Six Frigates

by Ian W. Toll

  AMERICAN NAVAL HISTORY had begun thirty years earlier, with the American Revolution. It was not a proud beginning. General George Washington and the Continental Army endured and eventually prevailed. The Continental Navy, with few exceptions, was a wasteful and humiliating fiasco.

  In 1775, the Continental Congress, assembled at Philadelphia, appointed a “Marine Committee” and charged its seven members with the task of organizing a navy. The committee met each evening in a private chamber on the second floor of the City Tavern, a block from the Philadelphia waterfront. Huddled in front of a fire, with the noise of a boisterous taproom rising through the floorboards, this handful of audacious neophytes invented the American navy. John Adams, a thirty-nine-year-old delegate from Massachusetts, later remembered these meetings as “the pleasantest part of my Labours for the four Years I spent in Congress,” but he was also painfully aware of the committee’s collective inexperience, not least his own. “It is very odd that I, who have…never thought much of the old ocean, or the dominion of it, should be necessitated to make such inquiries,” he told his good friend Elbridge Gerry. “But it is my fate and my duty, and therefore I must attempt it.”

  From the outset, the committee struggled to reach consensus on the most basic strategic and tactical questions. Would the navy be used to defend the nation’s shores? For convoys? For commerce raiding? To deliver diplomatic ministers to Europe? What kind of ships? Should they be bought or built? How should they be armed and manned? Officers’ commissions were dealt out according to a spoils system in which political influence was more important than seamanship or other pertinent qualifications. Only time and experience would expose the officer who was inept, cowardly, corrupt, or insubordinate, and many of the earliest American naval officers combined several of these qualities. On some ships, drunkenness and desertion were as common among the officers as among the enlisted men. Wardrooms were fractured by rivalries and personal enmity. Lieutenants and midshipmen feuded and dueled and pilfered one another’s personal possessions. European officers who had been cast off from other navies arrived in America and finagled commissions. Influential men lobbied their congressional delegates to take unruly sons and nephews off their hands. Officers feuded publicly, even publishing broadsides against their rivals in the newspapers. Adams remarked that Congress was besieged by officers who were “scrambling for rank and pay like apes for nuts.”

  The first men-of-war to sail under American colors were converted merchant vessels, weakly constructed and easily overwhelmed in action. In late 1775, the committee authorized the construction of thirteen light frigates, based upon designs proposed by two Philadelphia shipwrights, John Wharton and Joshua Humphreys. Because Britain had discouraged the construction of warships in the colonies, American shipbuilders generally lacked relevant experience, and they made costly and time-consuming mistakes. None of the Continental frigates was completed on time, but as it turned out the construction delays did not really matter. Once the ships were launched, they all lay at anchor or dockside for a year or more, awaiting ordnance, rigging, provisions, and crews. Arming them posed a serious problem. Britain had forbidden the manufacture of heavy cannon in the colonies, and there were no domestic foundries capable of smelting, refining, and casting big naval guns. The Continental frigates that did get to sea were often so poorly fitted out that they were quickly forced back into port for repairs. Many were stepped with rotten masts that snapped in a gale. Fine imported English or Russian sailcloth was in short supply, and the navy resorted to hemp and jute-blended sails derisively labeled “Hessians,” which were too heavy to provide driving power in light breezes.

  Critics pointed out that the revolutionary cause would be better served by having no frigates than by having half-completed or damaged frigates lying idle in American harbors. A port-bound frigate had to be guarded against attack by British raiding parties. Washington was exasperated by constant requests for troops to guard the Continental warships. He believed, not unreasonably, that the navy should exist to support the army, and not the reverse. In July 1777, when a British invasion force was advancing toward Philadelphia, he urged that the frigates lying in the Delaware River be scuttled to prevent capture. Congress could not bring itself to swallow such a bitter pill, but the issue was settled when enemy cruisers and gunboats attacked up the Delaware and the Continental Navy’s entire force on the river was destroyed, either by the British or by their own crews. Of the thirteen American frigates built during the Revolution, seven were captured and taken into the Royal Navy, and another four were destroyed to prevent their falling into enemy hands.

  Only in Europe did the rebel navy achieve any degree of success. When France entered the war in 1778, its Channel ports were thrown open to American warships and privateers, providing good bases within a day’s sail of England’s busiest sea-lanes. Benjamin Franklin, serving as American envoy in Paris, pledged to “insult the coasts of the Lords of the Ocean with our little cruisers.” The best-remembered naval hero of the American Revolution was a Scotsman, John Paul Jones, who captained two successful hit-and-run cruises in British coastal waters in 1778 and 1779. Raiding isolated seaports in England and Scotland, taking dozens of prizes, defying the Royal Navy cruisers dispatched to hunt him down, Jones robbed the British people of their sense of peace and security at home. “Paul Jones resembles a Jack O’Lantern, to mislead our marines and terrify our coasts,” said the Morning Post in London: “He is no sooner seen than lost.” He was branded a “desperado,” “a daring pirate,” a “vile fellow.” Jones’s reputation was capped by a truly remarkable naval victory on September 23, 1779. As captain of a converted French Indiaman, the 40-gun Bonhomme Richard, Jones engaged the British 50-gun frigate Serapis off Flamborough Head on the east coast of England. After a close-action battle of four hours, in which the Serapis lost about half her crew, the Englishman surrendered. One of the Richard’s midshipmen said that the surviving men in his division were wearing no more than the collar of their shirts, and that the “flesh of several of them dropped off from their bones and they died in great pain.” The Bonhomme Richard sank before she could be brought into port; Jones transferred his crew into the Serapis and navigated her under American colors into the Texel.

  The American privateering war dealt a heavy blow to British trade. Privateers were privately owned and financed ships of war that were licensed to prey on enemy shipping. Captured vessels and cargoes became the property of the owners, who awarded the officers and crew a share of the prizes taken during each cruise. The Continental Congress and the states distributed about two thousand privateering commissions during the war; a thousand were distributed in Massachusetts alone. The mania for privateering was stimulated by a blend of patriotism and greed, but the latter was understood to dominate. Most American merchants and shipowners transferred their wartime capital into the privateering industry. Swarms of privateers attacked the British supply convoys off the American coast; others cruised the English Channel and sent captured prizes into French ports. The success of their efforts was measured in rising maritime insurance premiums paid by British mercantile interests.

  Americans had their French allies to thank for the decisive naval campaign of the Revolutionary War. A twenty-eight ship fleet under the command of Rear Admiral François de Grasse cut off General Charles Cornwallis’s escape by sea from Yorktown in September 1781, forcing the surrender that effectively brought the war to an end. When a messenger brought Washington the news that de Grasse’s fleet had anchored in Lynnhaven Bay, off Cape Henry, the commander in chief leapt off his horse and waved his hat over his head in celebration. On September 5, off the Virginia Capes, de Grasse’s fleet engaged a British fleet under the command of Admiral Thomas Graves. No ships were captured or sunk on either side, but the British fleet withdrew and returned to New York, abandoning Cornwallis’s army to its fate. The Battle of Virginia Capes, twenty-four years before Trafalgar, was the last time the French would ever defeat the Royal Navy in a major fle
et engagement.

  In the first flush of independence, what little remained of the Continental Navy was taken entirely out of service. The ships were sold at auction, the officers decommissioned, and the men discharged, often without receiving the back pay they were owed. A recently launched battleship, the largest built in America up to that time, was presented as a gift to the French. American seamen went back to their familiar peacetime pursuits on merchant vessels, coasters, and fishing dories. The country was broke and heavily in debt; Congress under the Articles of Confederation had no power to raise funds; the public was weary of war. There was a widespread fear that if the armed forces were permitted to remain intact they might be tempted to seize power and impose a military autocracy on the infant republic. If naval protection was needed, Americans reasoned, their French allies would come to the rescue once again.

  The very last ship in the Continental Navy was the frigate Alliance. “This ship is now a mere Bill of Costs and I do not think we have the Means to fit her out,” wrote Robert Morris, the revolutionary financier who served as Superintendent of Finance in the postwar period. She was sold to a private buyer in 1785 and later abandoned on a mud bar in the Delaware River, where her sagging hulk remained until the 1920s.

  Adams was stung by the magnitude of the failure. “In looking over the long list of vessels belonging to the United States taken and destroyed, and recollecting the whole history of the rise and progress of our navy, it is difficult to avoid tears,” he told a congressional committee in 1780. Vast funds and huge commitments of manpower had been exhausted in the construction, arming, and victualling of warships that never inflicted any serious blow against the enemy. Robert Morris said there was no use keeping a navy afloat if the American people were unwilling to bear the financial burden. “Until Revenues for the Purpose can be obtained it is but vain to talk of Navy or Army or anything else…. Every good American must wish to see the United States possessed of a powerful fleet, but perhaps the best way to obtain one is to make no Effort for the Purpose till the People are taught by their Feelings to call for and require it. They will now give money for Nothing.”

  INDEPENDENCE WAS EXPECTED to open lucrative new markets for shipping and trade. Once free of British taxes and trade restrictions, revolutionary pamphleteers had promised, commerce would boom and Americans would prosper beyond their wildest dreams. In 1778, David Ramsey imagined a postwar world in which American ships would “no longer be confined by the selfish regulations of an avaricious stepdame” but would “follow wherever interest leads the way.” Thomas Paine, in Common Sense, said: “Our plan is commerce, and that, well attended to, will secure us the peace and friendship of all Europe, because it is the interest of all Europe to have America a free port.” American food exports, he added, “will always have a market while eating is the custom of Europe.” The cover of a popular 1782 almanac depicted an allegorical scene entitled “America Triumphant and Britannia in Distress.” America was represented as a woman, sitting on a shore on the left side of the picture. A caption described her as “holding in one hand the Olive branch, inviting the ships of all nations to partake of her commerce; and in the other hand supporting the cap of liberty.” In the harbor at her feet were ships flying the flags of France, Spain, and Holland. On the right side of the picture, sitting on the opposite shore, was Britannia. The harbor at her feet was deserted, and she was “weeping at the loss of the trade of America.”

  These hopes were quickly dashed. American trade had always depended, above all, on access to England’s West Indian colonies. The hungry Caribbean Islands, with their huge slave populations and their narrow economies devoted entirely to cultivation of sugar and coffee, had once consumed more than two thirds of American food exports. In 1783, however, a British Order in Council debarred any American ship from entering any British West Indian seaport. The measure was final, sweeping, and devastating. Cut off from their traditional markets, prices of flour, beef, pork, salted fish, naval stores, bar iron, and other mainstays of the American export economy fell 30, 40, or 50 percent. By 1788, ship arrivals from the British West Indies had fallen to half of what they had been before the Revolution. With Europe at peace, the vast opportunities offered by the wartime carrying trade would not be available until several years later.

  In the seaports, unemployed seamen and shipwrights loitered around the wharves and slept in the streets. Warehouses stood half empty. Entire families threw themselves on the mercy of the churches and poor relief rolls. Creditors foreclosed on homes and farms. A British official said that the New England merchant marine had “suffered more by the Act of Independence than any part of the Country, from the decay of their shipbuilding and the effect which the dismemberment of the Empire has produced on their oil and fish in foreign markets.” With their traditional markets for salted fish cut off, boats that had once fished cod and mackerel on the Grand Bank now rotted on the beaches. An unknown number of New England fishermen emigrated to Nova Scotia, where their catch could be lawfully sold in British markets. “Our West Indies business is ten times worse than it was before the war and God only knows that was bad enough then,” wrote one merchant. “Trade and commerce is almost at a stand.” Merchants called in their debts to inland farmers and forced many into debtor’s jails. In late 1786 in western Massachusetts, rebellious farmers united behind the leadership of Captain Daniel Shays, a veteran of the Revolution. They attacked and shut down debtor’s courts in Northampton, Worcester, Concord, Taunton, and Great Barrington, and eventually stormed a federal arsenal in Springfield. Before “Shays’ Rebellion” was suppressed in 1787, it left many American conservatives wondering whether democratic government was tenable.

  Prior to the Revolution, British merchants had contracted to have their ships built in America, where timber was cheap and plentiful; they would sail for England on their maiden voyages, to be entered into British registry. After the war, British commercial regulations banned the practice. Lumbermen, draftsmen, shipwrights, yard workers, and every class of specialized craftsmen who depended upon shipbuilding were thrown on hard times. A French traveler reported that in the Massachusetts town of Newburyport, three ships were launched in 1788; at the industry peak, sixteen years earlier, there had been ninety. The same traveler found Portsmouth “in ruins, women and children in rags…everything announces decline.” In a petition to Congress, Boston shipwrights complained that the decline of shipbuilding had left “a numerous body of citizens, who were formerly employed in its various departments, deprived of their support and dependence.” The Bostonians warned that agriculture would share the same fate as commerce, “as the impoverished state of our seaports will eventually lessen the demand for the produce of our lands.”

  Enterprising merchants sought out new trading partners in exotic parts of the world. For the first time, ships sailing under the Stars and Stripes were seen in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. In 1785, the Empress of China, a 360-ton New York merchantman, sailed round the Cape of Good Hope to Canton, and returned the following year with a cargo of silks, nankeens, teas, china plate, and cassia. The voyage turned a profit of $37,000 on an investment of $120,000. Many followed in her wake, laden with native North American ginseng for the Chinese market. The Bengali government, still independent, offered most-favored-nation trade status to American ships in the East India Company’s outposts. New markets were found in the Baltic and the Mediterranean. Churchgoing Rhode Island and Massachusetts merchants, their consciences apparently untroubled, outfitted new ships with ring bolts spaced at intervals of a few inches on the lower decks. These specially constructed vessels sailed for the Guinea coast, laden with hogsheads of rum to be bartered for cargoes of human beings.

  A LEADING OBJECTIVE of America’s post-revolutionary foreign policy was to secure access to new export markets. Trade consuls were dispatched to nineteen foreign ports. France offered the greatest hope of replacing the lost British markets, both because of the size of its economy and its colonial empire (especia
lly the French West Indies) and because it remained America’s major ally. In 1784, Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence and wartime governor of Virginia, was appointed as a “Minister Plenipotentiary” and charged with negotiating new commercial treaties with European trading partners. He sailed from Boston in a packet, the Ceres, on July 5, 1784. It was his first time at sea.

  Jefferson was six feet two and a half inches tall, his figure bony and loose-jointed but “well formed, indicating strength, activity, and robust health.” His skin was flushed and freckled; his eyes hazel, his hair reddish-blond. Though he found the nineteen-day transatlantic voyage uncomfortable, Jefferson kept meticulous daily records of latitude and longitude, the direction and strength of the winds, the temperature, and his sightings of gannets, petrels, sheerwaters, sharks, and whales. The Ceres landed at West Cowes on the Isle of Wight; a week later, Jefferson crossed the Channel to Le Havre in a small boat, sleeping in a cabin that he could enter only by crawling on his hands and knees under a low beam.