Preble took exception to something a fellow merchant sailor had said to him

I have been very much enjoying Perilous Fight by Stephen Budiansky, an account of the naval side of the War of 1812. Excellent history and excellent story-telling.

The period is interesting as well. After the American Revolution, we had a period of government under the Articles of Confederation which demonstrated the weakness of the loose alliance approach. This led to the Constitutional Convention and the eventual brilliant comprise of our checks-and-balances form of constrained republican government.

One of my pet peeves is our current day media's inclination to identify everything as an existential crisis instead of acknowledging that we live in the most prosperous, stable, peaceful time in history. For all the nattering about polarization and extremism, etc. it is all in the minds of undereducated and over-credentialed journalists who don't know what they are talking about.

The War of 1812? Now there's a crisis. North versus south, Federalists versus Democrats, the war party versus the commerce party, agriculture verse mercantilists, etc. And with no institutional history or credibility. We were still making things up as we went along.

Time and again there are precursor full-throated arguments to the whinging of today's anemic descendants.

Fascinating.

Page 3.

That America would have a navy at all in 1812 on the eve of her mad war against Britain was the direct result of events of a decade before that had spoken more to the young nation’s heart than to her mind. The American mind was dead set against the temptations that the republic’s founders believed always led governments to war and tyranny. A solid majority of America’s political leaders opposed on principle the very notion of a standing navy, a solid majority of Americans opposed the taxes that would be required to pay for one, and no sane American of any political inclination thought that any navy their country could ever possess would be able to contend with those of the great European powers.

Yet from the Anglophile merchants of New England to the backwoods farmers on the frontier, Americans had been stirred by the glory that had been won by the captains and men of the tiny United States navy in worlds far away ever since its founding in 1794, and it was that glory that had kept the service alive against all rational calculation to the contrary.
Edward Preble had no illusions about the price to be paid for that glory. “People who handle dangerous weapons,” he once wrote, “must expect wounds and Death.” Preble was a man of action to the core, possessed of a legendary decisiveness and a volcanic temper. Just a year before joining his country’s young navy in 1798 as a not-so-young thirty-seven-year-old lieutenant, Preble had taken exception to something a fellow merchant sailor had said to him in Boston, and cracked him over the head with a musket. Preble ended up paying his victim’s room and board and medical bills while he recovered, then gave him $200 for his troubles; he never apologized, though.