Six Frigates

by Ian W. Toll

  For three weeks, Joshua Humphreys, Captain Murray, and the crew worked to right the Constellation. They stripped her rigging and tackle and removed all of her stores, which they laid out on the wharf to be dried in the sun. On May 3, they successfully floated her and hauled her to the wharf, where teams of unskilled laborers would “cleanse her of the Mud & filth collected since the misfortune.” There she lay, with her rigging “promiscuously scattered about…and a good deal of it cut & otherwise abused.” It was soon clear that the Constellation was not going to leave the Delaware that year. In December, Murray wrote Smith to say the passage should not be attempted because of the hazards posed by winter storms. Smith, reluctantly, was forced to agree with the captain’s logic. Why employ a crew to navigate the frigate all the way to Washington, as Murray had asked in an earlier letter, when she could simply remain at Philadelphia at her “good snug Wharf at the expence of only $3 per day wharfage?”

  Jefferson had been warned by shipwrights that vessels laid up in ordinary were prone to rapid decay. There was a risk that the frigates dismantled and moored in the Eastern Branch might “be entirely rotten in 6 or 8 years, or will cost us 3 or 4 millions in repairs.” The added costs of repairing the ships could well exceed the funds saved in placing them in caretaker status. A potential solution was to build an enormous dry dock on the banks of the Potomac, which would allow the fleet to be placed, the president said, “in a state of perfect preservation, so that at the beginning of a subsequent war it shall be as sound as…when laid up.” Infatuated with the dry dock concept, Jefferson collaborated with Benjamin Henry Latrobe, the English-born architect and engineer who was serving as Surveyor of the Public Buildings, to prepare a design. They envisioned cutting a great basin on the river’s bank, enclosed by a lock and fed by a source of running water—either Rock Creek, Tiber Creek, or the upper Potomac. Eight hundred feet long and 275 feet wide, sheltered from the elements by a vast roof, the basin would be large enough to accommodate twelve frigates—in other words, the entire navy. Once dry-docked, the vessels would be scrubbed with fresh water, then drained and ventilated. Advocates maintained that they could be left stored in that manner for a century without deteriorating. Although the claimed benefits were exaggerated, there was no question that dry docking significantly elongated the life of a wooden ship.

  Jefferson had a scale model of the dry dock built and exhibited in the White House. He estimated that the project would cost about $1 million and require a year to complete. He pitched the concept to Congress in his annual message, first in 1801 and again in 1802, urging the logic of “saving what we already possess.” But the idea never won funding. Anti-navalists were not persuaded the dock would reduce long-term maintenance costs, and the navalists were unwilling to give Jefferson the means of taking the entire fleet out of service.*

  “ALMOST EVERY OTHER AMERICAN STATESMAN might be described in a parenthesis,” Henry Adams wrote of Jefferson, in his great nineteenth-century history of the nation’s third presidency. “A few broad strokes of the brush would paint the portraits of all the early Presidents…but Jefferson could be painted only touch by touch, with a fine pencil, and the perfection of the likeness depended upon the shifting and uncertain flicker of its semi-transparent shadows.”

  Henry Adams (John and Abigail’s great-grandson) might have been the first historian to puzzle over Jefferson’s contradictions, but he would not be the last. In the past two decades, especially, scholars and biographers have given emphasis to a pattern of hypocrisy and duplicity in the president’s life and career. Affecting the modesty and frugality of a simple country farmer, Jefferson’s private tastes ran to fine food, fine wines, fine homes, and fine horses. He criticized government waste, overspending, and public debt, but his profligate spending habits kept him buried under a mountain of personal debt all his adult life. He was enthralled by mechanical contrivances and innovations, but an enemy of industrialization. He denounced financial speculators while speculating aggressively in real estate. Deploring the smear tactics that were so pervasive in the 1790s, he arranged to have his political adversaries smeared. He declared that “If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all,” but he was the first acknowledged leader of a major American political party. Jefferson was his country’s greatest spokesman for liberty—swearing “eternal hostility to every form of tyranny over the minds of men”—and also the deeded owner of more than two hundred men, women and children, some of whom were his blood relations. As Dr. Samuel Johnson had asked: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”

  With this in mind, it is hardly surprising to find that Jefferson’s words and deeds on the subject of seapower are dissonant. While serving as minister to France in the 1780s, he had argued in favor of building frigates to patrol the Mediterranean, offering several reasons: “1. Justice is in favor of this opinion. 2. Honor favors it. 3. It will procure us respect in Europe, and respect is a safeguard to interest.” Fifteen years later, campaigning for president at the head of a fiercely anti-navalist Republican Party, he declared himself in favor of “such a naval force only as may protect our coasts and harbors from such depredations as we have experienced; and not for…a navy, which, by its own expenses and the eternal wars in which it will implicate us, will grind us with public burthens, and sink us under them.” He took a direct hand in disseminating an anti-navy treatise, Thomas Cooper’s Political Arithmetic, endorsing the view that John Adams’s naval buildup had served the interests of northern merchants and shipowners while “the consumer, the farmer, the mechanic, the laborer, they and they alone pay.” To Joseph Priestley, the English clergyman and political theorist, he ranted that the Federalists were “running navigation mad, & commerce mad, & navy mad, which is worst of all.”

  In Jefferson’s mind, as in the minds of most Americans, the navy was subordinate to a larger problem: How much should be risked to protect shipping and trade? Jefferson believed America’s destiny lay in the west, in the settlement and cultivation of the interior. If foreign trade had to be tolerated, it was to be tolerated only as a necessary evil. He distrusted the merchants of the northern seaports, thought them inherently less patriotic than many of their countrymen, and was determined to reduce their influence in politics. “Merchants have no country,” he later wrote. “The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains.” When living in Paris in 1786, Jefferson had been asked to assist the editors of the Encyclopédie méthodique in preparing the entries on the American states. His comments on Rhode Island had been uncharacteristically blunt, possibly because he feared any ambiguity would be lost in translation:

  The cultivators of the earth are the most virtuous citizens and possess most of the amor patriae [love of country]. Merchants are the least virtuous, and possess the least of the amor patriae. The latter reside principally in the seaport towns; the former in the interior country. Now it happened that of the territory constituting Rhode Island and Connecticut, the part containing useful seaports was erected into a state by itself and called Rhode Island, and that containing the interior country was erected into another State called Connecticut, for though it has a little seacoast, there are no good ports in it. Hence it happens that there is scarcely one merchant in the whole state of Connecticut, while there is not a single man in Rhode Island who is not a merchant of some sort.

  Because it was not much more than 1,000 square miles and had hardly any agriculture, Jefferson added, Rhode Island did not deserve the status of a state. He predicted that it would eventually be expelled from the Union or merged into Connecticut.

  But Jefferson denied that he was an enemy to all commerce, or that he wanted every American to take up farming. On this point he was never as dogmatic as his critics charged. Like any southern planter, he understood the importance of exporting America’s huge agricultural surplus, and conceded that ships were needed to carry those exports to for
eign markets. In his inaugural address he promised the “encouragement of agriculture, and of commerce as its handmaid.” While farmers were undoubtedly “the most valuable, the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous” of all citizens, it was not for political leaders to decree how their constituents should earn a living. Americans had inherited from the mother country “a decided taste for navigation and commerce” they were “determined to share in the occupation of the ocean” and their elected leaders were therefore duty-bound “to preserve an equality of right…in the transportation of commodities, in the right of fishing, & in the other uses of the sea.”

  Jefferson was never aligned with the most extreme anti-navalists in his own party. He was willing to concede the need for an American navy, on three conditions. First, that its purpose, design, and deployment must be defensive. Second, that it must not be exploited as a source of patronage and corruption by the maritime and shipbuilding interests (who were, not coincidentally, aligned with the Federalists). Third, and most important, it must be affordable.

  In practice, the last condition left the United States with no realistic hope of building a navy large enough to contend with the great powers of Europe because the cost of such a fleet would exceed the value of the commerce it protected. “To aim at such a navy as the greater nations of Europe possess would be a foolish and wicked waste of the energies of our countrymen,” Jefferson had written in his Notes on the State of Virginia. “It would be to pull on our own heads that load of military expence which makes the European labourer go supperless to bed, and moistens his bread with the sweat of his brows.” A small navy, on the other hand—one capable of policing sea-lanes against piracy—was within the country’s means. It was on this basis that Jefferson had first advocated naval action against the Barbary pirates in 1786, and he had never wavered. It was a consistent thread in a career that has since become famous for its inconsistencies.

  ON MARCH 13, 1801, nine days after his inauguration, Jefferson received a disturbing set of dispatches from the Mediterranean. Yusuf Karamanli, the Bashaw of Tripoli, had summoned U.S. Consul James Cathcart to his palace and threatened to send his corsairs out to attack American shipping. The attacks could be averted, Cathcart was told, if the U.S. government would present Tripoli with a cash gift of $225,000 immediately and $25,000 in future annual tribute. In the interest of peace, the Bashaw added, he would wait six months for the American president’s response.

  Yusuf’s ultimatum was a flagrant breach of the treaty governing U.S. Tripolitan relations. Negotiated in 1796 and ratified by the Senate the following year, the treaty had established a “firm and perpetual Peace and friendship” between the two nations, to be guaranteed by the Dey of Algiers. In exchange for a onetime cash payment of $56,000, which he had received upon signing the treaty, Yusuf had pledged not to allow his corsairs to attack American vessels plying the lucrative Mediterranean trade routes. Article 10 had stipulated that “no pretence of any periodical tribute or farther [sic] payment is ever to be made by either party.” But the Bashaw now brazenly denied that he had ever agreed to any such thing, insisting that “for the Peace we had paid him it was true, but to maintain the Peace we had given him nothing.”

  Cathcart responded bravely, telling Yusuf that “the meanest of our Citizens would expend their last dollar and lose their last drop of blood before they would ever consent to become tributary to the Regency of Tripoli.” In the past, however, American ministers had used equally brave rhetoric just before agreeing to new and larger payments to the Barbary powers. Why should the Bashaw assume this case would be any different?

  The dispatches had been written five months earlier, in mid-October 1800. Even if Jefferson had wanted to reply before the threatened deadline, there was not enough time. The new president could only assume Tripolitan cruisers would be hunting American ships through the Mediterranean in another month’s time, if they were not doing so already. He ordered circulars distributed in the major seaports advertising the danger to vessels bound for the Straits of Gibraltar and beyond.

  Jefferson’s predecessors had managed the problem of Barbary piracy with a combination of flattery, promises, bribes, and occasional threats. The earlier Algerian treaty of 1795—the treaty that had triggered a momentary suspension of the frigate-building program that year—was supposed to have been the key to maintaining peace throughout the Mediterranean. As the largest and most powerful of the Barbary regencies, Algiers was thought to hold great sway throughout Islamic North Africa, and it was hoped that the patronage of the “most potent and exalted” Dey of Algiers would allow American envoys to deal with the other three powers—Morocco, Tunis, and Tripoli—from a position of strength. On this premise, George Washington championed—and the Senate ratified—a treaty that was expensive, humiliating, and served to prop up the system of piracy and blackmail that had been practiced by the Islamic societies of North Africa for three centuries.

  An American envoy, William Eaton, left a colorful description of his first meeting with the Dey of Algiers:

  We were shown to a huge, shaggy beast sitting on his rump upon a low bench covered with a cushion of embroidered velvet, with his hind legs gathered up like a tailor, or a bear. On our approach to him, he reached out a forepaw as if to receive something to eat. Our guide exclaimed: “Kiss the Dey’s hand!” The consul general bowed very elegantly, and kissed it, and we followed his example in succession. The animal seemed in that moment to be in a harmless mood. He grinned several times but made very little noise…. Can any man believe that this elevated brute has seven kings of Europe, two republics, and a continent tributary to him when his whole naval force is not equal to two line-of-battle ships? It is so.

  The settlement with Algiers had cost the United States almost a million dollars in a combination of cash payments and sundry gifts. Among the 122 Americans who had been taken hostage by the Algerian corsairs in the prior decade, 85 were released; the others had died in captivity. Among the gifts was a newly built light frigate, the Crescent. Designed and built by Joshua Humphreys, the Crescent was admired as a very fine ship—dry, weatherly, and fast. There was no doubt she would be fitted out as a corsair to attack the shipping of Europe’s lesser maritime powers. The treaty further committed the United States to deliver annual tribute in the form of naval stores, weaponry, and ammunition, specified as “powder, lead, bullets, bombshells, masts, poles, yards, anchor chains, cables, sailcloth, tar, pitch, boards, beams, laths, and other necessities.” The annual cost of this cargo of maritime stores was initially estimated, in 1795, at $21,600, but as markets tightened the actual cost proved three or four times higher. The United States thus found itself supplying the vital inputs for a system of state-sponsored piracy.

  A provision in the treaty required the Dey of Algiers to keep secret the enormous settlement he had extorted. It had been inserted by the American negotiators in the hope that Tripoli and Tunis would not demand similarly extravagant sums. (Morocco, having signed a treaty in 1786, was deemed relatively benign.) At first, the strategy seemed to pay off. American envoys obtained treaties with Tripoli and Tunis for the relatively modest sums of $56,486 (November 1796) and $107,000 (August 1797) respectively. Almost immediately after signing the treaties, however, the Bashaw of Tripoli and the Bey of Tunis began to suspect they had been duped. American vessels were entering the Mediterranean in ever larger numbers. The commercial wealth of this distant and relatively unknown nation was obviously much greater than they had been led to believe. Rumors of the lavish sums paid to Algiers reached their ears. They demanded more money, more presents, more naval stores.

  Stalling for time, U.S. consuls in the Mediterranean offered magnificent gifts to the Barbary rulers: silver snuff boxes, diamond rings, jewel-encrusted gold watches, ornamental swords, rubies, emeralds, lengths of fine silk and linen, and (especially) firearms. The renowned English gunsmith H. W. Mortimer was commissioned by the U.S. government to design and build a gold-barreled musket to be prese
nted as a gift to the Bey of Tunis. Mortimer’s invoice of £525 included a description of the weapon:

  A most Superb Gun, Elegantly mounted in solid Gold barrel & lock, richly & beautifully Embossed with gold ornaments & with the furniture finished in a manner never before attempted in this Kingdom. Ornaments on the Stock, Barrel & Lock consisting of matchless designs. Warlike Trophies formed of Helmets, Caps, Coats of Mail, Battleaxes, Battering rams, Pikes, Swords, Scimitars, Drums & Fifes, Trumpets & Bugle horns, Halberds, Bows with Quivers of Arrows, Flags, Cannons, Shields, etc. etc. etc. Fruits & Flowers of various kinds forming a most beautiful assemblage, in neat Mahogany Case lined with Crimson Velvet.

  The Dey of Algiers’s influence with the other Barbary powers was not as great as had been advertised. Tripoli and Tunis envied Algiers and dreamed of extorting similar sums from the United States. The Bey of Tunis, upon learning that Algiers had taken delivery of the Crescent, insisted that Tunis should have a new frigate as well. Thanking Jefferson for “all the military and naval stores, as well as the superb jewels,” he got quickly to the point: “I avow to you, with frankness…that it would have been infinitely agreeable to me if you had also made me a present of a vessel of war.” Most worrying was the fact that the Dey, whose steady friendship the United States had counted upon, would not stay bought. He was constantly irritated, either because his tribute was late, or judged deficient, or both. If he so much as lifted a finger to help the Americans, he expected fresh compensation. After sending a letter to Tripoli on behalf of American interests in January 1801, he turned to the American consul in Algiers, Richard O’Brien, and demanded presents. Pleading lack of funds, O’Brien scraped together $500 to buy two pieces of muslin, twelve lengths of fine cloth, two handkerchiefs, two caftans, two pieces of Dutch linen, a 40-pound loaf of sugar, and a sack of coffee. Poking through these admittedly tawdry offerings, the Dey complained: “No watch? No ring?,” but kept them nonetheless.