Six Frigates

by Ian W. Toll

  When the House vote was cast on March 10, 1794, an Act to Provide a Naval Armament passed by a margin of 50–39. Passage in the Senate followed quickly on a voice vote and Washington signed it into law on March 27. The act authorized the War Office either to buy or build six frigates. Four would be rated for 44 guns and two for 36 guns. The bill set the numbers, grades, and ratings of officers and men, laid out details of pay and rations, and gave the president authority to appoint six captains, each of whom would supervise the construction and launch of one ship. The then-colossal sum of $688,888 was appropriated to fund the program.

  Republicans managed to work their will in one respect. They added a provision stipulating that the sole purpose of the frigates was to police the Mediterranean against piracy. Should a truce be successfully negotiated with Algiers, the building program would come to an immediate standstill and the navy, such as it was, would cease to exist.

  The House did not vote on strict party lines. Several Republicans from northern coastal and urban districts, where pro-navy sentiment was strong, cast their votes with the Federalists. The result hinted at the latent rivalry between North and South, but also at the antagonism in every part of the country between the maritime seaboard and the agrarian interior. Even so, these two embryonic political parties had found, in the navy, a hard ideological line to divide and define them. The Federalists had become (and would remain) the party of the navy. Republicans had embraced anti-navalism as a core ideology, and a generation would pass before they began to change their minds.

  Among the 39 “no” votes recorded on March 10 was that of the de facto Republican floor leader, James Madison. This was one of those twists of historical fate that often passes unnoticed. If the Virginian had found another 6 votes, he would have blocked construction of the same six frigates that would play such a momentous part in his own presidency, twenty years later.

  CONGRESS HAD ACTED; the authorization had been given; very large sums of money were ready to be poured out of the federal treasury. All eyes now turned to Secretary of War Henry Knox, whose office would bear the principal responsibility for getting the frigates built and launched.

  Knox, who had started out in life as the proprietor of a Boston bookshop, had served under Washington as the Continental Army’s chief artillery officer in the early days of the Revolution, rising eventually to the rank of major general. He had pulled off one of the most important logistical feats of the early Revolution in the winter of 1776, when he oversaw the transport of fifty-nine heavy cannon from Fort Ticonderoga, on Lake Champlain, to Boston. The guns were dragged on sleds, mile by bitter mile, over the Berkshire Hills. When rebel artillery emplacements appeared unexpectedly on Dorchester Heights, with the enemy positions well within their range, the British were forced to withdraw from Boston, never to return.

  The War Office was on the corner of Chestnut and Fifth, diagonally across from the State House and Congress Hall. From this cramped suite of rooms, heated by the warmth of a single fire, General Knox and a half dozen clerks managed the entire defense establishment of the United States. Knox, who dearly loved food and drink, had ballooned to a weight of nearly 300 pounds. He carried a gold-headed cane which he waved theatrically as he spoke. He was cheerful and high-spirited by temperament; but he was also in the habit of being obeyed, and when irritated with a subordinate he was liable to burst into profanity in a voice that was strong and “deep as a thunder-growl.”

  Congress had charged Knox with considering the problem from the standpoint of the ships themselves—design, armament, personnel, construction, and cost. The technical and logistical problems involved in building frigates were daunting. It would be a vast and complex undertaking. It was only natural for Knox to feel overwhelmed and perhaps a bit intimidated by the duty that had descended on him. He was the son of a sea captain but had spent his entire career ashore, and by his own admission he could not begin to grasp the intricacies of naval architecture. Knox’s instinct was to reach out to friends, acquaintances, and colleagues who knew more than he did about the subject. In this, he was fortunate in the location of the capital.

  Surrounded in every direction by rich, arable farmlands, Philadelphia was the land-to-sea link for the entire Delaware River basin. Water and Front Streets, running parallel to the river for miles along the waterfront, were given wholly over to the maritime industry. The bowsprits of the square-riggers extended 50 or 60 feet above the storehouses adjoining the wharves. Elaborately carved and garishly painted figureheads gazed down at the pedestrians on Front Street. Despite its location, 100 miles up the river from the open sea, Philadelphia was by far the largest seaport in North America, and it was almost certainly the largest freshwater port in the world. More than a quarter of the nation’s total exports—nearly $7 million worth in 1793—passed through its wharves. More to the point, Philadelphia was the largest shipbuilding center in the United States. In 1793, more than 8,000 tons of shipping were built at Philadelphia—twice the tonnage of any other shipbuilding center in the United States. The city was home to many of the country’s most respected ship architects and builders. Knox reached out to this community of experts, invited them to his office, toured their shipyards, and pored over their plans. He did everything short of strolling along the Philadelphia waterfront and stopping strangers at random to ask for their opinions.

  The city’s leading ship architects were, almost to a man, members of the religious sect known as the Society of Friends, more commonly called “Quakers.” The “Greene Country Towne” on the western bank of the Delaware River had been founded by William Penn just over a century earlier, as a refuge for Quakers fleeing religious persecution in Europe. By the late eighteenth century, immigration had reduced the sect to about a fifth of the city’s population, but their virtues of frugality, humility, and egalitarianism were deeply rooted in the city’s laws and customs.

  Quakers believed in the “inner light,” or the essential goodness of each human being. No one person, they believed, was more or less capable of spiritual enlightenment than any other. They embraced the subversive idea that the plain teachings of the Christian gospel should be applied literally and in every aspect of daily life. No one could distinguish a rich Quaker from a poor one, because they all dressed in plain, homespun clothes without lace, ribbons, or silver buckles. Women wore bonnets and plain white or blue skirts with handkerchiefs high and tight around their necks. Men wore broad-brimmed hats, plain gray mulberry coats, breeches with white stockings, and square-toed shoes. Quakers would not lift their hats, bow to a magistrate, or swear oaths. They had no churches and no clergy. Disdaining the notion of a “hireling priesthood,” they met in plain, wooden meetinghouses where no person occupied a place of authority and where any man, woman, or child could speak at will. The Quaker doctrine of social equality was two centuries ahead of its time. Women and men, rich and poor, servants and employers, Indians and Europeans, blacks and whites were essentially alike in the eyes of God—they were all “Friends”—and therefore deserving of the same rights and courtesies as any other. Quakers were among the first Americans to petition for the abolition of slavery, and when their efforts failed, they took direct action by buying slaves and setting them free.

  A South Carolina congressman, William Loughton Smith, likened the union of the states to a troubled marriage. “We took each other, with our mutual bad habits and respective evils, for better, for worse,” he said. “The northern states adopted us with our slaves, and we adopted them with their Quakers.”

  One facet of Quaker doctrine, above all others, brought them into conflict with their fellow citizens. This was the “peace testimony,” which condemned war or any kind of “warlike preparation.” Quaker pacifism was absolute and unconditional: no exception was allowed for defense against invasion. Not only were Quakers expected to refuse to serve under arms, but they were to refrain from any act that would enable others to do so. In practice, this meant that Quakers could not assist in the building of fortif
ications or barracks; they could not pay any tax levied to pay for measures of collective defense; they could not contribute to any aspect of military provisioning or logistics. Strictly speaking, Quaker doctrine even ruled out providing medical care to wounded soldiers, if doing so would free others to take up arms.

  Critics charged that the Quaker peace testimony was camouflage for cowardice and even greed. “They are not Men of Arms,” one wrote, “but a herd of silly insignificant People, aiming rather to heap up Riches in Obscurity, than to acquire a Fame by an heroick Undertaking.” Anger against the sect rose during the Revolution, when many Quakers purported to agree with the justice of the cause but refused to join the fight. Conscientious objectors were fined and jailed. As a codicil to his essay Common Sense, Tom Paine (who was himself a Quaker, born and raised in London) included an address to the “Religious Society of the People called Quakers.” Pacifism, he wrote, was a gift to all tyrants because it had “a direct tendency to make a man the quiet and inoffensive subject of any and every government which is set over him.”

  We fight neither for revenge nor conquest; neither from pride nor passion; we are not insulting the world with our fleets and armies, nor ravaging the globe for plunder. Beneath the shade of our own vines are we attacked; in our own houses, and on our own lands, is the violence committed against us….

  If the bearing [of] arms be sinful, the first going to war must be more so, by all the difference between willful attack and unavoidable defence. Wherefore, if ye really preach from conscience, and mean not to make a political hobby-horse of your religion, convince the world thereof by proclaiming your doctrine to your enemies, for they likewise bear ARMS.

  Not all Quakers failed to be impressed by the arguments against the peace testimony, and the revolutionary experience opened a rift within their ranks. When news of the battle at Lexington and Concord reached Philadelphia in April 1775, thirty young Quaker men formed themselves into a militia and began drilling on the public greens. Others enlisted in the Continental Army or aboard privateers. Major General Nathanael Greene, who served under Washington as Quartermaster General and later as commander of American troops in the South, had been raised as a Quaker in Rhode Island. Many Quakers who chose to fight were “read out of meeting”—the equivalent of excommunication. Some managed to have themselves reinstated; others never did.

  One of these renegade Quakers was a forty-two-year-old Philadelphian shipbuilder named Joshua Humphreys. He had been born in Merion Township (now Haverford), in the backcountry west of Philadelphia. At age fourteen he had traveled to Philadelphia to be apprenticed to Jonathan Penrose, then one of the city’s leading shipwrights. At some point in his late adolescence, for reasons not known, he transferred his apprenticeship to another Quaker shipwright, John Wharton. When Wharton died in 1771, Humphreys, then just twenty years old, became a young master shipwright with his own yard. He was an early and ardent supporter of the American Revolution and the Revolution, in turn, helped him to achieve success in his profession. Brushing aside pacifist objections, he outfitted more than a dozen privateers for Philadelphia customers, and he built the Randolph, one of the thirteen original Continental frigates. In postwar Philadelphia, Humphreys was one of the busiest and most-sought-after shipbuilders in the city. His main shipyard complex was located on the waterfront south of town, in the neighborhood of Southwark, adjacent to an old Swedish Lutheran church.

  Like many professional shipbuilders, Joshua Humphreys had never been to sea, and by his own admission he had never even seen one of the great European battleships. But he had designed, built, or repaired perhaps three hundred merchantmen in the course of his thirty-year career, and he knew far more about marine architecture than the captains who took his creations to sea. Whether motivated by patriotism, or a pecuniary interest in navy contracts, or simple professional enthusiasm, Humphreys threw himself into the subject of designing the new frigates. He devoured every book on naval architecture he could get his hands on. He was always ready to let loose a torrent of words whenever the subject of designing and building warships came up. Humphreys’s command of the subject seems to have dazzled Secretary Knox, who eagerly sought his advice.

  To convey the ingeniousness of the Humphreys design requires a brief discussion of the three broad categories of warship then afloat. The largest was the battleship, known by contemporaries as a line-of-battle ship or a ship of the line. Battleships were huge, heavy, and relatively slow, usually carrying guns on two fully armed gun decks, with additional weapons mounted on the quarterdeck and forecastle. They generally carried at least 74 guns, and their frames, or “scantlings,” were so massive that they could withstand heavy enemy fire. The frigate was an intermediate class of warship. Every frigate mounted her principal battery of guns on one fully covered gun deck, though she often mounted additional weapons (as with the battleship) on the quarterdeck and forecastle. Frigates might carry as many as 40 to 50 guns, or as few as 20; most carried between 28 and 38. The third category incorporated a wide variety of “unrated” vessels—smaller ship-rigged (three-masted) sloops and brigs, generally carrying fewer than 20 guns, all on the upper deck. They were commanded by lieutenants or recently promoted captains.

  The frigate represented a compromise between power and speed. She was lighter and of shallower draft than a battleship, but she mounted enough firepower to overawe any merchantman or privateer. She was a good open-ocean sailing ship and versatile in her uses. The frigate could range ahead in search of the enemy, drop over the horizon, nose into bays and harbors, run up rivers, and carry intelligence back to the flagship. Nelson called frigates “the eyes of the fleet.” The frigate was also suited to long, solitary cruises, seeking action with other enemy frigates, seizing enemy commerce, or carrying dignitaries to distant posts. But a frigate rarely engaged an enemy battleship, if she could avoid it, because in such an action she would be cruelly outgunned.

  During the Revolution, American shipwrights had been dismayed by the special challenges involved in building frigates. They had to be much larger and stronger than merchant vessels. Being so much heavier than merchantmen, they had to carry a much larger rig—towering masts and spars—to drive them through the water at speed. A frigate’s chief purpose was to serve as a floating battery, or a transportable platform for heavy naval cannon. This platform was most effective when placed high above the sea. Guns on the upper decks could be fired at a great distance; they could be worked in heavy weather; they could be fired to leeward even when the ship was pressed with sail and heeling severely; they could be fired down onto a smaller enemy’s decks. But guns placed high above the waterline also raised the vessel’s center of gravity and thus compromised her stability. An unstable ship would have a long, sickening roll that would bury her mainchains in the foam. In heavy weather she would ship big seas through her hawseholes, gunports, and even over her bulwarks. The tremendous strain on her overall structure would cause her to deteriorate rapidly. Because of her need to carry heavy guns, a frigate’s instability was her birthright, the inevitable consequence of her reason to exist. In designing a frigate, the ship architect’s greatest challenge was to resolve this inherent weakness as best he could.

  Joshua Humphreys proposed, in short, to build exceptionally large, heavily armed, fast-sailing frigates—ships weighing well over 1,000 tons, with a deck length of not less than 175 feet, mounting a battery of thirty 24-pounder long guns on the gun deck and a smaller battery of carronades on the upper deck. “They are superior to any European frigate,” Humphreys wrote of the design he had in mind, “and if others should be in [the enemy’s] company, our frigates can always lead ahead and never be obliged to go into action, but on their own terms, except in a calm; in blowing weather our ships are capable of engaging to advantage double-deck ships.” In another formulation, he proposed “such frigates as in blowing weather would be an overmatch for double-deck ships, and in light winds evade coming into action.”

  The frigate Humphreys envisi
oned would be powerful enough to overwhelm a lone enemy cruiser because of her unusually heavy battery of 24-pounder long guns, weapons that had been known to drive a ball through two feet of solid oak planking at a range of 1,000 yards. When pitted against a battleship, the American frigate would enjoy one of the most important advantages that any warship can ever have: the option to either fight or flee, to outrun or outgun. In heavy weather, when an enemy battleship would be obliged to house her lower deck guns to avoid being swamped, Humphreys’s frigate might have the temerity to attack the larger ship and overpower her. In milder conditions, when a battleship could bring all of her guns into action, his frigate would be fast enough to make sail and “clean outrun” the larger ship.

  Algerian piracy was the immediate impetus for the frigates, but Humphreys was thinking of the potential for a confrontation with one of the warring superpowers of Europe. Britain and France had each been responsible for depredations against American shipping, and each had vital interests in North America that might bring them into conflict with the United States. The potential for a war at sea with the British or French was a politically sensitive topic—there was still strong anti-navy sentiment in Congress, and the fear that American warships would drag the nation into an unwelcome war was one reason for it. Humphreys was aware of these sensitivities, and he wrote in veiled terms. But laced throughout his letters was his conviction that the frigates should be designed to fight a naval war with one or more of the great European naval powers.

  Over several generations, the English had developed a rating system that organized all battleships and frigates into six “rates.” A ship’s rate was determined, nominally, by how many guns she carried. The Royal Navy included ships of many different sizes and designs, some new and some long afloat, and many that had been built in France, Spain, or Holland and later captured. For decades, the sprawling British fleets had been anything but homogeneous, and the rating system was intended to impose order on the chaos. The first-, second-, third-, and fourth-rates were the battleships. The fifth- and sixth-rates were, respectively, the heavy and light frigates. But in the closing years of the eighteenth century, the six-rating system was fast becoming an anachronism. The British fleet was increasingly dominated by two types of warship: the 74-gun battleship and the 36- or 38-gun frigate. These accounted for virtually all new construction, while ships of other rates, whether larger or smaller, were liable to be rebuilt or taken out of service. The reasons for these changes were complex. In part, they were a tactical response to corresponding changes in the enemy fleets; in part, a means of alleviating the manpower shortage in the Royal Navy; in part, to economize on shipbuilding costs. Whatever the reasons, however, the important fact was that the British fleet and to some extent the French and Spanish fleets as well were evolving toward a binary combination of 74-gun battleships and much smaller frigates.