 In a war that reached new lows for historical accuracy sacrificed in the name of patriotic fever, accounts of Shannon's victory would be ascribed to many reasons. Very few of these took into account that Lawrence had rushed into a fight with an untrained and unprepared crew for what awaited him. Theodore Roosevelt would later state this plainly, lambasting former American "history writers" while doing so. In less than 2 minutes Shannon's crew had taken horrible losses and did not break, while Chesapeake's crew did. Unfortunately for Lawrence, he did not meet an average British frigate of this point in the long wars, undermanned and with many men aboard who were not real seamen, but a frigate with a crew at the highest pitch of training, led by an expert in naval gunnery. It has been said of Shannon, that "a more destructive vessel of her force had probably never existed in the history of naval warfare".
