Joshua Barney

Somewhere in the western Atlantic in the early spring of 1775, a merchant ship called the Sidney was coming apart at the seams, and the person responsible for her was fifteen years old.

The leak had started before they cleared the Virginia Capes, which had sent them back to Norfolk for repairs that did not take. At Norfolk the first mate had quarreled with Captain Drysdale and walked off the ship, so they sailed short-handed. Then Drysdale sickened and was dead within the week. That left one boy, a hold full of wheat consigned to Nice, a crew of grown men, and a hull letting in the ocean.

His name was Joshua Barney and he was Drysdale’s brother-in-law, apprenticed to him and to nobody else, which meant that with Drysdale gone the boy had no legal master and no obvious authority over anyone aboard. He assumed both. His first order was to man the pumps. A gale on the eastern side of the crossing opened the seams wider, and they pumped their way into Gibraltar with the water gaining.

The port officers there had some difficulty accepting that the child on the quarterdeck was the master. Barney had no money and needed a shipyard, so he went to the house of Murray and Company and talked them into advancing roughly three thousand five hundred dollars for repairs against a bottomry bond, a loan secured by the ship herself, payable ten days after arrival at Nice. He signed it himself. He was fifteen.

He got to Nice, sold the wheat at a good price, and then ran into official trouble of the kind that ends careers. His answer was to cross the Alps to Milan and put his case personally to the British minister there, who intervened on his behalf and unstuck it. The last favor the British government ever did Joshua Barney was performed in Milan in 1775, and he spent the next forty years making them regret it.

He was not finished. Rather than sail home empty and cost his employer money, he chartered the Sidney to the Spanish army as a transport. This put him at Algiers that summer, watching Spain’s expedition against the city collapse into one of the more complete disasters of the age, after which he carried wounded Spanish soldiers back to Alicante. Then he crossed the Atlantic again and walked into his employer’s counting house in October with a folder of papers.

The story as it comes down to us has him throwing the papers on the desk and telling the man to read them. It has the tone of a family anecdote polished by retelling, and probably is. What is not in doubt is what the papers said. The boy had buried his captain, saved the ship, borrowed against her in a foreign port, sold the cargo at a profit, beaten a foreign bureaucracy, chartered her out for extra freight, and brought her home. He had turned sixteen somewhere in the middle of it.

He arrived to find the country at war. It is worth pausing on the fact that everything above happened before the interesting part of his life began.

They did not treat him as a prisoner of war. American seamen taken in this period were frequently tried as traitors and pirates, and Barney was among them: tried, convicted, and delivered to Old Mill Prison at Plymouth. The place was ringed by two stone walls with twenty-five feet of open ground between them.

He was inside about five months. He used them.

As an officer he was permitted to buy clothing from local tradesmen who came to the prison. He commissioned a coat from a tailor in town and had it trimmed in the pattern of a British naval lieutenant, and had it smuggled in. He acquired a shapeless grey greatcoat large enough to go over it. He cultivated a British sergeant of the guard who had served in America and had come home with sympathies he was not advertising. And he recruited two fellow prisoners: a tall broad-shouldered man to be standing near the inner wall at the right moment, and a boy about his own size to take the greatcoat afterward and answer to his name at roll call.

On May 18, 1781, the tall man put Barney over the inner wall. He dropped the greatcoat on the far side, walked to the outer gate in the uniform of an officer of the Royal Navy, and the sergeant opened it for him. Then he simply walked away.

It took the prison a full day to notice he was gone.

He had memorized the names and addresses of people in Plymouth who were friendly to the American cause, which is a detail that says more about his method than the coat does. Anyone can buy a coat. He got out because he had spent five months collecting the information that made the coat useful. From Plymouth he worked his way to France and from France home, arriving in Philadelphia in March 1782 to recuperate at his wife’s family’s house.

He was twenty-two, and he had been a prisoner of the British three times.

They renamed the prize General Washington and gave her to Barney, which is a neat piece of circularity, since she had begun life as the American privateer General Washington before the British took her and renamed her General Monk in the first place. He sailed her to France with dispatches for Benjamin Franklin and came home with the news that the peace had been signed. He also carried a party of Austrian naturalists across the Atlantic, which is the sort of cargo that turns up in a life like this and refuses to fit anywhere.

At the end of the war he was admitted an original member of the Society of the Cincinnati in Pennsylvania, later transferring to the Maryland society. Thirty-four years later he was still wearing the badge in the last portrait painted of him.

Then he made the mistake of his professional life. Congress named him one of the six captains of the new United States Navy. Barney looked at where they had placed him on the seniority list, decided it was an insult, and declined.

It is easy to be hard on him for it. It was vanity, and it cost him two decades of the career he was built for, and by any reasonable measure he knew it afterward. It is also true that seniority in that service was not a matter of pride alone; it determined commands, prize money, and whether a man ever got a ship again. He was wrong, but he was not being frivolous.

In December 1793 Barney sailed the ship Sampson out of Saint-Domingue. Several days out she was taken by the British frigate Penelope and carried into Jamaica, one of a very large number of American vessels seized under the British order in council of the previous month.

They tried him for piracy at Spanish Town. He was acquitted, but the Sampson and her cargo were condemned, and he came home to Baltimore in May 1794 on a pilot boat with nothing. He had come within a courtroom of being hanged.

There had been an earlier incident, in July 1793, that reads like something out of a boys’ adventure and appears to be true. Three British privateers surrounded the Sampson in the Caribbean and put a boarding party aboard, taking off most of the crew and leaving only the carpenter, the boatswain, and the cook. They found iron chests containing roughly eighteen thousand dollars and offered Barney his freedom for the money. He refused. They put him back aboard his own ship under guard, and after a week he and his four remaining men rose against eleven British and took her back.

Whatever residual patience he had for Great Britain died in that Jamaican courtroom. By December 1794 he was writing letters from Bordeaux.

He took a commission in the navy of the French Republic and served as a captain from 1796 to 1802. In the summer of 1796 he commanded the frigate Harmonie, sailing her from Rochefort to run arms and ammunition into Cap-Français, then cruising the Caribbean between Havana and the Chesapeake and back. He made a great deal of money.

He also made himself politically radioactive at home. These were the Quasi-War years, when the United States and France were fighting an undeclared naval war, and an American officer wearing the tricolor in a Baltimore street was making a statement whether he meant to or not. Barney generally meant to.

The legends attach themselves to this period like barnacles. He is supposed to have met Marie Antoinette, who offered him her cheek instead of her hand. The song “Barney Leave the Girls Alone” is supposed to have been written about him. He is described as having a mild face and dark blue eyes, which is not what the record of his conduct would lead you to expect. Treat all of that as legend, and enjoy it as legend. It survives because people who met him thought it was plausible.

The war ended and Barney spent his remaining strength on two fights, both of which he lost.

The first was for his men. He pushed for a bill in Congress to compensate the flotillamen for their service and for the personal property they had lost when the fleet was blown up. The bill failed. Then the government issued an order for those same men to go and raise the barges they had been ordered to sink. The bill failed and it infuriated him. Then the order came, and that was worse.

The second was against his own body. He resigned at fifty-five with a musket ball in his thigh that could not be removed and pain that never let up.

He had bought fifty thousand acres in Kentucky as a young man, back when he had money and a future, and he had been talking about going out there for most of his life. In 1818 he sold the Elkridge farm and set off for Elizabethtown with his family in the fall.

The roads did what roads did to a man in that condition. By the time they reached Pittsburgh the old wound had turned on him and he was dying. He died there on December 1, 1818, at fifty-nine, and they buried him in Allegheny Cemetery.

He is several hundred miles west of the bay he spent his life defending, and several hundred miles short of the place he was going.

Four ships of the United States Navy have carried his name: the Civil War ferryboat Commodore Barney, the torpedo boat Barney (TB-25), the Wickes-class destroyer Barney (DD-149), and the guided missile destroyer Barney (DDG-6), which served until 1990. In 1918 the Navy renamed the elderly torpedo boat Coast Torpedo Boat No. 11 purely so that the name could go to the new destroyer, which is how a name gets handed down like a piece of family silver.

Washington has Barney Circle and Commodore Joshua Barney Drive. The Merchant Marine Academy named its drill field Barney Square, which is the right memorial for a merchant sailor who became a naval hero and never entirely stopped being both.

Prince George’s County has a replica flotilla barge at Bladensburg Waterfront Park, the Battle of Bladensburg Monument, and the Commodore Joshua Barney Monument at Fort Lincoln Cemetery.

In 2014 the county dedicated Undaunted in Battle, an eight-by-ten-foot bronze bas-relief by Joanna Blake, on the ground where the third line stood. It shows three figures at the moment Barney went down: the commodore, an unnamed Marine, and Charles Ball. Putting a formerly enslaved gunner at the center of a national war memorial was a deliberate choice and the right one. Blake died two years later.

In 1978 an underwater survey in the Patuxent located a wreck consistent with the Scorpion, largely intact under the mud. Artifacts from the flotilla are held at Jefferson Patterson Park and the Calvert Marine Museum.

And in 1832 Mary Barney published A Biographical Memoir of the Late Commodore Joshua Barney in Boston, assembled from his own autobiographical notes and journals. Nearly everything we have in his own voice comes through that book. Without it he would be a name on four hulls and a bronze.

The tempting summary is that he was a hero, and he was, but that is not the interesting part. The interesting part is that he was also vain, acquisitive, politically reckless, a trader in human beings for a period of his life, and the author of his own worst professional decision, which he made over a slight to his pride. He lost nearly every strategic engagement of his last campaign. He lost the battle for Washington. He lost the fight to get his men paid. He never reached Kentucky.

What he never once did, across forty-three years and three navies and three imprisonments and one bullet he carried to his grave, was leave the field before he was carried off it.