Six Frigates

by Ian W. Toll

  The tactics employed by the Algerian corsairs against merchantmen were simple, effective, and brutal. They sailed lateen-rigged ships, xebecs, polacres, and feluccas that were fast enough to overtake most prey under sail, but could also be rowed in a calm. Running down a fleeing merchantman, they dropped their long lateen yards across the victim’s rail. Ferocious men armed with pistols and cutlasses swarmed aboard and slaughtered any who resisted. The captives were beaten, stripped, and chained together belowdecks, and then returned to Algiers, where they were imprisoned or sold into slavery.

  The Algerians allowed some of the captured Americans to write home, perhaps in the hope of obtaining ransoms from their families. David Pierce had been master of the schooner Jay of Colchester, captured in the Atlantic, four days out of Malaga and bound for Boston with a cargo of raisins, figs, grapes, and wine. “On our landing,” he wrote,

  we were all put into Chains without the least distinction and put to hard labor from daylight until night with only the allowance of two small black loaves and water & close confined at night…. When they boarded us they even took the clothes from our backs & brought us on board almost naked in this situation they put us into the Cable Tier without any thing, not even a blanket to Cover us where we remained until our arrival here without even a shirt to shift us. Death would be a great relief & more welcome than a continuance of our present situation…. We think ourselves happy if we escape through the day being beat by our driver, who carries a stick big enough to Knock a man down, and the innocent often suffer with the guilty as they say we are all Christians.

  American vessels had once been ubiquitous in the Mediterranean. Now, in a matter of weeks, they vanished. Seamen who had braved the most awesome winter gales the North Atlantic had to offer were paralyzed by the fear of enslavement in North Africa. Vessels bound for the Straits of Gibraltar could not be manned at any rate of pay. Maritime insurance premiums doubled and then tripled, U.S. government bond prices collapsed, and merchant houses were bankrupted.

  The closing of the Mediterranean to American commerce was a particularly bitter setback because Europe, in 1793, was once again at war—and war, as always, brought the hope of windfall profits. There was intense demand for imported foodstuffs and naval stores beyond the Straits of Gibraltar. Tens of thousands of British soldiers and sailors were posted at bases in Gibraltar, Minorca, Malta, and Sicily, and their supply officers would pay generously for “all manner of eatables and drinkables.” Great fortunes were there to be made. “If we had but the free navigation of the Mediterranean,” David Humphreys lamented, “what an extensive market would be open for our produce!”

  Some Americans saw evidence of English treachery. Britain’s merchant interests regarded Americans and other neutrals as economic rivals to be foiled by any means necessary. The British government had mediated the October truce between Portugal and Algiers, which had allowed the Algerines to break out of the Mediterranean. English diplomats had reportedly gone so far as to lobby Queen Maria of Portugal to deny naval convoys to American vessels. The combined powers appeared to be setting up a proxy war against American commerce. “England and Spain seem to be plotting in what way they can most effectually clip our Eagle’s Wings,” wrote Edward Church. “They are both extremely envious of her soaring.”

  NEWS OF THE CAPTURES appeared in the Philadelphia newspapers in mid-December. As Christmas and New Year’s came and went, and the winter ice closed the river to navigation, the Algerian emergency commanded the city’s rapt attention.

  In 1793, Philadelphia was to the United States as London was to England or Paris was to France: simultaneously the nation’s political, economic, and cultural capital. With a population of some fifty thousand, it was by far the largest city in North America. In the English-speaking world, only London was larger. Travelers agreed that Philadelphia had America’s best theaters, libraries, inns, and taverns. It was home to the nation’s most eminent scientists, philanthropists, poets, physicians, and artists. Its newspapers were the most famous, or the most infamous, but in either case the most widely circulated. Behind paned windows overhung with brightly colored awnings, its rows and rows of shops displayed the greatest variety of imported luxuries. Its real estate was the most expensive on the continent. In contrast to the gloomy, labyrinthine alleyways of New York and Boston, Philadelphia’s streets were broad, sunny, and straight, intersecting at right angles to form a perfectly symmetrical rectilinear grid. They were paved with cobblestones and shaded by precisely spaced trees, and at night they were lighted by four-paned whale-oil lamps erected on elegant wrought-iron poles. High walkways paved with brick or flagstones allowed women to go out on foot without collecting filth on the hems of their dresses. Many of the more lavish row houses were adjoined by private gardens planted with rose bushes, azaleas, magnolias, or English ivy. Wallpaper, ice cellars, walk-in closets, and indoor lavatories were luxuries only the rich could afford, so the rich made a point of having them.

  Philadelphia was a multicultural, multi-religious, polyglot society, and by eighteenth-century standards the city was uncommonly tolerant of its own diversity. Journeymen and mechanics in leather aprons and homespun jackets shared the sidewalks with expensively dressed merchants, lawyers, and clergymen. Fifth-generation Anglos co-existed comfortably with newly arrived Palantine Germans, Swedes, Welsh, Scots-Irish, Irish, and French royalist exiles. Free blacks, American Indians, buckskin-clad frontiersmen, and dangerous-looking sailors did not warrant a second glance.

  Most important, Philadelphia was the seat of the federal government. Four and a half years had passed since the ratification of the Constitution, and George Washington was commencing his second term as president of the United States. His opulent cream-colored carriage, drawn by six white horses and attended by four footmen in livery, was a familiar sight in the streets of the city. Serving in his administration were several of the ranking statesmen of the founding generation, a circle that later came to be known, collectively, as “the founding fathers.” John Adams was the first vice president, Thomas Jefferson the first Secretary of State, Alexander Hamilton the first Secretary of the Treasury, and former Continental Army general Henry Knox the first Secretary of War. Congress met in a plain two-story red brick building known as Congress Hall, just west of the Pennsylvania State House on Chestnut Street between Fifth and Sixth. The two buildings were adjoined by a public yard where, in mild weather, the senators and representatives lounged on benches or napped in the shade of a weeping willow. The yard was enclosed by a seven-foot brick wall broken only by a high arched gate that opened onto Walnut Street, and faced the ominous edifice of the Walnut Street prison.

  Even before the Algerian captures, the president and his advisers had worried about the nation’s ability to defend itself in what seemed to be an increasingly lawless world. The French Revolution, now entering its fourth year, had taken a savage and radical turn. King Louis XVI, whose troops, ships, and money had helped America win its independence, had been guillotined in Paris on January 21, 1793, his severed head brandished before a jeering mob. Shortly thereafter, leaders of the radical faction known as the Jacobins seized power and began a bloody campaign of terror against their domestic enemies. That same month, news arrived from Europe that Great Britain, Spain, and the Netherlands had declared war against France with the avowed purpose of restoring the Bourbons to the throne. The entire continent was mobilizing for war.

  Even at that early date, in the fall of 1793, it was evident that this new war would be something unprecedented in European history. The conflict between Revolutionary France and its enemies would be, arguably, the first true world war—a war fought on many continents and many oceans. It would be a test of strength between irreconcilable political philosophies. When the fighting was finished, Europe would be ruled either entirely by revolutionaries or entirely by monarchs. It would be longer and more savage than the earlier imperial wars of the eighteenth century, foreshadowing a future in which conflicts would be fo
ught not between kings and their armies, but between and against entire peoples.

  Washington had embraced a policy of strict neutrality, embodied in his historically famous “Neutrality Proclamation” of April 1793. Neutrality may have been the only realistic choice for a nation with seven hundred farm boys in uniform and not a single armed ship afloat. On the other hand—and this is the largely forgotten dimension of Washington’s policy—there was everything to be gained from allowing the nation’s merchant marine to flourish in the wartime carrying trade. Northern merchants would prosper and southern planters would command better prices for their exportable produce. Surging customs duties would generate revenue for the federal government, which was essential to the entire fiscal and economic program crafted by Alexander Hamilton.

  And yet, in the late months of 1793, it was not clear that neutrality could even be managed. Neither the French nor the British were wholly satisfied with American neutrality, and each preyed upon American shipping under the pretense of blocking shipments of wartime contraband to enemy ports. War brought chaos, especially on the high seas, where lawlessness was endemic; American vessels were increasingly at the mercy of any sea robber who wished to prey upon them. New reports of captures by British, French, and Algerian ships poured in all at once. By land, reports of Indian attacks on frontier settlements (presumably incited by Great Britain) gave the impression that the western frontiers were crumbling. It was hardly far-fetched to imagine that Philadelphia could be invaded and occupied by redcoats, as it had just fifteen years earlier. In a world at war, it seemed, American defenselessness would only provoke aggression. Hamilton’s warning in Federalist No. 11 now loomed as prophecy: “A nation, despicable by its weakness, forfeits even the privilege of being neutral.”

  BEFORE THE ALGERIAN CRISIS, there had not been much serious talk of building a navy. Even proponents tended to accept the judgment that the federal government, still groaning under the weight of its Revolutionary War debts, could not afford one. The administration’s only tangible proposal had been to organize American seamen into a kind of naval militia—“to register all actual seamen, and to render those of a certain age amenable to service, if demanded within a given period.” But Congress had not even acted on that half-step. In a typical pre-1793 resolution, the Senate endorsed the idea of a new American navy—but only “as soon as the state of the public finances will admit.”

  News of the Algerian attacks changed the politics of the issue in one stroke. On January 2, 1794, a closely divided House enacted a resolution proclaiming that “a naval force adequate to the protection of the commerce of the United States, against the Algerine corsairs, ought to be provided.” A select committee was appointed to study the intelligence reports and determine what class of warships should be built. The committee, weighted with congressmen from northern seaports who were themselves merchants and ship owners, reported its findings on January 20:

  By the best information the committee could obtain, it appears that the naval force of the Algerines consists of light vessels, of different size and force…carrying in the whole two hundred and eighty-two guns…. The vessels (except two or three) are slenderly built, smaller in size than vessels belonging to the Christian Powers, carrying the same number of guns, and principally manned with people little accustomed to the management of large ships.

  Concluding that a small squadron should be more than adequate to deal with Algiers, the committee recommended that Congress appropriate funds to acquire a squadron of six warships. The estimated cost of construction, victualling, and three months’ pay for officers and crew was $600,000. It was an estimate that would seem preposterous in retrospect.

  House debate on the proposed squadron began on February 16 and dominated the chamber’s attention for a month. The debate was remarkable for its scope and complexity, ranging across diplomacy and foreign affairs, military strategy and tactics, fiscal policy and taxes, the benefits of foreign trade, and the meaning of national honor. It exposed, along the way, fundamental questions about America’s national identity. Should the United States build a navy? Should it join the Europeans in paying protection money to the Barbary States? Or should the commercial maritime interests be left to fend for themselves? Would a navy bankrupt the country? Would it plunge the nation into Europe’s war? Shouldn’t America instead channel its resources and energies into internal development?

  Congress was not yet divided along formal party lines. The very concept of a political party had not yet become respectable. But the ideological schism that lay beneath the party system had already opened, and every member knew it. Individual senators and congressmen were lining up behind one or the other of the two dominant personalities in Washington’s cabinet, Secretary of State Jefferson and Treasury Secretary Hamilton, who cordially hated one another and took the opposing sides of every important issue that came before the president. The followers of Hamilton called themselves “Federalists,” a term that had its origins in the constitutional debates. The followers of Jefferson were beginning to get comfortable with the term “Republicans” and in time they would embrace it as a party label.*

  Although Jefferson was recognized as the ultimate leader of the Republicans, James Madison was in fact the party’s chief organizer, tactician, and the source of much of its energy. He was a third-term member of the House, and although the congressional leadership system had not yet emerged, there was no doubt that he controlled the Republican voting bloc in the House and possibly in the Senate as well. Madison and the Republicans argued that a navy was hopelessly unaffordable to a nation still groaning under the weight of its Revolutionary War debts. Once started, they warned, a navy would become a self-feeding organism, demanding greater and greater sums as it grew. Even Alexander Hamilton, in Federalist No. 34, had asserted that fourteen of every fifteen shillings in taxes collected in Great Britain was required to service the national debt it had run up to support its navy. The French Revolution had been preceded by a financial crisis brought about, in large part, by the cost of the ancien régime’s vast naval establishment. Like the European naval powers, they argued, the United States would be forced to levy higher taxes on its people. Wasn’t that what had caused the American Revolution?

  The Republicans were obsessed with restraining the size and reach of the federal government, and their campaign against the navy was one face of that obsession. Government institutions were in Federalist hands and therefore a source of Federalist influence and patronage. As the partisan rupture widened, Republicans began to speak fearfully of the growth of a Federalist military establishment—of row after row of party loyalists in uniform and under arms. With the memory of marauding British troops so fresh in mind, the revolutionary generation felt a deep loathing for standing armies. While a navy could never pose an equivalent threat to inland farms and homes and villages, it was not difficult to imagine boats loaded with heavily armed sailors and marines descending upon rebellious coastal regions and occupying the seaports.

  Regarding militarism as the close cousin of despotism, Republicans were inclined to regard navies as the playthings of kings and tyrants. William Maclay, the Republican senator from Pennsylvania, who was an ardent anti-navy man, kept a detailed and frequently acerbic running commentary on the debate in his private journal. “This thing of a fleet has been working among our members all the session,” he grumbled. “I have heard it break out often.” He was convinced the Federalists were exaggerating the danger in order to maneuver the Congress into a declaration of war, for “war is often entered into to answer domestic, not foreign purposes.” Maclay detested the thought that Americans might “forego our republican innocence, and, like all other nations, set apart a portion of our citizens for the purpose of inflicting misery on our fellow mortals. This practice is felony to posterity.”

  Early congressional debates were notoriously chaotic. Members leapt to their feet in no particular order, launching new lines of argument, rebutting opinions that had been offered day
s or weeks earlier, or reiterating arguments that had already been presented. Even so, the Federalist performance in the navy debate was far more disciplined and coordinated than that of their rivals.

  The first part of the pro-navy case was grounded in the simple arithmetic of costs and benefits. The Republicans had objected to the cost of building a navy, but what did they have to say about the cost of not building one? Protecting the sea-lanes, argued the Federalists, was in the entire nation’s interest. In the spring of 1794, marine insurance premiums on ships sailing for transatlantic destinations had risen to 25 percent of the total value of ship and cargo. This would impose an additional cost on trade of some $2 million per year. The burden would be carried not just by merchants, but by farmers who exported their produce and by consumers of imported goods. Take the case of salt, said the Federalists. The threat of piracy would raise the cost of imported salt by at least a dollar and as much as two dollars per bushel. In the first year alone the added costs would equal three to six times the total cost of the proposed squadron. The Federalists’ second thrust was a rousing appeal to national honor, and this was the feature of their argument that had the most rhetorical power and the most resonance beyond the capital. Didn’t the Republicans have any national pride? Hadn’t America recently won a war against the most powerful nation on earth?