The House Armed Services Committee received an unusual assignment: in effect,
it had to fight over again one of the celebrated naval actions of
the War of 1812—the capture of
the U.S. frigate Chesapeake by the British frigate Shannon, off Boston
Harbor. The American hero in that encounter was Captain James Lawrence. The villain, according to a later Navy
court-martial, was 3rd Lieut. William S. Cox. Last week the House
Committee had a resolution before it that would reverse the verdict
against Cox.In the thick of battle, as the British prepared to board the Chesapeake,
the third lieutenant helped carry the dying captain below. Technically,
as next in command , Cox should have
remained on deck. For this dereliction of duty he was subsequently
discharged from the service in disgrace.Soon afterward, naval historians began to doubt Cox's guilt, wondered if
he had been made a scapegoat for a sorry U.S. defeat. Arguments in the
third lieutenant's favor: the Chesapeake was fresh from refitting,
manned by a green crew. Just before she sailed out to meet the Shannon,
many of her men were drunk. The court-martial testimony showed that
Cox, who was 23, fought his guns bravely until the crews deserted;
then, cutlass in hand, he rushed up on deck to repel the boarders. Cox
probably did not realize he was in command when he helped Captain
Lawrence below deck.Cox's descendants have been campaigning ever since to clear his record.
His son, William Cox, was expelled from Lafayette College for striking
a professor who called his father a coward, according to the family.
Half a century ago, an unsuccessful effort was made to get Congress to
reverse the court-martial verdict. When Theodore Roosevelt, in his
Naval War of 1812, said that Lieut. Cox had acted “basely,” one of
Cox's descendants protested so vigorously that Roosevelt apologized,
and corrected his account in a later edition.Just before World War II, Electus D. Litchfield, a Manhattan architect
who is Cox's great-grandson, appealed to President Franklin Roosevelt,
who proved sympathetic but without any legal power to reverse the 1814
court-martial. Two years ago Litchfield persuaded Georgia's
Representative Eugene Cox to introduce a resolution restoring
William Cox to the rank of third lieutenant as of his death in 1874.
This was the resolution before the House Armed Services Committee last
week. The outlook is that Litchfield, now 80, and 30-odd other
descendants may see the family name cleared by this session of
Congress.
