Six Frigates

by Ian W. Toll

  As a small, underpopulated country, the United States had no hope of achieving numerical parity with the major European naval fleets for two generations at the very least; meeting them with their own types of ships would not do. In proposing very heavy frigates—frigates with keels, frames, and scantlings akin to those of a 74-gun ship—Humphreys was essentially proposing to build a hybrid between the frigates and battleships of the Royal Navy. His unique insight was that the Europeans, with their binary fleets composed of battleships and smaller frigates, had failed to grasp the advantage of ships that combined qualities of both. Moreover, the very failure of the European navies to recognize the merits of such a hybrid exposed a tactical weakness that could be exploited by the Americans in the event of a naval war.

  Although he did not say it, Humphreys might have added that if the United States should ever fight another naval war with Great Britain, the English frigate captains would be driven by their own hubris to attack the more powerful American ships. Their pride and contempt would act as a powerful gravitational field, drawing them inexorably into fights they could not win.

  THE PROFESSIONAL SHIPWRIGHT of the period was conservative by tradition and temperament. His conservatism was a natural consequence of the grave responsibility he bore. When evaluating an unproven innovation in ship design or construction, he could easily picture himself cringing before the accusing stares of widows and orphans. He had entered his vocation by serving a long apprenticeship to an older man, an established master builder who had himself been schooled in much the same way. His craft was an heirloom that had been handed down from generation to generation. If it evolved at all, it did so only gradually, little by little, in fits and starts. In 1794, a newly launched ship was not much different from one still afloat after fifty years of service.

  The Humphreys frigate was unconventional, and therefore controversial. According to a rival Philadelphia shipwright, the proposed design was “rejected by the unanimous voice of all the principal shipbuilders from Swedes Church to the upper part of Kensington.”

  The criticism leveled against Humphreys may not have been entirely impartial. His professional colleagues were all members of a small, fractious circle of local Quaker shipbuilders. They were business rivals who had no doubt been manhandled by Humphreys in fair competition and who resented his rapid ascent to the summit of the profession. And there was an enormous amount of federal spending at stake. Their principal objection was to the ship’s great size. Some believed that the heavy frame and long keel would cause structural weakness. Others maintained that the weight and number of the guns should be reduced. Concerns were raised about the deep draft. But the essence of the case against the design was simply that frigates of that size did not exist anywhere else in the world. If England and France chose not to build such frigates, they asked, then why should the United States? Why not trust in the wisdom that could only come through centuries of experience?

  In February 1794, as the frigates bill was still working its way through Congress, Humphreys was summoned to the War Office on Chestnut Street to discuss his proposed design. On arriving, he found that one of his competitors, Jonathan Penrose (the son of the Penrose to whom Humphreys had first been apprenticed), was already sitting with Secretary Knox in his office. Penrose was pressing Knox to choose a more orthodox design—to build smaller, lighter 36-gun frigates. An argument ensued. As Humphreys recalled it, Penrose charged that his dimensions were “extravagant, and that the ships, if built by them, would be useless, as they could not be built sufficiently strong.” Humphreys defended his model. “Building the frigates of extended dimensions,” he argued, “would give us a superiority over any of the European frigates and would render all their frigates of little or no effect in a contest with us. It would give us a lead in naval affairs that no smaller dimensions would afford us.” Knox asked the two master shipbuilders to try to agree upon a compromise, but they were unable to do so.

  Penrose had another young Quaker shipwright living under his roof. This was Josiah Fox, a well-to-do, thirty-year-old Englishman who had traveled to the United States in 1793 in order to survey American timber resources. He had been engaged to teach Penrose’s sons the art and science of drafting. Fox had completed his apprenticeship in the Royal Dockyard at Plymouth, and as such, claimed to be the only ship architect in America “who had served his apprenticeship under the best architects and shipyards of that period in England, and the English navy was recognized as the finest in the world.” He also claimed that he alone was able to produce models “formed to combine buoyancy with fast sailing.”

  Humphreys asked Fox for a formal assessment of his design, probably in mid-April. Fox’s reaction was blunt. His view was that in the Humphreys frigate the wales were placed too low; the bow and stern were too sharp; and there were too many large hollow spaces in the hull, which would contribute to the weakness of the hull’s structure. The design ought to include more rake (the stem and stern should rise at a smaller angle from the keel). Fundamentally, Fox was concerned that the Humphreys frigate was too long in proportion to her beam. The resulting structural weakness was so great that the ship might even break her back on launching.

  The historical record of the debate over the frigate design is fragmentary and incomplete. Since the key players were all residing in Philadelphia, they exchanged their views in face-to-face meetings at the War Office, and no paper trail was created. It seems clear that Knox solicited the advice of several of Philadelphia’s leading ship architects, and attempted to herd them toward consensus. He drew upon the expertise not only of Humphreys and Fox, but also of John Wharton and perhaps to a lesser extent the younger Penrose.

  Knox was troubled by the lack of consensus among his advisers. Writing to John Wharton in May, he asked about several aspects of the Humphreys design, and his questions provide some indication of the objections that were being raised. He asked:

  Whether the model has too much or too little raising, and whether it is too sharp or full forward and abaft? Whether the proportion of the depth of hold, to the depth of beam, is just? What is your opinion as to the length of the ship? And what are the advantages and disadvantages of such long length?

  If the principal objection to Humphreys’s design was that it was different from what had prevailed in Europe, Humphreys’s response was to say that the United States could not afford to imitate its rivals. “It is determined of importance to this country to take the lead in a class of ships not in use in Europe, which would be the only means of making our little navy of any importance. It would oblige other powers to follow us intact, instead of our following them…. It will in some degree give us the lead in naval affairs.”

  On April 15, little more than two weeks after the passage of the frigates bill, Secretary of War Knox sent his recommendations to the president. He advocated building frigates based on the Humphreys design, writing that they would “combine such qualities of strength, durability, swiftness of sailing, and force, as to render them equal, if not superior, to any frigate belonging to any of the European Powers.” The president gave his assent the next day and urged that the work begin as quickly as possible.

  By the end of the month, Humphreys had provided the War Office with a half model of the hull for the 44-gun frigates. The dimensions were 147 feet on the keel, 43 feet of beam, and 14 feet depth of hold. In June, Humphreys was informed that he had been appointed “Master Constructor of the United States.” He would serve as a full-time salaried employee of the federal government, devoting all of his time to the construction of the frigates. Because Humphreys had not been compensated for the months of work he had already done on the building program, his date of employment was backdated two months, to May 1, 1794.

  Knox had also been impressed by the young Englishman with the Royal Dockyard credentials who had criticized the dimensions of Humphreys’s frigate. In July, the War Office employed Josiah Fox to serve as a draftsman to the man whose design he had disparaged. In spite of the
ir professional differences, Humphreys at first professed to hold Fox in high regard, acknowledging that the younger man’s training in England had made him “a first rate draftsman.” But the arguments continued. Humphreys soon accused his colleague of drafting the models “according to his own opinion, so foreign to my own,” and reassigned him to the inglorious work of “making moulds for cutting timber.” The two Quaker shipwrights eventually came to hate one another so fervently that neither man could stand to be in the presence of the other. When Fox identified himself by the title “Naval Constructor” in a letter of July 1797, Humphreys detonated. “Sir,” he replied,

  I cannot receive hereafter or attend to any directions from you, although directed by the Secretary of War, while you style yourself “Naval Constructor.” You must know that my station in the service of the United States requires no directions from a “Naval Constructor.” You also know that I am at the head of that Department, and when you direct a letter to me let it be done in style as “Clerk of the Marine Department.” Whenever the Secretary deems my services no longer necessary, you may then to other persons assume such title as your vanity may suggest.

  This response was addressed to “Mr. Josiah Fox, Clerk in the Marine Department, War Office.”

  THE QUICKEST AND LEAST EXPENSIVE way to obtain the frigates would be to purchase and convert existing merchantmen. The second option—to construct new ships—would clearly take longer and cost more. From the very beginning, however, the president and his advisers preferred building and launching to buying and converting. Building new ships would enable the War Office to enforce rigorous quality controls, and it would give Humphreys the opportunity to test his design theory from the laying of the keel to the crossing of the yards.

  Washington wanted the six frigates built in six different seaports, to be chosen based on “wealth and populousness,” both to spread the financial benefits and to ensure that a handful of Philadelphia Quakers would not become the nation’s exclusive source of expertise in the construction of ships of war. Knox proposed to build the four larger ships specified in the act of Congress—the 44-gun frigates—in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. Joshua Humphreys would build Philadelphia’s 44-gun vessel in his Southwark shipyard. The two 36-gun frigates would be built in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and Norfolk, Virginia. Washington ordered one change. He desired that one of the 44s be built in Norfolk, in his home state of Virginia. Baltimore would instead build one of the smaller ships.

  Just a few years earlier, opponents of the Constitution had argued that no central government could effectively govern a territory the size of the original thirteen states. The building of the frigates would test that hypothesis. The largest procurement program in the brief history of the federal government would sprawl across the map in a 600-mile arc. Messages would take weeks or months to pass between the capital and the more distant sites.

  Philadelphians were disappointed. They had evidently hoped that the entire building program would be carried out in the capital. A local sea captain complained that building the frigates in six cities appeared to “be going great lengths for the gratification of a few individuals.” Writing to Knox, he pointed out that the War Office plan would require six separate agents and six master builders, and predicted (with impressive foresight) that the communication intervals would lead to time-consuming delays. Knox replied flatly that the president’s decision would stand, adding that “it is just and wise to proportion…benefits as nearly as may be to those places or states which pay the greatest amount to its support” and that saving “a few thousand dollars in expenses will be no object compared with the satisfaction a just distribution would afford.” It was an early example of pork barrel politics, before that term had even been coined.

  The government tried to retain as much control over the far-flung building program as could reasonably be expected. The War Office did not merely parcel out contracts to private shipbuilding firms. It leased shipyards in each of the six seaports, transforming them into federal installations and calling them “Navy Yards.” Master shipwrights, superintendents, clerks, craftsmen, and yard workers were hired as full-time salaried employees who were individually and directly accountable to the War Office. Merchants who were assumed to have the best knowledge of local vendors were engaged to act as procurement specialists or “agents.” They would be paid a commission on all materials and supplies they purchased for the building program.

  The master builders in each city received their instructions in July. They were told that they must “undeviatingly adhere” to the drafts and models sent from Philadelphia. To keep the program under budget, they were warned to “observe the highest degree of economy…whether of materials, or labor of the workmen.” On the other hand, they would be personally responsible for making certain that “no materials, of any sort, enter into the construction of the said ship, but of the best quality.”

  Knox closed with a dangling carrot. Each seaport’s performance in building its frigate would guide the War Office in “ascertaining where similar work may in future be done to most advantage…and the place where the business shall be best performed may derive permanent and great benefits.”

  WORD THAT A NEW NAVY was being assembled set off a frenzy of job seeking. Washington and the War Office were inundated with letters requesting officers’ commissions for a son, a nephew, or a friend. The scenario was familiar. In the early years of the republic, the clamor for government patronage was relentless. From the day of his inauguration Washington had been under siege. The rich, the wellborn, and the politically connected naturally assumed they were entitled to special consideration, and they did not hesitate to ask for what they wanted. Friends, colleagues, relatives, and acquaintances begged to be appointed as postmasters, clerks, customs inspectors, and judges. They wrote the president directly, and they expected to hear back directly, with a personal reply written in his own hand. Responding to such letters consumed much of Washington’s time.

  The president was sensitive to the deep-rooted distrust of federal institutions, particularly in his home state of Virginia, where ratification of the Constitution would not have been possible without his support. In the hope of consolidating the prestige and authority of the government he had helped create, Washington always insisted upon exacting standards of merit and good character in all federal appointments. When he did not know an office seeker personally he consulted with trusted third parties, sometimes approaching the senators representing the candidate’s state. He rejected applications even when it was socially or politically awkward to do so.

  As a military man who had witnessed at firsthand the debacle of the Continental Navy, the president was aware that the quality of the naval officer corps was more important by far than the quality of the frigates. Good officers and bad ships would make a better navy than good ships and bad officers. When Washington was importuned in March by an old friend on behalf of his son, he responded bluntly: “It is impossible he can be contemplated by me as commander of one of the Frigates…. The most that can be done for your Son would be to make him a second or third Lieutenant, and even here I would not, at this time, be under any engagement until the matter is more unfolded than it is at present.”

  Congress had authorized the recruitment of a full complement of naval officers for each of the six frigates. At first, however, only six men—the captains—would be appointed. Each was to be employed to oversee the construction of one frigate. First on the captains’ list was a naval veteran of the American Revolution, John Barry, who had commanded the Continental frigates Raleigh and Alliance in 1778–81. Barry was a Philadelphian who had many friends in Congress, and Washington relied on his advice in naming the other five captains. Barry reported to a friend that in spite of “powerful interest made here to get men appointed Captains in the Navy…the President from the first was determined to come as near to justice as was in his power. The appointments have given general satisfaction.” Barry’s influence was li
kely decisive in the selection of the five men who followed him. The question of seniority and relative rank was, as usual, a powder keg. Hoping to avoid internecine feuding, the War Office fixed the captains’ order of seniority by the dates of their commissions in the earlier war. The last and lowest-ranking man on the list seems to have been appointed almost as an afterthought. Alone among them, he had never held a naval commission, although he had commanded several successful privateers in the Revolution. He was Thomas Truxtun, a native of Hempstead, Long Island—and although no one could have known it at the time, he would do more to shape the culture of the new officer corps than any of the men who stood above him on the roster.

  Truxtun set out for Baltimore to prepare a shipyard for the construction of a 36-gun frigate. The road ran through Newark, Delaware, to a hamlet known as Head of Elk. There he was forced to change horses, because the Elk River crossing was via a small boat that the passengers pulled across, hand-over-hand, by hauling on a rope that was strung across the stream. From the far bank, it was a single long day’s ride to the outskirts of Baltimore.