If Mitchell had just run away he probably would still have had the crew’s sympathy, but attempting to enlist in the rival service was another matter.

From the excellent Perilous Fight by Stephen Budiansky, an account of the naval aspects of the War of 1812. Page 155. Discipline in a young democratic republic.

At four in the afternoon of September 15 Commodore William Bainbridge went aboard the Constitution, hoisted his broad red pennant, and found himself with a mutiny on his hands before he could even open his mouth.

Breaking ranks, the crew swarmed around Captain Hull, begged him to stay, gave him a thundering three cheers, and swore they would sail out and take the British flagship, the sixty-four-gun Africa, with him as their captain. But if they had to serve under Captain Bainbridge, they demanded to be transferred, at once, to any other vessel. In the midst of the uproar the ship’s armorer, Leonard Hayes, was placed under arrest and hauled off onto one of the nearby gunboats “on the charge of insolent and mutinous language.”

Finally Bainbridge addressed the crew. He demanded to know whether there were any among them who had actually sailed with him before and refused to go with him now: “My men, what do you know about me?” It was the wrong question: they knew plenty. One after another of the men spoke up to say that they had indeed sailed with him and would not do it again if they could help it. One man declared he had been with Bainbridge on the Philadelphia “and had been badly used.” Though the man allowed “it might be altered now,” he would still prefer going with Captain Hull, “or any of the other commanders.”

Eighteen sentries were posted all over the ship that night, but that did not prevent two of the crew from slipping over the side and stealing the cutter to try to make a break for it. They were quickly caught when they floated past an anchored gunboat nearby and were returned to the Constitution in the morning.

All hands were called aft, and Bainbridge for the first time in his career decided that he might gain more by not flogging a recalcitrant crewman. Addressing the assembled crew, Bainbridge proposed a deal: “I will not punish these men as they deserve if you will consent to go in the ship.” Moses Smith recalled that “this was appealing to our best feelings,” and “nearly every man consented, to save his brother sailors from punishment.” The only punishment recorded aboard the Constitution for the next two and a half months occurred a week later, and even that won Bainbridge support from the crew: a seaman named George Mitchell, ashore on liberty, was returned to the ship one afternoon by an army recruiting agent. If Mitchell had just run away he probably would still have had the crew’s sympathy, but attempting to enlist in the rival service, and pocketing the eight-dollar bounty for it, was another matter. “No one could justify him,” Smith said. He got twelve lashes, probably the mildest sentence Bainbridge had ever awarded for such an offense, too mild as far as most of the crew was concerned.