Give Me a Fast Ship

by Tim McGrath

  Many a sailor suffered through the harsh winter of 1783–84. For eight years toasts were raised to their bravery, and naval captains could not find enough of them. Now gaunt and threadbare, they resembled ghostly specters, haunting the waterfront taverns and London Coffeehouse in the rain and snow looking for any berth, even on foreign ships.

  John Barry found their condition unforgivable. He had already gone hat in hand to Morris to get a deathly ill but impoverished sailor financial assistance to go to a hospital, but Morris could do nothing. Now Barry, unpaid himself, took out a $200 loan from the Philadelphia Bank. His sympathetic friend John Brown did the same. Unable to pay the full worth of their shares, they offered the men a lesser amount in cash for the unpaid prize warrants. It was the first generous act the sailors had seen in months, and kept more than one mariner out of debtors’ prison. Barry’s $200 went quickly. Harassed by bill collectors himself, Barry was so hard up when the loan was called in that he asked his old rustling partner, Anthony Wayne, if he could loan him the $200. Wayne did not have any money either.8

  Widows and orphans of naval personnel met with similar responses from Congress. Barry and John Paul Jones both took particular interest in the case of Joanna Young, whose husband, John, was lost with the Saratoga. When she learned that army widows were getting half-pay stipends from Congress, she applied for the same. Congress denied her request; after all, army officers were “subject to arduous duty without a prospect of booty,” while naval officers, “in a less severe service,” were “in a situation of realizing substantial riches”—prize shares—or what naval officers now called back pay. The Widow Young should seek assistance elsewhere.9

  To be fair, Congress had little money and no will to raise more. In 1783, John Adams wrote Morris how he wished he were in Congress to “assist you in persuading our Country men to pay taxes and build ships.” Eventually, the national government got around to some—not all—of navy veterans’ pay. One example is that of the sailors from the Bonhomme Richard, who fought one of the fiercest battles in naval history. After some deliberation, Congress voted to pay them for their services—in 1848. If the soldiers and sailors of the American Revolution set the bar for devotion to duty and sacrifice for succeeding generations of Americans, so, too, did Congress—and the public—set the example of “support the troops”—as long as no taxes were required for the best weapons, decent wages, or the care of their widows and orphans.10

  Some historians believe the Continental Navy was not worth the cost in money and lives for the results achieved, arguing that American privateers captured and destroyed far more British vessels than the navy did. But others disagree; the navy’s fifty-seven ships captured much more than their share of enemy vessels, providing sorely needed revenue for Congress and arms and supplies desperately required for Washington’s army.

  The fact is, while John Adams’s delight over the navy’s birth was reduced to the thought of tears by war’s end, the Continental Navy did succeed. Victories from Nova Scotia to the West Indies, coupled with the raids along the British Isles, boosted patriot morale, forced the Royal Navy to cruise and fight on two hemispheres, sent British insurance rates soaring, spread terror to sea towns throughout King George’s realm, and fueled antiwar sentiment in Parliament and the British press. Their successes went a long way towards bringing France into the war.11

  From Hopkins’s fleet at the beginning to the lone frigate Alliance at the end, the roll call of Continental veterans—Jones, Barry, Biddle, Wickes, Conyngham, Rathbun, Parke, Trevett, Kessler, Fanning, Gardner, Jordan, and Brussels among them—set the bar for the United States Navy, born in 1794. As historian Gregory J. Urwin eloquently noted, these men—and their shipmates—left their new country a legacy of heroism. The enemy bloodied them and the sea took many of them, but the survivors, many wounded and worn down from their travails, returned from the sea to a home their sacrifices helped create. If, as some have written, the Civil War is America’s Iliad, could the Continental Navy’s saga be our Odyssey?

  In 1787, John Paul Jones finally got his wish: the title of rear admiral. Thomas Jefferson, America’s ambassador to France, helped him attain it.

  The fact that it was with the Russian Navy was fine with both Jones and Congress. After four years of trips to Europe and back, hunting down the prize money for himself and his men from the Bonhomme Richard, Jones learned that Catherine, Tsarina of Russia, wanted to enlist his services. He would be given a fleet, and sent to fight the Turks in the Black Sea. Congress, which had awarded Jones with a gold medal, saw this as an opportunity for its best-known captain to master an admiral’s responsibilities and battle tactics, and it would not cost a thing.

  Jones arrived in Russia older than his forty years. His health was poor and he had not been to sea since commanding the Ariel. But after serving admirably in the Russian Navy, he fell victim to the intrigues of Catherine’s court and was accused of raping a young girl. An inquiry found the youngster’s story flimsy, and Jones did not stand trial.

  It was a broken man who returned to western Europe. News of the scandal had beaten him there, and he found himself explaining the “dark Asiatic intrigue” to anyone who would listen to him. The writer Thomas Carlyle, seeing him in his old uniform, called him “the ghost of himself.” America’s new minister to France, Gouverneur Morris, was bored by the sight of him. Jones ached for another chance at fame, but no one would give it to him. He had pleaded with Jefferson, now secretary of state, to let him represent America to the Dey of Algiers in an effort to free those sailors captured by the Barbary pirates, but he received no answer.

  On July 18, 1792, Gouverneur Morris received a “Message from Paul Jones that he is dying. I go thither and make his will.” Morris found him alert but a ghastly color—Jones had jaundice. Later that evening Morris returned and found Jones dead, his body kneeling at his bedside. Days later, the dispatch he had been waiting for came from President Washington, asking Jones to lead a delegation to Algiers. Instead, his corpse was pickled in alcohol, sealed in a lead-lined coffin, and buried in a grave on the outskirts of Paris.12

  John Barry spent the four years after the war trying procure payment for his men and himself. As captain of the Alliance, he was kept on Congress’s payroll until the ship was sold. He and the Austins eventually reclaimed the family estate, and Barry bought his own, a plantation called Strawberry Hill, north of Philadelphia on the Delaware. From there he could look down on Petty’s Island and watch the sad deterioration of the Alliance.

  In 1787 he was given command of the merchantman Asia, and sailed her to China—but not before coming up with a solution to get the Constitution passed. After the Constitutional Convention that September, the Pennsylvania Assembly began debating its merits. When anti-Federalists did not show up for a vote to pass it, Barry led a crowd of sailors and wharf toughs to their boardinghouse, shanghaied the two who were still there, and brought them back—guaranteeing a quorum and a vote. Benjamin Franklin, the president of the state’s Supreme Executive Council, wanted to see the Constitution passed, but could not resist ordering Barry’s old friend, Charles Biddle, now Pennsylvania Attorney General, to arrest the captain for manhandling state representatives. Biddle executed the order—while Barry was sailing to China.13

  Barry “swallowed the anchor” after his return, but was called back to duty in 1794 when Congress created the United States Navy. President Washington gave him the first captain’s commission. Now in his fifties and plagued by gout and asthma, Barry served honorably during the Quasi-War with France, wearing John Paul Jones’s gold-hilted sword.

  But while he captured a slew of prizes, he was openly derided as “old and infirm” by Benjamin Stoddert, the first secretary of the navy. Yet Barry made his flagship, the frigate United States, a floating naval academy, turning out officers who later distinguished themselves in the Barbary Wars and the War of 1812, including Stephen Decatur, Richard Somers, and Charles Stew
art. He and Sarah never had children but raised two of his nephews as their own sons. Barry succumbed to asthma in 1803.14

  The second captain of the new United States Navy was a Nicholson—Sam, not James. He had been honorably acquitted in his court-martial in 1783, and returned to his career as a merchant captain. Placed at number 2 on the new Captains List, he was the first commander of the frigate to be built in Boston, the Constitution. Throughout the challenges of getting her built, Nicholson drove Barry crazy with his correspondence, mostly dealing with the new uniforms.

  Nicholson also had more misadventures than triumphs once he got the Constitution to sea. After seizing a British ship that had been captured by the French, he determined she was not a prize (she was) and released the French crew as well. He was also a victim of true tragedy, losing his son on another voyage. Relieved of command, he was made superintendent of the Charlestown Navy Yard. He died in 1811.15

  His brother James had been in the ground seven years when Sam died. James Nicholson spent the last year of the war on a series of errands for Robert Morris, still angling for command of the Bourbon. After the war he settled in New York City and became a staunch Jeffersonian. He died in 1804.16

  After the surrender of Charleston, Samuel Tucker turned to privateering, commanding the Thorn. He was captured in 1781 after an engagement with HMS Hind along the St. Lawrence River, and taken to Prince Edward Island as a prisoner. He escaped later that year, and wrote to the lieutenant governor, Andrew Snape Hamond, apologizing for breaking his word not to escape (Hamond’s reply pretty much said “Think nothing of it”). After the war, he took up farming in the Territory of Maine. During the War of 1812, Tucker commanded a schooner, the Increase, and captured the Halifax privateer Crown in 1813, at the age of sixty-six. He died twenty years later.17

  Unable to be paroled for a British officer of similar rank, Abraham Whipple also turned to farming. He served in the Rhode Island legislature, but soon his debts outpaced his worth, and he was forced to beg Congress for the money owed him just to keep his farm. “I have never been recompensed,” he wrote in his memorial. Whipple moved to a small farm in Ohio, where he died in 1819.18

  While a court-martial cleared Sam Nicholson of the charges made by the Deane/Hague’s officers, John Manley was found guilty in his, and forfeited his commission. It was an ignominious end for one of the earliest heroes in the war. He died in 1793.19

  The Revolution was over, but Richard Dale’s career was just beginning. After making voyages to China, Dale also became a captain in the new navy. By then he had married a cousin of Sarah Barry’s and settled in Philadelphia. He took a squadron to the Mediterranean to battle the Barbary pirates. When he resigned, he went into the insurance business, becoming director of the Insurance Company of North America. He died in 1826. Among his possessions was Jones’s sword, bequeathed to him by John Barry.

  Silas Talbot was exchanged in 1781. After leaving Mill Prison he made his way to France and from there, back to America, only to learn that his wife had died. After a stint in the New York Assembly he was elected to Congress. His political future looked bright, but when Congress approved the building of six frigates for the new navy, the call of the sea became too hard to ignore. Old comrades like Hoysted Hacker asked him to help them attain a captain’s commission, but Talbot was too busy getting his own. His was the third name on the new list. Talbot succeeded Nicholson as captain of the Constitution and commanded her through the end of the Quasi-War. His fellow captain, Thomas Truxton, considered him “a mere privateersman,” but Talbot need not take a backseat to anyone in the service of his country. From Long Island to Fort Mifflin, from the Argo to the Constitution, Talbot did more than his share. He died in 1813 and is buried in Trinity churchyard in New York City.20

  Inadvertently, Talbot kept Joshua Barney out of the United States Navy. Offered the fourth commission, Barney turned it down, believing that being ranked beneath Talbot (whose Continental commission came years after Barney’s) was an insult. Instead, he accepted a captaincy in the French navy. When the Quasi-War broke out, he returned to America after resigning command of the French frigate l’Insurgente, which was later captured in the biggest engagement of the conflict by Thomas Truxton and the Constellation.21

  For all Barney’s heroics during the Revolution, it was his service during the War of 1812 that he is best remembered for. He captured dozens of prizes as a privateer before accepting a captain’s commission in the navy, and led a flotilla of gunboats and barges in a stubborn defense against a much larger British fleet on the Patuxent. Then he took his sailors and marines to defend the city of Washington at the Battle of Bladensburg, where he was wounded and captured by the British yet again, nearly forty years after his first stints as a prisoner. He died in Pittsburgh in 1818.22

  After being removed from the Continental Navy, Pierre Landais moved to New York City, where he badgered Robert Morris and Congress for money. Ironically, it was John Paul Jones who interceded on Landais’s behalf, in one last effort to make peace. No matter: in 1787, Jones was walking down a New York street when Landais saw him from behind. “I spit in your face!” he cried, once again challenging Jones to a duel. Jones demurred, later attesting that he was neither spat on nor challenged. Landais died at eighty-seven, and lies in the cemetery of St. Patrick’s Cathedral.23

  In 1797, newly elected president John Adams had been feted on a visit to Providence, Rhode Island, when he had one last visitor to his guestroom, “an old man bowed with infirmities.” Moving stiffly with a cane, he shuffled into the room. It was Esek Hopkins.24 The old commodore had come not just to pay his respects, but to thank the president for being his champion and friend when no one else thought or cared to do so. The seventy-nine-year-old Hopkins was truly, at the time, his country’s ancient mariner—but because of his failures, he was their forgotten one as well. He was sixty when he was dismissed from the navy, and he never went to sea again. He died, practically unknown, in 1802, but will likely remain the only man given the title “Commander-in-Chief” of an American navy.25

  After the Ariel, Nathaniel Fanning obtained a lieutenant’s commission in the French navy and served on three privateers, making a host of captures and being captured two more times himself. Taken prisoner while commanding the privateer Ranger in late 1782, he was mistaken for being Irish by the captain, clapped in irons by a “one-eyed, surly” lieutenant (who had served under James Wallace aboard the Rose), and given a “half pound of wormy bread and one pint of water.” Luckily for Fanning, he convinced the captain he was an American: the man had hung two of Fanning’s Irish sailors earlier, calling them traitors to King George. Fanning was rescued by a French ship-of-the-line. Years later, Fanning joined the new United States Navy as a lieutenant. He died of yellow fever in 1805 while commanding a gunboat.26

  Believing his taste for adventure satisfied, John Kessler ran a Boston grocery store and worked as a tax collector until a new career called him. He became a fur trader in Maine before returning to Philadelphia with his family, where he served as a constable. He retired in 1816 on a pension for injuries received while serving aboard the frigate Alliance, and died in 1840.27

  On April 8, 1783, Captain John Bazeley of the Amphion came aboard the prison ship Jersey, where he read the king’s proclamation ending hostilities. It took days to get the imprisoned sailors—many unable to walk and others dying—off the hulk. The Jersey was left to rot in the river. For the next hundred years, human bones washed up on the shores of Wallabout Bay. In 1873, the bones were buried with full military honors in a crypt at what is now Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn. The Prison Ship Martyrs Monument honors their sacrifice.28

  Bazeley did not find young James Forten among the Jersey’s prisoners. He had been exchanged months earlier, and made it back to Philadelphia, to the great surprise of his mother, who had heard he was killed in battle. Apprenticed to a sailmaker, he later bought the business and patented a machine that re
volutionized sail making. Forten became one of the richest men in Philadelphia. He was a staunch figure in the early-nineteenth-century abolitionist movement, living long enough to write articles for William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator. When he died in 1841 his funeral was attended by thousands of Philadelphians. One newspaper heralded Forten as “earnest of his hatred of Slavery and love of liberty.”29

  Elizabeth Baker was not yet nineteen years old when her betrothed, Nicholas Biddle, was killed in 1778. It would be another nineteen years before she wed, her husband a Charleston gentleman named Isaac Holmes. Their marriage was childless. Elizabeth was only forty-eight years old when she died on Christmas Day, 1807.30

  After being awarded a pension by Congress in 1783, Joseph Brussels, now a teenager, was taken under the wing of Henry Fisher, the head of the Delaware pilots. Fisher taught the boy about the Delaware River and Bay with knowledge that only a pilot could have. Brussels became a respected pilot, and married a friend of Fisher’s daughter. He and his wife had a little girl. Life was good.

  His wife died young, and Brussels turned his daughter over to the Fishers while he reenlisted in the navy. Brussels went to the Mediterranean under Commodore Richard Dale—his old lieutenant from the Bonhomme Richard. When the squadron was off the west coast of Italy, Dale gave Brussels shore leave. At that time Brussels had not seen his family in more than twenty years. There was an epidemic of fever in the city. Brussels caught it and died; his brothers buried him with his parents.

  Years later, Fisher’s daughter, Sarah Rodney, wrote to Brussels’s daughter, telling her about her father’s remarkable life, especially about his voyage aboard the Bonhomme Richard, and the “memorable Victory that will gild the Names of Paul Jones and R. Dale with their gallant crew as long as the pages of the Revolution will be read by unborn millions.”31