Six Frigates

by Ian W. Toll

  Adams sought and received the advice of his Federalist cabinet, all holdovers from Washington’s administration. Each of the secretaries recommended the same course of action: to make one last, public attempt at a diplomatic reconciliation. (Their advice was unanimous because they had all sought and received guidance from Alexander Hamilton, now a New York lawyer in private practice.) The president was persuaded. A fresh diplomatic overture, if successful, would end the crisis; if it failed, it would nurture popular sentiment for a fight. While awaiting the outcome, the nation could get itself on a war footing.

  With his chosen policy in hand, Adams called Congress back to the capital for a special session to begin on May 15. From every state, north and south, legislators slogged back to Philadelphia over roads that had been assaulted by heavy spring rains; as the date approached they straggled into town, exhausted and dirty. On the appointed day, Congress was still short of a quorum; but by the sixteenth, enough members had arrived. Adams delivered his opening address at noon.

  France, Adams declared, had “inflicted a wound in the American breast.” Its refusal to receive an ambassador “is to treat us neither as allies, nor as friends, nor as a sovereign state.” It and the rest of the world must be persuaded that “we are not a degraded people, humiliated under a colonial spirit of fear and a sense of inferiority, fitted to be the miserable instruments of foreign influence, and regardless of national honor, character, and interest.”

  A three-member bipartisan peace commission would sail for France immediately to make one last attempt at negotiation. In the interim, the country should strengthen its armed forces. The militia should be reorganized into a provisional army and three new permanent regiments should be established—one each of cavalry, infantry, and artillery. But the greatest effort and expense, Adams said, must be reserved for the navy:

  Our seacoasts, from their great extent, are more easily annoyed and more easily defended by a Naval force than any other. With all the materials our country abounds; in skill, our naval architects and navigators are equal to any; and commanders and seamen will not be wanting….

  …it appears to me necessary to equip the frigates, and provide other vessels of inferior force to take under convoy such merchant vessels as shall remain unarmed.

  If Adams’s inaugural ceremony two months earlier had created a feeling of bipartisan amity, the special session broke the spell. Republicans, dismissing the significance of the peace mission, were convinced that the president was pushing for a naval buildup as a means to provoke the French into a full-scale war. The speech, Bache wrote in the Aurora, was a war cry let out by “a man divested of his senses.” He wondered if Adams had “fed upon pepperpot these three weeks past in order to bring his nerves to a proper anti-Gallican tone.” Referring to the narrow electoral margin of the previous November’s election, he doubted whether “the President by Three Votes” had a mandate to drag the country against its will into war—and reverting to one of his favorite themes, he mocked Adams as “His Rotundity.”

  As one of the three diplomatic commissioners, Adams chose his old friend Elbridge Gerry, a man who still commanded the respect and trust of Jefferson and the Republicans. Writing to Gerry, Adams denied the Republican charge that he was pushing the country toward war. “As to going to war with France lightly, I know of nobody who is willing for it—but she has already gone to war with us lightly. She is at war with us, but we are not at war with her.”

  THE PRESIDENT’S NAVAL PROGRAM sailed through the Federalist Senate, but the House was still closely divided. The nominal breakdown of Federalists and Republicans was 56–48, but some members were almost always absent and others had a bent for crossing party lines. House Republicans, counting heads, saw they did not have the votes to deny Adams his navy outright, so they resorted to parliamentary delaying tactics and crippling amendments in the hope of accomplishing much the same thing.

  James Madison had relinquished his seat and gone home to Virginia, leaving a void that no other Republican seemed to have the intellectual powers or political clout to fill. But a second-term congressman from western Pennsylvania was emerging as his natural successor. Albert Gallatin was a native-born Genevan who had emigrated to America in the hope of making his fortune. He had first set foot in Boston, in 1780, at the age of nineteen, and shortly thereafter migrated to western Pennsylvania. He had entered politics as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention in Harrisburg, where he was an opponent of ratification. Elected to the House in 1794, Gallatin’s signature issue was his insistence upon a rapid pay-down of the national debt, which he regarded as the root of all political evil. He set up the Ways and Means Committee as a counterweight to the treasury, and with his formidable grasp of finance he was able to throw light on Hamilton’s obfuscation of the true extent of federal borrowing.

  On June 24, Gallatin rose to his feet and objected to the completion and arming of the frigates. To maintain them would cost some $350,000 a year, and to man them would cost the treasury another $500,000 per year. The nation, said Gallatin, could ill afford these tremendous expenses. Calculating that six or even ten frigates could not convoy more than 5 percent of American merchant trade, Gallatin argued that “they could, therefore, be of little use, but might be the means of producing the greatest evil to the country.” Republicans moved to have the entire question of the navy referred to a committee where it could be studied and debated, perhaps forestalling action until the fall session. When that tactic was defeated, they offered an amendment to limit the deployment of the frigates to American territorial waters, which also failed.

  “An Act providing a Naval Armament” was signed into law on July 1. The bill passed the House by the apparently commanding margin of 78–25, but the Republican amendments had knocked out the president’s request for nine sloops of war and imposed a one-year time limit on the law. The legislation authorized the fitting out and manning of three frigates and spelled out details of personnel, pay, and rations. Congress appropriated $200,000 to complete and arm the frigates and $100,000 for pay and provisions. Federalists were disappointed. After all the talk of a major defense buildup, the measures adopted that summer seemed anticlimatic. The British minister in Philadelphia said that “every measure of warlike preparation or internal defence has been adopted with an excess of caution, and provided for with a niggardly hand.”

  As the recess approached, the heat settled in oppressively and the city became, in the first lady’s words, a “bake house.” The partisan bitterness reached new heights. When John Adams learned at third hand that his vice president was criticizing his policy toward France, he exploded: “It is evidence of a mind soured, yet seeking for popularity and eaten to a honeycomb with ambition, yet weak, uninformed, and ignorant.” Jefferson professed to regret the general decline in civility: “Men who have been intimate all their lives cross the street to avoid meeting and turn their heads another way, lest they should be obliged to touch their hats.”

  AFTER THE GROUNDING of the United States on launch, Secretary of War James McHenry was concerned that the mishap might be repeated in Baltimore. The War Office ordered Humphreys to tear himself away from his duties for a few days to travel south and “consult on the best Method to be pursued in Launching the Frigate Constellation into the Water (so as to float) without Sustaining injury by the Operation.”

  Work on the 36-gun Baltimore frigate had progressed under the autocratic supervision of Captain Thomas Truxtun. She was still on the stocks, but she was fully caulked and the shipwrights were at work sheathing her hull in a thin copper skin. A ship with an unprotected wooden hull would become a virtual reef within months of entering salt water. Colonies of barnacles and shellfish and other marine organisms would attach themselves below the waterline, impairing the vessel’s speed and maneuverability. Worse, the teredo, a wood-eating ship worm, could eat through a hull completely. Copper sheets bolted to the hull would deter most sea organisms, and they were known to repel the teredo altogether. Humphre
ys had insisted that “it is important to a Nation that all their ships of War shall be coppered,” and since the American copper-rolling industry was in a primitive state, thousands of four-foot sheets were imported, at great cost, from England.

  On Humphreys’s arrival in Baltimore, he and the Baltimore master, David Stodder, took soundings in the basin at the end of the slipway. They found 16 feet of water deepening to 30 feet further from shore. The United States had drawn 19 feet on launch. The shipwrights took some comfort in the thought that high tide would add another three feet of depth, that the Constellation was a smaller ship than her Philadelphian sister, and that the soft mud bottom of the Patapsco would be more forgiving than the Delaware’s firmer riverbed. Even so, no ship the size of the Constellation had ever been launched into the Patapsco, and the depth of water adjacent to the yard left no margin for error.

  Truxtun, who was finding it hard to obtain enough skilled workers in Baltimore, asked that as many Philadelphians as could be spared be sent south to assist in launching the Constellation. Humphreys promised to send “as many hands as I possibly can,” but warned that it would be difficult because “many have objections to Baltimore.”

  News of the planned launch was reported in a Baltimore newspaper: “Wind, weather and tide permitting, the United States Frigate CONSTELLATION will be LAUNCHED on THURSDAY, the 7th of September.” As in Philadelphia, the launch drew an enormous crowd, probably more than ten thousand, most of whom traversed on foot the quarter-mile stretch of sandy marsh separating Stodder’s yard from the city. An army guard was detached from nearby Whetstone Point and local militia companies paraded in their colorful uniforms. Sentries on the ground kept the crowds back, while others were posted on deck, where they would remain as the ship entered the river. As in the Delaware four months earlier, a fleet of colorfully decorated private boats dropped their anchors a short distance from the bank.

  Constellation was about 20 percent smaller (by tonnage) than the United States, but she was still a tremendous vessel when compared to the brigs and schooners that Baltimore shipwrights were accustomed to launching, and her gigantic hull must have been an extraordinary sight. She was held upright by a file of heavy oak stanchions that rose, like flying buttresses, from the ground to her wales. The new copper sheets under the waterline would turn green and greasy after a few months at sea, but now they shone a deep, polished bronze. One hundred and twenty dollars’ worth of tallow had been applied to grease the ways. Truxtun stood on the quarterdeck in full-dress uniform; he would ride his ship into the Patapsco.

  Two hundred workmen were engaged in the difficult operation—all of them, Stodder warned, must be ready to obey his instructions “at the instant directed.” A drummer stationed by his side emphasized his orders. At high water, a few minutes after nine o’clock in the morning, the signal was given and the men all around the ship swung their mauls in unison and struck the heavy wedges under the hull “with as much exactness and precision as the manual exercise by a regiment of veterans.” The coordinated blows lifted the weight of the hull imperceptibly from the keel blocks.

  At Stodder’s word, the stanchions were removed, the stops knocked away, and the lashings cut. The frigate lurched, glided down the slipway, and plunged into the river. The thousands cheered. The cannons in the yard roared. The infantrymen in the waist of the ship, now afloat, fired a 16-gun salute, one for each state in the Union. The process had seemed as natural and effortless as a duck sliding off a log.

  Truxtun was relieved. “A Better Launch I never Saw,” he told Humphreys. “The Ship Cleared the ways without touching or Meeting with the Smallest Accident…did not strain in the least, or straiten her sheer.” “Nothing could surpass the proud and stately movements of the ship,” a witness reported; “—she seemed conscious of the occasion, and passed on to the embrace of her destined element with an air of dignity and grandeur, inconceivable.”

  EVERY JULY AND AUGUST, relentless summer heat and eighteenth-century standards of sanitation made urban life unbearable. Philadelphians, like city dwellers everywhere, heaved their household garbage into the sunken gutters that ran along the streets outside their homes. Manure, animal carcasses, and fishheads baked in the sun and permeated the city with a putrefying stench. Rainstorms were welcomed because they washed the streets clean, but during the long summer droughts, accumulated heaps of refuse fed the dogs, pigs, and goats that ran wild in the streets.

  Like all the big seaports, Philadelphia was susceptible to late summer outbreaks of the viral disease known as yellow fever. Just four years earlier, in the early fall of 1793, nearly one in ten Philadelphians had died in the city’s worst ever epidemic. Eighteenth-century physicians imagined that the fever was brought about by “a particular construction of the atmosphere”—deadly “fetid humors” and “mephitic vapors” that emanated from the ground. Few suspected that the real perpetrator was the Aedes aegypti, a mosquito borne up the river in ships arriving from the tropics. Introduced into the city’s densely populated waterfront districts during the sweltering summer months, when windows were thrown open to bring in a breeze, the mosquito and the deadly virus it carried gained easy entry into Philadelphian homes.

  On August 1, 1797, three weeks after Congress had adjourned and left the city, the physician Benjamin Rush was called to the bedside of a storekeeper near the Penn Street wharf. The patient complained of wrenching headaches, dizziness, chills, and nausea—symptoms that might have indicated any number of common summertime illnesses. In the next five days, however, he progressed through a cycle of advanced hemorrhagic symptoms that marked him as a terminal victim of yellow fever. He became severely dehydrated; his skin turned flushed and leathery, his eyes jaundiced and shot through with thick, red veins. In the last two days, if his case was typical, he would have begun to bleed freely though the eyes, nose, ears, and anus. Blood might even have seeped like sweat from his pores. His tongue would have taken on a dry, polished texture, turning sallow and then darkening to black. He would have vomited seemingly impossible quantities of a black, granular material that had the appearance and consistency of coffee grounds. He would have descended into an unconscious delirium, tormented by hallucinations, shouting at imagined demons, possibly even rising to attack his attendants.

  On the fifth day, the storekeeper died. In the following week, several other inhabitants of the neighborhood took sick. The numbers of dead and dying rose rapidly. Soon there would be fifty new cases per day. With the memory of the 1793 epidemic in mind, the public was quick to assume the worst. The panic intensified with the publication of official warnings and a plan to rope off infected neighborhoods. The roads out of the city were choked with refugees, a series of squalid tent cities sprung up in vacant fields west of Broad Street, and a temporary hospital was set up in the Wigwam Tavern on the Schuylkill. The federal government was effectively shut down as officeholders and clerks joined the exodus. By the end of August, an estimated 35,000 inhabitants had evacuated. Those few that remained were awed by the city’s eerie, post-apocalyptic stillness.

  One of the worst afflicted neighborhoods was Southwark, where the frigate United States was still secured at the Humphreys Wharf. To repair the damage she had sustained to her bottom on launching, the ship had been careened, or “hove down,” so that teams of workers could gain access to her keel. This long, painstaking process had required all of her gunports and hawseholes to be stopped up and made watertight, planks to be nailed to her strakes to provide footing for the workers, and her lower masts rigged up as derricks. With the means of numerous hawsers run ashore, the great hull had been heaved down, inch by inch, until the spar deck was nearly vertical and the men could get at the damage on the ship’s bottom.

  In late August, Captain Barry reported that the difficult repairs had been completed, and the ballast and water casks brought aboard and stowed, and asked the War Office for permission to take the ship to her moorings lower down the river. The captain was anxious to move the frigate away
from the riverfront, where there had been, as he reported, several cases of the “bilious unremitting fever.” Most of the riggers and craftsmen who had been hired to fit out the ship for sea were packing up their families and fleeing for their lives.

  Joshua Humphreys had retreated to his country house in Haverford Township. The master builder sheepishly informed the War Office that letters addressed to him could be “left at the Buck Tavern at Turnpike Road kept by Mrs. Chilling, which is within a mile and half of my house.” At first, he hoped that the fever would subside, allowing the ship to be made ready for sea before winter. By late September, however, with the dead still being piled on carts to be buried in mass graves, he was less confident:

  I was in hopes of soon returning to the City, and until yesterday was very sanguine of having [the frigate] completed, to sail before the river closed this season, but the unfortunate report of the contagion, and the number of deaths in the vicinity of the yard, will prevent for the present, my return there. The number is much greater than in the year 93. I know of no family that has escaped. The Clerk of the Yard was taken sick in the Country House and is now dead.

  While Humphreys was rusticating in safety, unhappy news arrived from Boston. The launch of the 44-gun frigate Constitution had failed. When the stanchions and blocks were knocked away, she had traveled 27 feet toward Boston Harbor and then stopped, stuck fast to the launch ways. Especially galling was the news that one of the thousands of disappointed spectators had been President John Adams. The Boston builder, Colonel George Claghorn, made a second attempt two days later. The frigate had traveled another 31 feet and again stopped short, and another crowd had gone home disappointed.

  “I cannot help feeling for the situation of the Frigate, as well as for Col. Claghorn whose situation must be mortifying,” Humphreys wrote the War Office. “If you should consider that I could offer any services to the Builder, I shall cheerfully obey your order.” Since Humphreys had suffered his own mortification in launching the United States into the ground, one suspects he was secretly pleased. Not surprisingly, he suggested that the mishap must have been due to unauthorized alterations in his design.