They had no patience with such spokesmen as Josiah Quincy, who said that Massachusetts would not go to war to contest the right of Great Britain to search American vessels for British seamen.

They had neither forgotten nor forgiven the mortal affront of 1807, when their frigate _Chesapeake_, flying the broad pennant of Commodore James Barron, refused to let the British _Leopard_ board and search her, and was fired into without warning and reduced to submission, after twenty-one of the American crew had been killed or wounded.
That shameful episode was in keeping with the attitude of the British navy toward the armed ships of the United States, "a few fir-built things with bits of striped bunting at their mast-heads," as George Canning, British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, described them.
Long before the declaration of war British squadrons hovered off the port of New York to ransack merchant vessels or to seize them as prizes.
In the course of the Napoleonic wars England had met and destroyed the navies of all her enemies in Europe.

The battles of Copenhagen, the Nile, Trafalgar, and a hundred lesser fights had thundered to the world the existence of an unconquerable sea power.
Insignificant as it was, the American naval service boasted a history and a high morale.

Its ships had been active.

The younger officers served with seniors who had sailed and fought with Biddle and Barney and Paul Jones in the Revolution.