| Chapter 1: | Educating Stockton |
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Yet each time he disobeyed, Nelson knew he was balancing on a razor's edge, for, as he observed, “if I had not succeeded, I might have been broke.”45
Stockton seems to have imbibed this “creative disobedience” lesson from Nelson all too deeply, and, early on, he earned the reputation as the navy's problem child for his own numerous acts of “creative disobedience.” In his first shipboard command in 1821, Stockton violated international maritime law by capturing ships of nations not at war with the U.S. Stockton (?) dismissed such charges even when they landed him in a Supreme Court trial, because he believed that his own understanding of the higher “laws of nations” against slavery allowed him to ignore international maritime law.
Care for Subordinates
Along with creative disobedience, Stockton may also have picked up from Nelson his care for his men, demonstrated by Nelson's unusual loathing of flogging by the cat-o’-nine-tails, the most common method of discipline aboard a man-of-war at the time. Nelson argued that flogging could ruin a good man and would only harden the troublemakers. Tradition held that Nelson never ordered a flogging.46 Following Nelson's lead, Stockton's second biography reported that he took his own unusual step of publicly “burying the cat[-o’-nine-tails]” as soon as he was given independent command in 1821. Stockton's “burying the cat” was reportedly a first for the U.S. Navy.47