James Bird [Laws A5]

DESCRIPTION: James Bird leaves his family to join Perry's fleet on Lake Erie. In the battle, he fights valiantly, continuing to serve even after being wounded. Later, however, he tells his parents that he is to be executed for desertion.
AUTHOR: James Miner
EARLIEST DATE: 1814 (newspaper, "The Gleaner")
KEYWORDS: execution war battle navy | James Bird Oliver Hazard Perry Lake Erie
HISTORICAL REFERENCES:
Sept 10, 1813 - Battle of Lake Erie. The Americans under Perry defeat the British.
Oct 1814 - Execution of James Bird for desertion while on guard duty
FOUND IN: US(All) Canada
REFERENCES (31 citations):
Laws A5, "James Bird"
Thompson-APioneerSongster 52, "James Bird" (1 text)
Shoemaker-MountainMinstrelsyOfPennsylvania, pp. 164-165, "James Bird" (1 text) (pp. 141-143 in the 1919 edition)
Thompson-BodyBootsAndBritches-NewYorkStateFolktales, pp. 345-347, "(James Bird)" (1 text)
Newman/Devlin-NeverWithoutASong, pp. 166-168, "James Bird" (1 text, 1 tune)
Walton/Grimm-Windjammers-SongsOfTheGreatLakesSailors, pp. 104-107, "James Bird" (1 text, 1 tune)
Eddy-BalladsAndSongsFromOhio 118, "James Bird" (1 text plus a fragment, 1 tune)
Peters-FolkSongsOutOfWisconsin, pp. 228-229, "James Bird" (1 text, 1 tune)
Belden-BalladsSongsCollectedByMissourFolkloreSociety, pp. 296-297, "James Bird" (1 text)
Flanders/Olney-BalladsMigrantInNewEngland, pp. 18-21, "James Bird" (1 text, 1 tune)
Lane/Gosbee-SongsOfShipsAndSailors, pp. 134-135, "James Bird" (1 text, 1 tune)
Cazden/Haufrecht/Studer-FolkSongsOfTheCatskills 9, "The Kingston Volunteers" (1 text, 1 tune, much more heavily "folk processed" than most other texts)
Warner-TraditionalAmericanFolkSongsFromAnneAndFrankWarnerColl 17, "James Bird" (1 text, 1 tune)
McNeil-SouthernFolkBalladsVol1, pp. 38-41, "James Bird" (1 text, 1 tune)
Pound-AmericanBalladsAndSongs, 41, pp. 93-97, "James Bird" (1 text)
Cox-FolkSongsSouth 62, "James Bird" (1 text)
Brown/Belden/Hudson-FrankCBrownCollectionNCFolklore2 221, "James Bird" (1 text)
Brown/Schinhan-FrankCBrownCollectionNCFolklore4 273, "James Bird" (1 excerpt, 1 tune)
Moore/Moore-BalladsAndFolkSongsOfTheSouthwest 130, "James Bird" (1 text, 1 tune)
Hubbard-BalladsAndSongsFromUtah, #153, "James Bird" (1 text, 1 tune)
Rickaby-BalladsAndSongsOfTheShantyBoy 38, "James Bird" (1 tune, partial text)
Rickaby/Dykstra/Leary-PineryBoys-SongsSongcatchingInLumberjackEra 38, "James Bird" (1 tune, partial text)
Burt-AmericanMurderBallads, pp. 183-184, "(James Bird)" (1 excerpted text, 1 tune)
Cohen-AmericanFolkSongsARegionalEncyclopedia1, p. 140, "James Bird" (1 text)
Forget-Me-Not-Songster, pp. 97-99, "James Bird" (1 text, with the tune listed as "The Tempest")
Leach-HeritageBookOfBallads, pp. 140-142, "James Bird" (1 text, 1 tune on p. 201)
Darling-NewAmericanSongster, pp. 158-159, "James Bird" (1 text)
MidwestFolklore, Ivan H. Watson, "Folk Singing on Beaver Island," Volume 2, Number 4 (Winter 1952), p. 248, "James Bird" (reference only)
cf. Gardner/Chickering-BalladsAndSongsOfSouthernMichigan, p. 479, "James Bird" (source notes only)
DT 361, JAMEBIRD*
ADDITIONAL: MacEdward Leach and Henry Glassie, _A Guide for Collectiors of Oral Traditions and Folk Cultural Material in Pennsylvania_, Pennsylvania historical and Museum Commission, 1973, pp. 32-34, "James Bird" (1 text)
ST LA05 (Full)
Roud #2204
RECORDINGS:
O. J. Abbott, "James Bird" (on GreatLakes1)
John W. Green, "James Bird" (1938; on WaltonSailors; the text printed in Walton/Grimm-Windjammers-SongsOfTheGreatLakesSailors does not list an informant, but is similar to Green's version, except that it is fuller; the tunes are not entirely the same)
Warde Ford, "James Bird" [fragment] (AFS 4202 A1, 4202 A2, 1938; in AMMEM/Cowell)
Mike Roark, "Lake Erie" (on MUNFLA/Leach)
BROADSIDES:
LOCSinging, as100590, "Mournful Tragedy of James Bird" ("Sons of freedom, listen to me, and ye daughters too, give ear"), L. Deming (Boston), no date
VonWalthour, CDDrive>b>b(5),"Mournful Tragedy of James Bird" ("Sons of freedom, listen to me, and ye daughters too, give ear"), L. Deming (Boston), no date
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "The Dying Fifer" (tune)
cf. "The Battle of Lake Erie" (subject: The Battle of Lake Erie)
cf. "The Battle of Erie -- 1813" (subject: The Battle of Lake Erie)
SAME TUNE:
The Dying Fifer (File: BrII227)
NOTES [2058 words]: The American victory on Lake Erie was something of a surprise due to the inexperience of the U.S. forces. To that point, the Americans had done very badly on the Canadian frontier (see the notes to "Brave General Brock [Laws A22]" and "The Battle of Queenston Heights"). If the Americans were to have any hope of reversing things, command of the waters of Lakes Erie and Ontario seemed crucial.
To make matters worse, both sides were concentrating most of their forces on Lake Ontario, which was downstream, easier to reach, and and has more people in the area. The naval force the British sent to Lake Erie, for instance, consisted of only about two dozen men headed by a 27-year-old Lieutenant named Robert Heriot Barclay (Borneman, p. 121) -- who was, however, a veteran of Trafalgar, and who had lost an arm in later fighting. If nothing else, he was aggressive.
The commander of the American fleet was a 27-year-old Master Commandant (a rank later retitled "Commander") named Oliver Hazard Perry, who had accepted the Lakes command (considered a step down from the blue-water navy) in order to at least see some action (Mahon, p. 166). He was a friend of the James Lawrence who had recently died on the U.S.S. Chesapeake (see the notes to "The Chesapeake and the Shannon (I)" [Laws J20]). Perry would try to emulate Lawrence's spirit; fortunately he did not emulate Lawrence's inept tactics.
Perry initially suffered one major disadvantage: His base was in Presque Isle Bay, by what is now Erie, Pennsylvania -- a good place to build a ship, but there was a bar in the harbor mouth which was too shallow to get his biggest ships out. Barclay blockaded the harbor entrance; had Perry tried to take his big ships out in those circumstances, they would surely have been destroyed and would have blocked the passage as well. But Barclay at the end of July 1813 briefly sailed away, and the Americans managed to get their ships out (Borneman, pp. 123-125; Hickey, p. 131; Mahon, p. 170; Pratt, p. 86, opines that the British, who had not yet completed their flagship Detroit, thought the American fleet too large to fight, but most others think it was a supply problem or the like. Mahon mentions a folktale that Barclay went to a dinner in Dover). The Americans would settle at Put-In Bay, near the western end of Lake Erie, not far from the British base at Amherstberg (Mahon, p. 170).
That may have been the decisive move of the campaign. Rather than the blockader, Barclay was now the blockaded. He had the single biggest ship on the lake, the Detroit, but it was not finished until mid-August, by which time the American blockade had made it impossible for the British to bring in big guns. The Detroit ended up armed rather haphazardly, using the few guns at hand (taken from a land fort; Mahon, p. 171); according to Hickey, p. 132, most of them had to be fired by shooting a pistol over the fire-hole (Mahon, p. 176, blames this on bad matches, but the result is the same). The next-best British ship, the Queen Charlotte, had almost no long guns -- that is, it was hard for her to hurt enemy ships at a distance. To add to Barclay's problems, he had to supply not only his own ships but the sundry army troops and Indians in the vicinity (Hickey, p. 132).
The Americans had their own problems. The main force of their fleet consisted of the two brand-new brigs (these were the two ships that had been so hard to get out of Presque Isle Bay), the Lawrence (named for James Lawrence) and the Niagara, both armed mostly with short-range carronades . He also had a medium-sized vessel, the Caledonia; the rest of his fleet was small schooners with only a few guns.
The fleets that fought at Lake Erie were probably about equal in practical strength. The American fleet had ten ships to six for the British (so most sources; Mahon, p. 169, credits the Americans with only nine and gives numbers of guns I haven't seen elsewhere), but in ships larger than gunboats, the British had four and the Americans three. Worse, none of the Americans vessels had ever served as warships before, nor even had much of the way of a shakedown (all the British ships, except the Detroit, had at least spend time maneuvering on Lake Erie), and the crews were inexperienced. And the American vessels were badly undermanned; it had initially been thought Perry would need about 740 crewmen, but apparently he decided to sail with only about 500 (Borneman, pp. 123, 125; Mahon, p. 169, says he had 490) -- and many of these were landsmen from General Harrison's army (Hickey, p. 132).
Barclay too had to put soldiers on his ships (Mahon, p. 169; p. 176 cites a British enquiry which claims there were no more than ten experienced seamen on each ship), but only Mahon seems to think this seriously handicapped him.
According to Mahon, the American vessels had a combined broadside of 896 pounds, the British 459 -- though Mahon has a tendency to magnify American competence, and no other source mentions quite such a discrepancy.
The battle was a rather disorderly affair. Perry had the advantage of the wind gauge, letting him choose the time and distance of the fight (Hickey, p. 132); but Perry used that to change his fleet arrangements once he saw Barclay's fleet. In the confusion that followed, the two biggest British ships, the Detroit and the Queen Charlotte, both turned on American flagship Lawrence, while the Niagara (commanded by Jesse Duncan Elliot, formerly Perry's superior; Borneman, p. 125) stayed in its place far back in the line rather than doing something about Queen Charlotte. As a result, the Lawrence would be crippled and out of the fight (Borneman, p. 128; Hickey, p. 133, reports that her crew suffered 80% casualties).
Perry eventually decided to leave the Lawrence (which would suffer about two-thirds of the American casualties in the battle; Borneman, p. 132) and head for the Niagara. Even though his ship was being destroyed (she was still floating, but dismasted and unmaneuverable and incapable of firing a proper broadside) and his crew slaughtered, he forbid his former flagship to surrender (Ratigan, p. 172). Sure, he might cause many more men to die -- but what was that compared with his reputation?
Barclay, meanwhile, had been wounded; he ordered his men to try to sink the boat in which Perry was fleeing, but then had to be taken below. And Perry got lucky. Queen Charlotte had lost her captain and the next two officers in command (Mahon, pp. 175-176), and Barclay was disabled on the Detroit (which had itself suffered badly at the hands of Lawrence), and the two mis-handled British ships ran afoul of each other. Niagara was able to cross the T of the other two ships, and Elliot (who had left the Niagara when Perry came aboard) brought up several smaller American ships to attack the other side, and the four smaller British ships were unable to stop him. Queen Charlotte struck her colors, then Detroit (Borneman, p. 132), and the other four British ships apparently preferred to give in rather than fight or flee (to be sure, Niagara, a square-rigged ship, should have been faster than the schooners and could probably have sunk most of them).
The fate of the British ships varied; that of the Detroit was particularly absurd. There was apparently in this period a habit of loading a boat with innocent animals and sending it over Niagara Falls (Ratigan, p. 179). The Detroit was one ship so used; Ratigan, p. 181 reports that her sacrifice ended the appalling practice; "that is the last record of such a fresh-water Roman holiday."
Perry's announcement of the battle result is famous; he reported to General William Henry Harrison, "We have met the enemy and they are ours."
This was fortunate for Harrison (one of many lousy American generals of 1812; with the military academy still new, most of the generals were political picks -- see Mahon, p. 103, which lists the four Major Generals, including Harrison, appointed in early 1813; all were old and well-connected. It says something that, relative to his peers, Harrison was a *good* general; the others were basically disasters). Perry's win would profoundly help Harrison's career, since it made it possible to retake Detroit and advance into Canada.
Harrison had already suffered badly at the hands of British commander Henry Proctor, who defeated pieces of Harrison's army in detail. After Lake Erie, with his supply lines in danger, Proctor should have fallen back, but waited too long, then let his Indian allies talk him into battle at Moravian Town on the Thames River (about half way between modern Windsor and London, Ontario). And his forces were not very strong -- perhaps 800 regulars and 500 Indians, most of whom had been on short rations (Hickey, p. 137; Mahon, pp. 182-183). The Americans charged, and Proctor's thin line was broken; his surviving European troops were sent reeling back, and many of the Indians, including the brilliant Tecumseh, were killed (Borneman, pp. 158-161).
Harrison, though he couldn't advance much farther, had secured Detroit, and that, combined with his treacherous slaughter at Tippicanoe, would later make him President.
Richard Mentor Johnson, who had trained up an elite cavalry unit (nearly every Kentucky regiment was mounted, but only Johnson's were allowed to take their horses into Canada; Mahon, pp. 181-182) and led the charge that won the battle and took part in the slaughter of the Indians, would eventually end up in a presidential race against Harrison in 1836; he was Martin Van Buren's vice presidential candidate, with the absurd campaign slogan "Rumpsey dumpsey, Rumpsey dumpsey, Colonel Johnson killed Tecumseh" (Morison, p. 454. Johnson almost certainly did not personally kill Tecumseh, but no one knew who had -- his body was reportedly never found, though Hickey, p. 139, talks of soldiers bringing home Tecumseh relics). As a result, Johnson was able to make at least an informal claim to have killed the Indian leader.
So strange was the 1836 election -- which featured three Whig candidates plus Democrat Martin Van Buren -- that, though Van Buren was elected directly by the electoral college, the college did not settle on a Vice President and the matter was settled in the Senate, where the Democratic majority naturally picked Johnson over the leading Whig candidate. I can't help but wonder if -- no matter what people said -- Johnson's non-election was because of his opinions on race. His first wife was said to have been half-black, and was actually one of his slaves, and the woman who may have been his third was also black; Widmer, pp. 119-120).
There is a broadside ballad about the Battle of Lake Erie, called "Perry's Victory" or something similar. Ratigan, p. 175, reports, "Considering the ratio of population, the ballad of Perry's victory outsold any popular recording of today. It was still a prime favorite at county fairs and other festivals half a century later." But it seems to have left no hold on tradition.
There are few other monuments to the campaign, either. Lake Erie was the first and only true naval battle of the War of 1812 (as opposed to single-ship combats or the combined arms battle of Plattsburg), and because it was a complete victory, there was no real need for further fighting. And, because a ship on the Upper Lakes could not be sent over Niagara Falls or otherwise reach the lower lakes, there was no other practical use for the ships, Lawrence, badly battered, was not preserved; Niagara, after Americans and British reached an agreement to disarm the lakes, was scuttled in Misery Bay (Varhols, p. 44). The cold fresh water preserved her, and she was eventually raised -- but the Niagara sailing now is a replica reassembled based on the raised ship (Varhola, pp. 45-46).
James Bird seems to have been a fairly typical American soldier of the period: Brave, but completely impervious to discipline. After joining the army, he transferred to the marines to escape the regimentation of army life. He showed great courage at the Battle of Lake Erie, but hated the tedium of garrison work, neglected his duties, and was court-martialed and executed at Erie, Pennsylvania. - RBW
Broadsides LOCSinging as100590 and VonWalthour CDDrive>b>b(5) appear to be the same edition. - BS
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File: LA05

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