Six Frigates

by Ian W. Toll

  In the ensuing weeks, the Boston yard workers increased the angle of descent of the launch ways, re-tallowed them, and cut away an adjoining wharf. The third attempt to launch the Constitution, a few minutes past noon on October 21, attracted a much smaller crowd. They were rewarded by the sight of the great frigate rumbling down the ways and plunging into the water, pushing a wave across the harbor.

  COLD WEATHER BROUGHT AN END to the yellow fever, as it always had in the past. Beginning in late October, refugees straggled back into the city—tentatively at first, and then in growing numbers. Windows were unshuttered and shops opened their doors. Ships that had lain at anchor at Marcus Hook for weeks finally got underway and rode the tides up to the city wharves. Federal officials and their staffs trickled back into town, congressmen and senators began arriving for the second session of the Fifth Congress, and the government gradually resumed its routines of daily business.

  Adams had hoped to send the United States to sea before the river froze and trapped her for the winter, but as the fever abated and the workmen returned to Southwark, it was painfully clear that the frigate would not sail in 1797. The careening had placed great stress on her entire frame, and the seams on her decks and topsides had broken open. Caulking gangs would have to replicate much of their earlier work. Having taken in her ballast, she had been warped out into the fairway; from Southwark she would have been a distant shape on the river, a bare hull without topmasts or rigging. She had no guns, no provisions, and no crew to speak of. An acting lieutenant of marines had been ordered to begin enlisting men to fill his complement; as the new recruits came aboard, they relieved the army guard that had been detached from Fort Mifflin. Twenty men were berthed aboard a ship designed to carry a crew of more than four hundred.

  The War Office kept up a steady drumbeat of pressure to finish arming, fitting out, and victualling the three frigates that were finally afloat. In a typical ultimatum, Secretary McHenry urged David Stodder to complete the fitting out of the Constellation “in the shortest possible time” and to “put her in a situation to leave Baltimore by the most prompt, full and undivided exertion of your whole time, talents and force…. Should she suffer by any want of Industry or exertion upon your part, it will necessarily and justly be ascribed to you.”

  But yellow fever also struck in Fells Point, Baltimore, interrupting work on the Constellation. She would pass the winter of 1797–98 in the Patapsco’s shallow channel, with ice all around her, and, after the thaw, resting on the riverbed at low tide. Stodder worried that the Constellation’s moorings might not be strong enough “during heavy Squalls or Spurts of wind.” There was apparently no anchor to be found in Baltimore heavy enough to secure the 1,200-ton vessel. The mental picture of the ship being thrown back onto the bank of the Patapsco was enough to move the War Office to have a heavy anchor sent to Baltimore from Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

  Humphreys and Captain Truxtun clashed over the proper height, diameter, and placement of the masts and spars. There was no well-established principle to guide shipwrights in the masting and sparring of ships, and the result tended to vary from vessel to vessel according to the whim of the builder. It was a technical question, but a vital one. In view of the great size of the frigates, all could agree that exceptionally large rigs were needed to provide sufficient driving power; but if the masts and spars were too large, they would render the ship unseaworthy.

  The War Office was inclined to defer to Truxtun, who was never happier than when taking up his pen to instruct others on the finer points of seamanship, and who had given a great deal of thought to the subject. “To find the length of the main-mast,” he wrote, “I take twice the breadth of the beam, and one-sixth of the sum, and add them together; and to find the length of the main yard, I take twice the breadth of the beam.” Truxtun’s formula, when applied to the Constellation, would result in towering masts and a heavy top-hamper (combined weight aloft). He suggested that his dimensions be reviewed by the other captains. “I mention sea officers,” Truxtun added, “because it is almost impossible that any other description of men, who have not had an opportunity of being often at sea, can form a proper judgment on this important subject.” By this he meant to imply that naval architects—Joshua Humphreys, specifically—should not have the final word.

  Humphreys reacted mildly to the gibe. The two had known one another for years, and Humphreys had built and repaired ships for Truxtun in the past. He might even have interpreted Truxtun’s remark as lighthearted and therefore essentially harmless. Moreover, in their highly ranked society, the naval captain stood a rung or two above the shipbuilder. Acknowledging his “worthy friend’s great experience as a sea officer,” Humphreys pointed out that he himself had a great deal of experience in “building, repairing, strengthening vessels many of which cases never came under [Truxtun’s] notice.” He thought the captain’s mast plan was too large, and warned that the frigates, if overmasted, would be unstable in heavy seas.

  The War Office took the easy way out by authorizing each captain to choose mast and spar dimensions for the frigate under his command, according to his own judgment. Humphreys lost the point, but his judgment would be vindicated.

  THERE WAS STILL NO WORD FROM PARIS on the progress of diplomatic negotiations. With war raging on land and sea, the three American envoys had worried that their dispatches might be intercepted. As a precaution, they sent them by circuitous routes, and contrary winds delayed them further still. Even by contemporary standards, the delays were frustrating. Congress found itself with little to do. The question of war or peace depended upon the news from France, and there was no news from France.

  At a quarter past noon on November 23, 1797, Adams delivered the opening address to the second session of the Fifth Congress. Whatever the outcome of the Paris talks, he said, the United States must have a navy. In a world in which “pride, ambition, avarice, and violence have been so long unrestrained,” the nation’s maritime commerce could not survive without naval protection. And commerce, said Adams, was essential to the American people: “The genius, character, and habits of the people are highly commercial; their cities have been founded and exist upon commerce; our agriculture, fisheries, arts, and manufactures are connected with, and must depend upon it. In short, commerce has made this country what it is, and it cannot be destroyed or neglected without involving the people in poverty and distress.”

  But when House leaders moved a resolution to provide additional funds for the completion of the three frigates, Republicans objected—and this time they were joined by several Federalists who were exasperated by the seemingly endless delays and cost overruns. One member remarked that Congress might as well throw the money into the sea. Instead, the House voted to appoint a special committee to investigate the “apparently enormous expenses and unaccountable delays” since 1794. Why were the frigates several years over schedule and hundreds of thousands of dollars over budget? How could a $200,000 appropriation provided just six months earlier have run out? How could Humphreys have disbursed the extraordinary sum of $7,000 in a single month? Who was to blame and whose heads were going to roll?

  Secretary McHenry’s defense was a long report with an impressive sheaf of accompanying documents and tables of data. Much of the information was evidently provided by Joshua Humphreys for McHenry’s signature; entire passages were lifted word for word from Humphreys’s earlier letters to the War Office. The report referred to the difficulties encountered in cutting the live oak out of the forests, the logistical challenges of delivering supplies to six different building yards, and the delays caused by the yellow fever outbreaks in Philadelphia and Baltimore.

  Humphreys, a stiff-backed Quaker businessman, privately fumed at the accusations of waste and corruption that had been raised against him in Congress. “When we came to calculate on expense, I have in my Yard exploded everything that was unnecessary,” he had earlier written Captain Thomas Truxtun: “…For my part I feel no kind of criminality attached to my
conduct, but am ready to look any accuser fully in the face and ready to answer any pertinent interrogations without a blush.”

  On March 4, exactly a year to the day since Adams had taken his oath of office, a packet of dispatches arrived at the offices of the State Department at Fifth and Chestnut Streets. Secretary of State Timothy Pickering deciphered the first few paragraphs, then hurried to the president’s house to brief Adams on their contents. The decoding would take weeks, and the whole story was learned only by degrees. But as the particulars emerged, Adams realized that the dispatches were incendiary. It was not just that the mission had failed, or that the government of France had shown little interest in negotiations. During their months in Paris, the three American envoys had been repeatedly insulted, threatened, and humiliated. They had even been told they would be required to bribe the foreign minister, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, as the price of direct negotiations.

  Talleyrand was one of the great political survivors of all time, a man who somehow managed to adapt to nearly every change in regime throughout the most turbulent period of French history. Horace Walpole compared him to “a viper who has cast his skin” and Napoleon would later call him “a pile of shit in a silk stocking.” He had honed his talents as a financier, administrator, and Machiavellian tactician while serving as a Catholic bishop in the last years of the ancien régime. In 1795 and early 1796, while living as an exile in western Massachusetts, he had made a fortune speculating in commodities and real estate. An American who knew him during this period recalled “his passionless, immovable countenance, sarcastic and malicious even in his intercourse with children…. But who does not know, or rather, who ever did know Talleyrand?”

  If the American envoys hoped that the foreign minister’s sojourn in America would leave him disposed toward peace, they were soon disappointed. France needed money to finance its continuing war against the Royalist coalition, and the privateering system was a lucrative source of revenue. Talleyrand himself needed money, both to support his extravagant lifestyle and to fund the system of graft that kept him in power. After an extraordinary series of battlefield victories won by the young Corsican general Napoleon Bonaparte, France was growing accustomed to treating the rest of Europe with the arrogance of a proven conqueror. Why shouldn’t the United States be reduced to the status of yet another vassal state, whose payments of bribes and tribute would buy it the right to exist?

  Upon their arrival in Paris, the American envoys had been kept waiting for weeks. When admitted into Talleyrand’s presence at last, he seemed bored and impatient and escorted them to the door almost immediately. A few days later, three of Talleyrand’s agents—Jean-Conrad Hottinguer, Pierre Bellamy, and Lucien Hauteval—approached the envoys and said there could be no treaty without the payment of a bribe (douceur) of £50,000 sterling to Talleyrand personally. “I will not disguise from you,” one of these would-be bagmen said, “…you must pay money. You must pay a great deal of money.”

  Congressional Republicans, still ignorant of the explosive contents of the dispatches, hoped that they would provide some evidence that the French government had been willing to negotiate. The trap was laid, and the Republicans stepped into it. On Monday, April 2, with the support of Federalists who may have had some inkling of their content, the House voted to demand full copies of the dispatches and the original instructions provided to the envoys. Adams, putting aside his reservations, delivered a complete, unedited, and fully decoded copy of the dispatches to Congress Hall the next morning. He withheld only the names of Talleyrand’s agents, who were identified as “X, Y, and Z.” As a result, the whole imbroglio passed into history as the “XYZ Affair.”

  The House cleared the galleries, locked the doors, and went into closed session for three days. Twelve hundred copies were printed. Not surprisingly, a few were soon leaked to the newspapers. Having hoped that the dispatches would furnish them with rhetorical ammunition to use against the president, the Republicans suddenly learned that France’s treatment of the envoys had in fact been far worse than Adams had let on. Now the entire nation would know the whole sordid tale. Abigail Adams observed that the Republicans were “struck dumb, and opened not their mouths.” Fenno, in the Gazette of the United States, wrote that the revelations had acted upon them “like the shock of some vast explosion,” and that Jefferson “stands an awkward and misplaced colossus.”

  Adams ordered the envoys to return home at once, and the State Department named Clement Humphreys as the diplomatic courier who would carry the president’s instructions to Paris. Humphreys had been indicted and convicted for assaulting Benjamin Franklin Bache on the deck of the United States a year earlier, but his fine had been paid by Federalist sympathizers. Republicans interpreted the appointment as a reward for extralegal violence against an anti-government editor. Jefferson wrote in his journal: “The President…has chosen as bearer of [dispatches] one Clement Humphreys, the son of a ship carpenter, ignorant, underage, not speaking a word of French, most abusive of that nation, whose only merit is having mobbed & beaten Bache on board the frigate built here, for which he was indicted & punished by fine.” Republican editor James Callender charged that “the case of Humphreys demonstrates how gladly those who professed to applaud his intended murder and who paid his fine would butcher if they dared.”

  But Adams was enjoying a surge of public support. On April 10, a huge crowd gathered outside his house to attend his weekly levee. Two days later, prominent Philadelphia Federalists met at Dunwoody’s Tavern on High Street to approve a series of resolutions supporting the president’s policy. Joshua Humphreys was among them. A much-repeated toast was: “To John Adams. May he, like Samson, slay thousands of Frenchmen with the jawbone of Jefferson.”

  Secretary McHenry asked Congress to mobilize for war. French privateers, he warned, were hovering in the sea-lanes off every major American seaport. To offer no resistance would “exhibit to the world a sad spectacle of national degradation and imbecility.” The administration’s defense program called for warships, harbor fortifications, ordnance, small arms, gunpowder, and other military stores. Within two weeks, Congress had given the president authorization to arm, man, and deploy twelve additional vessels. This legislation triggered a round of new merchant ship conversions, and this in turn expanded the number of ships available to the navy and allowed the big frigates to cruise with smaller ships in company. Congress also appropriated $400,000 to equip, man, and provision the frigates.

  Republicans would oppose the president, Albert Gallatin pledged, even if “branded with the usual epithets of Jacobins and tools of foreign influence.” He rose to his feet, day after day, to decry the rush to build a navy. Citing statistics to prove that American commerce had grown and prospered year after year, even while being plundered by the warring powers, he argued that “a commerce can be protected without a navy, whilst a nation preserves its neutrality.” A navy would be a sop to the merchants of the northern seaports, but its costs would fall heavily on the rural interior. And if taxes were inadequate, the nation would run up its national debt, borrowing at 6 percent interest from the same northern merchants and moneymen who had demanded a navy in the first place. The Federalists, Gallatin said, were cooking up a war scare to “increase their power and to bind us by the treble chain of fiscal, legal and military despotism.”

  But the political balance had tipped decisively in the government’s favor. Several House Republicans joined the Federalists in supporting the naval measures, which passed handily. “The question of war & peace,” Jefferson wrote Madison, “depends now on a toss of cross & pile.”

  AS THE FIRST SPRING thaw arrived in March 1798, and the ice covering the surface of the Patapsco shifted and began to break up, the War Office instructed Thomas Truxtun to “repair with all due Speed on board the Ship Constellation lying at Baltimore…no Time [should] be lost in carrying the Ship into deep Water, taking on board her Cannon, Ammunition, Water Provisions & Stores of every kind, completing
what Work is yet to be done, shipping her Complement of Seaman & Marines, and preparing her in every Respect for Sea.”

  Born in Hempstead, Long Island, Truxtun was the only son of a country lawyer. Defying his father’s wishes that he should study law, he had escaped to the sea at age twelve to pursue a brilliant and lucrative career in the merchant marine. Before the Revolution, he was briefly pressed into the Royal Navy, where he was offered a midshipman’s warrant, which he declined. By 1798, Truxtun was a wealthy merchant sea captain, and one of the leading lights of his profession, with thirty years of experience at sea. He had been three times around the Cape of Good Hope, having commanded two highly profitable voyages to China and one to India. He had probably earned enough money to provide for his ten children without ever making another voyage, and certainly had no need for the $120 a month in salary and rations that the federal government was paying him. Money, he declared, no longer held his interest. “Does any man enter into [naval service] for the sake of subsistence?” he asked. “Are not glory and fame the grand incentives?”

  Truxtun had collected all of the books, charts, and tables published in Greenwich by the British Commissioners of Longitude, and he had mastered the difficult art of determining longitude by “lunars”—a process requiring precise celestial observations and arduous logarithmic calculations. Many sea officers despaired of ever mastering the system. In the hope of reducing the process to manageable proportions, Truxtun had published a book on the subject, entitled Remarks, Instructions, and Examples relating to the Latitude & Longitude. He supplied copies to the U.S. War Office, suggesting that each of his fellow captains be assigned to read it.