Six Frigates

by Ian W. Toll

  Truxtun held staunch views on the importance of choosing lieutenants and midshipmen carefully. “Without officers what can be expected from a navy? The ships cannot maneuver themselves,” Truxtun lectured McHenry. “If we are to have a navy, we must make officers to manage that navy.” Though he had spent most of his career in the merchant service, he was wary of men who had learned the ropes aboard merchantmen. The life of a naval officer, he said, was a life of unremitting toil, close attention to detail, and intense devotion to excellence in every aspect of his duty and deportment. The slack discipline that prevailed in the merchant service would not do. “Every citizen in private life is his own master,” he said, “but when he enters into the navy or army he is no longer so, for he must submit to strict subordination.”

  The hope of the American navy would lie in its first generation of midshipmen, the young officers at the bottom rung of the promotion ladder. These “young gentlemen” would enter the service with little or no experience at sea; they would learn their profession in the navy. They would have to prove themselves worthy of promotion, or be pruned out of the service. Those with ambition, Truxtun warned, would have to avoid the destructive influences and habits that were so prevalent among sea officers in the merchant marine.

  If the dunces who are [a midshipman’s] officers or messmates are rattling the dice, roaring bad verses, hissing on the flute, or scraping discord from the fiddle, his attention to more noble studies will sweeten the hours of relaxation. He should recollect that no example from fools ought to influence his conduct or seduce him from that laudable ambition which his honor and advantage are equally concerned to pursue.

  Truxtun also watched over the critical process of recruiting 220 common seamen to fill out the frigate’s complement. The War Office had authorized him to enlist men who were older than eighteen, younger than forty, and “five feet six Inches high without shoes.” The surgeon should be on hand to certify that each sailor was “well-organized, healthy, robust, and free from scorbutic and consumptive Affections.” They should be engaged for a term of one year and paid a monthly wage of ten dollars for ordinary seamen and fifteen dollars for able seamen. A sailor could be paid an advance equal to two months’ pay if his officers were confident he would not run away with the money. Advances lost to deserters would be deducted from the responsible officer’s own salary.

  Naval service, the War Office emphasized, would be strictly voluntary. There would be no English-style impressment of sailors; nor would there be any of the ruses so commonly used to trick or coerce them: “It being important that those who enlist should feel an Inclination for the service, no indirect means are to be used in inveigling them, and therefore no Individual must be enlisted while in a state of intoxication, nor must he be sworn until 24 hours after signing the enlistment.” It would not be easy to recruit enough prime seamen to fill the Constellation’s large complement. Baltimore, like the other major American seaports, was booming. Vessels were departing every day, and the merchant houses were competing for the best, most experienced seamen by bidding up their wages. Most sailors preferred a two- or three-month West Indian voyage to a year’s term of enlistment on a warship. Many had served in the Royal Navy and wanted no more of that kind of discipline.

  Truxtun placed his second lieutenant, John Rodgers, in charge of overseeing recruiting for the Constellation. A native of Havre de Grace, Maryland, Rodgers was a big man, tall and dark-haired, with heavy bones in his face. Though he was only twenty-five years old, he had commanded his first merchant voyage while still in his teens. Before accepting his naval commission, he had lost a merchant vessel to a French privateer. He would emerge as one of the dominant personalities in the early American navy, wearing the uniform for forty years, serving in three wars, and eventually serving as president of the Board of Navy Commissioners.

  Truxtun ordered Rodgers to open a “Rendezvous” at Cloney’s Tavern in the maritime district of Fells Point. He was to be careful in managing costs. “Every expence attending the rendezvous for fire, candle, Liquor, house rent, &c &c must not exceed one dollar for every man actually entered & received on board,” the captain warned. On the other hand, the recruiting station, which would be located on a busy street, should reflect well on the ship and on the navy. Truxtun consented that “a reasonable allowance will be made you for music to indulge and humour the Johns in a farewell frolic.” Each sailor who took the oath would be provided with a set of “slops,” or sailor’s clothing. He would receive one woolen hat, one coat, one vest, two pairs of woolen overalls, two pairs of linen overalls, four shirts, four pairs of shoes, four pairs of socks, one stock and clasp, and one blanket. In addition, the Constellation would ship a supply of heavy wool watch coats, which would be distributed to the men of the watch who had to stand unsheltered on the deck in cold weather.

  Rodgers remained at Fells Point every day for five weeks, but the recruiting progressed slowly. Often he passed an entire day without signing a single man. Even after the War Office authorized an increase in wages, Rodgers was only able to enlist a hundred men, less than half the number needed. The rest would have to be found in other seaports further down the Chesapeake Bay.

  On April 22, with the wind blowing hard, the Constellation cast off her moorings and got underway, navigating down the Patapsco’s main ship channel, well north of the shoals off Rock Point and the dramatic white rocks that guard the head of the bay. There she entered Chesapeake Bay, one of the largest and most magnificent estuaries in the world, a brackish soup fed by the collective discharge of forty rivers and a twice-daily surge of salt water from the Virginia Capes. Constellation sailed by Cape St. Clair and the smart little harbor of Annapolis on the south bank of the Severn River; by the pale line of bluffs on the western shore, with no safe harbor for miles; by the long, timbered shoreline of Tilghman and Sharp’s Islands on the eastern shore; by the stands of loblolly pines, some 100 feet high; by low marshlands choked with cordgrass and wild rice; by endless mudflats littered with heaps of spent oyster shells and rafts of deadwood and worked over by teal, pintails, and great blue herons; by Cove Point; by Drum Point. And here the ship came to anchor in the mouth of the Patuxent River, where she would complete her provisioning before dropping still further down the bay.

  Her officers reported that the ship handled beautifully on her first passage. Sailing under double-reefed topsails, courses, jib, and staysails, she “ran ahead of everything that was in company, going down with their light sails set.” She steered easily, “like a boat.”

  A SHELL OF ICE COVERED the Delaware in January and February 1798, but when the spring thaw opened the river to navigation, the War Office informed Captain Barry that the United States “incommodes in her present Station the Merchant Vessels in coming in and going out,” and directed that the frigate be taken downriver to an anchorage opposite the ropewalks, south of the city.

  The warmer weather played havoc with the ship’s caulking. Fluctuations in temperature and humidity continued to work the seams open, allowing rainwater to leak into the berth and orlop decks. Joshua Humphreys, who would have liked to be done with the seemingly endless recaulking of the United States, was told that “the Decks, topsides, and other parts of the ship are much opened & the oakum loosened, and those parts will require caulking previously to her leaving the Delaware.”

  She may have leaked, but the United States was beginning to wear the unmistakable appearance of a fully rigged ship of war. Miles of freshly laid hemp cordage had been brought aboard for the setting up of the lower rigging, and the newly enlisted hands were employed each day in worming, serving, splicing, hitching, bending, grafting, seizing, and parceling. Barry was overseeing the work of the sailmakers, who were cutting a new suit of sails from bolts of patent English canvas imported a year earlier. Painters were putting the finishing touches to the figurehead, an elegant female figure whose accessories had allegorical significance: “Her hair escaped in loose, wavy tresses, and rested upon her breast…. In
her right hand she held a spear and belts of wampum—the emblems of peace and war. In her left was suspended the Constitution of the Union…. On the base of the tablet were carved the eagle and national escutcheon, and the attributes of commerce, agriculture, the arts and sciences.”

  The difficulty in obtaining suitable cannon was a source of great frustration. The War Office had hoped to foster the development of domestic foundries, but the casting of heavy ordnance was an intricate process that no American ironmonger had yet mastered. The navy purchased dozens of weapons from the Cecil Foundry, located between Philadelphia and Baltimore near the head of the Elk River, only to learn that many were unsound. Captain Barry warned the War Office that shoddy cannon were liable to explode in battle. Not only could such accidents kill or maim six or a dozen men, but they tended to terrify and demoralize the survivors, who would shrink from firing the other weapons. Better to sail with twenty dependable guns, Barry wrote, than a hundred that were “in the least suspected.”

  As a last resort, terrestrial cannon were transferred from coastal fortifications to the frigates. Barry persuaded New York governor John Jay to part with twenty-six 24-pounder cannon from the fortress on Governors Island. They were sent by sea and taken aboard the United States in May. For the spar deck, a battery of 12-pounders was removed from the fort at Whetstone Point in Baltimore and transported by sea to New Castle, where they were mounted on newly built oak gun carriages and hoisted aboard the frigate. The United States’s armorer stowed an impressively diverse inventory of munitions, shot, and small arms. There were stools of grape and canister shot, double-headed chain shot, braces of pistols, muskets and blunderbusses, flints, flannel powder cartridges, portfires, priming tubes, matchstuff, cutlasses with scabbards, boarding pikes, and lynch stocks. Some of the smaller items were cheap and readily obtainable, others not so. The War Office hoped to import 500 tons of saltpeter from Calcutta to be used in manufacturing gunpowder. Secretary of State Pickering requested the necessary clearances from the British ambassador, promising that the material would be used to wage war “against the inveterate and inexorable enemy of Great Britain.”

  From Philadelphia it was 100 miles downriver to the open ocean and a 100-foot drop in elevation. The United States went down the river in stages, anchoring first at Mud Island, then at Marcus Hook, then off the town of Chester. At each anchorage she settled deeper into the water as she took on men, arms, stores, and fresh water.

  Working a big ship down a tidal river was the ultimate test of seamanship. The sounding lead was in constant use and the anchor was carried cock-billed, hanging from the cathead, ready to drop at a moment’s notice. If the wind was working moderately against the tide, the ship could drift broadside to the stream. But when the tide set to leeward, maneuvering was almost impossible. Though the frigate could rush headlong down the river, she would have no steerageway at all. With her deep draft, she could easily be lifted onto a shoal. She might be obliged to drop anchor and await a change in wind or tide.

  On June 13 the frigate lay at Chester, where she took on water casks to complete her ration for a cruise of three months. The added weight settled her deeper into the river; she was observed to draw almost 21 feet abaft. Her anxious pilot asked that she take on no more stores until she had dropped down to New Castle, at the head of the Delaware Bay.

  FROM BOSTON CAME THE DISAPPOINTING NEWS that the 44-gun Constitution was nowhere near ready for sea. Well-manned merchantmen were clearing for destinations all over the world, but the big frigate lay at anchor in Boston Harbor, short of men. Recruiting handbills had been posted throughout the waterfront districts, urging “the brave and hardy seamen of New England” to present themselves at a rendezvous on Fore Street, “where they shall be kindly received, handsomely entertained, and may enter into immediate pay.” Not enough had responded to the call.

  The Boston Navy Agent, Stephen Higginson, blamed the officers. Captain Samuel Nicholson, he told the War Office, was “a rough, blustering tar merely,” a man whose “noise & vanity is disgusting to the sailors.” As for the second lieutenant, “he is said to be intemperate & he looks like it.” The surgeon was “the opposite of what he ought to be in Morals, in politics, and in his profession. There is not a man in this Town who would trust the life of a dog in his hands.”

  A nephew of the Secretary of State, who had won a contract to supply the Constitution, complained that “wet provisions” (casks of salted beef or pork) had been sitting in a storehouse for four months awaiting the paperwork necessary for them to be taken on board the frigate. He feared they would turn rancid and go to waste. The War Office, he told his uncle, was not up to the challenge of outfitting a frigate, let alone a fleet:

  Till there is some system—a Department, and proper agents under & dependent on it I despair of our receiving any benefit, at least, from this Frigate. I believe there has been a Scandalous waste of property in building her; owing, I conceive, to the entire ignorance of the [War Office]…. What can be done, I know not. It is to be regretted, that So fine a Ship should lie uselessly at her anchors.

  The War Office was the target of mounting criticism from many quarters. John Barry placed much of the blame for the delays in the outfitting of the United States on Secretary McHenry, commenting acidly that “there ought to be some allowance made for young beginners.” Even Alexander Hamilton, McHenry’s patron and mentor, was forced to admit that the man was “loaded beyond his strength.” The most devastating assessment of his job performance may have been the gentle admonition he had received from President Washington two years earlier. The commander in chief had urged him “to deliberate materially, but to execute promptly and vigorously, and not to put things off until the morrow which can be done, and require to be done, today.”

  As early as March 1798, when called upon to defend his management of the frigates, McHenry had admitted that he was overburdened and asked to be relieved of some of his responsibilities. In the post-XYZ environment, Congress was in a mood to spend liberally on a naval mobilization. But its members were also painfully aware that the added funding, if funneled through the War Office, would likely be squandered. Over Republican opposition, a bill to establish a new cabinet-level Department of the Navy passed and was signed by the president on April 30. Adams and his advisers began searching for a candidate to assume the new job of Secretary of the Navy.

  THAT SPRING, Philadelphia was in the grip of war fever. In Southwark, a hotbed of Federalist militancy, Joshua Humphreys hosted a raucous banquet at Jim Cameron’s Tavern. To accommodate the crowd, tables were set up in an alley outside, sheltered by two sails. President Adams attended as the guest of honor. Toast after toast was drunk; the liquor flowed freely; the guests “roared like a hundred bulls.” Glasses were raised to “the infant navy of the United States—Like the Infant Hercules, may it even in its cradle strangle the serpents which would poison American glory.” Soon after: “Death to Jacobin principles throughout the world.” And then: “May the Atlantic be a Red Sea to all who shall attempt to invade our country.” A Republican editor reported that “These hundred staunch Federalists drank no less than thirty-two staunch toasts, to each of which they gave exactly 9 cheers…each of which was accompanied with the tossing of hats, caps & wigs in the air, merry-andrew jumps…[and] other irregularities and violent movements.”

  When the orchestra at the New Theater on Chestnut Street struck up once popular French revolutionary anthems such as the “Marseillaise” and “Ça Ira,” theatergoers shouted in protest. A Federalist editor condemned the songs as “Gallic murder-shouts…that grate and torture the public ear.” With the first lady in attendance, the singer Gilbert Fox sang a new rendition of the patriotic song “Hail Columbia” to such wild acclaim that he was called back to the stage to sing it four more times. When some of the musicians refused to play the song, perhaps because they were tiring of it, they were pelted with missiles by Federalist rowdies who (as Bache reported in the Aurora) “created some alarm in the ci
tizens in every part of the house, who imagined that these men had broken out of the Lunatic Hospital.”

  Federalists took to wearing black “cockades,” or rose-shaped ribbons similar to those worn by American soldiers during the Revolution. The black cockade was intended as an answer to the red or tricolor cockades that Republicans had worn since 1789 in support of the French Revolution. These variously colored emblems of political affiliation held the capital in the grip of what one Republican labeled “COCKADEROPHOBIA.” In some neighborhoods, a person wearing the wrong color risked being assaulted. A congressman recalled witnessing a scuffle between two women on the steps outside a church as they attempted to “violently pluck the badges from one another’s bosoms.”

  Pro-government militias were forming up all over the city. Young men lined up at recruiting stations to join the Troops of Horse, the Grenadiers, or the MacPherson’s Blues. The ranks of the Blues swelled to over six hundred. Abigail Adams was delighted by this sudden dam burst of martial enthusiasm. “This city,” she wrote, “which was formally torpid with indolence and fettered with Quakerism, has become one military school, and every morning the sound of the drum and fife lead forth, ‘A Band of Brothers Joined.’”

  Her husband was showing signs of the immense pressure he was under. He had lost weight; he was pale and haggard; he had lost several teeth and Abigail worried that he was smoking too many cigars. John Adams had never been especially popular with the American people. He always avowed that he was indifferent to public approbation, so long as he was right. But he was warmed by the outpouring of popular support for his policy, and urged his supporters to mobilize for war. “To arms, then, my young friends,” he wrote to a group of young Bostonians who had offered themselves as volunteers; “To arms, especially by sea!”