Six Frigates

by Ian W. Toll

  The city’s principal shipbuilding district was concentrated in the area around Fells Point, but Truxtun preferred David Stodder’s yard, a mile downriver, where more space could be had on reasonable terms. The yard was situated near the mouth of Harris Creek, in a wooded, secluded area east of town, but not so far that laborers could not be induced to join the work rolls. The facilities on the site seemed equal to the needs of a naval shipyard: there was a large and well-appointed blacksmith shop, sheds for the boat builders and mastwrights, and a serviceable road running into the town. Just across the Patapsco was Whetstone Point and the crumbling remains of a fortress that had been built during the Revolution. The yard was situated on the perimeter of a natural basin that would provide ample depth for the launch of a large ship.

  Truxtun betrayed a northerner’s instinctive disdain for the maritime and shipbuilding capabilities of the southern seaports. He told the War Office that Baltimore offered “no choice of Artificers, Labourers [are] scarce and indolent, every article [is] higher in point of price than in the other parts of the United States northeast of this.” He estimated that the same ship could be built in Philadelphia for 20 percent less. Worse, Truxtun heard whispers circulated through the yard that the Master Constructor, David Stodder, had informed his subordinates that he did not like the Humphreys design and would ignore the draft that had been sent from Philadelphia. Truxtun, characteristically, confronted the man face-to-face and Stodder tamely retracted all he had said.

  The first step in preparing the yard was to shore up the foundation for the keel blocks. Sand and gravel were dumped into holes dug in the soggy bank of the Patapsco. Massive wooden pilings, spaced about five feet apart, were driven into the holes. An oak “cap” was affixed to the top of each piling, with the grain in the wood running in the same direction as the slipway, to form a keel block. Together, these blocks would have to bear the weight of more than 1,000 tons of oak, pine plank, copper sheathing, and iron bolts. They were positioned in such a way as to slope toward the water at about one inch per foot. As the first keel timbers were delivered to the yard, they would be “scarfed” together in a series of carefully cut and precisely fitted joints, fixed in place with wedges and bolts. Once the keel was completed and faired, the framing of the ship could begin.

  NORTH AMERICA WAS RICHLY ENDOWED with the raw materials needed for shipbuilding. Its forests seemed to offer a limitless supply of the world’s most prized ship’s timbers—northern white oak for planking and frame pieces, pine and spruce and cedar for masts and spars and deck beams. Navigable rivers provided access to the heavily forested interior and a means of transporting raw timber down to the sea. Hemp was grown for cordage, jute for caulking material, flax for sailcloth. Mines and blast furnaces produced pig iron for the blacksmiths, who turned out the wrought-iron bolts, hooks, bands, nails, spikes, pintles, gudgeons, and chain plates.

  Washington and his advisers were in no mood to economize. The frigates would be built to last. The builders and yard workers, who had been conditioned to turn out vessels for merchants who wanted the work done quickly and cheaply, would have to unlearn some of their bad habits. Once the keels were laid down, the master builders, agents, and superintending captains at each building site would hold joint responsibility for quality control. But before construction work could even begin, the building materials—the timbers—had to be selected, cut out of the forests, and transported to the yards.

  Humphreys was exacting in his specifications. The beams and decks should be made of Carolina pine, he wrote, and the planks of red cedar. But most important—here he was both explicit and insistent—key pieces of the frame, including the futtocks, knight heads, hawse pieces, bow timbers, stanchions, knees, transoms, and breasthooks, must be made of live oak.

  Quercus virens, the southern live oak, is found only in the southeastern United States, and only in a twenty-mile-wide coastal zone stretching from southern Virginia to East Texas. It makes a dramatic and beautiful sight. John Muir, who knew what he was talking about, called it “the most magnificent planted tree I have ever seen.” An early European naturalist wrote that live oak had “the appearance of a large apple or pear tree, [with a]…spreading picturesque top, and delicate olive shaped leaves of a deep shining green…one of the most magnificent and delightful shade trees in the world.” A mature tree stands 40 to 70 feet high, but its branches can spread to a radius of 75 feet or more and its shade can cover half an acre. The trunk is enormous, reaching 20 feet in circumference, but it divides into branches 5 to 18 feet from the ground, giving the tree a squat, stocky appearance. The limbs separate from the trunk at right angles and extend horizontally, often low enough for a man standing on the ground to reach up and touch. As it grows, the live oak’s vascular system is plugged up with a thick, viscid gum, making it dense and heavy—as heavy as 75 pounds per cubic foot, the heaviest oak there is. It seems impossible that the trunk can support the weight of so many huge branches, each weighing in the tons and each reaching outward at right angles. One only has to look at the tree—to contemplate its peculiar geometry—to gain some idea of its tremendous strength.

  Not long after Europeans settled in North America, shipwrights recognized the potential of the live oak as a building material. Its extraordinary tensile strength and its resistance to both salt air and rot made it ideal for the key load-bearing sections of a ship’s frame. In the joints formed between the trunks and limbs could be found angled pieces that served perfectly for the “short timbers”—the knees and futtocks on which so much of the ship’s structural integrity and longevity depended. Carpenters prized its uniformity of substance, its straightness of fiber, its smooth consistency, its fine grains. Properly seasoned, it was said to have a life span five times that of white oak. But the shipyard workers also dreaded the extra work it took to cut, shape, and manipulate live oak, and they rolled their eyes whenever a new load of raw timber sections was brought into the yard. A nail driven into it was nearly impossible to extract. Axes bounced off it and saws moved back and forth across it again and again, making little or no discernible progress. Nothing took the sharpness out of a ship carpenter’s tools as quickly as well-seasoned live oak.

  In Philadelphia, Fox was busy producing the “moulds” which the cutting parties would use to match the size and shape of the timbers to the dimensions of the frigates. Molds were life-sized, three-dimensional models of each unique timber section, constructed of light wooden battens. The dimensions of each piece, taken from the original plan, were chalked onto the smooth, dark, painted floorboards of a “moulding loft,” typically the second floor of a large warehouse. The dimensions were then taken off the floor, the battens cut and carefully numbered, and the entire package shipped unassembled to the forest. The cutting parties assembled the molds and used them to measure and cut the logs.

  Obtaining the timber for the frigates would prove far more difficult, expensive, and time-consuming than anyone might have expected. Several hundred live oak trees were needed for each of the six ships. Because of the great size of Humphreys’s model, the frame pieces could only be cut from the largest and oldest trees. To find the specified timber, the cutting parties would have to journey into the most remote and inhospitable part of the live oak’s range—the uninhabited coastal islands of Georgia.

  A Boston shipwright named John T. Morgan agreed to lead the first timber-cutting expedition. As a reward for taking on the arduous assignment, he hoped to be appointed master constructor of one of the frigates. The entire building program depended on his success. Arriving at St. Simon Island off the Georgia coast in early August 1794, Morgan was aghast at the conditions he found. The workmen, who had not yet arrived, would have to live in lean-tos on the edge of a swamp, pelted by never-ending rain, wallowing in mud, tormented by mosquitoes. “I have received the moulds,” he wrote to Humphreys, “but have no hands, and if I had, it would not have been in my power to cut one stick as yet, for I have not seen ten fair days since I left you…. Neve
r was so much rain known in this country.” All the provisions would have to be sent in by sea. The expedition would need to be supplied with regular cargoes of food, blankets, and medical supplies. To haul the timber out of the forests, they would need to bring in heavy wagons, teams of oxen, and hay and grain to feed the animals.

  On September 23, ninety “sober and industrious Axe-men and Ship-carpenters” sailed from New London, Connecticut. They arrived at St. Simon in mid-October. Within a week of their arrival, many of the New Englanders were prostrated with illness, probably malaria. A visitor compared their camp to an army field hospital after a battle. Of the men who survived, all but three decided that no amount of money could induce them to stay, and shipped out before Christmas. Morgan was among the sick. “I have been all but dead since the 4th of September,” he complained to Humphreys in October. “I lost a fine lad, an apprentice, last Saturday with the fever. I have it now. Everybody is sick here and if I am to stay here ’til all the timbers is cut, I will be dead.”

  “If you was here,” he added, “you would curse live oak.”

  In late October, Captain John Barry, who had been appointed commander of the yet-to-be-built Philadelphia frigate, took passage on the brig Schuylkill from Philadelphia to assess the state of affairs on St. Simon Island. The vessel anchored off the north shore and the captain went ashore at Gashayes Bluff. He found Morgan “with his two boys sick and not a man with him nor a stick of wood cut.” Barry sent for reinforcements. Sixteen slaves were brought from the mainland (with wages presumably paid to their owners) and set to work clearing a road from the camp into the interior of the island.

  As if his other problems were not enough, Morgan was concerned that he would not find live oak specimens large enough to satisfy Humphreys. “These moulds frighten me they are so long,” he confessed. It was the “compass pieces”—the sharp-angled knees and breasthooks—that presented the greatest difficulty. Only the largest live oak trees—perhaps one in fifty—would serve the need. But the largest specimens were often the hardest to get at. The live oak stands were located along creeks and on the margins of swamps in the remote corners of the island. When cut timber could not be floated out, the logs had to be “baulked” by teams of oxen over the roots and underbrush. By December, Morgan reported that “all but four of the oxen have died.”

  Humphreys received his first load of live oak more than six months after work on the Philadelphia frigate had purportedly commenced and four months after Morgan had first set foot on St. Simon. He was “pleased with the timber generally.” But he was less satisfied with the next shipment, which arrived two weeks later along with a box of native Georgia oranges for Mrs. Humphreys. “Your letter and box of oranges came safe to hand,” he wrote Morgan, “but the oranges were so soured by the most infamous stem piece you sent that their flavor is lost. I am sure you must never have seen it otherwise you would not have sent it, for the most ignorant negro you have employed would have had sufficient understanding to know it would not do.”

  AT THIS EARLY STAGE, the ships were designated only as “Frigates A, B, C, D, E, and F.” Because they were progeny of the new federal government, each of the proposed names on a list prepared by the War Office embodied an institution or symbol of the U.S. Constitution. Washington (perhaps thinking it was not a very important point) simply chose the first five names on the list: United States, President, Congress, Constitution, and Constellation. The sixth frigate, which would be built in Norfolk, Virginia, would later be christened Chesapeake.

  As 1794 drew to a close, Secretary Knox prepared a progress report. Taking a defensive tone, he asked Congress to keep in mind that “few or no materials of any sort, either for construction or equipment, existed in their proper shape. That everything, if not to be created, was to be modified. That the wood of which the frames were to be made was standing in the forests; the iron for the cannon lying in its natural bed; and the flax and hemp, perhaps, in their seed.” Promising that “the materials will soon be collected, and the building vigorously pushed,” Knox predicted that the frigates would be completed within twelve months. As to the likely expense involved in completing the ships, he would make no prediction.

  The final dimensions were not taken off the loft floors until the summer of 1795, and by the end of that year, no frigate was more than half-finished. Humphreys’s Philadelphia frigate, the United States, was only partially framed, although nearly all of the needed timbers had arrived and been stored in the yard. Truxtun’s Baltimore frigate, the Constellation, was merely a collection of timber lying here and there on the ground, roughly laid out in the manner in which it would be scarfed and bolted into the frame. It took an educated eye to see how this sculpture garden of raw, roughly shaped logs would be assembled into a structure resembling a ship. Knox faced the embarrassing task of informing Congress that, for the second consecutive year, twelve more months were needed to complete the frigates.

  In February 1796, diplomatic negotiations with Algiers at last bore fruit. President Washington asked the Senate to ratify a treaty which, he said, would bring a “speedy peace and the restoration of our unfortunate fellow-citizens from a grievous captivity.” The Algerian peace would cost Americans nearly a million dollars in bribes, ransom, and payments of tribute. Particularly humiliating was a stipulation that the United States would build a 32-gun frigate for the Dey and deliver it to him as a gift. The cost of the treaty was equivalent to 13 percent of the total annual expenditures of the federal government in that year. The Senate ratified it without debate.

  On the same day, Washington sent a second message to Congress. A Republican amendment to the original law authorizing the frigates had required the building program to come to an immediate halt in the event of a truce with Algiers. The president now asked Congress to continue the work or risk “the derangement in the whole system.” Congress chose to give him half of what he asked for. The three frigates that were most advanced—United States (Philadelphia), Constellation (Baltimore), and Constitution (Boston)—would be completed and launched. The remaining three would be left to rot on the stocks; eventually, perhaps, to be broken up for firewood.

  CHAPTER THREE

  On Saturday, March 4, 1797, the morning skies above Philadelphia were overcast and gray. John Adams, the newly elected president of the United States, left his lodgings at the St. Francis Hotel a little before noon and climbed into the new carriage he had recently purchased for a price of $1,500. The carriage, he told Abigail, was elegant enough for a president, but it was distinctly unpretentious when compared to his predecessor’s luxurious coach, which had been pulled through the streets of the capital by a team of six horses and attended by liveried foot servants. Adams satisfied himself with two horses who were “young, but clever.”

  As he arrived at Congress Hall, the sun was breaking through the haze; the afternoon would be clear and brisk. He entered the first-floor chamber of the House of Representatives and took a seat on the dais next to Thomas Jefferson, who had just been sworn in as vice president. The closely packed crowd in the chamber and galleries waited for a moment in tense silence. After a pause, Washington entered, resplendent in a black velvet suit, trailing a cavalcade of clerks and servants, with an expression on his face that was, Adams wrote, “as serene and unclouded as the day.”

  Spectators and participants remarked upon the almost overpowering emotional intensity of the scene. Adams later said of the ceremony: “Everybody talks of the tears, the full eyes, the streaming eyes, the trickling eyes.” The three men on the dais—the retiring president, the incoming president, and the incoming vice president—were the three most prominent American statesmen of the revolutionary generation. The ceremony would mark the nation’s first peaceful transition of power. It was, Adams later said, strange and affecting to witness this essential ritual of democracy—to see the “sight of the sun setting full-orbit, and another rising (though less splendid).”

  Washington’s departure from office was the cause of
great anxiety. For eight years, his imposing presence had been a comfort to his countrymen, who regarded him as the one man who could float above the increasingly bitter partisan warfare in the capital, and they feared for the survival of constitutional government in his absence. Adams and Jefferson were old friends but also political rivals; they had opposed one another in the election and Adams’s victory had been narrow. The result thrust Jefferson into the inelegant position of acting simultaneously as vice president and leader of the opposition.

  The issue that divided them was France. Two decades after the Declaration of Independence had been signed on this very spot, the United States faced its most dangerous foreign policy crisis since the Revolution. The government of Revolutionary France, angered by what it saw as American favoritism toward Great Britain, had begun licensing privateers to attack American shipping. The State Department had collected sworn statements detailing the seizure of three hundred American merchant ships, and reports of new captures were arriving every day. France had refused to recognize or accept the new American ambassador when he presented himself in Paris in December 1796. The French minister in Philadelphia, Pierre Adet, had publicly denounced the new American president as favoring an alliance with England.

  Adams wore a pearl-gray broadcloth coat with a sword hanging from his belt and a cockaded hat under one arm. He did not wear a wig, as they were passing out of fashion. His thinning hair was powdered and pulled neatly back. He was five feet seven inches tall, about average height for a man of that era—but in company with Washington and Jefferson, each of whom stood more than six feet tall, he seemed shorter and fatter than he was. His detractors were in the habit of sneering at Adams’s physique. But if it was true that Adams was overweight, it was also true that he was no stranger to hard physical labor, and he had a pair of farmer’s thick, muscular wrists to prove it.