Six Frigates

by Ian W. Toll

  Norfolk was overjoyed to be the first port of call for the victorious frigate and her prize. The mayor and other civic officials prepared a welcome dinner for the captain and his officers, preceded by a parade of local militia companies and a sixteen-round rifle salute. All up and down the eastern seaboard, the newspapers were full of admiring reports of the Constellation’s victory, the theaters performed hastily written sketches and songs, and vendors sold ornaments and memorabilia commemorating the battle, including “brave Truxtun cock’d & round hats, in the Military and Naval stile.” A widely quoted toast, first given at a banquet in New Hampshire, alluded to Talleyrand’s rejection of American diplomatic overtures: “Captain Truxtun: our popular Envoy to the French, who was accredited at the first interview.” Alexander Hamilton attended a dinner given in the captain’s honor at the Tontine Coffee House in New York. A group of English merchants and underwriters at the London Exchange raised 500 guineas to commission a silver urn for Truxtun, in thanks for the blow he had struck against the common enemy.

  In Philadelphia, leading Republicans predicted that the capture of L’Insurgente would lead to an escalation of the conflict, but President Adams was pleased. “I wish all the other officers had as much zeal as Truxtun,” he told Stoddert. “…If you correct [his] ardor a little, as you ought to do, I pray you to do it very gently and with great delicacy. I would not have it damped for the world.”

  Truxtun’s ardor would be on full display in his campaign to collect the prize money he and his crew were owed. Captured enemy vessels were required to be sold at auction or purchased by the federal government, and a share of the proceeds paid to every officer and seaman aboard the victorious ship. Each man was paid according to a formula based on his rank, with the captain taking the largest share (three twentieths of the total). If the prize was of lesser force than the capturing ship, the crew received half the proceeds and the federal government retained the other half. If the prize was equal or superior in force to the capturing ship, the prize was declared “the sole property of the captors,” and the crew was paid the entire amount of her value. The relative force of Constellation and L’Insurgente was therefore a question of pressing interest to Truxtun and the men who had served under him.

  Truxtun maintained that L’Insurgente was superior. His accounting dwelled on her crew, which he reckoned at 409, compared with 316 on the Constellation; and also on the number of guns she carried: 40, as compared to the Constellation’s 38. But these figures were misleading, perhaps deliberately so. The Frenchman carried more than fifty passengers, who had made little or no contribution to the fighting. More to the point, L’Insurgente was nearly 30 percent lighter than Constellation by tonnage, and she carried 12-pounders as her main battery of weapons, whereas the Constellation carried 24s. By any objective measure the prize was of lesser force than the Constellation. But Truxtun and his officers employed a combination of bluster and obfuscation to convince their countrymen (and perhaps themselves) that the Constellation had triumphed over a more powerful opponent.

  An Admiralty Court, assembled at Norfolk in June, took sworn testimony from First Lieutenant John Rodgers. Rodgers cited the bare numbers of guns and men on each ship, but the court did not press him (and he did not volunteer) to give details about the calibers of the weapons or the overall size and weight of the two frigates. Based on this testimony, the court ruled that L’Insurgente was the stronger ship. A panel chaired by Navy Agent William Pennock subsequently examined L’Insurgente and assessed her value at $120,000.

  The Rules and Regulations of the Navy, then in draft form, decreed that any officer “who shall execute, or attempt, or countenance any fraud against the United States…shall on conviction be cashiered and rendered forever incapable of any future employment…and suffer such other punishment as a court martial shall inflict.” By law, all money raised by the government in prize cases was to be deposited into a fund to support disabled officers, sailors, and marines. Rodgers thus tried to defraud the navy, and to do so in a way that would deprive disabled veterans of their pensions. Though Truxtun did not testify, he supported the court’s judgment and attempted to collect the entire $120,000. Captain Alexander Murray, also stationed in Norfolk, believed Truxtun’s powerful influence was at work behind the scenes. “There is one thing Certain, that his Word is a Law here,” he wrote the secretary, “which may not be his fault, as Mankind will sometimes be Blinded in the radiance of Glory.”

  Stoddert was not fooled. Although he had not seen L’Insurgente with his own eyes, he had received a survey report with her dimensions from Josiah Fox. He knew she was inferior in force to the Constellation, and he also knew $120,000 was a high estimate. “The sum fixed on by the Gentlemen at Norfolk is far beyond her value, in my opinion,” he told Truxtun. “She is, I presume, seven or nearly seven years old, a rough-built Vessel, much the worse for wear. Her copper it seems will soon want shifting.” The secretary asked Joshua Humphreys to provide his fairest estimate of her value, “no more, no less.” Based on Fox’s plans and detailed survey notes, Humphreys arrived at an estimate of $84,500. Stoddert also considered appealing the Admiralty Court’s ruling that L’Insurgente was the stronger of the two frigates into a federal district court, but that would involve “the disagreeable circumstance” of litigation between the Navy Department and the country’s most celebrated naval hero. So Stoddert made Truxtun an offer: 100 percent of Humphreys’s reduced estimate of $84,500. “I hope this offer will be agreeable,” he wrote. “You know the principle upon which I make it, & I really think it ought to be satisfactory. I cannot exceed it.”

  Truxtun, perhaps suspecting the judgment concerning the relative force of the two frigates was unlikely to hold up in court, accepted the offer. His share, after agent’s commissions and expenses, would amount to more than $8,000. It was a fortune—the modern-day wage equivalent would be about $2 million. Many of the Constellation’s enlisted men, however, failed to collect their shares of the settlement, having naively sold them to speculators for a fraction of their value.

  GEORGE WASHINGTON HAD AGREED to come out of retirement to serve as commander in chief of the 10,000-man “new provisional army.” On November 10, 1798, dressed in full military regalia and accompanied by a cavalry company, the old general rode into Philadelphia to an ecstatic welcome.

  The decision to bring Washington back was, Abigail Adams said, “one of those strokes which the prospect and exigency of the times required, and which the President determined upon without consultation.” But John Adams had no real enthusiasm for the mobilization of land forces, and his preference for the navy grew stronger as the Quasi War entered its second year. “Floating Batteries and wooden walls have been my favorite System of Warfare and Defense for this Country for Three and Twenty years,” he wrote in reply to an address by the Boston Marine Society. News of a great British fleet victory over the French off the coast of Egypt the previous August (Nelson’s Battle of the Nile) helped convince Adams that the mobilization of a new American army was expensive and unnecessary. “At present there is no more prospect of seeing a French army here than there is in heaven,” he told McHenry.

  There was a second factor working in the president’s mind. Against his wishes, Adams had nominated Alexander Hamilton as second-in-command of the army. His hand had been forced by Washington, who had threatened to refuse command of the army if he could not choose his own subordinates. Major General Hamilton had taken effective control of the force, distributing officers’ commissions and placing his loyal lieutenants in command of key regiments. Adams began to understand that Hamilton harbored ambitions of conquest—that he would, if given the opportunity, lead an “army of liberation” to conquer Louisiana and Spanish Florida, perhaps even continuing through Mexico and into Central and South America. With the cooperation of the British navy, St. Domingue and France’s other remaining West Indian colonies could be wrested away. When his conquests were secure, Hamilton would return to America as the archetypical ma
n on horseback with a victorious army on foot.

  It was a well-traveled route through history. Great republics had often been subverted by their own successful generals. It was the route traveled by Julius Caesar, when he crossed the Rubicon; it was the route that was being traveled at that very moment by Napoleon Bonaparte, returning to Paris after his great victories over the Austrians in northern Italy. At the last extremity, Hamilton’s personal ambition might climax in an upheaval of the same constitutional government that he had done so much to create and nurture. The domestic political turmoil of the 1790s had left Hamilton and the so-called High Federalists with profound doubts that the Constitution could be saved, and perhaps even whether it was worth saving.

  Abigail had once warned that Hamilton would “become a second Buonaparty” if ever given the opportunity, and Adams was now inclined to agree. “The man is stark mad or I am,” he said. Elbridge Gerry recalled a conversation in which Adams said he “thought Hamilton and a party were endeavoring to get an army on foot to give Hamilton the command of it, and thus to proclaim a regal government and place Hamilton as the head of it, and prepare the way for a province of Great Britain.” Years later, Adams told a correspondent: “I have always cried Ships! Ships! Hamilton’s hobby horse was Troops! Troops! With all the vanity and timidity of Cicero, all the debauchery of Marc Anthony, and all the ambition of Julius Caesar, his object was the command of fifty thousand men. My object was the defense of my country, and that alone, which I knew could be effected only by a navy.” At about the same time Adams began to understand that his cabinet, all holdovers from the Washington administration with the exception of Navy Secretary Stoddert, were personally loyal to Hamilton. Cabinet deliberations were being relayed to Hamilton in detail, and perhaps even guided by him at a distance. Adams began to keep his own counsel, sharing nothing with his department heads but what was absolutely essential.

  Even after Talleyrand’s blundering attempt to extort a bribe from American diplomats in the fall of 1797, Adams was willing to engage in negotiations with the French. In late 1798, while many Federalists in Congress were clamoring for a declaration of war, Adams had announced to the Congress that his government would resume diplomatic engagements should France promise not to repeat the humiliating treatment of the American envoys. If the French government would first take the “requisite step” of providing such assurances, Adams said, he would send a second delegation to Paris.

  France had good reasons to pursue a peaceful accommodation with America. The Directory observed the warming trend in Anglo-American relations with growing apprehension, and feared for the security of French colonial possessions in the Caribbean and the North American mainland. For all the harassment of merchant vessels by French privateers, France depended upon neutral maritime powers, particularly the United States, to carry goods and foodstuffs between Europe and the islands. When Talleyrand learned of the firestorm created in the United States by the XYZ revelations, he understood that he had overreached himself. As a conciliatory gesture, he issued direct orders demanding the liberation of American prisoners in the West Indies. Adams learned of these measures, and other indications of a French eagerness to renew diplomatic contacts, through American envoys in other European capitals.

  On February 18, 1799, without consulting his cabinet and without any warning, Adams sent a message to the Senate. It was read by a surprised Jefferson, sitting in his capacity as president of the Senate: “Always disposed and ready to embrace every plausible appearance of probability of preserving or restoring tranquility, I nominate William Vans Murray, our minister resident at the Hague, to be minister plenipotentiary of the United States to the French Republic.”

  High Federalists, many still hankering for a formal declaration of war, were thunderstruck. “Had the foulest heart and ablest head in the world been permitted to select the most embarrassing and ruinous measures,” said Senator Theodore Sedgewick of Massachusetts, “perhaps it would have been precisely the one which has been adopted.” Abigail Adams observed with satisfaction that the New England war party was “like a flock of frightened pigeons; nobody had their story ready.” Secretary of State Pickering told colleagues that he had had nothing to do with the decision, and openly opposed it. “The only negociation compatible with our honor or safety,” he said, “is that begun by Truxtun in the capture of L’Insurgente.”

  Hamilton advised that it would be politically unwise to oppose Adams outright, but urged his followers to expand the mission to include two other envoys with harder-line credentials. The Senate endorsed a three-headed delegation consisting of William Vans Murray; Chief Justice Oliver Ellsworth; and William R. Davie, governor of North Carolina.

  Pending the result of this new round of negotiations, Adams told Stoddert, naval operations should be carried out with undiminished energy. “Nor do I think we ought to wait a moment to know whether the French mean to give us any proofs of their desire to conciliate with us,” he wrote. “I am for pursuing all the measures of defense which the laws authorize us to adopt, especially at sea.” One frigate must be spared, however, to deliver Ellsworth and Davie across the Atlantic. That important assignment would fall to Captain John Barry and the USS United States.

  BENJAMIN STODDERT HAD MOVED his wife and seven children from Georgetown to Philadelphia, and the family settled into a comfortable house on Chestnut Street between Ninth and Tenth, not far from the Navy Office. The new secretary was performing well on the job. He had earned the confidence of the president, who relied upon him to direct all Quasi War operations during Adams’s seven-month sojourn in Massachusetts through the spring, summer, and early fall of 1799. Stoddert was, in fact, the only member of the cabinet who was not allied with Hamilton against Adams in the Federalists’ increasingly heated intraparty struggle. “Mr. Stoddert is a man of great sagacity, and conducts the business of department with success and energy,” wrote Treasury Secretary Oliver Wolcott in late 1799.

  While managing the Quasi War deployments, Stoddert also planned for the long-term development of the navy, arguing (without success) for building a fleet of battleships, and developing procedures to limit the chaos, waste, and mismanagement that had been the blight of naval building programs since 1794. Above all, the secretary placed great emphasis on the importance of recruiting and promoting midshipmen who were capable of rising to command rank. Without an officer corps characterized by “zeal & spirit,” he said, the navy “had better burn its vessels.”

  The lack of American bases and supply depots in the West Indies complicated the Quasi War deployments. In the late spring of 1799, the United States, Constitution, and Constellation each returned home, leaving the theater of operations without much of a naval presence at a time when large numbers of merchantmen were sailing from American ports. Stoddert hoped that the Constitution would return to the south by June 1, but she did not manage to leave Boston until July 23. Painful experience would teach Stoddert that six to eight weeks in port were needed to refit, reprovision, and man the big frigates. Moreover, the navy was an all-volunteer force, and recruiting was an omnipresent consideration. As a merchant and shipowner, Stoddert knew how the game was played. The sailors must be paid off and allowed to spend every last dollar on shore. “I think it will be best for you to discharge as many of your men as can be spared from the necessary services on board, whose times expire in this month and next,” Stoddert wrote Captain Barry in May, as the United States lay in the Delaware, preparing to sail on her truce mission to France. “The sooner they are discharged, and have an opportunity of spending their money, the sooner they will enter for another year.”

  The success of the navy, in mid-1799, was reflected in the sharply declining numbers of American merchantmen captured by French privateers. In the waters surrounding Guadaloupe, where eighty-nine American vessels had been captured the previous year, only thirty-eight were taken in 1799. Overall, the number of American ships lost to the French in 1799 fell by nearly two thirds. A congressional study
concluded that the navy had saved the nation more than $9 million in shipping losses. Naval deployments had proven that America was capable of defending its maritime trade against a major European power, and may have persuaded the Directory not to escalate the conflict by issuing a formal declaration of war.

  Rivalries among naval commanders continued to roil the waters. Stoddert was called upon to settle a rancorous dispute concerning the rank and seniority of Captains Truxtun, Dale, and Talbot. Truxtun’s had been the sixth and last name on the 1794 captain’s list, and he was the only man who had not served in the Continental Navy during the Revolution (he had commanded a privateer). But when work had halted on three of the six frigates in 1796, Richard Dale and Silas Talbot (who had ranked third and fifth, respectively) had been released from duty. Their commissions had lapsed, and each man had returned to private life as a merchant captain. Did Truxtun, the most efficient and successful officer in the navy, who had returned from the Leeward Islands with a captured enemy frigate, still rank behind Talbot and Dale? Or had he superseded them? Each of the parties was especially interested in the decision because there was talk in Congress of creating the rank of admiral, and each man’s seniority would influence the likelihood of his promotion.

  “This avarice of Rank in the infancy of our Service is the Devil,” Stoddert remarked in a letter to Alexander Hamilton, and he refused to pay any attention to the Truxtun-Dale-Talbot quarrel for almost a year. By midsummer of 1799, however, it was no longer possible to postpone a decision. Silas Talbot was serving as captain of the Constitution, which was provisioned, outfitted, and ready to sail from Boston Harbor. Early in July, Talbot informed Stoddert that he would resign and leave the ship unless his commission indicated that his original 1794 rank remained intact. Stoddert resented the ultimatum and was inclined to side with Truxtun, but he referred the decision to President Adams, who sighed: “We shall never get the Constitution to sea, by any means that I know of.”