lyonheart wrote:Hello RunsForCelery!
"Wow! Cool! Neat!"
Thanks very much for such an exposition on so many aspects of commerce warfare, it's fascinating.
The fate of the USS Essex immediately came to mind early in your comparison and I notice the USS Firefly, Captain Porter's next command, seems far closer to your Desnari commerce raiding schooner as it was a 300 ton brig of just 14 guns only 109 feet long etc.
However, I was under the impression that American privateers were still quite a nuisance in 1814, even in the Irish Sea; to wit tripling or quadrupling British marine insurance rates, if insurance could be found, due to greater losses than during just the Napoleonic wars [~1811, before the American 1812 war] while the rest of Europe was benefiting from the peace and resumption of trade, generating some internal political pressure to end the American war quickly, that among other things privateers had captured something like ~1350 ships, nearly all merchants and something like 24,000+ prisoners, roughly 4 times what the US Army captured, and while that may have been only ~2.5% of the British merchant fleet, it was far better than anyone else had ever done in tweaking the British Lion's tail.
Granted that reducing many of the privateer shipyards was one reason for the RN's ongoing Chesapeake Bay campaigns [echoed on Safehold], and the RN captured about half of the privateers or ships with 'letters of marque' [which were very easy for a merchant captain to get] most prizes were taken by 10% or less, echoing U-Boat experience.
Thus despite the end of Napoleon and the RN's ability to concentrate on the US, our privateers were still harassing British shipping even as Washington was being burned; Lloyd's reported 2 US Navy warships and several privateers had captured 108 British prizes that month alone, including even in the Thames estuary, with the year's total at or near the 400 of 1813, more than the 300 of 1812, though that was in just over 6 month's.
While news of the Treaty of Ghent reached most of the US by February 1815, the last privateers didn't return until June, with another 250 prizes for that near half-year!
So while the RN may have considered it successfully protected most of its convoys, losses to privateers were at best only about 1% in any single year; it obviously could have been much worse, pushing Britain to get the rest of Europe to condemn and end the practice in 1856.
L
Ah, I trust you did note the part where I said (emphasis added):
runsforcelery wrote:The American privateers of the War of 1812 were as effective as they were primarily because, at the beginning of the war, the Brits were still tied down in European waters by the need to protect their commerce closer to home and worry about the French Navy. By 1814, when Napoleon had begun his involuntary vacation at Elba and the French Navy was no longer a problem, the privateers had been driven almost entirely from the seas by a combination of convoy tactics, aggressive "hunter killer" operations (as we'd probably call them today), a close blockade of the Chesapeake (where most of the privateers were built), and landing operations to burn privateers on the stocks and to eliminate the shipyards capable of building more of them. Great Britain never managed to completely eliminate them, but she certainly managed to transform them from a major threat into a minor (if occasionally painful) irritant.
So just where, exactly, did I say in any of this that the American privateers weren't still taking plenty of prizes in 1814? It's true that the tempo of American privateering in 1814 was higher than in 1813, but the privateers who were doing all of that privateering were primarily the ones which had been built and gotten to sea in 1813 or earlier. That is, the Brits had largely succeeded in choking off the flow of new privateers, and they were steadily whittling down the numbers of existing privateers, which means that the rate of increase was actually dropping even as the absolute number of prizes went up. Moreover, the number of prizes taken per privateer was declining radically. The privateers who took the vast majority of the prizes after mid-1813 were purpose-built ships like Rattlesnake and Prince de Neufchateau — big (relatively) and powerfully armed schooners, for the most part, built on the "Baltimore clipper" model more often than not — and very few more of them were getting to sea. Had the war continued into 1815 or later, even fewer of them would have gotten to sea. One of the primary reasons for the attack on New Orleans was to neutralize the city as a base for privateers, since it was much more difficult to seal off all the various passes out of the mouth of the Mississippi River than it was to blockade the Chesapeake. (That threat to his financial prosperity was one of the big reasons Jean Lafite turned to to help defend the city, after all.) It failed, but I strongly suspect that had the war continued it would have been attempted a second time, possibly successfully, or else the Brits would have seized island bases or enclaves along the Gulf coast — rather as the Federal Navy did with Biloxi during the Civil War — to use as bases to interdict privateers operating out of the river. None of that really affects the sense of what I said about the effectiveness of the American privateers or their ability to pose a "major threat" beyond 1814, however.
I'm unclear as to whether or not your conclusion that "it obviously could have been much worse" is an indication that you feel the Brits weren't actually getting on top of the situation (as I believe they were) or if you are saying that the level of threat to Britain "could have been much worse" if the Royal Navy hadn't been getting on top of it. In either case, my conclusion that all of the privateers moving against British commerce in 1814 were merely "a minor (if occasionally painful) irritant" stands, as does the validity of my analogy between the fact that the British were never significantly handicapped in their military or commercial operations against the United States in the course of the war by American commerce-raiders. The protests of the merchants of the City of London are an example of the way in which an asymmetrical campaign attacks not the fundamental ability of a more powerful opponent to conduct successful military operations but rather the willingness of that more powerful opponent to do so. Neither the American privateers nor the Church privateers represent (or represented) the sort of existential threat to their opponents which the U-boats presented to England in both world wars.
Which is rather the point I was attempting to make.
can be directed to reading it.