Six Frigates

by Ian W. Toll

  Adams had hoped that he and Jefferson would put aside their political differences and make good their old friendship. He would be disappointed. Jefferson foresaw that the French crisis would destroy Adams politically. “I know well that no man will ever bring out of that office the reputation he carries into it,” he wrote. “The honeymoon would be as short in that case as in any other, & its moments of ecstasy would be ransomed by years of torment & hatred.” Washington had been a stabilizing force; his stature and universal popularity had allowed him to soar above the partisan rift. With his retirement, Jefferson predicted, “the next president of the United States will only be the president of a party.” He and Madison planned to have nothing to do with the new administration. They would bide their time and wait for the political windstorm to blow Adams away.

  HAD THE NEWLY SWORN PRESIDENT felt an urge to take in the Philadelphia skyline that March, he could have crossed the courtyard to the State House and climbed three sets of stairs and two ladders to the top of the belltower. From that altitude he would have looked down on an urban landscape of steeply canted shingled rooftops and brick chimneys, interrupted here and there by a white wooden church steeple. A quarter mile to the west, the city petered out into a neighborhood of brick kilns and burying fields, and beyond that a bucolic suburb of meadows, ponds, and orchards. To the north, beyond the low hills of the Northern Liberties, the marshlands were spanned by a long causeway, often crowded with Conestoga wagons bringing farm produce into the city from the backcountry north of Germantown. To the south was Moyamensing Township, the future site of South Philadelphia—a long, rolling stretch of wheat fields and pastures enclosed by post-and-rail fences and dotted with farmhouses.

  To the east was the wide, lazy, muddy river. From Federal Street all the way up to Shackamaxon, where it shoaled and turned east, scarcely a yard of riverfront was left vacant. Ships docked yardarm to yardarm at the wharves, their crosstrees perched above the windowless storehouses along Front Street. The roadstead beyond was congested with other ships riding to the tide in eight-fathom water. Cutters, barges, shad boats, and two-masted shallops plied the waters in the main anchorage, selling provisions directly to the larger merchantmen riding at anchor in the stream.

  The less valuable real estate at the southern extremity of the riverfront was the shipbuilding district, known as Southwark. Frames and hulls in various stages of advancement stood on the stocks, perpendicular to and inclined toward the river, and evil-looking columns of thick, black smoke rose from the tar pits. The largest hull by far was the enormous shape of the frigate United States. Though her keel had been laid down almost two and a half years earlier, she was still on the stocks, looming like a cathedral over the rooftops of the surrounding houses and taverns. Her hull, now completely planked, was braced upright by heavy stanchions and enveloped in scaffolding. Her bulwarks rose 60 feet above Swanson and Christian Streets—about the same height as Adams’s putative vantage point in the State House belltower. From that distance—about a mile and a half—she would have appeared pale and gleaming in the afternoon sun. This was Saturday, a work day, so teams of caulkers and carpenters would have been swarming over her.

  Joshua Humphreys’s yard was the scene of feverish activity. Supplies needed to complete the frigate were brought through the gate in drays, carts, stages, and wagons; materials were unloaded onto the dock from shallops, barges, and flat-bottomed durham boats. Humphreys made meticulous daily records in his account books: buckets of paint and pitch; sheets of copper; assorted cables, blocks, and anchors; buckets of bolts and nails; racks of iron hooks and assorted fasteners; lengths of canvas and assorted cordage. As the storehouses overflowed, newly arrived equipment and supplies were dumped in makeshift heaps in any vacant corner of the yard.

  Caulkers were hard at work sealing the hull. Fragments of discarded rope ends were smeared with hot tar, then pounded with mallets into the seams between the strakes, and finally paid with layers of hot pitch. Others were hurrying to complete the frigate’s inboard works—installing the interior decks and bulkheads, planking over the ceilings, fairing the exposed edges of the frame timbers. Twelve white oak “diagonal riders” were being seated in the keel and through-bolted to the interior of the hull. This was another of Humphreys’s controversial innovations, which he believed would add longitudinal strength to the hull and diminish the amount of “hogging” (downward sagging of the bow and stern, which would cause the ship’s midsection to arch upward like a hog’s back) that would occur after the launch.

  The United States was one of the city’s most popular sightseeing destinations. From the High Street Wharf, pedestrians walked a mile south along the river on Front Street and arrived at the entrance to the yard, where her bows towered above their heads like the wall of a medieval castle. She was by far the largest ship ever built in Philadelphia. Seamen and travelers could boast that they had seen larger—but even a 2,000-ton English ship of the line would cut a smaller profile when she was afloat, with her keel three or four fathoms beneath the waterline.

  Given that the United States was the single most expensive military asset in American history, security was amazingly slack. Tourists strolled into the yard as if they owned the place. They mounted the scaffolding, climbed into the inboard works, and chatted with the tradesmen. The danger of sabotage did not escape Joshua Humphreys’s imagination. One phosphorous match, struck in the right place, would reduce the entire project to an enormous heap of ashes. The War Office sent a detachment of soldiers to stand guard over the frigate, but Humphreys was not satisfied. The guards, he noted, seemed to spend most of the day drinking. Instead of holding back the civilian hordes that descended on the yard each day, they simply collected and pocketed payments of admission. When they grew too bored or too drunk to stay at their posts, they wandered off. That March, Humphreys wrote the secretary to complain:

  It is with great regret I have to inform you of the many irregularities in the guard placed for the safety of the frigate…. Last Saturday morning I found several of them drunk. This led me to watch their conduct closely. That evening, about nine o’clock, the sentinel was found asleep. About ten no one [was] on duty, he had left his post for a relief, tho’ contrary to a late struck order. Between eleven and twelve o’clock, no one [was] on duty, the musket then left in the duty box, which I brought up to the house, where it now remains. This conduct, my duty would not permit me to pass in silence.

  Among the curious were many of Philadelphia’s most prominent citizens. Humphreys was always on hand to conduct guided tours for the many federal officials, members of Congress, and assorted grandees who visited the yard. Among his best-known guests were George and Martha Washington, and later John Adams. Humphreys was an unabashed Federalist partisan. His loyalty might have had something to do with his pecuniary interests, since the Federalists were the party of the navy as well as the party in power. But Humphreys’s instinctive deference to high-ranking officials was also typical of the era in which he lived. In the 1790s, there was no broadly accepted notion of a “loyal opposition,” and it was not anomalous for Humphreys, or others like him, to regard critics of the commander in chief as essentially treasonous. It was against this backdrop of partisan acrimony that the beating of Benjamin Franklin Bache took place on April 5, 1797.

  Bache, a maternal grandson of Benjamin Franklin, was editor of the notorious opposition Aurora General Advertiser, published six days a week in a two-story print shop at 112 High Street. The newspaper’s subscriber base of 1,700 did not begin to quantify its influence, because Bache’s editorials were reprinted to the letter in other opposition newspapers throughout the country. Bache had ridiculed President George Washington’s imperial style—his “pompous carriages, splendid feasts, and tawdry gowns”—as the “apish mimicry of Kingship.” He wrote that Washington’s military incompetence during the Revolution would have lost the war, had Bache’s illustrious grandfather not persuaded the French to intervene. He went so far as to accuse Washi
ngton of having committed battlefield atrocities during the French and Indian War, four decades earlier. During the 1796 presidential campaign, Bache supported Jefferson over Adams, mocking the latter’s “sesquipedality of belly.” Federalists reserved a special loathing for Bache, whom they derided as “Young Lightning Rod”—an “infamous scoundrel” and purveyor of “malignant falsehoods.”

  On the afternoon of April 5, a month after Adams’s inauguration, Bache and two friends walked to Southwark and were given permission by the guard to go aboard the United States. They climbed the scaffolding and stepped onto the gun deck, stopped to admire the view of the river from the stern galleries of the captain’s cabin, and then climbed up the companionway to the quarterdeck. At that moment someone struck a bell, and at the signal, “some 12 or 15 of the workmen came upon the deck…and stood along the gunwale.” Bache did not see the attack coming:

  I was thus standing, alone as I thought, still looking at the bell, when I felt a violent blow on my head. My first thought was that something had fallen on me; I then received a second blow, and immediately after, perceived the cowardly ruffian behind me in a menacing attitude. Stunned as I was with the violence of the two blows, which must have struck from behind, I was unable to defend myself against a third, much less to return them…. The perpetrator of this act of cowardly assassination, I have since been informed, is HUMPHREYS, son of the builder of the frigate.

  The beating had been administered by Clement Humphreys, Joshua’s oldest son and apprentice. Bache’s friends, heavily outnumbered, carried the injured journalist from the yard. He spent the next two days at home in bed, convalescing.

  DURING THE FINAL WEEKS before launch, work on the frigate accelerated to an almost frantic pace. Painstaking bookkeeping was essential to prevent equipment and supplies from walking out of the yard, and Humphreys’s account books recorded the distribution of an extraordinary array of materials and supplies to the working parties. Nails and spikes and twopenny jacks were distributed by the thousands, along with scupper pumps, barrels of pitch, caulking thrumbs, hides of leather, assorted chizzles and gimblets, pails of putty, and panes of glass. The books made note of which tools were handed out each morning—mauls, beveling hammers, claw hammers, caulking mallets, screw augers, and smoothing planes—and which were checked back in at night. The carpenter and his mates went to work installing shelves and lockers in the gun room and drilling holes on the orlop deck for the hooks from which the seamen’s hammocks would swing. The sound of hammers striking nails began a little after daybreak each day and scarcely let up until nightfall, as the men nailed lining on the air ports, canvas on ladders, cleats to secure the kentledge (iron ballast), and tin lining to the freshwater pumps. Four stop-blocks and two pounds of spikes were distributed to secure the figurehead; ten pounds of spikes were distributed “for the purpose of securing guns in a gale of wind.”

  As the days grew longer and warmer, sightseers descended on the yard in ever greater numbers. Again Humphreys complained to the War Office:

  It will be absolutely necessary to have the wharf kept clear of the inhabitants. I know of no other way than by increasing the guard, which in my opinion ought to consist of at least forty [men], with good officers. I wish you will please take the matter into your consideration and order such force as you may think proper.

  He informed the War Office that he intended to launch the United States at high water on the afternoon of May 10. The great hull now had a clean, finished look: the wooden trunnels had been trimmed and capped, so that the strakes ran fair and smooth all round the ship. Two huge iron anchors had been sunk into the ground and secured to the frigate with cables lashed through the hawseholes and hove taut to the capstan. All the launching accoutrements—the bilge ways, blocking cross pieces, fore and aft wedges—were primed and fitted.

  The launch would be one of the greatest spectacles that the city of Philadelphia had ever seen. At daybreak on the tenth, dozens had already shown up to lay claim to the best vantage points around the yard, and by late morning the streets south of town were choked with an “immense concourse of spectators.” They came on foot, on horseback, in carriages—a crush of humanity pressing south on Front and Water Streets, lining the wharves, clambering over the rooftops, craning their necks from every patch of unoccupied grass along the riverbank. The uniformed companies of the Pennsylvania militia were on parade, and a park of artillery was ready to fire a salute as the ship entered the river. Some reports put the crowd at more than thirty thousand. Whatever the number, it was certainly one of the largest ever assembled in North America.

  On the river, riding at anchor a short distance off the bank, was a fleet of private yachts and pleasure boats, some colorfully decked out with flags and bunting. The brig Sophia had sailed down the river with three cabinet officers—the secretaries of State, War, and Treasury—all aboard.

  Humphreys had good reason to be anxious. Launching a hull the size of the United States, even under the best possible conditions, brought daunting physical forces into play. Since it had never been done before, at least in Philadelphia, the procedure was almost by definition an experiment. He worried about the strangely low level of the water: a strong northwest breeze had prevented the whole volume of the flood tide from coming up the river. If he had erected the slipways at too steep an incline, the ship might descend too rapidly and strike the riverbed. On the other hand, if the slipways were too green, or not greased amply with tallow and oil, or if the air was too humid, the frigate might stick to the ways and refuse to budge. Success depended on an exact sequence of perfectly timed events involving more than a hundred men stationed on the ground, under the hull, and on the spar deck. A failure, witnessed by virtually the entire population of Philadelphia, including most of the ranking officers of the federal government, would be a calamity and a personal humiliation from which the Quaker shipwright might never recover.

  A few minutes after one o’clock, at the very height of the tide, Humphreys ordered the restraining blocks removed from under the keel. Almost at once, prematurely, the 1,500-ton mass of oak, iron, and copper shifted and began to travel toward the river. Spectators let out a cheer and the militia fired an abortive salute. At that instant Humphreys grasped that there was nothing he or any other mortal being could do to arrest the launch—the frigate wanted to go, and she was in fact going. The critical thing was to knock away the remaining spur shores before they could damage the hull, and he shouted for this to be done. The men on deck, understanding that the launch was underway, sprinted with their axes to cut away the lashings. About thirty workmen were stationed under the keel blocks—they lay down and hugged the ground as the great shape of the hull rumbled over them. None was injured. The frigate plunged into the river, pushing a wave of water out into the stream, and the spectator boats must have heaved and strained at their moorings.

  Humphreys announced that he was delighted with the launch. After going aboard and taking measurements, he found, to his “unspeakable satisfaction,” no more than one and a quarter inches of hogging—far less than the two feet that was common for ships of that size. His report did not mention—and the spectators apparently did not notice—that the frigate had indeed struck the riverbed on launching, severely damaging her keel and rudder braces.

  A full hour after the launch, a newspaper reported, Front and Second Streets were still choked with crowds returning to the city.

  DEVOTED AS PRESIDENT ADAMS was to the navy, he was more devoted to the first lady. He skipped the launch of the United States because he expected Abigail to arrive that day from Massachusetts. Leaving the capital early in the morning, he met her that afternoon on the road about twenty-five miles north of the city. She climbed down from her carriage and climbed up into his; they stopped for dinner in Bristol and rolled into the city at sunset.

  Distressing news from Europe had arrived in the weeks after his inauguration. The French Directory had formally abrogated the Treaty of 1778. An American ambassador
, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, had been expelled from the country. Several new decrees had expanded the French war against American commerce. Any English goods found aboard an American ship, contraband or not, would be confiscated. American vessels were required to carry a rôle d’équipage—a list, in a specified format, of all crew members. If a skipper could not produce the list, or if it was not formatted perfectly, the ship and her cargo would be confiscated. Any American sailor found serving on an enemy ship could be hanged as a pirate. French warships and privateers could now seize American vessels on any one of several flimsy pretexts, no matter what their cargoes or their destinations. They would be brought into French harbors where notoriously corrupt Admiralty Courts would condemn them in cursory proceedings. France had effectively declared a worldwide, all-out guerre de course—a war against American trade.

  Adams found his options limited. Events were moving quickly. A declaration of war against France might be justified, but even with one of the frigates afloat at last, it would be months before she could be fitted for sea. The United States, formidable as she might be, did not comprise a navy. Moreover, even if the nation had been prepared for war militarily, it was not close to being prepared politically. There was still no national consensus in favor of war with France, and Republicans were convinced that the entire crisis had been manufactured as a means of maneuvering the country into an alliance with Great Britain. A premature declaration of war would probably prompt a secession movement in the south and west.