Six Frigates

by Ian W. Toll

  The problem reached its peak in the First and Second Mediterranean Squadrons of Commodores Richard Dale and Richard Morris in 1801–03. As captain of the Philadelphia in July 1802, Captain Samuel Barron reprimanded his lieutenants for failing to maintain discipline among the frigate’s midshipmen. “I have great cause to complain of the conduct of the midshipmen of this Ship,” he wrote.

  They are young men totally regardless of any order they receive and pay no kind of attention to their duty, answer no purpose on board but to create noise and confusion, and set an ill example to the people….

  It has already been ordered that officers of the watch are not to engage in any conversation on deck but what relates to their duty and not to appear without side arms. Both those orders have been disregarded. On the contrary, they are generally in the group or riding on the gunwale, at the gangway, lolling on the binnacle or capstan or on the guns of the quarterdeck, but more generally around a table on the gun deck, making use of such language as any decent sailor would be ashamed of. They absolutely keep the ship in an uproar; the boys and others imitate their example; and no greater scene of disorder and confusion can possibly exist than at times does on board this ship.

  The most trivial disagreement was liable to trigger a challenge. One midshipman was offended when another entered the wardroom wearing a hat. Another challenged a messmate because the offender had spilled some water on a letter he was writing. A pair of midshipmen nearly dueled after arguing whether a bottle was green or black. “I can’t omit one piece of disagreeable information,” Captain James Barron wrote his brother from Malta in January 1803; “namely the situation of Mr. Vandyke, who is now laying momently expecting death to his relief from a most horrid wound which he received in a duel from Mr. Osborne, lieutenant of marines. Two days will end his voyage through this life, and all for the preference in a simple game of billiards.”

  In some cases, no one seemed to recall the original disagreement. It did not matter. Once the mechanisms of a challenge were set in motion, it was nearly impossible for the adversaries to extricate themselves without leaving a stain on their reputations. “I at present am unable to acquaint you of the origin of the quarrel of these two young men,” John Rodgers wrote of a duel that killed a junior officer. “But, from the information I have been able to collect…it was something of a very trivial nature. Indeed, it would appear that they went out rather from motives of bravado than anything else, and after getting on the ground were ashamed to return without fighting.”

  One of the strangest duels in the early navy was set in motion by an exchange of friendly banter between Stephen Decatur and Richard Somers in 1798, when both were midshipmen serving on the United States under Captain Barry. The two young men were, by their own reckoning, inseparable friends, and as they were joking in the wardroom one day, Decatur laughingly called Somers a “fool.” Neither man thought anything of it until the next day, when several of their fellow officers refused to share the wardroom table with Somers. Having talked it over among themselves, they had agreed that Decatur’s use of the term “fool” constituted an insult, and that Somers must either issue a challenge or be ostracized as a coward. Somers and Decatur protested that their bantering had been harmless. Decatur had not meant to suggest that Somers was literally a fool, and Somers had not taken offense at the remark. Decatur offered to host the entire wardroom at a dinner in which the exchange would be explained in fuller detail. Their messmates refused the invitation.

  Somers’s exasperated response was to issue a challenge, but not to Decatur. Nominating Decatur as his second, he challenged the other officers to fight him in sequence. The multiple challenge was accepted. In the first duel, Somers took a ball in his pistol arm; in the second, he took a ball in the thigh. Decatur offered to take his friend’s place for the third duel, but Somers refused. Bleeding heavily, Somers sat on the ground while Decatur propped up his pistol arm. After the third exchange of gunfire, all agreed that Somers had resolved any doubts about his courage, and the business was called off.

  The duel was a ritual that was supposed to uphold each adversary’s honor and reputation through a demonstration of personal courage. But some were fought under conditions so lethal that it was a virtual certainty one or both men would be killed. The two ranking marine officers of the Constellation—Captain James McKnight and Lieutenant Richard Lawson—fought such a duel at Leghorn, Italy, in October 1802. Lawson proposed large-caliber, smoothbore flintlock pistols at the murderous distance of three paces. When McKnight’s second refused the terms, Lawson circulated a written statement among the Constellation’s officers boasting that he had “proved the famous duellist a coward.” McKnight then agreed to fight with a brace of pistols at the distance of six paces. In the unlikely event that both men should miss, they would throw down the firearms and fight on with cutlasses. At the first exchange, Lawson shot his captain though the heart and killed him.

  One of McKnight’s fellow officers took the body to the coroners at Leghorn, where he “was witness to a scene I shall ever remember, that have been obliged to see a brother officer’s heart cut out, that I might certify that the ball had passed through the center of it…. I left them up to their armpits in blood.” He collected contributions from the wardroom of the Constellation to pay for a decent burial. The frigate’s captain, Alexander Murray, was one of the navy’s most vocal critics of dueling; he suggested that McKnight’s headstone be inscribed with an epitaph stating that the dead man “had fallen a victim to a false idea of honor.”

  Since dueling was also common in the Royal Navy, and because American and English officers came into contact at Gibraltar, Malta, and other Mediterranean seaports, it was perhaps inevitable that the friction between them would lead to duels. The tug-of-war over deserters was, as Preble had discovered in Gibraltar, a constant problem in any ports shared by British and American warships. It is also true that the American Revolution loomed large in recent memory, and there were undoubtedly English officers who resented the very existence of the United States and thought its puny navy laughable. But for every hostile English officer, there was another who greeted his American equivalent with genuine warmth. In some cases, officers of the two services got on well; in others, not at all. “The envy & jealousy of the British officers is excited by our fine Ships & handsome maneuvering,” wrote Midshipman Wadsworth in March 1804; “we meet on shore but to fight & insult each other.” Yet at almost that same moment Preble was being wined and dined in Malta as a guest of Governor Sir Alexander Ball, Admiral Sir Richard Bickerton, and the colony’s various other high-ranking military and civil officers. The British, Preble reported, “have given every assurance of being friendly disposed towards the United States.”

  Nor was cordiality confined to the upper ranks. Midshipman Melancthon Woolsey recalled that a group of midshipmen from the frigate Boston had gone ashore in Malta to celebrate the Fourth of July in 1802. On the streets of Valetta, they encountered another set of midshipmen from the Royal Navy ship Tigre. One might have expected hostile words to pass between them, as the Americans were celebrating a holiday that marked a major British defeat. Instead, they all went “arm in arm” to a coffee shop for an ice cream. The next day, the Boston’s midshipmen invited their new friends to dine aboard the American frigate. Arriving at noon, the Tigre’s midshipmen did not leave the Boston until ten o’clock that night, leaving their American hosts (as Woolsey said) “nearly as independent as we had been the day before.”

  Six months later, however, a different group of American midshipmen were at liberty in Malta. They were attached to the frigate New York, anchored in the Grand Harbor at Valetta. On a night late in January 1803, they went ashore to attend an opera at the Marsamuscetto Theatre on St. Mark’s Street. While seated at the performance, a young American officer named Joseph Bainbridge—William’s younger brother—heard an English voice say: “Those Yankees will never stand the smell of [gun]powder.”

  Bainbridge (if the American v
ersion of events is to be believed) chose to ignore the remark, as it had not been directed at him. In the lobby, during an intermission, the same stranger passed by him and brushed him rudely with his shoulder. Bainbridge ignored this second insult, so the stranger came in for another pass and brushed him again, at which point Bainbridge made a fist and smashed his antagonist in the face. The stranger proved to be John Corcoran, a civilian clerk in the British Commissariat Department. He sent his challenge the next day.

  Bainbridge chose Stephen Decatur as his second. Decatur pointed out that Corcoran was older, more experienced, and a better shot. To compensate for Bainbridge’s disadvantage, Decatur proposed that the two adversaries fight at a distance of four paces. Alternatively, he offered to fight Corcoran in Bainbridge’s place at a more conventional range. The Englishman agreed, reluctantly, to fight the younger man at four paces. On the second exchange, Bainbridge’s shot hit Corcoran in the face. He fell to the ground, blood gushing from his mouth, and died a few minutes later.

  In his journal that day, Henry Wadsworth observed that “this morning a duel was fought between Mr. Bainbridge, midshipman of the New York and Mr. Cochran [sic]—an Englishman residing at Valletta: the latter received the ball in his head and instantly died: they fought at four paces distance and exchanged two shots: with pleasure I observe that Mr. Bainbridge was clearly in the right and behaved honorably throughout the affair.”

  Governor Ball ordered a judicial inquiry, and may have demanded that Bainbridge and Decatur be turned over to the civil authorities to face trial. Commodore Morris refused, and sent them both back to America. The affair seems to have blown over quickly, for both officers were back in the Mediterranean by the following summer, and Governor Ball was warmly entertaining Morris’s successor.

  Not surprisingly, the frequency of dueling appears to have been inversely related to the frequency of naval combat. The junior naval officer, done up in his high standing collar and gold lace, was as testy and vain as a fighting gamecock. He prayed for war as a farmer would pray for rain and a lawyer would pray for lawsuits. War was his profession: it offered the most practical outlet for his aggression and the best hope for his advancement. For the junior officers of the Mediterranean Squadron, there had not been enough war to go around. Commodore Preble, as he planned the summer campaign, was determined to set that right.

  COMMUNICATIONS BEING WHAT THEY WERE in 1804, Preble’s dispatches reporting the surrender of the Philadelphia and her crew arrived in Washington on March 19—a month after Decatur’s successful expedition to destroy her at her moorings. President Jefferson and his cabinet were thus made aware of the abysmal intelligence that Yusuf had 307 American prisoners and a new 44-gun frigate in his clutches, but did not yet have the slightly reassuring news that the frigate, at least, had been removed from the equation.

  Jefferson and his department heads were dismayed. The Tripolitan War was virtually the only blemish on their first-term foreign policy record. In every other respect, the Republican administration could congratulate itself. The United States was at peace with all the major European powers. The rupture of the abortive Peace of Amiens in May 1803, and the resumption of war between Britain and France, had brought a predictable surge in American exports and shipping clearances. Most important, the recently completed purchase of the Louisiana Territory had, at a single stroke, doubled the size of the country and resolved a major potential source of international conflict on the western frontier. Against all of this, the extortionist city-states of the North African coast were merely an irritant, but they were proving more irritating than expected.

  A day after receiving Preble’s dispatches and Bainbridge’s official letter, Jefferson forwarded the entire package to Congress. In the past he had tended to defer to Congress’s judgment on the size and costs of Mediterranean naval operations, but now he was unambiguous and resolute: he wanted more ships and more men. “[T]his accident renders it expedient to increase our force, and enlarge our expenses in the Mediterranean, beyond what the last appropriation for naval service contemplated.”

  Even worse than the actual loss of the frigate and her crew, Jefferson and Madison agreed, was the impetuous behavior of the American ambassadors in Europe—those in Paris and Moscow, especially—who had taken it upon themselves to ask their host governments to intercede with the Bashaw on the prisoners’ behalf. “I have never been so mortified as at the conduct of our foreign functionaries on the loss of the Philadelphia,” Jefferson wrote Navy Secretary Smith on April 27. “They appear to have supposed that we were all lost now, & without resource: and they have hawked us in forma pauperis begging alms at every court in Europe.” Jefferson had no wish to see Napoleon or the tsar of Russia claim credit for persuading Yusuf to free the prisoners—“Our expedition will in that case be disarmed, and our just desires of vengeance disappointed, and our honor prostrated.” He was anxious to show the world that the United States was capable of forcing Tripoli to terms without the intervention of other powers. It was essential, he instructed Smith, “to strike our blow…without a moment’s avoidable delay.”

  Another source of embarrassment was the various attempts by friends and family members to ransom individual officers. Private ransom offers, Madison explained to a Philadelphian, ran the risk of raising the Bashaw’s expectations and thus “thwarting the negotiations of the Executive,” which might then “protract the sufferings of those unhappy men.”

  The Republican-controlled Congress responded quickly to Jefferson’s desire for reinforcement. It required just six days to pass “An Act Further to protect the commerce and seamen of the United States against the Barbary Powers,” which gave the president broad powers to carry on operations against Tripoli as he chose, including “equipping, officering, manning, and employing such of the armed vessels of the United States, as may be deemed requisite….”

  To the vital question of costs, Congress’s answer was a new ad valorem tax of 2.5 percent on all imported goods. Revenues would be set aside in a dedicated “Mediterranean Fund.” Since 1801, Secretary Gallatin and the fiercely anti-tax Republican rank and file had complained of rapidly escalating naval expenses. The Mediterranean Fund was their sine qua non; from that point forward, the Tripolitan War would be underwritten by the shipping and commercial interests it benefited.

  Jefferson ordered four additional frigates manned and readied for sea. Three were among the original six: President, Congress, and Constellation. The fourth was the Salem-built subscription frigate Essex. A storeship, the John Adams, would sail laden with provisions for the squadron, including (among many other things) 6 tons of suet, 70 tons of bread, 450 bushels of peas, and 1,500 gallons of molasses.

  In appointing commanders to the relief squadron, the Navy Office was thrown onto the horns of an unwanted dilemma. Edward Preble had done, in Secretary Smith’s words, “all that a sound mind, an ardent Zeal, and daring valor could achieve.” But if four frigates were to sail for the Mediterranean, four captains would have to sail with them, and it was impossible for Smith to find that many officers who stood junior to Preble in order of seniority. By tradition and rule, the senior most captain would automatically become the new commodore on his arrival in the Mediterranean station. Preble could not be reinforced without being simultaneously demoted. It was yet another example of how the navy’s rigid adherence to the rule of seniority impaired its operational effectiveness. Smith hoped Preble would remain in the Mediterranean as commander of the Constitution, but he must have known the proud down-easter was unlikely to suffer relegation with composure.

  The new commodore would be Samuel Barron, a thirty-nine-year-old Virginian and son of a merchant sea captain. Barron was reputed to be a fine seaman, but he had nearly died during a bout of yellow fever in 1799 and suffered chronic health problems that seemed to worsen whenever he put to sea. He would command the President as his flagship. His younger brother, James, was also a captain and would command the Essex. The remaining two captains, John Rodgers
and Hugh Campbell, would command the Congress and Constellation, respectively. The morning after Jefferson’s message to Congress requesting reinforcements, Smith told a lieutenant at the Washington Navy Yard that “the Frigates President and Congress must be prepared for Sea with all practicable dispatch. On this occasion we require the exertions of your most strenuous efforts.”

  The mostly bare hulls of the President and Congress were moored on the edge of the channel, stripped of their blocks, tackle, rigging, and spars, all of which had been carefully stored in dry sheds. Their tops and caps had been removed from the lower masts, and large “tents” of well-tarred canvas had been stretched above their decks. For months, the yard’s permanent staff had been left mostly idle, whiling away their hours sleeping and drinking. Now, a furious burst of labor was required to return the ships to service. As usual, there was a critical shortage of skilled workmen to be found in Washington, and more would have to be recruited from the maritime centers of Baltimore and Philadelphia. On April 7, Smith received word that Joshua Humphreys had hired fifteen or sixteen men in Philadelphia and expected to hire five or six more in Baltimore. Because of the war-related boom in shipping, wages were high everywhere, and workers would migrate to the wilderness capital only because the federal government offered to overpay them.