He had the misfortune to become famous as the Republican congressman caught pissing in the British ambassador’s fireplace

From the excellent Perilous Fight by Stephen Budiansky, an account of the naval aspects of the War of 1812. Page 260.

But Porter’s combativeness had none of the wounded or defensive self-justification that so ate at the spirit of his friend Bainbridge. Porter was as jealous for honor, rank, and money as any of his naval colleagues and carried on feuds with the best of them but seemed to find an outlet for his feelings in extroverted brashness rather than festering resentment. He thought dueling “a practice that disgraces human nature,” and he had the energetic and at times fierce intellect of a self-educated man, which had served him well in his fourteen years since joining the navy in 1798 as an eighteen-year-old midshipman. He came from a seafaring family and had sailed with his merchant captain father out of Baltimore from an early age; keenly aware of his educational shortcomings, he had applied himself tirelessly throughout his life to make up for it. As a prisoner in Tripoli he had studied French well enough to read, write, and speak the language competently, had worked at drawing and become a talented pen-and-ink artist, and had read history. He would later write the finest literary work of the war, his account of his cruise in the Essex, a book whose unguarded openness gave ample ammunition to his English detractors for years afterward but whose vitality came directly from not only its guilelessness but its restless intelligence. Where Bainbridge was reduced to stuttering in moments of emotional upheaval, Porter poured out prose and hatched ideas. His marriage in 1808 to the seventeen-year-old daughter of William Anderson—he was the Pennsylvania tavern keeper who a few years later had the misfortune to become famous as the Republican congressman caught pissing in the British ambassador’s fireplace—was marked by the same tempestuous energy; they had ten children, and many unhappy confrontations, over the years.