Six Frigates

by Ian W. Toll

  Like many eighteenth-century intellectuals, Jefferson and Madison regarded politics and government as tedious work, a duty rather than a calling. They were dedicated members of the international “republic of letters,” and passionately devoted to the study of science, philosophy, history, and the arts. They stood for reason, empiricism, free speech, and a free press; for scientific inquiry, self-governance, individual rights, and a secular state. In their own eyes, they were the advance guard of a world revolution that was being waged, as Jefferson would later put it, “against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” It was a revolution that had not yet been won, and might yet be lost—or, as Immanuel Kant had put it, in 1784: “We are not living in an enlightened age. We are living in an Age of Enlightenment.”

  While in Paris, Jefferson offered to act as Madison’s literary purchasing agent, choosing “such books as may be either old and curious or new and useful.” He spent hours browsing in the bookshops and stalls along the Seine, “turning over every book with my own hand and putting by everything related to America, and indeed whatever was rare and valuable to every science.” His first letter to Madison from Paris was accompanied by a shipment of 45 books, including 37 volumes of the Encyclopédie méthodique; a single “literary cargo” in 1785 included 207 books. Madison, deeply engrossed in his campaign to replace the Articles of Confederation with a new constitution, was especially interested in “whatever may throw light on the general Constitution and [laws] of the several confederacies which have existed.” He would be happy to have books by the “historians of the Roman Empire during its decline,” “Pascal’s provincial letters,” “Ordinances Marines,” Amelot’s “travels into China,” and “such of the Greek and Roman authors where they can be got very cheap, as are worth having and are not on the common list of School classics.”

  The Virginians’ transatlantic correspondence mostly ranged over subjects unrelated to politics or diplomacy. In a typical letter, politics and public affairs would receive attention only after long discussion of more interesting subjects; and even then, the dreary business was likely to be relegated to a half-apologetic postscript. Pages were devoted to Buffon’s theory of the central heat of the earth; to the “grinders of the Incognitum which were found in Brasil and Lima” to animal magnetism; to hot air ballooning; to the Aurora Borealis; to the Maison Carrée at Nîmes, which Jefferson pronounced “the most beautiful and precious morsel of architecture left us by antiquity” and to the reported discovery of a subterranean city in Siberia, with “an equestrian Statue around the neck of which was a golden chain 200 feet in length.” Madison sent Jefferson a pamphlet on the language of the Mohicans, to assist his friend in his project of collecting “all the vocabularies I can of the American Indians, as of those of Asia, persuaded that if they ever had a common parentage it will appear in their language.”

  Jefferson sent Madison curiosities and gadgets not yet generally available in America: a pocket compass, a box of phosphorous matches, a pedometer, a retractable telescope, and an Argand cylinder lamp, which was said to generate light equal to that of six or eight candles. Madison in turn sent Jefferson dozens of specimens of North American flora, which Jefferson hoped to transplant; the shipments included paccan nuts, pippins, apple and sugar maple trees, cranberry plants, plum trees, live oaks, candleberry myrtles, standing American honeysuckles, three-thorned acacia, rhododendrons, and dogwood trees. He also offered to send samples of North American “animal curiosities.” “I can without difficulty get the skins of all our common and of some of our rarer quadrupeds,” he promised, “and can have them stuffed if desired. It is possible also that I may be able to send some of them alive.” In a letter of June 1786, Madison opened with a paragraph on political developments in Virginia and then continued: “For want of something better to fill the remainder of my paper, I will now add the result of my examination two days ago of another of our minor quadrupeds. I mean a Weasel.” The description of the animal and its internal organs filled eight long paragraphs. Thirty-eight different anatomical measurements were recorded in an appended table.

  Madison was one of the recognized leaders of the “nationalist” movement, which championed a more muscular constitution to strengthen Congress’s powers of legislation and taxation. Jefferson’s letters from France, describing the frustrations and failures of diplomacy in Paris, London, and other European capitals, lent strong anecdotal support to the cause. The European powers were adept at exploiting the jealousies between the individual American states, Jefferson wrote, and the situation would only grow worse until “with respect to every thing external we be one nation only, firmly hooped together.” Foreign policy must be the exclusive province of a supreme central government, while “interior government is what each state should keep to itself.” It was essential, he told Madison, to arm American negotiators with powers of commercial retaliation that could be enforced in every seaport, regardless of the laws or policies of the individual states. “I think it possible that England may ply before them. It is a nation which nothing but views of interest can govern.”

  At Madison’s urging, Virginia planned a national conference in Annapolis, Maryland, in September 1786, inviting the other states to send delegates “for the purpose of forming such regulations of trade as may be judged necessary to promote the general interest.” One of the delegates sent by the state of New York was Alexander Hamilton, Madison’s former colleague in the Continental Congress. Thus began one of the most indispensable partnerships in early American history.

  In an era preoccupied with details of birth and lineage, Hamilton had entered the world as a bastard from a broken home. Born on Nevis, raised on St. Croix, Hamilton had started out in life as a lowly clerk in a small British West Indian merchant shipping firm. Emigrating to New York in 1772, he had earned a degree at King’s College (later Columbia), joined the Continental Army in 1775, and served as an aide-de-camp to General Washington. He had led a daring assault on a British redoubt at Yorktown, retired from the army with the rank of colonel, married into New York’s powerful Schuyler family, studied law, joined the bar, served in both Congress and the New York State Assembly, and was, by 1786, an elite Wall Street lawyer and one of the nation’s leading critics of the “feebleness” of the Articles of Confederation. Hamilton’s ascent from humble beginnings had been extraordinary, and his greatest achievements still lay ahead of him.

  His hair was a sandy, reddish strain of blond; his complexion pale, smooth, and prone to freckling. His eyes were gray-blue and bordered across the top by straight, delicate eyebrows. He dressed impeccably in tailored suits, knee breeches, and waistcoats, with polished brass buttons and silver buckles on his shoes. He kept his hair long, as his son James described it, “plaited, clubbed up, and tied with a black ribbon [in back]. His front hair was pomatumed, powdered, and combed up and back from his forehead.” In his engraved portrait on the modern ten-dollar bill, Hamilton’s unsmiling expression projects confidence, aggressiveness, and restless energy, but there is also a suggestion of warmth and wit at the corners of the eyes and mouth.

  Hamilton’s career as an American nationalist had begun during the vicious winter of 1777–78, when the Continental Army hunkered down at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, snowbound and nearly starving. History has made Valley Forge a symbol of the rebel army’s will to endure awful deprivation, but contemporaries dwelled less on the heroism of the troops and more on the neglect and incompetence of the civil authorities in Philadelphia, less than twenty-five miles away. Washington said that some of his troops “might have been tracked from White Marsh to Valley Forge by the blood of their feet.” Half-naked, half-frozen, half-starved, huddled like bear cubs in a winter den, the soldiers subsisted on meager rations while the Continental Congress debated how to persuade the states to provide more funds to support the war effort. In Hamilton’s view, it was plain that the men had been failed by Congress, which had dithered and debated and exposed the men “frequently to temporary want, and
to the danger of a dissolution, from absolute famine.” The delegates had consistently maneuvered on behalf of the parochial interests of the individual states, when the war effort demanded that they serve “the common interests of the confederacy.”

  Just five states attended the Annapolis convention, and in the absence of a quorum no reform could be enacted. But the convention agreed on a resolution, written by Hamilton, acknowledging “important defects in the system of the Federal Government” and calling for a Constitutional Convention to take place the following year in Philadelphia. Madison, returning to Virginia, visited Mount Vernon, and persuaded George Washington to throw his immense prestige behind the cause.

  Delving into the books that Jefferson had acquired for him in Europe, Madison made an exhaustive legal and historical study of confederations and ancient republics, and he arrived at the Philadelphia convention prepared. He framed the debate with a paper entitled “Vices of the Political System of the United States.” He and his fellow Virginia delegates prepared fourteen resolutions, collectively known as the “Virginia Plan.” Washington, elected president of the convention, let it be known that he favored the plan, and his support was critical. On September 17, 1787, the convention approved a new constitution and sent it to the Continental Congress, which ten days later sent it to the states for ratification.

  References to a navy in the proposed constitution were limited to a few broad clauses: Article I granted Congress the authority to “provide and maintain a Navy” and to “make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces” Article II designated the president as “Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.” Equally important was Congress’s power, also in Article I, to “lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises,” because a great deal of money would be needed to “provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States.”

  Ratification was up against heavy odds, not least of which was the presence of strongly anti-federal sentiment in Hamilton’s and Madison’s home states of New York and Virginia. It was Hamilton’s idea to publish a series of essays urging ratification, and he threw himself into the work with characteristic intensity, penning fifty-one individual essays in four months. Madison added twenty-nine and New Yorker John Jay, who was ill, managed five. All were published under the pseudonym “Publius.” Printed in four New York newspapers between October 1787 and May 1788, they were collected in a book entitled The Federalist in the spring of 1788.

  Hamilton’s Federalist essays made a ringing case for “active commerce, an extensive navigation, and a flourishing marine” (No. 11). It was America’s destiny to trade by sea, and “the little arts of the little politicians” could never “control or vary the irresistible and unchangeable course of nature.” The major European powers were determined to suppress the growth of American trade—to “clip the wings by which we might soar to a dangerous greatness.” If America was serious about asserting its maritime rights and protecting its hard-won independence, “we must endeavor, as soon as possible, to have a navy” (No. 24). Madison pointed to the vulnerability of the nation’s long, unfortified coastline. Those living near the sea, north and south, should be “deeply interested in this provision for naval protection” (No. 41). Without a navy to defend them, they were vulnerable to the “predatory spirit of licentious adventurers,” and would sooner or later be “compelled to ransom themselves from the terrors of a conflagration, by yielding to the exactions of daring and sudden invaders.”

  Opponents of ratification warned that a navy would expand the power of the federal government to the detriment of the states; that it would increase the public debt; that it would lead to higher taxes; and that its expense would fall on the small farmer of the impoverished interior of the country, who might never even lay eyes on the sea. The proposed navy, declared William Maclay, a Pennsylvanian, was merely a pretext to raise taxes and hire “a host of revenue officers” to collect them—and then, “farewell freedom in America.” An old soldier in Massachusetts pointed out that no foreign fleet could invade the territories of the United States, because “they cannot bring their ships on the land.” Some argued that America’s destiny lay to the west, and that the country should not waste its time or treasure building fleets to fight for control of the ocean. “No, sir,” said James Jackson of Georgia, “to the agricultural interest—to the hardy sons of the West—to the American yeomanry we shall appeal, and we shall there find support.” The time for a navy would come far in the future, said William Grayson of Virginia, when the United States had populated its enormous inland territories. Only then, “half a century hence,” would it be wise “to talk of measures for a navy.”

  On October 27, 1787, the first of the Federalist essays was published in New York. On December 7, Delaware became the first state to ratify the Constitution, followed in quick succession by Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Georgia, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. In the ensuing six months, Maryland, South Carolina, and New Hampshire ratified. That summer, the two largest states in the country, Virginia (June 25, 1788) and New York (July 26, 1788), voted to ratify by narrow margins: 89–79 in Virginia and 30–27 in New York. The new government took effect on March 4, 1789.

  In New York City, a great victory celebration was held under the direction of the French architect and designer Pierre L’Enfant. A huge parade, the largest the nation had ever seen, meandered through the streets in a procession stretching a mile and a half long. The procession was led by a Grand Marshal who wore a blue coat with a red sash, followed by thirteen deputies who wore white coats and blue capes, each representing a state. The trade guilds were represented by delegations marching under banners identifying them as blacksmiths, joiners, pressmen, cordwainers, tanners, coopers, iron-mongers, glassmakers, and so on. Farmers marched under a banner that read: “God Speed the Plough.” Captains of merchant ships carried one that said: “Our Exports Exceed Our Imports.” The bakers carried a gigantic loaf of bread, identified by a banner as the “Federal Loaf.” An artillery company marched with their fieldpieces in tow; the students and faculty of Columbia College brought up the rear. The whole was borne along by the music of marching bands. Newspapers estimated the number of marchers at more than five thousand. At the end of the parade, on the grassy expanse of Bowling Green, the assembly shared in a banquet of bullock, mutton, and ham, served under an enormous canvas tent. A scroll hung at the entrance, with the words “Independence, Alliance with France, and Peace.”

  The most impressive feature of the parade, observers agreed, was a house-sized model frigate on wheels. Built by New York’s shipwrights, this early version of the modern-day parade float was 27 feet long on the keel and 10 feet on the beam, stepped with three towering masts, fully and accurately rigged with shrouds, stays, and miniature sails; armed with thirty-two miniature cannon that fired salutes; and manned by a crew of thirty sailors and uniformed officers. She was drawn through the streets by ten white horses. Her figurehead was a likeness of the New Yorker for whom she was named, the man who had been a dedicated promoter of the merchant marine, and who had almost single-handedly secured New York’s ratification of the Constitution. His name was carved across her transom: “HAMILTON.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  On October 8, 1793, the U.S. minister to Portugal, David Humphreys, addressed a circular letter “To All Governors, Magistrates, Officers Civil, Military & others concerned, in the United States of America.” Copies were to be carried by vessels sailing from Lisbon for every point on the compass. It was short and to the point:

  You are earnestly desired, as speedily as possible, to give a universal alarm to all Citizens of the United States concerned in navigation, particularly to the southern parts of Europe, of the danger of being captured by the Algerines…. A truce for twelve Months is concluded between Portugal and Algiers. In consequence of which a fleet of Algerine Cruizers passed through the Straits into the Atlantic on Saturday night last.

  It was, to be
specific, a fleet of eight vessels, comprising “four frigates, three Xebecks, and a Brig of 20 guns,” and its undoubted objective was “to cruise against the American flag.”

  As the awful intelligence spread throughout the Mediterranean, American merchants and sea captains panicked. Their letters betrayed a breathless terror. “I have not slept since Receipt of the news of this hellish plot—pardon me for such Expressions—Another corsair in the Atlantic—God preserve us—,” wrote Edward Church, U.S. consul in Lisbon, to Thomas Jefferson, who was now serving in Philadelphia as the nation’s first Secretary of State. Through the rest of October and early November 1793, the limitations of eighteenth-century communications left the maritime community in suspense. A month after the warning had gone out from Lisbon, no credible report of the whereabouts of the Algerian fleet had arrived in any of the major Portuguese, Spanish, or Mediterranean seaports. Every American vessel bound for Lisbon, Cadiz, or the Straits of Gibraltar was a potential victim.

  Finally, in mid-November, hard news arrived from Algiers itself. A consul who lived in the hostile seaport under diplomatic protection reported that “the Algerine cruisers have captured in the latter end of October ten American Vessels, the Masters & Crews to the number of 110 Men is brought into Algiers and is made Slaves of this Regency, these and all the other American Captives is in a distressed and naked situation.” Among the captured ships were the Hope of New York, bound from Rotterdam to Malaga in ballast; the brig George of Rhode Island, inbound to Lisbon laden with grain and Indian corn; and the Dispatch of Petersburg, Virginia, bound from Cadiz to Hamburg with sugar, indigo, and sarsaparilla.