Sea of Glory

and accolade he might desire.
    The navy had also changed in the last four years. Reform was in the air. Secretary of the Navy Upshur had vowed to protect junior officers suffering under a captain’s immoderate and tyrannical rule. Just a few months before he had restored to duty a lieutenant who had been put under arrest by Commodore Charles Morgan of the Mediterranean Squadron. Both Lieutenant Robert Pinkney and Surgeon Charles Guillou claimed that Wilkes was guilty of far worse outrages against his officers. Subjecting the leader of the Ex. Ex. to an extensive court-martial proceeding would not only serve Upshur’s agenda within the department, it would make it difficult, if not impossible, for Wilkes to trumpet the findings that the Tyler administration wanted kept under wraps.
    Wilkes, however, was determined that the Expedition—and, of course, himself—would get the recognition they deserved. As it so happened, on the very day he arrived in Washington, there was a meeting scheduled of the newly created National Institute for the Promotion of Science. Spearheaded by former secretary of war Joel Poinsett, the man who had chosen Wilkes to command the Expedition, the National Institute, a forerunner of the Smithsonian Institution, had been awarded custody of the Expedition’s collections. Wilkes had joined the Institute by mail during the voyage, and he now realized that the organization might provide him with a way to circumvent the Tyler administration. Wilkes hurriedly made his way to the meeting, where Poinsett enthusiastically heralded his return and proposed that he deliver a lecture about the voyage later in the month.
    In the days ahead, Wilkes began to marshal support from influential Democrats while formally announcing his return to the Tyler administration. He had already been counseled by his brother-in-law in New York to control his emotions as best he could. “Let Charles by all means keep cool,” James Renwick wrote Jane. “His friends will be sufficiently indignant, he must conciliate.” But when Wilkes first met Secretary Upshur, he was anything but conciliatory. “[The secretary’s] reception of me was very cold,” he wrote. “He never offered to shake hands with me, nor requested me to take a seat. I felt indignant at such treatment and my spirit rose.” Wilkes proceeded to take a seat, and as he launched into a furious soliloquy condemning the action that the Navy Department had taken against him, Upshur sat silently in his chair, nervously taking off and putting back on his reading glasses. Wilkes ended his diatribe by warning Upshur that he was about to lose “the brightest feather he could put into his bonnet” if he continued on this course. Immediately following the meeting, Wilkes wrote Upshur requesting that a general court of inquiry be called to investigate his conduct during the Expedition. He knew that if he could win a favorable result in the more informal circumstances of a court of inquiry, his case would never go to trial.
    He had also been advised to appeal directly to the White House. “As to the President,” Renwick cautioned, “he can be counseled and not driven.” But once again, Wilkes’s attempts at diplomacy failed miserably. On the evening he called on the president, Wilkes found Tyler with a dozen of his cronies, seated around a fireplace, squirting tobacco juice into the fire. “I was literally struck [dumb] with surprise to find myself in such a company at the President’s House,” he wrote. “It was exactly like a Virginia or North Carolina bar room, and after the chair was brought forward, the President said, ‘be seated, Sir,’ and this was all the recognition I got of my presence.” Wilkes was convinced that Tyler had no idea who he was; either that or he was “determined to ignore all that had anything to do with the Expedition.” Seething with hurt and anger, Wilkes excused himself from the room.
    He next sought out John Quincy Adams. Although no Democrat, Adams had been a supporter of the Expedition from the very beginning; he was also a trustee of the National Institute, and Wilkes poured out his soul to the seventy-five-year-old congressman and former president. He told Adams that Tyler’s and Upshur’s reception had “overpowered him; and all the anxieties and cares and sufferings of the whole [four] years were as nothing to the anguish he had endured within the last five days.” He also complained that while he had been