Canandaigua, for some reason, became the focal point of several major court cases in the early years of our republic. Handsome young man-about-town Philip Spencer was a Canandigua boy who became the unhappy star of one such proceeding, even though it happened far from home.
By all reports Philip was a charming and persuasive teenager, one whose wealthy and influential parents and grandparents were always getting out of scrapes. I think of him as a country club boy, deferential to the adults in their presence but instigator of pranks and even of little crimes behind their backs. He didn’t last long at what’s now Hobart, or at Union College, before the authorities bounced him out.
Dad secured him a midshipman’s commission in the navy… an “almost-an-officer” rank in which you’d get training and experience to become commissioned. Successive dissatisfied captains bounced him from ship to ship in a “shunt the crud” maneuver until he wound up in the South Atlantic on USS Somers as part of a midshipman’s cruise, designed to break these young gentlemen in with practical experience.
It shouldn’t be any surprise to hear that Philip wasn’t enthusiastic for responsible life aboard a ship of war, far from the pleasures of Rio or even Canandaigua. Before long he was regaling shipmates with visions of what HE would do if HE were in charge of the ship, rather than their stodgy old captain (not that he had any qualifications at all to do so). With several enlisted men he began to sketch out a scheme to seize the ship and begin a life as pirates.
Can they possibly have been serious? Or was this just youthful high-jinks games playing? In the end it didn’t matter. The captain got wind of it, seized Philip and several enlisted men, and even found a paper Philip had written in Greek listing crewmen likely to be sympathetic, and assignments for the takeover. There was no trial – only a conference of officers on December 1, 1842 – and with no further ado nineteen year-old Philip Spencer, along with two of his co-conspirators, was hanged from the yardarm, after which their bodies were pitched into the sea.
This seems excessive to us, and perhaps it was – BUT consider that in those days there was no communication at all back to home. Mutiny was always a possibility, and the captain had no backup at all, except for his own officers (IF he could trust them) and whatever men remained loyal. It’s possible… maybe not likely… that had Philip’s plans matured, a blood bath would have followed. It’s also possible, given his track record, that he’d have fouled things up, or even just lost interest.
Even so, once Somers returned to New York City news raced across a shocked nation, and the reaction from Washington, D.C. was volcanic. Philip’s father was secretary of war in the President’s cabinet, and this affair was not going to go away.
After extensive testimony a naval board of inquiry backed the captain, but public furor remained so hot that Captain Mackenzie demanded a full court-martial to clear his name. He won on a technicality (a split decision meant that the charges against him were rejected), but the public never forgave him. James Fenimore Cooper, who had been a midshipman himself, was furious, and Herman Melville, who had a cousin on board, probably drew from the case in writing Billy Budd.
Whether or not he deserved hanging, and whether or not that drumhead not-quite-court-martial was justified, Midshipman Philip Spencer had definitely tried to suborn mutiny. Both the midshipman’s cruise and the method of appointing midshipmen were in thorough disrepute, and in 1845 the U.S. Naval Academy opened at Annapolis. Four years of rigorous training and instruction were now the route to a naval commission. The navy, and the nation, were far the better for it. In a back-handed way, it may have been thanks in part to Philip Spencer.