Six Frigates

by Ian W. Toll

  In September 1800, a 32-gun converted merchantman named the George Washington sailed from Delaware Bay to carry that year’s annual tribute—money, naval stores, various other presents—to Algiers. She was the first American warship ever to enter the Mediterranean. Her captain was William Bainbridge, who had won promotion from lieutenant in spite of his surrender of the schooner Retaliation to L’Insurgente in the West Indies two years earlier. While she was anchored in Algiers Harbor, within easy range of more than two hundred shore guns, the Dey sent word that he expected the George Washington to carry the Algerian ambassador and his entourage to the Ottoman Porte (or court) in Constantinople. The entourage would consist of a hundred men, women, and children, and it would bear various presents, including a petting zoo of antelopes, horses, parrots, sheep, ostriches, and (if the record can be believed) four lions and four tigers. When Bainbridge refused the voyage, the Dey threatened to tear up his American treaty and have the American ship blown out of the water. “You pay me tribute,” he reportedly told Bainbridge. “By that you become my slaves.”

  Believing the Dey’s threats, Bainbridge submitted. His humiliation was complete when the Algerians demanded that the Stars and Stripes be lowered. The vessel named for America’s recently deceased first president would be obliged to sail under the Algerian Crescent. Bainbridge later defended his conduct by insisting he had no realistic alternative. “I hope I shall never again be sent to Algiers with tribute,” he wrote, “unless I am authorized to deliver it from the mouth of our cannon.”

  “I AM AN ENEMY to all these douceurs, tributes & humiliations,” Jefferson confided to Madison shortly after taking office. “I know that nothing will stop the eternal increase of demand from those pirates but the presence of an armed force, and it will be more economical & more honorable to use the same means at once for suppressing their insolences.”

  The Peace Establishment law gave the president authority to keep six frigates in service: he was at liberty to send them to the Mediterranean, if he chose to do so. Jefferson issued orders for a squadron to rendezvous at Hampton Roads. The New York–built 44-gun frigate President would serve as flagship, with two privately built subscription frigates, Philadelphia and Essex, in company. A naval schooner, the Enterprise, would be attached to the squadron to perform as a tender. The squadron was directed to take on provisions and men and ready itself for sea by May 1, 1801.

  Aware that the decision to send the squadron could lead to war, Jefferson waited to consult with his full cabinet before issuing sailing orders. Gallatin did not arrive in town until May 13, and the meeting took place at the White House two days later. Jefferson put two questions to his department heads, recording their answers in his own handwritten notes. First: “Shall the squadron now at Norfolk be ordered to cruise in the Mediterranean?” If so: “What shall be the object of the cruise?” The cabinet decided unanimously in favor of sending the frigates with orders “to superintend the safety of our commerce, and to exercise our seamen in nautical duties.” It would be characterized as a “squadron of observation,” with peaceful intentions. However, if it was discovered that Tripoli was waging war against the United States, the squadron would be authorized to retaliate against Tripolitan ships and even to attack Tripoli itself.

  Jefferson and his advisers agreed that Thomas Truxtun, hero of the Quasi War, remained the single most capable officer in the navy. Though he was known to be a staunch Federalist, they were inclined to offer him command of the squadron. Summoned to the capital by outgoing Navy Secretary Stoddert, Truxtun arrived two days after Jefferson’s inauguration and called upon the new president at Conrad & McMunn’s. The meeting, Truxtun said, was cordial and pleasant. But the brash captain continued to press his claim to seniority over Silas Talbot, and his indefatigable lobbying campaign soon strained the patience of the new administration. Truxtun made the tactical error of appealing to Vice President Aaron Burr, an old friend, apparently failing to understand that Burr was the president’s hated rival and commanded no influence in the administration. His next move, circumventing the chain of command, was to appeal directly and personally to Jefferson himself, who brusquely rejected Truxtun’s claim on the grounds that the question had been put to rest by former President Adams, “an authority equally competent with myself.”

  Frustrated and resentful, Truxtun announced that he would decline command of the Mediterranean Squadron, ostensibly because “peace can afford no field for me on the ocean.” Smith acquiesced, placing Truxtun on half pay and ordering Richard Dale, another of the original six captains appointed by George Washington, to report to Norfolk and assume command. As Dale arrived aboard the President on May 22, Truxtun assured him she was “the finest frigate that ever floated on the waters of this Globe.” On June 1, the squadron sailed for the Straits of Gibraltar.

  CHAPTER SIX

  During his diplomatic service in France two decades earlier, Jefferson had repeatedly been warned that the Barbary States were perfectly situated to blackmail any nation desiring access to the Mediterranean trade routes. Their proximity to passing ship traffic, the difficulty of blockading their harbors, their lack of maritime commerce upon which to retaliate—all of these factors united to make war against the Barbary powers expensive and frustrating. The only realistic military options were large-scale naval operations or troop landings, and both alternatives were more costly and more risky than the time-worn path of bribery and tribute.

  Though he had been fairly warned, it seemed as if Jefferson was destined to learn these lessons the hard way. The conflict with Tripoli was no closer to resolution in 1803 than it had been in 1801. As devoted as he was to strict economy in government, Jefferson could not fail to notice that the funds spent to keep a squadron active in the Mediterranean had surpassed the highest estimates of what it would take simply to bribe Yusuf off. After two years in office, the president appeared willing to reconsider the wisdom of his hawkish policy.

  The first two years of the U.S.-Tripolitan War proved the rule that good officers are more important than good ships. Three months were required to carry dispatches from Washington to Gibraltar and back. The voyage between Gibraltar and Tripoli added another three weeks, at least. When a commodore sailed from the American coast, he might as well have been transported to another planet. If he proved complacent, inefficient, or incompetent, there was no way to correct the error until months had passed.

  Commodore Richard Dale’s tour began with a stormy transatlantic passage in which the President and her consorts labored through violent head seas and heavy squalls. The flagship’s deck seams opened and she leaked badly into her lower decks. When the battered squadron crept into Gibraltar Bay on July 1, 1801, Dale learned that Tripoli had indeed declared war on the United States six weeks earlier. Complying with his orders, Dale dispatched most of his squadron to blockade Tripoli. From the start, however, the attempted blockade was feeble and intermittent. The unfamiliar harbor was protected by uncharted reefs and rocks, and the deep-draft American frigates could not safely approach the main channel. Frequent gales sent a heavy swell on shore, requiring the blockading vessels to gain sea room or risk being thrown onto the enemy’s beach. The nearest safe harbor was on the island of Malta, two or three days’ sail against the prevailing winds. The squadron was not numerous enough to maintain a constant presence in the offing; its vessels needed to rotate back into port frequently for reprovisioning and refitting.

  Discouraged by the difficulty of the blockade and fearful of losing his ships, Dale concentrated his efforts on providing convoys to American merchantmen. The only fighting of his tour took place on August 1, when the schooner Enterprise, commanded by Lieutenant Andrew Sterrett (the same Sterrett who had served under Truxtun on the Constellation, and who had executed an American sailor for cowardice during the L’Insurgente action), engaged a Tripolitan 14-gun galley commanded by Admiral Rais Mahomet Rous. In a three-hour battle, the outgunned galley lost sixty men, while the Enterprise, incredibly, lost
none. The Tripolitans twice lowered their colors, only to resume fighting when the Americans approached to take possession of the surrendered vessel. Sterrett, believing that he did not have authorization to make the galley a prize, ordered her masts cut away and her guns thrown into the sea. Thus crippled, she was permitted to return to Tripoli. Yusuf, infuriated, ordered the ship’s admiral beaten and forced to ride backward on a donkey through the streets of the city while wearing a necklace of sheep entrails.

  In his first annual message to the Congress in December 1801, Jefferson acknowledged that “some difference of opinion may be expected to appear” among the Republicans with regard to naval operations, but that “a small force will probably continue to be wanted for actual service in the Mediterranean.” In February 1802, Congress granted authority to “subdue, seize and make prize of all vessels, goods and effects, belonging to the Bashaw of Tripoli, or to his subjects.” The navy was authorized to recruit American seamen for terms of up to two years. Secretary Smith ordered a relief squadron, including the frigates Constellation and Chesapeake, to sail for the Mediterranean. Dale’s ships would return to the United States, discharge their crews, and undergo needed repairs and refitting.

  The administration continued to regard Truxtun as the navy’s most talented officer, and in January 1802 Secretary Smith offered him the command of the relief squadron preparing to sail from Hampton Roads. Accepting the commission, Truxtun traveled to Norfolk to prepare the Chesapeake for sea. The Chesapeake was the smallest of the original six frigates, and Truxtun deemed her too humble to serve as his flagship. He would have preferred his old command, the Constellation, or one of the 44s—but for various reasons none was available. Chesapeake’s lieutenants were young and untrained, and it looked at if he would have to promote one or more midshipmen to fill out their ranks. The inexperience of his officers would force Truxtun to involve himself deeply in the tedious details of readying the frigate for sea.

  The answer to his problems, Truxtun decided, was for Smith to send him a flag captain—an officer who stood below him on the captain’s list and who would direct everything pertaining to the Chesapeake and her crew, freeing the commodore to attend to the squadron and the war. Truxtun did not ask for a flag captain. He demanded one. Informing the Navy Secretary that “I have a reputation to lose which I am very tenacious of,” the malcontented commodore presented an ultimatum. If no flag captain could be found to sail with the Chesapeake, “I must beg leave to quit the service.”

  The threat to resign may have been a bargaining ploy. But Smith had reached the end of his tolerance for Truxtun’s Olympian ego and his high, whining tone. No flag captain was available for the Chesapeake, Smith replied on March 13, and therefore: “I cannot but consider your notification as absolute.” Without giving Truxtun a chance to respond, Smith struck his name off the navy rolls and ordered Richard Valentine Morris to travel immediately to Norfolk to assume command of the Chesapeake and the relief squadron.

  Had Smith foreseen the consequences of appointing Morris, he might have gone to any lengths to appease Truxtun. Morris (nephew of Gouverneur Morris, the famous financier and diplomat of the American Revolution) was a disastrous choice. Against advice he chose to bring his pregnant wife and young son along for the cruise. Sailing from Norfolk on April 14, the Chesapeake was tossed in heavy seas and sprang her mainmast. On her arrival in Gibraltar in late May, Morris reported: “I never was at sea in so uneasy a ship; in fact, it was with the greatest difficulty we saved our masts from rolling over the side.” For much of the next seven months, Morris would keep the frigate in port, undergoing long and leisurely repairs.

  Morris’s orders had directed him to “place all our naval force under your command before Tripoli.” From the start, however, Morris showed little or no interest in blockading Tripoli. The junior officers came to believe that Mrs. Morris was the real source of authority on board, and clandestinely referred to her as the “Commodoress.” Her principal interest seemed to be to keep the flagship in port as much as possible. Mrs. Morris gave birth to a baby boy in the hospital at Malta, while the Chesapeake lay at anchor for five consecutive months in the Grand Harbor of Valetta. As a gesture in the direction of his orders, Morris sent Captain Alexander Murray and the Constellation to blockade Tripoli; but Murray soon realized that the deep-draft Constellation was no more suitable for operating in the uncharted shoal waters off Tripoli than her sister, the President, had been under Commodore Dale. Tripolitan galleys and gunboats were able to slip out of the harbor by sailing along the shore, using their superior knowledge of the passages through the shoals.

  Jefferson and his cabinet were rapidly losing faith. The failure of the blockade was not the worst of it: Morris’s dispatches were so obtuse that the president and his secretaries found it difficult to piece together what was happening in the Mediterranean. “I have for some time believed that Commodore Morris’s conduct would require investigation,” Jefferson told Gallatin. “His progress from Gibraltar has been astonishing.” In September 1803, Morris was recalled to the United States, where he would face a court of inquiry and be summarily dismissed from the navy.

  Thus far, all that the United States had accomplished was to make a show of naval force in the Mediterranean. The galleys and feluccas of the Barbary fleets were no match for the big American frigates, and they dared not challenge them directly. But naval superiority would not matter in the end. The corsairs could sally out from the harbors, seize unprotected merchantmen, and retreat to safety before the squadron could react. These tactics would never pose a direct threat to the American frigates, but—as a Tunisian minister told William Eaton, the American consul in Tunis—“though a fly in a man’s throat cannot kill him, it will make him vomit!”

  But there was another, more important consideration. The futility of American naval operations had eroded American prestige in the Mediterranean. The United States, its envoys warned, was on the verge of becoming a general laughingstock throughout the region, and the result might weaken the American bargaining position in future negotiations with the other Barbary powers. Eaton expressed his concern to Madison in August 1802: “Our operations of the last and present have produced nothing in effect but additional enemies and national contempt. If the same system of operations continue, so will the same consequences…. The [Tunisian] minister puffs a whistle in my face, and says; ‘we find it is all a puff! We see how you carry on the war with Tripoli!’”

  Bribing Yusuf began to look like a more palatable option. “I sincerely wish you could reconcile it to yourself to empower our negotiators to give…an annuity to Tripoli,” Gallatin wrote the president that August; “I consider it no greater disgrace to pay them than Algiers.” Stressing debt reduction above all other objectives, the Treasury Secretary urged Jefferson to consider it as a “mere matter of calculation whether the purchase of peace is not cheaper than the expense of a war.” In a cabinet meeting the following May, Jefferson put the question to his department heads: “Shall we buy peace with Tripoli?” The response was unanimously in the affirmative.

  But Jefferson was not quite ready to pull his frigates back from the Mediterranean. He would continue to pursue—as he put it to Madison in his reticent way—“a steady course of justice aided occasionally with liberality.” To put it differently, the navy would continue to make a show of force in the Mediterranean, but American diplomats would not be slow to offer bribes, ransom, and tribute when it appeared that peace could be bought on reasonable terms. The Bashaw of Tripoli would be offered a financial settlement in exchange for renewing the peace. Until a deal was done, however, the war would carry on.

  Two commodores had disappointed Jefferson’s hopes. Secretary Smith was determined that the third, Edward Preble, should succeed where his predecessors had failed.

  ON THE MORNING OF MAY 21, 1803, Boston Harbor was swept by breezes under cloudy skies. It was the busiest month of the year, with vessels of every description preparing for sea and taking on cargoes.
At her moorings was the USS Constitution, the 44-gun frigate that had been launched from nearby Hartt’s Shipyard six years earlier. Joshua Humphreys had never laid eyes on her, but she was his ship, his design. Built on the same lines as the United States, she was 204 feet long from her Hercules figurehead to her taffrail; she displaced more than 2,000 tons of water. She was almost certainly the largest ship in the harbor that day.

  Having been laid up in ordinary for more than ten months, she would have looked lonely and bare, stripped of her guns, masts, boats, anchors, and most of her men. Originally, her hull had been painted ochre with a black wale strake, her two uppermost panels vibrant blue and red, and her taffrail gold; but now the paint was faded and peeling, contributing to the overall impression that she had been neglected and unloved. She would need a good deal of work to be made respectable, let alone seaworthy.

  Her new captain, Edward Preble, was from Falmouth (later Portland), a small seaport town in the northern, non-contiguous district of Massachusetts (later Maine). Preble was a small, wiry man, with the sharp, prominent nose and cold, piercing eyes of a bird of prey. His coloring was “that of a fair-skinned man who had spent many years at sea,” and his hair was close-cropped and combed forward in front, giving him the look of an ancient Roman general. He suffered from ulcers that kept him in a bad temper for weeks at a time; his subordinates quickly learned that he was prone to explode without warning into fits of rage.