Six Frigates

by Ian W. Toll

  Valuing his solitude, Jefferson did not allow a servant to accompany him on his daily rides. He rode east or west along Pennsylvania Avenue, the District’s main thoroughfare, named as a consolation to the state from which the capital had been transferred. The road started in Georgetown, crossed the Rock Creek bridge at M Street, passed through the little village that had sprung up around the White House, crossed Goose Creek by a stone bridge at Second Street, cut through the little village that surrounded the Capitol, then turned south on New Jersey Avenue and ran through a hilly backcountry all the way to the Navy Yard on the Eastern Branch of the Potomac. This was, at least, the theoretical route. In 1801, the best parts of the road were still littered with stumps, while the worst stretches appeared to peter out into the surrounding wilds. One bridge across Rock Creek had collapsed into a heap of stones, and the stretch between the creek and the executive village passed over a steep hill that was virtually impassable to carriages and wagons. Between the White House and Capitol Hill, a rutted causeway traversed the “Tiber swamp,” a soggy lowland overgrown with brambles, hawthorns, blackberries, and wild rose bushes. A flagstone walkway had been started from the White House toward the Capitol, and a footpath strewn with stone chips had been started from the Capitol toward the White House, but both had been abandoned before they ever met. At high tide, Pennsylvania Avenue was often flooded, and a traveler trying to reach Capitol Hill from the west would be obliged to take a long, circuitous detour along the highlands to the north, or float down the Potomac in a boat.

  Visitors compared the District to the ruins of an ancient city, once great and populous, now half-buried and overgrown. L’Enfant’s street plan appeared to bear little or no relationship to the actual landscape. Major intersections could be reached only by cow paths, and were marked only by stones half-hidden in the underbrush. One could walk or ride for miles through bogs, copses, and meadows and never encounter another person. The District had been a financial graveyard for every major real estate speculator who had bet on its future, and the economic devastation was evident in the dozens of half-built and abandoned buildings, many occupied by vagrants. One still wore a bold red sign: HOTEL. On the arrival of the federal government in 1800, there were only 109 houses built of native brick or stone in the District. Most permanent residents lived in rude wooden huts or hovels. Congressmen and senators were content to live in boardinghouses like prep school boys crammed together into dormitories.

  “Figure to yourself,” wrote a Virginia congressman in 1807, after he had fallen from his horse on Pennsylvania Avenue between the White House and Capitol Hill, “of a man almost bruised to death, on a dark, cold night, in the heart of the capital of the United States, out of sight or hearing of human habitation, and you will have a tolerably exact idea of my situation.”

  According to a story told many years later by his grandson, Jefferson was returning from his daily ride one afternoon, accompanied by several acquaintances whom he had invited to dinner. The horses and riders were spread out along the bridle path, some ahead and some behind. As the president’s horse reached the edge of one of the District’s many small streams, a stranger who was on foot asked if he could be carried across. Jefferson gave the man a hand up and allowed him to ride behind, and then let him down on the far side.

  The gentlemen in the rear coming up just as Mr. Jefferson had put him down and rode on, asked the man how it happened that he had permitted the others to pass without asking them? He replied, “From their looks I did not like to ask them. The old gentleman looked as if he would do it, and I asked him.” He was very much surprised to hear that he had ridden behind the President of the United States.

  THERE WAS NEVER ANY QUESTION who the major figures in Jefferson’s administration would be. James Madison would serve as Secretary of State and Albert Gallatin as Secretary of the Treasury. They were the recognized leaders of the Republican Party; they possessed intellectual and political talents on a par with the president’s; they held Jefferson’s total and implicit confidence. So completely did they dominate the administration that Jefferson’s presidency has been depicted as a triumvirate. The addition of two New Englanders gave the cabinet an appearance of geographic balance. Levi Lincoln, a Massachusetts lawyer, was appointed Attorney General, and Henry Dearborn, from the northern district of Massachusetts (later Maine), Secretary of War.

  Finding a candidate to occupy the office of Navy Secretary presented a potentially serious problem. From the day the first frigate’s keel had been laid in 1794, the Republicans had complained without interruption about waste and overspending in the naval accounts. During the campaign they threatened to do away with the navy altogether. It could come as no surprise to Jefferson that no high-ranking Republican was eager to preside over an institution marked for downsizing and possibly even termination. And few politically reliable Republicans had the requisite maritime experience to run the Navy Office. “Republicanism is so rare in those parts [regions] which possess nautical skill,” Jefferson observed, that qualified Republican candidates were scarce.

  Between December 1800 and March 1801, the job was offered to—and refused by—Robert Livingston of New York, Congressman Samuel Smith of Baltimore, John Langdon of New Hampshire, and finally William Jones of Philadelphia. Jefferson jokingly remarked to Gallatin that “we shall have to advertise for a Secretary of Navy.” His appeals grew more pointed as the rejections mounted. In March, the president again turned to Congressman Smith, who had refused the job in December, and pressed him to reconsider. Smith had a “moral duty,” Jefferson told him: “if you refuse, where are we to find a substitute?”

  Samuel Smith agreed to a temporary arrangement. Keeping his seat in Congress, he would oversee the day-to-day affairs of the Navy Office, acting nominally under the authority of the Secretary of War. It was not until July 15 that Jefferson finally identified a suitable candidate. Samuel Smith’s brother, Robert, who had a flourishing admiralty law practice in Baltimore, agreed to take the job. Robert Smith was a Revolutionary War veteran who had seen combat, like his predecessor, at the Battle of Brandywine. He had lived in Baltimore from the age of two and was, like Madison, a graduate of Princeton University. Smith was apparently a controversial choice—he made a poor first impression on several of his colleagues, who seemed to doubt his capabilities. It was understood that a major benefit of the appointment was that it would bind the Smith family—a powerful Republican family, influential in Maryland politics—to the Jefferson administration.

  Incoming Treasury Secretary Gallatin was intent on undoing the entire Hamiltonian legacy of internal taxes, funded debt, and centralized government institutions, and he threw himself into the task with ferocious energy. “To fill that office in the manner I did, and as it ought to be filled, is a most laborious task and labor of the most tedious kind,” he later recalled of his first two years. “To fit myself for it, to be able to understand thoroughly, to embrace and to control all its details, took from me…every hour of the day and many of the night, and nearly brought a pulmonary complaint.”

  Gallatin’s first objective was to eliminate the national debt, which stood at $83 million in 1800. Amounting to about $15 for every American man, woman, and child, the debt was by no means excessive. As the population and economy expanded, the burden diminished steadily even if the principal outstanding did not. But what Hamilton had called a “national blessing” the Jeffersonians denounced as a “moral canker.” Public debt begat high taxes, corruption, and repression. It gave rise to a parasitical class of financial speculators. It would cause America to duplicate, as Jefferson wrote, “the English career of debt, corruption and rottenness, closing with revolution.” In his first report to the president, Gallatin proposed to pay down the national debt at a rate of $7.3 million per year, which would reduce the principal by a total of $32.3 million in the span of two presidential terms, leaving a balance of $45.6 million in 1808. If the policy was continued, it would cut the balance to zero by 1817.

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bsp; It was an aggressive timetable, considering that the total revenues of the federal government amounted to less than $11 million per year. It also raised a second question: What should be done about taxes? As much as they hated public debt, the Jeffersonians abhorred taxes, especially internal excise and property taxes, which fell upon land and individual citizens. With roots in the revolutionary movement against England, anti-tax ideology had a powerful hold on the American imagination. Both Washington and Adams had been forced to call out troops to put down tax rebellions. Republicans had used the issue to great effect during the 1800 campaign; taxes, said the Jeffersonians, were “hostile to the genius of a free people.”

  Carried into office on the wings of Republican anti-tax rhetoric, Jefferson was tempted to eliminate all excise and property taxes in one dramatic stroke. Gallatin was not unsympathetic to this view, telling the president that “if this Administration shall not reduce taxes, they never will be permanently reduced.” But he was concerned that tax cuts would interfere with his still more important priority to pay down the national debt. The Jeffersonians were forced to confront a paradox in their arithmetic—their goals of tax reduction and debt reduction were at odds, unless federal spending could be rolled back to a bare minimum.

  In his first inaugural, Jefferson promised “a wise and frugal Government, which…shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.” In private letters, he made the point more sharply: the Republicans would “reform the waste of public money, and thus drive away the vultures who prey on it.” Using presidential authority whenever congressional authorization was not needed, Jefferson and his cabinet simply dismissed federal officeholders they considered superfluous. The State Department closed all foreign embassies except those in Madrid, Paris, and London. The Treasury Department’s internal revenue inspectors were fired en masse. “We are hunting out and abolishing multitudes of useless offices,” Jefferson told his son-in-law in June; “striking off jobs, etc., etc.” The magnitude of federal waste they were finding, he told James Monroe, was even greater than the Republicans had expected: “agencies upon agencies in every part of the earth, and for the most useless or mischievous purposes, and all of these opening doors for fraud and embezzlement far beyond the ostensible profits of the agency. These are things of the existence of which no man dreamt, and we are lopping them down silently to make as little noise as possible.”

  In the first full year of Jefferson’s presidency, there were 6,479 uniformed and civilian personnel on the rolls of the army, navy, and marine corps, amounting to more than 70 percent of all federal employees. Inevitably, the budget ax would fall on the armed forces. Apart from the Jeffersonian aversion to standing armies and navies, the end of hostilities with France had weakened the case for military spending. The day before Jefferson had taken office—literally less than twenty-four hours before his inaugural ceremony—John Adams had signed into law a Peace Establishment Act authorizing his successor to order a massive naval demobilization. The lame duck Congress had enacted the law as an act of preemption, hoping it would forestall even more drastic action by the incoming Republicans, some of whom had threatened to eliminate the navy.

  At the height of the Quasi War, the service had swollen to 700 officers commanding 49 ships, most of which were converted merchantmen and galleys. The Peace Establishment Act would reduce the officer corps to 9 captains, 36 lieutenants, and 150 midshipmen. Of the fleet, only thirteen frigates would be kept in the service, and seven of these would be “laid up in ordinary”—stripped of their armament and rigging and stored under specially constructed sheds. All of the smaller vessels in the navy—brigs, schooners, galleys—would be sold back to private owners and returned to the merchant service from which they had been drawn. Hundreds of officers would be discharged and paid a severance equivalent to four months’ salary. Of those officers retained, the ones not immediately employed on active duty would be reduced to half pay. Outgoing Navy Secretary Benjamin Stoddert remarked that the officer layoffs would be “a most painful Duty—fortunately for my feeling it will not fall on me.” In the early weeks of the new administration, Stoddert’s successor, acting Secretary Samuel Smith, wrote to approximately two thirds of all active duty naval officers with the news that they were no longer needed. “The act providing for naval peace establishment has imposed on the President a painful duty,” he wrote Captain Sever of the Congress, in a typically worded termination letter:

  It directs him to select from among the Captains in the Navy nine Gentlemen to be retained in service, & to permit the remaining Gentlemen of that grade to retire…. I have deemed it a duty as early as possible to inform you that you will be among those whose services, however reluctantly, will be dispensed with…. You will please settle your accounts for pay & subsistence with the Purser of the Congress.…Be assured that the President has a just sense of the services rendered by you to your Country.

  Assuming politics would enter into the process, some naval officers declared fealty to the Republican Party. But Smith denied there was any partisan element to his decisions. “Permit me here to remark that you are mistaken, when you suppose that the Politics of the Party will be the criterion by which the selection of officers will be made,” he told a lieutenant who had written to plead for his job. “Merit & services & a deep proportion for each state will be a better criterion. They will govern this Department, & this rule cannot fail to meet your entire approbation & that of every good American.”

  Jefferson was determined to consolidate the entire naval shore establishment in the District of Columbia, at the Washington Navy Yard on the Eastern Branch of the Potomac (known today as the Anacostia River). “I shall really be chagrined,” he wrote Samuel Smith on April 17, “if the water in the Eastern Branch will not admit our laying up the entire seven [frigates] there in time of peace, because they would be under the immediate eye of the department, and would require but one set of plunderers to take care of them.” The transfer of the ships to the Potomac was bitterly resented by the (largely Federalist) maritime interests of Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New York, but they were powerless to prevent it. Keeping the frigates in Washington, Jefferson told Congress, was the fairest and most economical policy. “Besides the safety of their position, they are under the eye of the executive administration, as well as of its agents, and where yourselves also will be guided by your own view…. They are preserved in such condition…as to be at all times ready for sea at a short warning.”

  In 1801, the Washington Navy Yard was nothing more than a cluster of huts, storehouses, and wharves on an isolated bank of the Eastern Branch, separated from Capitol Hill by a thick forest. The grounds of the yard had been enclosed by a “good tight board fence” that would soon be replaced with a stone wall. Inside the yard was a two-story brick house for the superintendent, a stone kitchen, a frame stable, a carriage house, and a hayloft. The channel was only accessible by a small portion of the waterfront, so the shallows at the river’s edge were being filled in with excavated soil and detritus. A timber wharf extended well out into the channel on a series of piles. Storehouses lined the eastern side of the yard, about 20 feet from the wharf. A row of adjacent huts housed the shops—among them the blockmaker, sail loft, armorer, tinman, blacksmith, cooper, and boat builder. Nothing was permanent: the entire premises was a construction site. Nearly every structure was in the process of being built, torn down, expanded, or otherwise improved. Fifty marines were ordered to report to the yard at five o’clock every morning, where they would assist the Master Constructor in preparing the frigates for long-term storage. The Marine Barracks was still under construction, so the marines would have to spend the summer living in tents and lean-tos.

  Decommissioning the frigates would require them to be navigated through the so-called Kettle Bottoms—a treacherous section of the lower Potomac River, near Maryland Point. A pilot took soundings and reported that he could confidently take any ship drawing less than 20 feet over the shoals. Fully laden,
a 44-gun frigate had been observed to draw as much as 23 feet, so it would be necessary to remove her provisions, start her fresh water (dump it overboard), and shift her ballast forward in order to “trim her by the head.” As each ship approached the mouth of the Eastern Branch, her captain was to prepare a complete inventory of the ship, her stores, her boats, her furniture, and all of her supplies and rigging. Once at the wharf, she would be stripped of all her rigging, cordage, cables, sails, and all other stores; and the crew paid off. Each decommissioned ship would be manned by a skeleton crew of some sixteen men. The annual cost to maintain each ship in ordinary, including pay and rations for the crew, was estimated at $15,300, or less than one tenth the cost of keeping her in active service.

  The United States, at anchor in the Delaware River near Chester, sailed for the Virginia Capes on May 17 and arrived in the Eastern Branch on June 6. Her boatswain, William Whitehead, reported that the frigate’s bottom copper was probably beyond repair. “I have frequently, on heaving in the Cable, seen it very much cut by the copper, particularly when the Ship has been ahead of her anchor. I have seen the Yarns shaved as if cut by a knife.” The Constellation, under the command of Captain Alexander Murray, was also in the Delaware River, two miles below the battery at Mud Island, just downriver from Philadelphia. In need of repairs, she was to be brought alongside a dock south of the Humphreys Shipyard. Since the Constellation was to be laid up in ordinary, Smith wrote Murray on April 11, “no unnecessary expence must be incurred in her repairs.”

  At 1:00 a.m. on the night of the twelfth, however, the ship suffered a catastrophic accident. With a strong northwest wind building to gale force, the Constellation began to drag her bower anchor. Drifting to the leeward, she ran aground. Fatefully, the grounding occurred at almost exactly high water, and “before timely assistance could be afforded, the Tide Ebbed so fast that she lay down almost on her Beam ends.” As the ship careened, her crew rushed to seal the ports, but the river poured in through the hatchways so suddenly that the officers had no time to rescue their possessions from the wardroom. The crew worked to strike the yards and topmasts and remove as much of the ship’s stores as they could before the lower decks were completely flooded. But the damage was done. The frigate lay half sunk in the river, just a few hundred feet from the Southwark waterfront where her sister, United States, had been launched four years earlier.