Give Me a Fast Ship
Page 2
And the most famous American in the world, Benjamin Franklin, had returned home to Philadelphia after years of serving in England as Pennsylvania’s agent. When his involvement in some backroom intrigue over the political impasse in Massachusetts became public knowledge, Franklin was summoned to “the cockpit,” the well of Parliament’s chamber, where he was berated, mocked, and threatened by its members. Franklin subsequently sailed home to Philadelphia and arrived on May 6, greeted as one onlooker recalled, “to the satisfaction of friends and the lovers of Liberty.”15
Adams found Philadelphia caught up with martial fervor. News of Lexington and Concord reached Philadelphia on April 23, St. George’s Day, where a party of notable Philadelphians was celebrating the birthday of the king’s namesake at the City Tavern. The renowned merchant Robert Morris was raising his glass to toast George III when a rider burst through the door with the news. As the celebrants scrambled outside, overturning tables and chairs, Morris, now alone in the room, toasted the Massachusetts rebels, and drained his glass. From that day forward, Penn’s peaceful city took on a martial aura: sounds of fife and drum wafted through the streets while various regiments and militia, organized by politician and well-endowed private citizen alike, drilled before the State House on Fifth and Chestnut Streets.16
Congress had a new venue, having moved from Carpenters’ Hall to the more spacious State House. Its block-long redbrick walls and six-story bell tower dominated the Philadelphia landscape. Two Philadelphians had submitted plans for its design in 1732. The winning draft came from the hand of attorney Andrew Hamilton, who successfully defended New York newspaperman Peter Zenger against an accusation of libeling the royal governor. The loser was the designer of Christ Church, Dr. John Kearsley, whose nephew would be arrested for treason shortly after Congress learned of his plan to raise an army of 5,000 Loyalists to keep Philadelphia in Tory hands.17
Adams and his colleagues set up shop in the Assembly Room on the first floor, where the high, broad windows, spaced between the gray-painted walls, were open to the spring breezes. Each colony’s representatives sat on round-backed chairs at tables covered with green cloth that added a touch of somberness to a room that was 40 feet, 4 inches long and 38 feet, 6 inches wide, about one-third the length of a frigate and just slightly wider than her beam.18
For the next six months, in this room, ninety miles from the Atlantic Ocean, John Adams—whose only sailing experience had been a fishing trip near Cohasset Rocks, fifteen miles off Boston—would serve as midwife in the birth of the first American navy.19
The Second Continental Congress moved slowly. Dispatches from the colonies, particularly those from the New England army that now had Gage’s forces penned in Boston, were devoured and debated, if not always acted upon. In a move to unify the southern delegates with their northern colleagues, John Adams nominated Virginian George Washington to take command of the newly christened American Continental Army facing Boston. Working relationships were established with each colony’s government—that is, those represented by American politicians who were unfettered by Crown loyalty.
Ironically, two giant issues were rarely mentioned. Independence from Great Britain was one. An American navy was the other. Those representatives who yearned, openly or privately, for reconciliation with the Crown viewed the creation of the latter as guaranteeing the former. The colonies they called home began in New York and ran south to Georgia; the war had yet to visit their territory. As far as the New England delegations were concerned, sentiments for reconciliation had long since vanished.
That summer, John Adams proposed the idea of an American navy. In Christopher Gadsden, he found a willing ally among the reluctant southerners. Gadsden believed the British fleet stationed off the coast “is not so formidable to America as we fear.” Further, Adams recounted to his fellow New Englander Elbridge Gerry that Gadsden believed
We can easily take their Sloops, schooners, and Cutters, on board of whom are all their best Seamen, and with these We can easily take their large Ships, on board of whom are all their impress’d and discontented Men [who] would certainly kill their own officers.
Adams concurred: “It is a different Thing, to fight the French or Spaniards from what it is to fight british Americans,” he wrote, and was as hopeful as his new friend Gadsden that “We may get a Fleet of our own.”20 The conservative bloc in Congress, led by Pennsylvanian John Dickinson, dismissed the idea out of hand. Dickinson engineered a peace feeler to George III, known as “the Olive Branch Petition.” A bitter Adams wrote his friend James Warren, whose brother Joseph—Adams’s friend and physician—had recently been killed at Bunker Hill:
We ought to have had in our Hands a month ago the whole Legislative, executive and judicial of the whole Continent . . . to have raised a naval Power, and opened our Ports wide; to have arrested every Friend to Government on the Continent and held them as Hostages for the poor victims in Boston, and then opened the Door as wide as possible for Peace and Reconciliation.21
In his letter Adams called Dickinson “a piddling genius.” He believed this epithet would be kept in confidence, only to find his letter intercepted by the British, whose gleeful publishing of it in Loyalist newspapers caused Adams embarrassment and provoked enmity from the more peaceable members of Congress.22 Dickinson’s faction did throw a bone to the war hawks in Congress, approving a resolution that each colony “at their own expence” purchase or build enough vessels “for the protection of their harbours and navigation on their sea coasts” from the Royal Navy.23 Congress adjourned until September.
The fates, or at least events, were kinder to Adams’s cause. When Congress reconvened that fall, he found new allies and foes. Back in Boston, he had one man serve him in both capacities: Vice Admiral Samuel Graves.
Graves was the senior British naval officer in America. At sixty-two, he was still a formidable presence on deck or in a salon, with a lifetime of action at sea behind him. By appearance and experience, he seemed every bit the perfect warrior to end this uprising. That was certainly his goal after Lexington and Concord; afterwards, he informed the Admiralty that his ships kept the rebels “in awe” while assuring the Lords of “heartily co-operating” with General Gage and “giving him every assistance in my power.”24
But Graves’s strong words were not followed by strong actions. No sooner had those Redcoats retreating from Concord returned to Boston than Yankee sailors, not wanting to be left out of the action, manned dozen of whaleboats and struck out for the islands around Boston. With their innate knowledge of tides, currents, and shoals, they went on a binge of destruction, burning lighthouses and hay bales and seizing livestock to keep the food-on-the-hoof out of reach of British foraging parties. Graves sent out longboats in pursuit, but they were easily outdistanced by the lighter, swifter whaleboats. By mid-May such unpunished activity had Graves feeling like Gulliver, bound by Lilliputians, especially when he learned that “it is forbidden under pain of death by the Rebels” to supply British forces. When asked by the royal governor of Virginia—John Murray, Lord Dunmore—for naval support, Graves initially refused; as “a numerous and well appointed [rebel] Army is assembled which without the protection of the Kings Ships can utterly destroy this Town and the Troops pent up in it.”25
The actions of Graves’s captains towards the colonists did little to win them over to the British side. “The depredations of the once formidable navy of Britain [are] now degraded to a level with the corsairs of Barbary,” James Warren’s wife, Mercy, wrote John Adams, although not all of their “pirattically plundering” went unanswered. British captain John Linzee took his sloop, the Falcon, into Buzzard’s Bay below Cape Cod and seized a timber ship, her hold full of ballast. When her captain informed Linzee that a merchantman laden with West Indies goods was heading that way, Linzee set off in pursuit, capturing her as well. He soon learned that New Bedford sailors were as feisty as their Boston counterparts; they fitted out
a sloop, chased the “royal pirates,” and recaptured both of Linzee’s prizes, sending him back to Boston empty-handed.26
But it was off the coast of Maine—then the eastern district of Massachusetts—where American sailors emulated the Minutemen of Lexington and Concord. Ichabod Jones, a Loyalist businessman admired by Graves for having “exerted himself in Supplying this Garrison” of Redcoats, proposed an expedition from Boston north to Machias, where its “New Settlers” had just survived a horrific winter. Jones offered to bring supplies to this coastland outpost, situated between New Brunswick and Mount Desert Island. With Graves’s blessing, he took two timber ships, the Unity and the Polly, carrying twenty barrels each of pork and flour to be exchanged for Machias lumber. To guarantee the mission’s success, Graves sent along a consort, the armed schooner Margaretta, under command of a young midshipman named James Moore. Jones saw the venture as a win-win-win: food for the Machias settlers, lumber for the Royal Navy, and a handsome profit for himself. He set sail in May and arrived on June 2.27
Jones’s plans of success did not go immediately awry when his ship anchored off Machias that evening. After a good night’s sleep, he went ashore to find the settlers neither glad to see him nor simpatico with his Tory mission. Weeks earlier, when news of Lexington and Concord had reached Machias, it was not received so much as embraced. Walking into town, Jones spied a “liberty pole” in the public square, a flagstaff topped by a replica of the Phrygian cap worn by freemen in ancient Rome, and erected by the local Sons of Liberty as a symbol of local sympathies. From the start, negotiations between Jones and the townsfolk were acrimonious, but after a bitter debate, his offer of goods for wood was put to a vote. The result barely went his way.28
His victory did not put Jones in a magnanimous mood. He brought the Unity and Polly to the wharf and began distributing the foodstuffs and goods only to residents who voted for his proposal. Then the “aggrieved party,” as one eyewitness reported, “determined to take Capt. Jones [and] put a final stop to his supplying the King’s troops with any thing.” A chosen band of kidnappers attempted to seize Jones at the church service, but he and Midshipman Moore were alerted by the minister’s servant. They escaped through a side window and fled into the woods. Once back aboard his ship Moore, already seething at the sight of the liberty pole, raised his sovereign’s colors, letting it be known that “if the people presumed to stop Capt. Jones’ vessels, he would burn the Town.”29
The villagers called Moore’s bluff. Some seized the Unity and “went directly to stripping the sloop,” while others attacked the Polly, manned her guns, and began firing on the Margaretta. Moore sailed his schooner downriver. At dusk, he saw a fleet of rowboats and canoes approaching. Once “within hail of the ship,” Moore seized his speaking trumpet, demanding to know what they wanted. They wanted Jones. Moore refused. The men of Machias raised their muskets and pistols. “Fire and be damn’d,” he roared. “Brisk fire from the [Margaretta’s] Swivels” sent the Americans hurriedly rowing out of range.30
At sunrise Moore could make out the Unity and Polly, manned to the gunwales with armed rebels. Determining that discretion was the order of the moment—if not, as we shall see, the day—Moore sailed the Margaretta to the harbor’s entrance. As the ship came about, her boom and gaff were carried away. Moore now sent his crippled ship over to a sloop in the harbor, a neutral observer of the fray. British tars boarded her and confiscated two spars to replace their damaged ones, while the Americans changed course and made straight for the Margaretta.
As the Americans got closer and closer to the schooner, it occurred to them that they had not appointed a leader. While some maintained their course and others constructed makeshift breastworks from the timber in the ships’ holds, they chose Jeremiah O’Brien, whose five brothers were also among the attacking force. Once they got close enough to the Margaretta, O’Brien ordered the British to “strike to the Sons of Liberty.”
Moore had eyes; he could see his position was hopeless. But whether he was overcome by anger or devotion to king and country, he “luffed the Vessel too [sic]” and brought her into the wind, unleashing as strong a broadside as swivels, muskets, and pistols could fire. His men “threw some Hand grenades” at the Americans for good measure, while O’Brien sent his two ships on either side of the Margaretta. “At that instant,” Moore’s pilot later recalled, “Mr. Moore received two Balls, one in his right Breast, the other in his Belly.” When the smoke cleared, nine British tars and fourteen Americans had been killed or wounded. The Margaretta struck her colors, the first British ship to surrender to Americans.
Fatally wounded, Moore was transported back to Machias, unrepentant of his decision to fight. Shortly after gasping that “he preferred Death before yielding to such a sett of Villains,” he died. The exultant townspeople rewarded O’Brien with command of the Unity, armed her with the Margaretta’s guns, and renamed her the Machias Liberty. “The naval Lexington,” as historian Nathan Miller called it, had been fought and won.31
While O’Brien was still flush with success, another opportunity for twisting the British lion’s tail dropped into his lap, or at least into the harbor. The schooner Diligent and the tender Tattamagouche were sent there not for revenge but to take soundings of the harbor for accurate chart making. O’Brien seized both without firing a shot. The small village of Machias now had something Congress did not—a navy.32
Farther south, General George Washington had arrived on July 2 to assume command of the rebel army that encircled Boston by land. “A good Soldier and a Man of sence,” one official recalled, while Abigail Adams wrote her husband how “the Gentleman and Soldier look agreeably blended in him.” As always, Washington had made a nearly universal good first impression, with the exception of one sentry who wrote, “Nothing happening extroderly” that day.33
But Washington’s implacable countenance concealed deep anxieties over his new command. The army ranged from trained Rhode Islanders under the magnetic Nathanael Greene to undisciplined locals known as “the 8 month army” for their term of enlistment. Their only semblance of professionalism was found in John Glover’s 21st Massachusetts Regiment from Marblehead, almost all of them sailors with a lifetime of practice in obeying and understanding orders. But Washington’s real problem was not manpower as much as it was supplies, especially gunpowder.34
What made this crisis more vexing for Washington was what he saw through his spyglass: British transports arriving in Boston harbor, with half barrel after half barrel of gunpowder unloaded among the other supplies for Gage’s Redcoats. Washington dispatched countless appeals to Congress, asking that each colony send him what he could “only lament the want of.” For the rest of the summer he awaited overland caravans of the precious necessity, or at least the hope of word of any imminent arrivals. Meager supplies of it drifted in. He bore the lack of gunpowder stoically, but when Franklin related the novel, money-saving idea of replacing muskets with bows and arrows, Washington must have been torn between rolling his eyes heavenward or sheer frustration: it did not seem likely that Gage would agree to a battle for Boston using the weapons of Crécy and Agincourt.35
From his first day in camp, Washington insisted that American resistance be conducted on land and land only. When the Massachusetts Congress approved a mission sending the Machias “fleet” to raid Nova Scotia, he vociferously objected; while he applauded the sailors’ “Spirit and Zeal,” he cited everything from “our Weakness and the Enemy’s Strength at Sea” to his main argument: “Our Situation as to Ammunition absolutely forbids our Sending a Single Ounce [of powder] out of the Camp at present.” But by September he changed his mind. Seeing that the answer to his problem was encamped alongside him, Washington turned to Glover and his “Webfoots.”36
Before the war, Glover was a successful merchant who had a reputation as a rum trader with his own schooner, the Hannah, named for his wife. He fought in the French and Indian War. Since the Stamp Ac
t he had been a leader in resistance to Crown policies; after Lexington and Concord he organized the Marblehead Regiment, comprising the coastal town’s sailors and fishermen. He had a broad forehead, wide-set eyes, and a rounded, firm chin. Glover, his men, and his ship were the obvious choice for Washington to start his own navy.37
The cautious Washington did not buy the Hannah. He rented her for “ONE Dollar pr. Ton pr. Month.” Glover picked officers and a crew from his Webfooters and placed Nicholas Broughton, an experienced merchant captain, in charge. Washington gave Broughton page after page of explicit orders: to “Cruise against such Vessels as may be found on the High Seas” carrying “Soldiers, Arms, Ammunition, or Provisions,” to treat any prisoners “with Kindness and Humanity,” and “to avoid any Engagement with any armed Vessel of the Enemy.” And, last but not least, “to be extremely careful and frugal with your Ammunition” and “by no Means to waste any of it in Salutes.”38
The Hannah was refitted as best as possible for wartime service, her bulwarks pierced for four 6-pounders. She sailed out of Gloucester under perfect conditions on September 5, flying a flag at her masthead with the words “Appeal to Heaven.” Among her crew was Glover’s son, John Junior. By late afternoon Broughton encountered the enemy, “two ships of War [that] gave me Chace.” Over the next twenty-four hours the cruisers pursed the Hannah. Using his knowledge of the waters and shoals, Broughton eluded them. His first two attempts at leaving Gloucester were thwarted, but he finally slipped out at sunset and headed south.39
The next morning Broughton saw a ship under the Hannah’s lee quarter—the ship’s side away from the wind. Finding her a ship of no force, Broughton pursued her, hailing her once she came within range of his guns. She was the Unity, bound for Boston, her hold full of supplies for Gage’s army (not the Unity from Machias). The Hannah escorted her back to Gloucester. Broughton and his crew were ecstatic. They could feel the prize money Washington promised jingling in their pockets.