by Tim McGrath
But their joy was short-lived; days earlier, the Unity had been taken by the British as a prize and hastily put into the king’s service. She was the property of New Hampshire congressman John Langdon. Once the ship was in port, Washington ordered her returned to Langdon. The Hannah’s crew, in a state of rebellion against the British, now rebelled against their general. Three dozen of them mutinied, forcing Washington to send troops to Gloucester with orders to bring them back to camp, where he intended “to bestow a different kind of reward for their behavior.” A court-martial convicted them and sentenced them to the lash. Just before the sentence was to be carried out, Washington changed his mind: only the ringleader was flogged.
With just one ship, Washington had started an unofficial American navy, settled a dispute with a congressman, and quelled a mutiny that provided him an opportunity to administer both discipline and mercy. That said, it was one instance where Washington might have, on the whole, wished he was back in Philadelphia.40
While he would later complain about “rascally privateersmen,” Washington nevertheless sought more ships to be armed and manned by soldiers in an effort to seize powder and supplies for his needy army. Over the next three months, the Hannah was joined by other schooners, manned by other “Webfooters,” their actions giving the general an equal amount of success and exasperation.41
They also brought apoplexy to Vice Admiral Graves. In truth, the admiral lacked sufficient ships for his needs. He had twenty-four at the outbreak of hostilities, with a coastline from Canada to Florida to cover. That summer he was criticized both to his face and behind his back for his lack of action against Machias and Falmouth, where Henry Mowat, commander of the ship Canceaux, was captured by rebels shortly after being warmly received by the town Loyalists. Mowat escaped. From Boston, Major General John Burgoyne complained to Lord George Germain in London, “What is the Admiral doing?” He provided the answer in the next sentence: “I can only say what he is not doing.”42
As summer ended, Graves decided to answer the American rebels in the harshest terms possible. Soon he and they would discover that the Royal Navy had just the right officers for such dirty work.43
By the time Broughton captured the Unity, Congressman Langdon was back in Philadelphia and Congress was back in session after a monthlong hiatus. There was much to do, and its members were beginning to discover they possessed powers that had been utterly beyond their comprehension just weeks earlier. They issued two million dollars in credit to run affairs; they began direct negotiations with the Native American tribes; they established a postal service. Delegates were now lawmakers.44
As a humid Philadelphia summer rolled into a cooler-than-usual autumn, John Adams returned to his favorite topic: an American navy. Events in their backyards—and along their coastline—continued to move the New England faction further towards an out-and-out break with Great Britain, and Adams began to personalize his arguments. He had every reason to. Letters from his wife, Abigail, contained thorough reports on the latest military actions around Boston. Adams had sent his family to their farm in Braintree, twelve miles outside of the city limits but along the main road into the town. From there, his wife told how she and their young children had American
Soldiers comeing in for lodging, for Breakfast, for Supper, for Drink . . . refugees from Boston tierd and fatigued, seek an assilum for a Day or Night, a week—you can hardly imagine how we live.45
The Adams family first heard and then witnessed the Battle of Bunker Hill from Braintree, later giving water to the beaten, exhausted, and wounded New Englanders as they limped past the farm. When a British man-of-war anchored nearby, Abigail wrote her husband how “it occurred an alarm in this Town and we were up all night.” Most delegates learned of the fighting around Boston through official dispatches. Adams read firsthand reports from an eyewitness, the mother of his children, and it fueled his desire for an escalation of all things military. He had lost his first battle to create a navy, but with his family in mind as much as his beloved Massachusetts, the landlubber lawyer made a new case for maritime armament that October.46
Adams also found in Congress both a formidable ally and a fearsome antagonist, each with a physical presence that dwarfed his own, and practically everyone else’s: Stephen Hopkins of Rhode Island and Samuel Chase of Maryland.
Hopkins came from a prominent Quaker family from Providence. He did not tie his hair back—it hung alongside his broad, open face. He was as bulky as he was tall, and always wore clothes of gray broadcloth and a felt hat that were positively drab compared to the clothing worn by his congressional colleagues, especially the youngest, Edward Rutledge of South Carolina, whose colorful dress Adams compared to a peacock. At sixty-eight, with a long political career behind him, Hopkins was senior to every delegate but Franklin. He had served as both governor and chief justice of Rhode Island and was an ardent abolitionist, although one younger brother, Esek, still dabbled in the slave trade.
Samuel Chase always believed himself to be the better man in any confrontation. He, too, cut an intimidating figure. Standing over six feet, he threw his weight around along with his words. A lawyer, he possessed a vicious tongue, and he relished using it. Chase was an ardent patriot; ten years earlier, during the Stamp Act controversy, he had admittedly burned both the stamps and their agent—the latter, fortunately, in effigy.47
Thus far, the greater Boston area had borne the brunt of British army operations, but no colony’s coastline had witnessed more depredations by the Royal Navy than Rhode Island, and for good reason. Rhode Islanders had tried to start the Revolution three years before Lexington and Concord. On June 10, 1772, a British schooner, the Gaspee, was in chase of a packet suspected of smuggling. The Rhode Islanders made for the shoals of Narragansett Bay, where the pursuing Gaspee ran aground. That night, men from Providence, led by Abraham Whipple, attacked the British crew, shot their commander, ransacked the Gaspee, and set her afire. Minutes later, she blew up.48
Parliament offered a £1,000 reward for the leader of this outrage against the Crown, but no Rhode Islander was greedy enough—or fool enough—to turn in the popular Whipple. It would be two years before retribution was exacted, coming from His Majesty’s frigate Rose and her captain, James Wallace.
Years before Banastre Tarleton and Walter Butler personified British villainy, James Wallace set the mark. Once his frigate reached the Rhode Island coast, he was determined to use every measure and each of his ship’s twenty guns to establish the king’s laws over these disloyal colonists. Sharing Wallace’s enthusiasm for punishing the Americans, Admiral Graves ordered him to “prevent all Supplies going to Providence” and to “seize Provisions and send them to Boston.” In Wallace, Graves had a most willing officer. Wallace embarked on a binge of seizures of both merchantmen and merchant men, arousing alarm and adding to the already bitter feelings between colony and king. Learning of Whipple’s role in the Gaspee affair, Wallace publicly declared he would hang Whipple “from the Rose’s yard arm.” The rascally Whipple sent Wallace a note: “Sir, always catch a man before you hang him.” Once hostilities broke out in 1775, Whipple had the first laugh aboard ship as well; as captain of the sloop Katy, fitted out by the Rhode Island Congress for the protection of the colony’s merchantmen, he captured the Rose’s tender after a brief but furious exchange of cannon fire.49
Congress was still in summer recess when Wallace, “in One of his mad Fits,” as Rhode Island officials put it in a letter to Hopkins, “drew up all three of the Men of War before the town of Newport and swore with the most bitter imprecations that he would burn it.” That was more than enough for the Rhode Island Assembly. Exasperated by Congress’s lack of leadership, they passed a resolution declaring “that the building and equipping of an American fleet” was necessary for “the preservation of the lives, liberty and property of the good people of these Colonies.” They sent Hopkins and their other representatives a directive: use any and
every political measure in getting a national fleet to sea, and get Congress to pay for it. Once Hopkins made their resolution known, John Adams went to work to make sure their wishes—and those of their fellow New Englanders—would become a reality.50
Adams, Hopkins, and the rest of the New England delegates faced opposition from members of every other colony from New York to South Carolina, especially the peace-loving Quakers and rebellious southerners who shared the viewpoint that a national navy was the latest in a series of actions designed not only to defend New England but to increase that region’s influence. Southern congressmen, with the exception of South Carolina’s Christopher Gadsden and Joseph Hewes of North Carolina, were adamant in their opposition. They were led by Samuel Chase.
Adams and Hopkins did not make a frontal assault on behalf of their cause. They spent September letting events play out. Upon their return to Philadelphia, the representatives were invited to inspect the row galleys being built at shipyards along the waterfront. When completed, twenty oars and two lateen sails propelled each of them across the water. Every galley carried a large cannon at the bow. The Pennsylvania Committee of Safety had appointed engineer Louis Nicola to come up with a plan to defend the Delaware, and he saw the galleys as an integral part in his strategy to repel what he called “an Insult by water” by British warships. The galleys made a favorable impression on Congress in general and Adams in particular.51
From Boston, Washington’s dispatches arrived on a regular basis. The general interspersed his pleas for powder and arms with news of the comings and goings of enemy ships, along with reports of the Hannah and the other “rented” ships serving as his army’s navy. In September he had issued a permit to Rhode Island merchants to sail “at their own Risque” for the West Indies and buy “what gunpowder they could find.”52
By the fall, Graves and his captains were no longer restricting their punitive actions to New England. Word soon reached Congress that, after the New York Provincial Congress ordered cannons removed from a New York City port battery for use by rebel forces, musket fire was exchanged between colonists and the ship-of-the-line Asia, moored in New York harbor. Her captain, Captain George Vandeput, directed a three-hour bombardment against the battery and the surrounding homes. Afterwards, Vandeput informed the city’s mayor that, if New Yorkers persisted in further rebellious acts, “the Mischiefs that may arise must lie at their Doors, and not mine.”53
Several southern royal governors, fearing for their safety and that of their families, fled their palatial homes for the confined creature comforts and maximum security found aboard British warships. First and foremost of these new exiles was John Murray, Lord Dunmore. After hearing the news of Lexington and Concord, the ruddy-faced Virginia governor, bowlegged after years of fox hunting with the local gentry (including Washington), had ordered the removal of gunpowder stores from the Williamsburg arsenal while abolishing Virginia’s House of Burgesses. When a band of patriots led by Patrick Henry seized the powder before Dunmore’s men could do so, Dunmore and family took refuge aboard the HMS Fowey, a twenty-gun frigate. Throughout the summer, he and Captain George Montagu raided Virginia’s coastline, using the ship, her men, and a new force meant to instill fear among white Virginians: armed runaway slaves whom Dunmore called his “Ethiopian Regiment.”54
The Royal Navy’s actions gave Adams the chance to resurrect his cause, and on October 3, he renewed his advocacy for sending Americans to war at sea on October 3. It nearly ended before it began. When Hopkins and Samuel Ward (an old Rhode Island foe of Hopkins until the rebellion) presented Congress with their colony’s proposal it was immediately tabled. But the delay lasted only two days, thanks, in part, to reports given to Congress by Philadelphia’s best-known sea captain.55
Days before, John Barry had returned from London aboard the Black Prince, the finest ship yet built in the colonies. Due to sluggish weather it had been a tedious voyage, save for one twenty-four-hour period when a gale and Barry’s expert seamanship sent the Black Prince flying over 237 miles, the fastest known sailing day in the eighteenth century. Upon his return, Barry presented his boss, Robert Morris, with the latest London newspapers and reports from Morris’s agents: news that “Eight men of war, from forty to fifty guns each, are ordered for the American station” and that five more British regiments were heading to America. Barry also brought word that two other ships bound for Canada were “loaded with Arms and powder” but without armed escort.56
Such tidings did not bring joy, nor tip the balance of votes Adams’s way, but they did reignite debate. Already convinced of the “daring intrepidity of our seamen,” Adams argued that “if they were once let loose upon the ocean they would contribute greatly to the relief of our wants as well to the distress of the enemy.” John Langdon concurred, as did Connecticut’s Silas Deane.
Opposition was, as Adams put it, “very loud and vehement,” but his most vocal critic that day was not Samuel Chase; it was Edward Rutledge. While Adams marveled at how “some of my colleagues appeared greatly alarmed” about even the idea of a navy, Rutledge was carried away with both his argument and himself. “Rutledge never displayed so much eloquence,” Adams acerbically recalled, convinced the twenty-six-year-old had been coached “out-of-doors” by the opposition. Comparing the idea of a navy to “an infant, taking a mad bull by his horns,” Rutledge concluded, “It would ruin the character, and corrupt the morals of our seamen. It would make them selfish, piratical, mercenary, bent wholly on plunder.” In short, an American navy would turn its sailors into their British counterparts—although some thought his descriptions of potential avarice drew comparison to American merchants. Rutledge had succeeded in switching the argument from having a navy to not having a navy.
Rutledge received an answer from his fellow South Carolinian Christopher Gadsden. The bald, hawk-faced old sailor reasoned that if there were no means to defend American ports, they should be closed. “The [British] Navy can stop our Harbours and distress our Trade,” he declared. “Therefore it is impracticable to open our Ports.” The sun was setting outside when Adams and his backers passed a resolution for a three-man committee to prepare a plan for intercepting the Canadian-bound vessels. The three? Adams, Silas Deane, and John Langdon.57
Congress returned to the State House the next morning, reviewing military expenditures, permitting each colony to arrest any citizen “whose going at large may, in their opinion, endanger the safety of the colony, or the liberties of America.” They took action to fortify the Hudson River. They discussed the recommendations of Adams’s committee that Washington use two Massachusetts armed ships, the Machias Liberty and the Unity, to intercept the two British supply ships. Before Congress adjourned for the day, they heard at last from Samuel Chase.
Citing the “hostilities” committed by Lord Dunmore, Chase delivered a sarcastic harangue: “I don’t think the Resolution goes far enough,” he bellowed. “Have the Committee any naval Force?” Calling the resolution “a mere Piece of Paper,” he lobbed question after question at his worthy colleagues like so many mortar shells: “Is there a Power in the Committee to raise and pay for a naval Force? Is it to be done at the Expence of the Continent[?] Have they Ships or Men?” To Chase the answer was clear—a government fights with the forces they have. Congress decided to take up debate on the Rhode Island Resolution the next day.58
The sun was shining on Saturday, October 7, as Adams joined his colleagues inside the State House. There was an air of anticipation among the representatives. Surely this would be the day when Adams would square off against Chase.59
It was not as pleasant in Bristol, Rhode Island, twelve miles southeast of Providence. “Little Wind and Hazy,” James Wallace entered in the Rose’s log. Wallace had brought with him a sizable squadron: four warships, four tenders, two transports, three schooners, and three sloops—sixteen vessels in all, making for Bristol. Later that morning he sent a lieutenant into town, demanding supplies
that included three hundred sheep. The townsfolk refused. Almost biblically, the sky blackened and a soaking rain began to fall.
The lieutenant’s longboat no sooner bumped along the Rose’s hull than the guns were run out from each warship, and Wallace began bombarding the town. For more than an hour cannonballs slammed into homes, shops, stables, even the town church. The Newport Mercury would later report how women and children “in great distress” fled the town to “seek shelter in the adjacent county.” Samuel Chase was right the day before: the Rhode Island Resolution did not go far enough—especially, on this day, for Rhode Islanders.60
Three hundred miles south, Adams and Chase faced each other from across the assembly chamber. Adams was as steadfast as ever. Days earlier he had interviewed John McPherson, an old privateer captain from the French and Indian War whom Adams considered “well skilled in naval affairs.” He found McPherson “sanguine, confident, positive, that he can torch or burn every Man of War in America.” While the Philadelphia press deemed the old salt “eccentric,” Adams saw him as a visionary whose confidence fed the fire in the congressman’s belly for his cause.61
But once again, it was Chase who carried the day. “It is the maddest Idea in the World,” he shouted, “to think of building an American fleet.” He did not relinquish the floor until he was certain he had decimated the opposition. To build a navy, the derisive Chase concluded, “We should mortgage the whole Continent.”
It was the long-nosed Silas Deane, not Adams, who took on Chase’s argument. “I wish [a navy] may be seriously debated. I don’t think it romantic at all.” Hopkins, seeing that Chase’s opinion still held sway, had no objections to another delay. Further debate was scheduled for October 16.62
