounded, chiefly by

musketry. On both sides the battle showed little skill with the guns;
but perhaps the “Pelican,” considering her undisputed superiority
during half the combat, showed even less than the “Argus.” As in the
“Chesapeake’s” battle, the discredit of the defeated ship lay in
surrender to boarders.
Two such defeats were calculated to shake confidence in the
American navy. That Allen should have been beaten in gunnery was
the more strange, because his training with the guns gave him his
chief credit with Decatur. Watson, the second lieutenant of the
“Argus,” attributed the defeat to the fatigue of his crew. Whatever
was the immediate cause, no one could doubt that both the
“Chesapeake” and “Argus” were sacrificed to the over-confidence of
their commanders.
 CHAPTER XIII.
The people of the Atlantic coast felt the loss of the “Chesapeake”
none too keenly. Other nations had a history to support them in
moments of mortification, or had learned by centuries of experience
to accept turns of fortune as the fate of war. The American of the
sea-coast was not only sensitive and anxious, but he also saw with
singular clearness the bearing of every disaster, and did not see with
equal distinctness the general drift of success. The loss of the
“Chesapeake” was a terrible disaster, not merely because it
announced the quick recovery of England’s pride and power from a
momentary shock, but also because it threatened to take away the
single object of American enthusiasm which redeemed shortcomings
elsewhere. After the loss of the “Chesapeake,” no American frigate
was allowed the opportunity to fight with an equal enemy. The British
frigates, ordered to cruise in company, gave the Americans no
chance to renew their triumphs of 1812.
Indeed, the experience of 1813 tended to show that the frigate
was no longer the class of vessel best suited to American wants.
Excessively expensive compared with their efficiency, the
“Constitution,” “President,” and “United States” could only with
difficulty obtain crews; and when after much delay they were ready
for sea, they could not easily evade a blockading squadron. The
original cost of a frigate varied from two hundred thousand dollars to
three hundred thousand; that of a sloop-of-war, like the “Hornet,”
“Wasp,” or “Argus,” varied between forty and fifty thousand dollars.
The frigate required a crew of about four hundred men; the sloop
carried about one hundred and fifty. The annual expense of a frigate
in active service was about one hundred and thirty-four thousand
dollars; that of the brig was sixty thousand. The frigate required
much time and heavy timber in her construction; the sloop could be
built quickly and of ordinary material. The loss of a frigate was a
severe national disaster; the loss of a sloop was not a serious event.
For defensive purposes neither the frigate nor the brig counted
heavily against a nation which employed ships-of-the-line by dozens;
but even for offensive objects the frigate was hardly so useful as the
sloop-of-war. The record of the frigates for 1813 showed no results
equivalent to their cost. Their cruises were soon told. The
“President,” leaving Boston April 30, ran across to the Azores,
thence to the North Sea, and during June and July haunted the
shores of Norway, Scotland, and Ireland, returning to Newport
September 27, having taken thirteen prizes. The “Congress,” which
left Boston with the “President,” cruised nearly eight months in the
Atlantic, and returned to Boston December 14, having captured but
four merchantmen. The “Chesapeake,” which sailed from Boston
Dec. 13, 1812, cruised four months in the track of British commerce,
past Madeira and Cape de Verde, across the equator, and round
through the West Indies, returning to Boston April 9, having taken six
prizes; at the beginning of her next cruise, June 1, the “Chesapeake”
was herself captured. The adventures of the “Essex” in the Pacific
were such as might have been equally well performed by a sloop-of-
war, and belonged rather to the comparative freedom with which the
frigates moved in 1812 than to the difficult situation that followed. No
other frigates succeeded in getting to sea till December 4, when the
“President” sailed again. The injury inflicted by the frigates on the
Atlantic was therefore the capture of twenty-three merchantmen in a
year. At the close of 1813, the “President” and the “Essex” were the
only frigates at sea; the “Constitution” sailed from Boston only Jan. 1,
1814; the “United States” and “Macedonian” were blockaded at New
London; the “Constellation” was still at Norfolk; the “Adams” was at
Washington, and the “Congress” at Boston.
When this record was compared with that of the sloops-of-war
the frigates were seen to be luxuries. The sloop-of-war was a single-
decked vessel, rigged sometimes as a ship, sometimes as a brig, but
never as a sloop, measuring about one hundred and ten feet in
length by thirty in breadth, and carrying usually eighteen thirty-two-
pound carronades and two long twelve-pounders. Of this class the
American navy possessed in 1812 only four examples,—the
“Hornet,” the “Wasp,” the “Argus,” and the “Syren.” The “Wasp” was
lost Oct. 18, 1812, after capturing the “Frolic.” The “Syren” remained
at New Orleans during the first year of the war, and then came to
Boston, but saw no ocean service of importance during 1813. The
“Hornet” made three prizes, including the sloop-of-war “Peacock,”
and was then blockaded with the “United States” and “Macedonian;”
but the smaller vessel could do what the frigates could not, and in
November the “Hornet” slipped out of New London and made her
way to New York, where she waited an opportunity to escape to sea.
The story will show her success. Finally, the “Argus” cruised for a
month in the British Channel, and made twenty-one prizes before
she was captured by the “Pelican.”
The three frigates, “President,” “Congress,” and “Chesapeake,”
captured twenty-three prizes in the course of the year, and lost the
“Chesapeake.” The two sloops, the “Hornet” and “Argus,” captured
twenty-four prizes, including the sloop-of-war “Peacock,” and lost the
“Argus.”
The government at the beginning of the war owned four smaller
vessels,—the “Nautilus” and “Vixen” of fourteen guns, and the
“Enterprise” and “Viper” of twelve. Another brig, the “Rattlesnake,”
sixteen, was bought. Experience seemed to prove that these were of
little use. The “Nautilus” fell into the hands of Broke’s squadron July
16, 1812, within a month after the declaration of war. The “Vixen”
was captured Nov. 22, 1812, by Sir James Yeo. The “Viper,” Jan. 17,
1813, became prize to Captain Lumley in the British frigate
“Narcissus.” The “Enterprise” distinguished itself by capturing the
“Boxer,” and was regarded as a lucky vessel, but was never a good
427
or fast one. The “Rattlesnake,” though fast, was at last caught on
a lee shore by the frigate “Leander,” July 11, 1814, and carried into
428
Halifax.
In the enthusiasm over the frigates in 1812, Congress voted that
six forty-fours should be built, besides four ships-of-the-line. The Act
was approved Jan. 2, 1813. Not until March 3 did Congress pass an
Act for building six new sloops-of-war. The loss of two months was
not the only misfortune in this legislation. Had the sloops been begun
in January, they might have gone to sea by the close of the year. The
six sloops were all launched within eleven months from the passage
of the bill, and the first of them, the “Frolic,” got to sea within that
time, while none of the frigates or line-of-battle ships could get to sea
within two years of the passage of the law. A more remarkable
oversight was the building of only six sloops, when an equal number
of forty-fours and four seventy-fours were ordered. Had Congress
voted twenty-four sloops, the proportion would not have been
improper; but perhaps the best policy would have been to build fifty
such sloops, and to prohibit privateering. The reasons for such a
course were best seen in the experiences of the privateers.
The history of the privateers was never satisfactorily written.
Neither their number, their measurements, their force, their captures,
nor their losses were accurately known. Little ground could be given
for an opinion in regard to their economy. Only with grave doubt
could any judgment be reached even in regard to their relative
efficiency compared with government vessels of the same class. Yet
their experience was valuable, and their services were very great.
In the summer of 1812 any craft that could keep the sea in fine
weather set out as a privateer to intercept vessels approaching the
coast. The typical privateer of the first few months was the pilot-boat,
armed with one or two long-nine or twelve-pound guns. Of twenty-six
privateers sent from New York in the first four months of war, fifteen
carried crews of eighty men or less. These small vessels especially
infested the West Indies, where fine weather and light breezes suited
their qualities. After the seas had been cleared of such prey as these
petty marauders could manage, they were found to be unprofitable,
—too small to fight and too light to escape. The typical privateer of
1813 was a larger vessel,—a brig or schooner of two or three
hundred tons, armed with one long pivot-gun, and six or eight lighter
guns in broadside; carrying crews which varied in number from one
hundred and twenty to one hundred and sixty men; swift enough to
escape under most circumstances even a frigate, and strong enough
to capture any armed merchantman.
 After the war was fairly begun, the British mercantile shipping
always sailed either under convoy or as armed “running ships” that
did not wait for the slow and comparatively rare opportunities of
convoy, but trusted to their guns for defence. The new American
privateer was adapted to meet both chances. Two or three such craft
hanging about a convoy could commonly cut off some merchantman,
no matter how careful the convoying man-of-war might be. By night
they could run directly into the fleet and cut out vessels without even
giving an alarm, and by day they could pick up any craft that lagged
behind or happened to stray too far away. Yet the “running ships”
were the chief objects of their search, for these were the richest
prizes; and the capture of a single such vessel, if it reached an
American port in safety, insured success to the cruise. The loss of
these vessels caused peculiar annoyance to the British, for they
sometimes carried considerable amounts of specie, and usually
were charged with a mail which was always sunk and lost in case of
capture.
As the war continued, experience taught the owners of
privateers the same lesson that was taught to the government. The
most efficient vessel of war corresponded in size with the “Hornet” or
the new sloops-of-war building in 1813. Tonnage was so arbitrary a
mode of measurement that little could be learned from the
dimensions of five hundred tons commonly given for these vessels;
but in a general way they might be regarded as about one hundred
and fifteen or one hundred and twenty feet long on the spar-deck
and thirty-one feet in extreme breadth. Unless such vessels were
swift sailers, particularly handy in working to windward, they were
worse than useless; and for that reason the utmost effort was made
both by the public and private constructors to obtain speed. At the
close of the war the most efficient vessel afloat was probably the
American sloop-of-war, or privateer, of four or five hundred tons,
rigged as a ship or brig, and carrying one hundred and fifty or sixty
men, with a battery varying according to the ideas of the captain and
owners, but in the case of privateers almost invariably including one
“long Tom,” or pivot-gun.
 Yet for privateering purposes the smaller craft competed closely
with the larger. For ordinary service no vessel could do more
effective work in a more economical way than was done by Joshua
Barney’s “Rossie” of Baltimore, or Boyle’s “Comet” of the same port,
or Champlin’s “General Armstrong” of New York,—schooners or
brigs of two or three hundred tons, uncomfortable to their officers
and crews, but most dangerous enemies to merchantmen. Vessels
of this class came into favor long before the war, because of their
speed, quickness in handling, and economy during the experience of
twenty years in blockade-running and evasion of cruisers. Such
schooners could be built in any Northern sea-port in six weeks or two
months at half the cost of a government cruiser.
The government sloop-of-war was not built for privateering
purposes. Every government vessel was intended chiefly to fight,
and required strength in every part and solidity throughout. The
frame needed to be heavy to support the heavier structure; the
quarters needed to be thick to protect the men at the guns from
grape and musketry; the armament was as weighty as the frame
would bear. So strong were the sides of American frigates that even
thirty-two-pound shot fired at forty or fifty feet distance sometimes
failed to penetrate, and the British complained as a grievance that
the sides of an American forty-four were thicker than those of a
429
British seventy-four. The American ship-builders spared no pains
to make all their vessels in every respect—in size, strength, and
speed—superior to the vessels with which they were to compete; but
the government ship-carpenter had a harder task than the private
ship-builder, for he was obliged to obtain greater speed at the same
time that he used heavier material than the British constructors. As
far as the navy carpenters succeeded in their double object, they did
so by improving the model and increasing the proportions of the
spars.
The privateer was built for no such object. The last purpose of a
privateer was to fight at close range, and owners much preferred that
their vessels, being built to make money, should not fight at all
unless much money could be made. The private armed vessel was
built rather to fly than to fight, and its value depended far more on its
ability to escape than on its capacity to attack. If the privateer could
sail close to the wind, and wear or tack in the twinkling of an eye; if
she could spread an immense amount of canvas and run off as fast
as a frigate before the wind; if she had sweeps to use in a calm, and
one long-range gun pivoted amidships, with plenty of men in case
boarding became necessary,—she was perfect. To obtain these
results the builders and sailors ran excessive risks. Too lightly built
and too heavily sparred, the privateer was never a comfortable or a
safe vessel. Beautiful beyond anything then known in naval
construction, such vessels roused boundless admiration, but defied
imitators. British constructors could not build them, even when they
had the models; British captains could not sail them; and when
British admirals, fascinated by their beauty and tempted by the
marvellous qualities of their model, ordered such a prize to be taken
into the service, the first act of the carpenters in the British navy-
yards was to reduce to their own standard the long masts, and to
strengthen the hull and sides till the vessel should be safe in a battle
or a gale. Perhaps an American navy-carpenter must have done the
same; but though not a line in the model might be altered, she never
sailed again as she sailed before. She could not bear conventional
restraints.
Americans were proud of their privateers, as they well might be;
for this was the first time when in competition with the world, on an
element open to all, they proved their capacity to excel, and
produced a creation as beautiful as it was practical. The British navy
took a new tone in regard to these vessels. Deeply as the American
frigates and sloops-of-war had wounded the pride of the British navy,
they never had reduced that fine service to admitted inferiority.
Under one pretext or another, every defeat was excused. Even the
superiority of American gunnery was met by the proud explanation
that the British navy, since Trafalgar, had enjoyed no opportunity to
use their guns. Nothing could convince a British admiral that
Americans were better fighters than Englishmen; but when he looked
at the American schooner he frankly said that England could show
no such models, and could not sail them if she had them. In truth,
the schooner was a wonderful invention. Not her battles, but her
escapes won for her the open-mouthed admiration of the British
captains, who saw their prize double like a hare and slip through
their fingers at the moment when capture was sure. Under any
ordinary condition of wind and weather, with an open sea, the
schooner, if only she could get to windward, laughed at a frigate.
As the sailing rather than the fighting qualities of the privateer
were the chief object of her construction, those were the points best
worth recording; but the newspapers of the time were so much
absorbed in proving that Americans could fight, as to cause almost
total neglect of the more important question whether Americans
could sail better than their rivals. All great nations had fought, and at
one time or another every great nation in Europe had been victorious
over every other; but no people, in the course of a thousand years of
rivalry on the ocean, had invented or had known how to sail a
Yankee schooner. Whether ship, brig, schooner, or sloop, the
American vessel was believed to outsail any other craft on the
ocean, and the proof of this superiority was incumbent on the
Americans to furnish. They neglected to do so. No clear evidence
was ever recorded of the precise capacities of their favorite vessels.
Neither the lines of the hull, the dimensions of the spars, the rates of
sailing by the log in different weather, the points of sailing,—nothing
precise was ever set down.
Of the superiority no doubts could be entertained. The best proof
of the American claim was the British admission. Hardly an English
writer on marine affairs—whether in newspapers, histories, or novels
—failed to make some allusion to the beauty and speed of American
vessels. The naval literature of Great Britain from 1812 to 1860 was
full of such material. The praise of the invention was still commonly
accompanied by some expression of dislike for the inventor, but
even in that respect a marked change followed the experiences of
1812–1814. Among the Englishmen living on the island of Jamaica,
and familiar with the course of events in the West Indies from 1806
to 1817, was one Michael Scott, born in Glasgow in 1789, and in the
prime of his youth at the time of the American war. In the year 1829,
at the age of forty, he began the publication in “Blackwood’s
Magazine” of a series of sketches which rapidly became popular as
“Tom Cringle’s Log.” Scott was the best narrator and probably the
best informed man who wrote on the West Indies at that period; and
his frequent allusions to the United States and the war threw more
light on the social side of history than could be obtained from all
official sources ever printed.

“I don’t like Americans,” Scott said; “I never did and never

shall like them. I have seldom met an American gentleman in the
large and complete sense of the term. I have no wish to eat with
them, drink with them, deal with or consort with them in any way;
but let me tell the whole truth,—nor fight with them, were it not
for the laurels to be acquired by overcoming an enemy so brave,
determined, and alert, and every way so worthy of one’s steel as
they have always proved.”

The Americans did not fight the War of 1812 in order to make
themselves loved. According to Scott’s testimony they gained the
object for which they did fight. “In gunnery and small-arm practice we
were as thoroughly weathered on by the Americans during the war
as we overtopped them in the bull-dog courage with which our
boarders handled those genuine English weapons,—the cutlass and
the pike.” Superiority in the intellectual branches of warfare was
conceded to the Americans; but even in regard to physical qualities,
the British were not inclined to boast.

“In the field,” said Scott, “or grappling in mortal combat on

the blood-slippery quarter-deck of an enemy’s vessel, a British
soldier or sailor is the bravest of the brave. No soldier or sailor of
any other country, saving and excepting those damned Yankees,
can stand against them.”

Had English society known so much of Americans in 1807, war

would have been unnecessary.
Yet neither equality in physical courage nor superiority in the
higher branches of gunnery and small-arms was the chief success of
Americans in the war. Beyond question the schooner was the most
conclusive triumph. Readers of Michael Scott could not forget the
best of his sketches,—the escape of the little American schooner
“Wave” from two British cruisers, by running to windward under the
broadside of a man-of-war. With keen appreciation Scott detailed
every motion of the vessels, and dwelt with peculiar emphasis on the
apparent desperation of the attempt. Again and again the thirty-two-
pound shot, as he described the scene, tore through the slight vessel
as the two crafts raced through the heavy seas within musket-shot of
one another, until at last the firing from the corvette ceased. “The
breeze had taken off, and the ‘Wave,’ resuming her superiority in
light winds, had escaped.” Yet this was not the most significant part
of “Tom Cringle’s” experience. The “Wave,” being afterward captured
at anchor, was taken into the royal service and fitted as a ship-of-
war. Cringle was ordered by the vice-admiral to command her, and
as she came to report he took a look at her:—

“When I had last seen her she was a most beautiful little
craft, both in hull and rigging, as ever delighted the eye of a
sailor; but the dock-yard riggers and carpenters had fairly
bedevilled her, at least so far as appearances went. First they
had replaced the light rail on her gunwale by heavy solid
bulwarks four feet high, surmounted by hammock nettings at
least another foot; so that the symmetrical little vessel that
formerly floated on the foam light as a sea-gull now looked like a
clumsy, dish-shaped Dutch dogger. Her long, slender wands of
masts which used to swing about as if there were neither
shrouds nor stays to support them were now as taut and stiff as
church-steeples, with four heavy shrouds of a side, and stays
and back-stays, and the Devil knows what all.”

“If them heave-‘emtaughts at the yard have not taken the speed
out of the little beauty I am a Dutchman” was the natural comment,—
as obvious as it was sound.
The reports of privateer captains to their owners were rarely
published, and the logs were never printed or deposited in any public
office. Occasionally, in the case of a battle or the loss of guns or
spars or cargo in a close pursuit, the privateer captain described the
causes of his loss in a letter which found its way into print; and from
such letters some idea could be drawn of the qualities held in highest
regard, both in their vessels and in themselves. The first and
commonest remark was that privateers of any merit never seemed to
feel anxious for their own safety so long as they could get to
windward a couple of gunshots from their enemy. They would risk a
broadside in the process without very great anxiety. They chiefly
feared lest they might be obliged to run before the wind in heavy
weather. The little craft which could turn on itself like a flash and dart
away under a frigate’s guns into the wind’s eye long before the
heavy ship could come about, had little to fear on that point of
sailing; but when she was obliged to run to leeward, the chances
were more nearly equal. Sometimes, especially in light breezes or in
a stronger wind, by throwing guns and weighty articles overboard
privateers could escape; but in heavy weather the ship-of-war could
commonly outcarry them, and more often could drive them on a
coast or into the clutches of some other man-of-war.
Of being forced to fly to leeward almost every privateer could tell
interesting stories. A fair example of such tales was an adventure of
Captain George Coggeshall, who afterward compiled, chiefly from
newspapers, an account of the privateers, among which he
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preserved a few stories that would otherwise have been lost.
Coggeshall commanded a two-hundred-ton schooner, the “David
Porter,” in which he made the run to France with a cargo and a letter-
of-marque. The schooner was at Bordeaux in March, 1814, when
Wellington’s army approached. Afraid of seizure by the British if he
remained at Bordeaux, Coggeshall sailed from Bordeaux for La
Rochelle with a light wind from the eastward, when at daylight March
15, 1814, he found a large ship about two miles to windward.
Coggeshall tried to draw his enemy down to leeward, but only lost
ground until the ship was not more than two gunshots away. The
schooner could then not run to windward without taking the enemy’s
fire within pistol-shot, and dared not return to Bordeaux. Nothing
remained but to run before the wind. Coggeshall got out his square-
sail and studding-sails ready to set, and when everything was
prepared he changed his course and bore off suddenly, gaining a
mile in the six or eight minutes lost by the ship in spreading her
studding-sails. He then started his water-casks, threw out ballast,
and drew away from his pursuer, till in a few hours the ship became
a speck on the horizon.
Apparently a similar but narrower escape was made by Captain
Champlin of the “Warrior,” a famous privateer-brig of four hundred
and thirty tons, mounting twenty-one guns and carrying one hundred
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and fifty men. Standing for the harbor of Fayal, Dec. 15, 1814, he
was seen by a British man-of-war lying there at anchor. The enemy
slipped her cables and made sail in chase. The weather was very
fresh and squally, and at eight o’clock in the evening the ship was
only three miles distant. After a run of about sixty miles, the man-of-
war came within grape-shot distance and opened fire from her two
bow-guns. Champlin luffed a little, got his long pivot-gun to bear, and
ran out his starboard guns as though to fight, which caused the ship
to shorten sail for battle. Then Champlin at two o’clock in the
morning threw overboard eleven guns, and escaped. The British ship
was in sight the next morning, but did not pursue farther.
Often the privateers were obliged to throw everything overboard
at the risk of capsizing, or escaped capture only by means of their
sweeps. In 1813 Champlin commanded the “General Armstrong,” a
brig of two hundred and forty-six tons and one hundred and forty
men. Off Surinam, March 11, 1813, he fell in with the British sloop-of-
war “Coquette,” which he mistook for a letter-of-marque, and
approached with the intention of boarding. Having come within pistol-
shot and fired his broadsides, he discovered his error. The wind was
light, the two vessels had no headway, and for three quarters of an
hour, if Champlin’s account could be believed, he lay within pistol-
shot of the man-of-war. He was struck by a musket-ball in the left
shoulder; six of his crew were killed and fourteen wounded; his
rigging was cut to pieces; his foremast and bowsprit injured, and
several shots entered the brig between wind and water, causing her
to leak; but at last he succeeded in making sail forward, and with the
aid of his sweeps crept out of range. The sloop-of-war was unable to
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cripple or follow him.
Sometimes the very perfection of the privateer led to dangers as
great as though perfection were a fault. Captain Shaler of the
“Governor Tompkins,” a schooner, companion to the “General
Armstrong,” chased three sail Dec. 25, 1812, and on near approach
found them to be two ships and a brig. The larger ship had the
appearance of a government transport; she had boarding-nettings
almost up to her tops, but her ports appeared to be painted, and she
seemed prepared for running away as she fought. Shaler drew
nearer, and came to the conclusion that the ship was too heavy for
him; but while his first officer went forward with the glass to take
another look, a sudden squall struck the schooner without reaching
the ship, and in a moment, before the light sails could be taken in,
“and almost before I could turn round, I was under the guns, not of a
transport, but of a large frigate, and not more than a quarter of a mile
from her.” With impudence that warranted punishment, Shaler fired
his little broadside of nine or twelve pounders into the enemy, who
replied with a broadside of twenty-four-pounders, killing three men,
wounding five, and causing an explosion on deck that threw
confusion into the crew; but the broadside did no serious injury to the
rigging. The schooner was then just abaft the ship’s beam, a quarter
of a mile away, holding the same course and to windward. She could
not tack without exposing her stern to a raking fire, and any failure to
come about would have been certain destruction. Shaler stood on,
taking the ship’s fire, on the chance of outsailing his enemy before a
shot could disable the schooner. Side by side the two vessels raced
for half an hour, while twenty-four-pound shot fell in foam about the
schooner, but never struck her, and at last she drew ahead beyond
range. Even then her dangers were not at an end. A calm followed;
the ship put out boats; and only by throwing deck-lumber and shot
overboard, and putting all hands at the sweeps, did Shaler “get clear
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of one of the most quarrelsome companions that I ever met with.”
The capacities of the American privateer could to some extent
be inferred from its mishaps. Notwithstanding speed, skill, and
caution, the privateer was frequently and perhaps usually captured in
the end. The modes of capture were numerous. April 3, 1813,
Admiral Warren’s squadron in the Chesapeake captured by boats,
after a sharp action, the privateer “Dolphin” of Baltimore, which had
taken refuge in the Rappahannock River. April 27 the “Tom” of
Baltimore, a schooner of nearly three hundred tons, carrying
fourteen guns, was captured by his Majesty’s ships “Surveillante”
and “Lyra” after a smart chase. Captain Collier of the “Surveillante”
reported: “She is a remarkably fine vessel of her class, and from her
superior sailing has already escaped from eighteen of his Majesty’s
cruisers.” May 11, the “Holkar” of New York was driven ashore off
Rhode Island and destroyed by the “Orpheus” frigate. May 19,
Captain Gordon of the British man-of-war “Ratler,” in company with
the schooner “Bream,” drove ashore and captured the “Alexander” of
Salem, off Kennebunk, “considered the fastest sailing privateer out
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of the United States,” according to Captain Gordon’s report. May
21, Captain Hyde Parker of the frigate “Tenedos,” in company with
the brig “Curlew,” captured the “Enterprise” of Salem, pierced for
eighteen guns. May 23, the “Paul Jones,” of sixteen guns and one
hundred and twenty men, fell in with a frigate in a thick fog off the
coast of Ireland, and being crippled by her fire surrendered. July 13,
Admiral Cockburn captured by boats at Ocracoke Inlet the fine
privateer-brig “Anaconda” of New York, with a smaller letter-of-
marque. July 17, at sea, three British men-of-war, after a chase of
four hours, captured the “Yorktown” of twenty guns and one hundred
and forty men. The schooner “Orders in Council” of New York,
carrying sixteen guns and one hundred and twenty men, was
captured during the summer, after a long chase of five days, by three
British cutters that drove her under the guns of a frigate. The
“Matilda,” privateer of eleven guns and one hundred and four men,
was captured off San Salvador by attempting to board the British
letter-of-marque “Lyon” under the impression that she was the
weaker ship.
In these ten instances of large privateers captured or destroyed
in 1813, the mode of capture happened to be recorded; and in none
of them was the privateer declared to have been outsailed and
caught by any single British vessel on the open seas. Modes of
disaster were many, and doubtless among the rest a privateer might
occasionally be fairly beaten in speed, but few such cases were
recorded, although British naval officers were quick to mention these
unusual victories. Unless the weather gave to the heavier British
vessel-of-war the advantage of carrying more sail in a rough sea, the
privateer was rarely outsailed.
The number of privateers at sea in 1813 was not recorded. The
list of all private armed vessels during the entire war included
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somewhat more than five hundred names. Most of these were
small craft, withdrawn after a single cruise. Not two hundred were so
large as to carry crews of fifty men. Nearly two hundred and fifty, or
nearly half the whole number of privateers, fell into British hands.
Probably at no single moment were more than fifty seagoing vessels
on the ocean as privateers, and the number was usually very much
less; while the large privateer-brigs or ships that rivalled sloops-of-
war in size were hardly more numerous than the sloops themselves.
The total number of prizes captured from the British in 1813
exceeded four hundred, four fifths of which were probably captured
by privateers, national cruisers taking only seventy-nine. If the
privateers succeeded in taking three hundred and fifty prizes, the
whole number of privateers could scarcely have exceeded one
hundred. The government cruisers “President,” “Congress,”
“Chesapeake,” “Hornet,” and “Argus” averaged nearly ten prizes
apiece. Privateers averaged much less; but they were ten times as
numerous as the government cruisers, and inflicted four times as
much injury.
Such an addition to the naval force of the United States was very
important. Doubtless the privateers contributed more than the
regular navy to bring about a disposition for peace in the British
classes most responsible for the war. The colonial and shipping
interests, whose influence produced the Orders in Council, suffered
the chief penalty. The West India colonies were kept in constant
discomfort and starvation by swarms of semi-piratical craft darting in
and out of every channel among their islands; but the people of