Author’s Note: Courage rarely announces itself. It forms through risk, resistance, and consequence long before history chooses names to remember. The Courage They Didn’t Teach moves decade by decade from the mid-1700s onward, setting aside hero worship to focus on moments when retreat looked safer but resolve demanded sacrifice. Please note that, since these people weren't readily celebrated, historical information may be light at times.
Each entry follows one life that faced danger, opposition, or erasure and stood firm without promise of reward. Some endured violence in the open. Others absorbed pressure in silence. Together, these stories show courage as a skill shaped by striving and refined long before applause, if applause comes at all.
As anybody who's aware of PT boats in World War II and Vietnam knows, a small boat in shallow water still troubles a warship. It slides where deep hulls can't go, vanishes behind bends, and returns when larger guns expect silence.
Joshua Barney understood water like a farmer understood weather, knowing the Chesapeake's creeks, shoals, and narrow turns; and in 1814 he used them against the greatest naval power on earth.
Joshua Barney:1759-1818
Barney had earned his scars long before British forces came for Washington. Born near Baltimore in 1759, he went to sea as a boy, joined the fight during the American Revolution, and survived a brutal education in capture, seizure, and command. From the Naval History and Heritage Command:
Joshua Barney was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on 6 July 1759, and died in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1 December 1818, having served with distinction in the Navy during both the American Revolution and the War of 1812.
In February 1776, as master’s mate of Hornet, he took part in Commodore Hopkins’s descent upon New Providence. Later he served on Wasp and was made a lieutenant for gallantry in the action between that vessel and the British brig Tender. While serving on Andrew Doria, he took a prominent part in the defense of the Delaware River. Lieutenant Barney was taken prisoner several times and several times exchanged. In 1779, he was again taken prisoner and was imprisoned in Hill Prison in England until his escape in 1781. In 1782, he was put in command of the Pennsylvania ship, Hyder Ally, in which he captured the British ship, General Monk, a vessel of far heavier guns than his own. He was given command of his prize and sailed for France with dispatches for Benjamin Franklin, returning with the information that peace had been declared.
A man like Barney didn't romanticize danger; he had lived too close to it.
By the War of 1812, Barney had already served his country at sea, served in the French navy, and returned home with a reputation for nerve. British raids along the Chesapeake exposed a painful weakness: the United States had few large ships available there, and the capital sat well within reach of enemy movement through the bay and rivers.
Barney proposed a rough, practical answer: shallow-draft gunboats that could harass British ships, guard local waterways, and fight where big vessels struggled.
The Chesapeake Flotilla formed in 1813 to protect key ports and waterways. Under Barney's command, it included barges, gunboats, and the flagship USS Scorpion. The force could never match the Royal Navy ship for ship, but Barney didn't need symmetry: he needed time, irritation, and enough firepower to make British officers pay attention. From the Naval History and Heritage Command:
Despite the optimistic vision, the hasty construction and lack of testing of the flotilla led to problems very early on. The main force of the flotilla quickly found itself bound up the Patuxent River, and eventually driven into the safety of the even shallower St. Leonard’s Creek by British vessels Dragon and St. Lawrence. After two engagements with the British, and the scuttling of gun boats 137 and 138, Barney was able to regain access into the main channel of the Patuxent River but still not reach the Chesapeake proper. The flotilla spent the remainder of the summer being pushed further and further up the river.
Learning of an impending British attack on Washington, Jones ordered Barney to bring the majority of his men to Washington and send the remainder of the flotilla upriver, and scuttle it if necesaary to prevent capture by the British. Leaving one-hundred and twenty men to handle the flotilla, Barney and approximately four hundred men headed to Washington for the Battle of Bladensburg. British reports indicate that sixteen of the seventeen ships that made up Barney’s flotilla had been destroyed, and only one was captured. While Barney’s initial vision of the flotilla as an offensive, harassing force that would push the Royal Navy out of the Chesapeake did not come to fruition, the mere presence of the flotilla did help divert British attention away from other targets in the bay.
In June 1814, his little fleet tangled with British forces near St. Leonard's Creek and earned the nickname “mosquito fleet” because it kept stinging a much larger enemy.
The British wanted Barney's boats gone. Rear Admiral George Cockburn, one of the hard-driving British commanders in the Chesapeake campaign, pressed to destroy the flotilla. From the White House Historical Association:
Barney's specialty was to launch swift attacks on large British vessels in the Chesapeake, then move his ships into the shallower water of the Patuxent, where the British could not follow him.
On June 1 Barney's force left the Patuxent; its goal was the Potomac, but British ships soon closed up the Patuxent's mouth. When the British warships came into view and attacked Barney's gunboats, Barney withdrew two miles upriver to St. Leonard's Creek.
The British realized that naval warfare in the Patuxent could only be conducted by barges and small boats, and on June 10 they sent barges up St. Leonard's Creek to attack Barney's force. Barney counter-attacked, immobilizing the British schooner St. Lawrence, and the British had to run the St. Lawrence ashore. However, the British did land troops on the banks of the Patuxent as Barney had no assistance from the local militia—the British had warned that they would burn any abandoned homes.
In an effort to lure Barney out of St. Leonard's Creek, a British force commanded by Capt. Robert Barrie of the 74-gun ship-of-the-line HMS Dragon spent June 5-June 16 pillaging Benedict, Calverton, Huntingtown, Lower Marlboro and Prince Frederick, Maryland, but Barney refused to be drawn out of the creek and did not respond.
Barney's vessels became trapped up the Patuxent River near Pig Point. Rather than let them fall into British hands, the Americans destroyed them; the boats died as fighting tools, but Barney and his men weren't finished.
Barney and his sailors marched toward Bladensburg, where American forces tried to stop the British advance on Washington on Aug. 24, 1814. Much of the defense collapsed, militia units broke, confusion spread, and the road to the capital opened. From the National Parks Service:
The opposing troops clashed just west of Bladensburg on August 24, 1814, in three hours of intense fighting. Though superior in number, most of the American defensive forces were poorly trained, ill-equipped, and positioned so the lines could not support one another. They were no match for the seasoned British army.
The British stormed the bridge and, after one failed attempt, crossed the river and pushed the Americans back. The first defensive line folded into the second, and soon confusion and panic swept through the American ranks.
Only the third defensive line made a heroic stand. There, Commodore Joshua Barney, along with about 400 flotillamen, 114 US Marines and militiamen, held off the British advance until the defenders were outflanked and their commander, Barney, was wounded.
President James Madison and several cabinet members were on the field of battle that day. Seeing the start of an American rout, they beat a hasty retreat to Washington, sending word ahead to First Lady Dolley Madison and others to save what possessions they could and flee.
That night the British victors occupied the nation’s capital and destroyed most of the public buildings. The defeat at Bladensburg and the enemy occupation of the capital made August 24 the darkest day of the war for the United States.
Barney's flotilla men and Marines stood with their guns and kept firing. His units delivered one of the few steady American performances of the day.
The stand ended the way most last stands end. Barney was wounded in the thigh while British troops overran the position. He was captured again, old enough by then to have chosen comfort, yet still stubborn enough to meet disaster from the front.
The capital burned after Bladensburg, and nothing written about Barney should fictionalize that his courage saved Washington.
Courage doesn't always win the field; sometimes it simply refuses to leave the field empty.
Barney died in Pittsburgh in 1818 while traveling west, after a life spent crossing water, prison walls, battle lines, and national moods. From the National Parks Service:
In a show of commitment to his men, Barney attempted to get a congressional bill passed that would award them compensation for their service and the loss of their belongings. But the bill failed, infuriating Barney, and a subsequent order for his men to raise the sunken barges they had abandoned only added insult to injury.
When Barney resigned at the end of the war, he was 55 years old and living with chronic pain from the musket ball lodged deep in his leg. His thoughts turned towards Kentucky, where he had purchased 50,000 acres as a young man.
Barney had visited Kentucky over the years, dreaming of eventually settling there. After selling the Elkridge farm, Barney finally set off with his family for Elizabethtown, Kentucky, in the fall of 1818, but they only made it as far as Pittsburgh. The arduous journey and difficult traveling conditions caused Barney’s leg injury to flare up, and by the time they reached Pittsburgh, he was close to death.
Joshua Barney died on December 1, 1818, finally succumbing after a lifetime of perilous pursuits and honorable service to his country.
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His name never became as bright as Andrew Jackson's or Oliver Hazard Perry's, and no easy slogan carried him into every schoolbook.
Yet his War of 1812 record deserves a place in the country's memory. He brought an old sailor's skill to a young nation's weak point, then stood with his men when the safer road led away from the guns.
That small boat in shallow water can't stop every storm, but it can still force the storm to reckon with it. Barney's flotilla vanished from the river, and Washington still burned, but the old commodore left behind a harder kind of victory: proof that courage can hold its post even when history hands it no parade.
Next up in the series: William Henry Harrison
William Henry Harrison steps forward next. Before the presidency, the campaign slogans, and the short final chapter in the White House, Harrison played a major role in the War of 1812's western theater.
At the Battle of the Thames in 1813, Harrison led American forces in a fight that ended in Tecumseh's death and broke the power of the British-Native alliance in the Old Northwest. His later fame blurs the earlier story, but his wartime record deserves attention.
Other columns in this series
- Franklin Before the Break
- The Woman Who Printed the Names
- The Man Who Refused to Stay Quiet
- Measured by the Stars
- Courage Measured in Seconds
- Margaret Corbin’s Stand Under Fire
- Hidden in Plain Sight—Deborah Sampson
- The Man Who Listened
- A 16-Year-Old Against an Army
- The Shot That Steadied a Revolution
- Mum Bett and the Law
- Phillis Wheatley and the Cost of Freedom
- Ona Judge Chose Freedom Over Comfort
- Richard Allen, A Faith That Wouldn’t Sit in the Balcony
- John Fitch: Steam Before the Spotlight
- The Night Dolley Madison Refused to Run
- Tecumseh, the Shawnee Who Refused to Think Small
- Prudence Crandall’s Classroom Rebellion
- Maria Stewart Refused the Silence
- David Walker Lit the Fuse Slaveholders Feared
- Thomas Macdonough and the Victory That Stopped Britain Cold
- Mary Pickersgill Stitched the Flag Before America Had the Song
