Six Frigates

by Ian W. Toll

  Congress had sailed from Newport, Rhode Island, on January 6, in company with the Salem-built subscription frigate Essex. Their destination was the East Indies, where they were ordered to fetch home a convoy of stranded American merchant vessels. Except for the short coastal run to Newport from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where the Congress had been launched the previous August, the passage to Asia would be her maiden voyage. She was under the command of Captain James Sever, a native of Portsmouth who had received his naval commission in 1794.

  The first five days out of Newport were wintry and bitter cold, with a northerly wind sending snow and hail down on deck. On the eleventh, however, the wind veered into the south and blew a very hard gale, bringing warm rain and heavy seas. Congress and Essex lost contact. The Congress’s standing rigging had been set up during the New England winter, and the sudden rise in temperature caused the tarred-hemp ropes to stretch and go visibly slack. Supporting tackles were set up and the ship hove to, but to no avail. On the morning of the twelfth, the mainmast began to give way, about eight feet above the deck. Fourth Lieutenant Nathaniel Bosworth raced up the shrouds to the maintop, followed by a crew of five sailors. The men worked furiously to cut away the topmast, in the hope of saving the lower mast, but before they could do so the entire mainmast gave way and plunged into the sea, taking the mizzen topmast with it. Bosworth drowned, while the others clung to the wreckage and were rescued. With the loss of so many sails and such a great part of her rigging, Captain Sever wrote, the Congress was left “laying in the trough of the Sea, Laboring very much.” At half past noon the fore topmast went over the side, and a few minutes later it was discovered that the bowsprit was badly sprung. At 3:30 p.m. the bowsprit was lost; soon afterwards the rest of the foremast went, leaving the unfortunate frigate completely dismasted and “entirely at the mercy of the winds and waves.”

  For the next several days, the crew of the Congress fought to save the crippled ship. Immense waves crashed over the spar deck. The jolly boat was torn from the stern davits and swept into the sea. Many of her crew assumed all was lost. A full ten days were required to rig the jury mast, and eventually the ship managed to limp back toward the North American coast. After a six-week ordeal, on February 22, the Congress and her exhausted crew reached the safety of Cape Henry and the Chesapeake Bay. As if to add insult to injury, her jury mast was lost over the side as the ship attempted to run up to Hampton Roads; she was obliged to anchor in the channel and rig another.

  The frigate had been saved, but discipline had collapsed. Captain Sever demanded the court-martial of First Lieutenant John Cordis for insubordination. Cordis, in turn, charged Sever with gross incompetence. Before the dismasting of the Congress, the lieutenant had recommended that she run or “scud” before the storm. While the shrouds and stays on the weather side were kept taut by the wind, he said, the slack could be taken out of the lee rigging. The ship could then wear, bringing the wind onto her opposite quarter, and the procedure could be repeated. Sever had overruled the suggestion, saying, “I, sir, am the best judge,” and the Congress instead lay close-hauled against the gale. If Sever had accepted his advice, Cordis told Secretary Stoddert, “we should have reserved the masts.” (The lieutenant’s position was vindicated when it was learned that the Essex, smaller and more lightly built than the Congress, had done just as Cordis had advised and survived the gale with masts and rigging intact.)

  Stoddert’s instinct was to side with the commanding officer, but there were other indications that Captain Sever had lost the confidence of his junior officers. Marine Lieutenant Benjamin Strother wanted out of the ship. “The Service is to me in every way disgusting, & I think you would perfectly agree with me if you [served aboard the Congress] for one week only,” he told Major Commandant William Burrows. He gave as his excuse a proneness to seasickness—“I have been almost continuously seasick & I believe I should remain so if I sailed for a year”—but he also referred, obliquely, to “many other reasons.” In March, a gang of sailors attempted to seize control of the frigate while she lay at anchor in Hampton Roads. They were arrested and confined. On April 9, Lieutenant Cordis traded fisticuffs with a sailor, Patrick Brown, who would not back off until the other officers threatened to shoot him.

  In mid-April, Midshipman John Duboise applied to the Navy Office for a transfer. Stoddert replied: “You soon shall be separated from Sever. If he goes in the Congress, you shall be removed. But do not mention this to the other Midshipmen, as there is too much disorder and uneasiness on board of the Congress already.” Before receiving this reply, Duboise fought a duel with a fellow midshipman, Samuel Cushing, and “shot his antagonist through the neck, which put an immediate period to his Existence.” Fearing arrest on a murder charge, Duboise fled.

  With so many injured frigates competing for attention from the small Norfolk shore establishment, Naval Constructor Josiah Fox and his gang of shipwrights and laborers were pressed to full capacity. There were simply not enough men on hand to do all the needed work. In March, Stoddert ordered that priority should be given to the Congress, since she was fully manned, with her officers and crew drawing wages. Fox apparently preferred to continue fitting out the Chesapeake, a ship he had designed and built himself. On March 20, Stoddert amplified the order. “The Congress is full of men,” he told Fox. “The Chesapeake has not a seaman aboard. You will take every man from the Chesapeake that can be in any measure useful…and pay no attention to any other object to the prejudice of [the Congress] until it is accomplished.”

  When Constellation arrived in Hampton Roads a few days later, however, Captain Truxtun was in no mood to wait for the mainmast he had been unable to obtain in Jamaica. “You will proceed with all the dispatch that is in your power to make the mainmast for the Constellation,” he told Fox, brushing aside Stoddert’s order. “You should procure a proper gang to make the Constellation’s spars…I desire that you proceed to obey this order, and that I hear no excuse in future.”

  Whatever the order of priority for frigate repairs, Stoddert was only too willing to delegate authority to his favorite captain. The various complaints emanating from the Norfolk station had already demanded far too much of the secretary’s time and attention. Though Truxtun was expected to assume command of the USS President, launched in New York on April 10, Stoddert asked that he remain in Hampton Roads until the “disorders” aboard the Congress could be sorted out. He encouraged Truxtun to “assume all the authority belonging to your rank at Norfolk, which is as much as if you were already an Admiral…or as if you had the Command of the whole Navy.” Truxtun did not have to be asked twice. He moved quickly to extend his autocratic rule over every aspect of naval business. A marine lieutenant on the station described him a “tyrant,” a man “accustomed to receive homage…without bounds,” who demanded “abject submission to his supreme will.” The commodore signed an order: “Thomas Truxtun, Vested with the powers of Commander in Chief of the Navy of U.S.”

  The dismasting of the Congress called Sever’s seamanship into question, but the public charges of mutiny, incompetence, and insubordination among her officers and crew threatened to turn the entire service into a laughing-stock. Truxtun told Stoddert he intended “to put an End to such Conduct as the officers of the Congress have exhibited here & with as little noise & trouble to the Public as possible,” in order to protect the standing and reputation of the navy.

  On April 29, a court of inquiry convened in the greatcabin of the Chesapeake as she lay anchored in the Elizabeth River. Truxtun and two other captains presided. Captain Sever arrived promptly at 9:00 a.m., his logbook under his arm, accompanied by his sailing master and several lieutenants. His chief accuser, First Lieutenant Cordis, did not appear: the court minutes stated that he was “unwell and not able to attend.” A letter signed by Cordis was read aloud. It flatly contradicted his earlier assertions, and corroborated Sever’s version of events in every important detail. The court quickly rendered its verdict: “We unanimously acqu
it [Captain Sever] with honor of any charge of negligence, and are of the opinion that he used all his skill and endeavors to prevent the accident,” which was caused by “the Badness and insufficiency of the Masts.” Sever was judged “a very Attentive, Modest, and firm officer, and a gentleman who possesses materials well worth cultivating in the Navy of the United States.”

  The entire proceeding had been orchestrated in advance. Working behind the scenes, Truxtun had arranged a deal with Lieutenant Cordis. In exchange for reversing his testimony, Cordis (whom Truxtun deemed “a good seaman”) was allowed to transfer into the Chesapeake, where he would retain his rank under Captain Samuel Barron. Several of the officers and most of the crew of the Congress would go with him. The would-be mutineers were condemned to be “flogged with a cat of Nine tails at the gang way,” with sentences ranging from forty-eight to a hundred lashes each. The ringleaders, after suffering the punishment, were to be “discharged as unworthy of ever serving in future on board of any ship belonging to the United States.”

  With the Chesapeake now fully manned and the Congress nearly empty, Truxtun prodded Fox to shift his focus to the former. On May 22, the Norfolk-built frigate put to sea for the first time. “As her sails filled, a band of music on the quarterdeck played the President’s March,” the Norfolk Herald reported. “As she passed the shipping that lay in the harbor, she fired a salute of 13 guns, which was handsomely returned by every vessel…. The wharves and houses next to the river were lined with people, who with three cheers welcomed her as she passed the town point…. Thus, from the Chesapeake, the navy of the United States receives no small addition of strength.”

  Pushing the Congress out of port would prove more difficult. Few sailors were willing to serve under Sever. “I fear some difficulty in manning [the Congress],” said Truxtun, “—the prejudices against Captain Sever are very great. Indeed I fear his Idea of discipline is not correct. Discipline is to be effected by a particular deportment, much easier than by great Severity.” Despite many sharply worded orders from Washington, the Congress did not sail from Norfolk until July, after a six-month hiatus in port. Even then, the ship remained unhappy. Captain Alexander Murray, after visiting her in October, told Stoddert he was “sorry to say that the same kind of discontent prevails yet aboard the Congress.” Captain Sever, he said, “is a well-informed gentleman but has not the practical knowledge of a Seaman.”

  THE HAMILTONIAN FACTION, including several members of the president’s cabinet, had done their utmost to capsize Adams’s decision to send a second peace delegation to Paris. They believed the policy would leave America looking weak and craven in Europe, and feared a rupture with England. But there was a critical subtext to the issue: the fate of the army. Adams did not disguise his view that the new army was superfluous and expensive. “Regiments are costly articles everywhere,” he told McHenry, “and more so in this country than any other under the sun.” If it were up to him, he said, the army “should not exist a fortnight.”

  His intraparty rivals took advantage of Adams’s long absence from the capital in the spring, summer, and early fall of 1799. The ever loyal Stoddert warned him, in letters written confidentially and “entirely in a private character,” that conspiracies were afoot to prevent the peace mission from sailing, and that “artful designing men might make such use of your absence” to subvert the president’s chosen policy. At last awakening to the magnitude of the opposition arrayed against him, Adams rode out of Quincy on the last day of September. Two weeks later, he reached Trenton, where the federal government had decamped in order to escape Philadelphia’s annual yellow fever epidemic. The town was choked with refugees, and the president was fortunate to obtain a small two-room suite at a local boardinghouse.

  General Hamilton, whose headquarters were located in Newark, called on Adams directly in order to press his case against the mission. They met at Adams’s boardinghouse, presumably in the small parlor attached to his bedroom, and spoke for several hours. According to Adams, Hamilton’s “eloquence and vehemence wrought the little man up to a degree of heat and effervescence.” Hamilton argued that England was likely to prevail over France in the great European war; that it would be contrary to American interests to conclude an early peace with France. He even predicted that Louis XVIII and the Bourbons would be restored to the French throne by Christmas. Adams later said he was taken aback by Hamilton’s “total ignorance” of the state of affairs in Europe. “I heard him with perfect good humor, though never in my life did I hear a man talk more like a fool.”

  The following day, Adams rendered his decision. The mission would sail at the earliest possible date. “The President has resolved to send the commissioners to France,” Hamilton wrote Washington, who had returned to Mount Vernon. “All my calculations lead me to regret the measure.”

  It was Adams’s particular wish that Chief Justice Ellsworth and Governor Davie should sail for France in the frigate United States. Her captain, John Barry, may not have been the navy’s most active or efficient commander, but he was the highest-ranking officer in the service, and the United States was (with Constitution) one of the two largest and most powerful ships in the fleet. The frigate would be closely observed in whatever French port she disembarked her distinguished passengers—L’Orient, Le Havre, Cherbourg—and Adams thought it important that she make a formidable impression. Stoddert tried to persuade the president to send a smaller vessel, so as to avoid diverting “so great a proportion of our force for so long a time,” but Adams was adamant. He would only concede to allowing the United States to return after delivering the envoys, rather than remain in a French port pending the result of the negotiations.

  John Barry, aging and in poor health, was developing a reputation as a commander who liked to keep his ship in port for excessive lengths of time. Stoddert’s letters on the subject grew more pointed. He asked Barry to consider the poor example the United States would set for the other vessels of the navy by remaining so long at her moorings while needing no obvious repairs. “Let me therefore urge you to hasten your departure,” he wrote on June 17, while the United States was lying in the Delaware. “If anything on my part is necessary to accelerate it, inform me, and it shall instantly be done. I hope you will be able to sail in the course of this week.”

  The envoys would meet the ship in Newport, Rhode Island. Stoddert urged Barry to be ready to sail the moment they arrived: “it will be proper that you take in without delay such Provisions, Stores etc etc such as you stand in need of that you may be ready in a moment to proceed to Sea.” Stoddert took a direct hand in arranging the details of hospitality and accommodations for the ministers and their suite, consisting of two secretaries and two servants. They should be, he told Barry, “liberally but not profusely supplied with the best provisions for the Voyage…erring rather on the side of too much than too little.” Arriving in Newport on October 31, Ellsworth and Davie made a point of praising “the most ample and satisfactory preparations for our accommodation on board the United States.”

  United States sailed on November 3, reaching the port of Lisbon three and a half weeks later. There her troubles began. A strict quarantine had been laid on all vessels arriving from America because of “the terrible and Mortiferous Contageon the Yellow fever which lays waste and destroys that country.” Detained several weeks in the Tagus by contrary winds, United States finally sailed for L’Orient on December 21. Barry had predicted a passage of seven or eight days, but on Christmas Eve, in the Bay of Biscay, a ferocious gale rose out of the north and blew relentlessly until January 2. When celestial observations again became possible, it was discovered that the ship had drifted far out into the Atlantic.

  Ellsworth and Davie, whose enthusiasm for sea travel was diminishing rapidly, asked to be landed anywhere on the continental European coast. They would travel overland to Paris. On January 11, 1800, the United States made landfall near La Coruña in northern Spain, but new gale-force winds forced her to strike her topmasts and s
eek refuge in the Bay of Ares. There she lost two anchors when her cables broke, and the big frigate was nearly lost. The envoys hailed a small fishing vessel, which landed them at the village of Puentes d’Eume, from which they could travel to La Coruña overland, and from there to Paris.

  In La Coruña they learned of the coup d’état of 18 Brumaire, in which the thirty-three-year-old Napoleon Bonaparte had proclaimed himself First Consul and the effective military dictator of France. Bonaparte was eager to isolate Britain by cultivating good relations with America and other neutral states. In December, he had proclaimed that French-American relations would be governed by Louis XVI’s Treaty of 1778. Talleyrand, who had managed to survive and regain his seat as foreign minister, sent passports to the American envoys with assurances that the new regime wished to receive them with full diplomatic honors. Their presence in Paris was urgently requested.

  Hostilities were brought to a close by the Convention of Mortefontaine, signed on October 3. A grand celebration was held north of Paris, at the chateau for which the treaty was named. The event was “the most splendid occasion of its kind since the beginning of the French Revolution.” Speaking to an audience of several hundred dignitaries, Napoleon described the three-year Quasi War as a “family quarrel.” Gifts were exchanged, and toasts brought back the old familiar rhetoric of Franco-American amity and alliance.

  The first rumors of peace reached America in November 1800; a copy of the treaty arrived in Washington in mid-December. Though it did not require France to pay indemnities for an estimated $12 million in cumulative maritime spoliations, it released the United States from obligations to France under the Treaty of 1778. The terms were welcomed by merchants and shipowners, who had never held out much hope of receiving compensation for past losses and who were chiefly interested bringing hostilities to an end. Pending ratification, Stoddert circulated orders to all naval commanders to cease preemptive attacks on French armed ships. Convoy operations continued. As news of the treaty spread, hostilities in the Caribbean relaxed and attacks on American shipping declined in frequency. By early spring of 1801, they had all but ceased. The Quasi War was over.