IV
“I have got you, you Christian dogs, you shall eat stones. ”
—Algiers Dey Hassan Pasha, greeting American captives in 1793
At the dawn of the new constitutional government, Adams and Jefferson returned to a changed United States. The Constitution’s ratification in 1788 promised better things for the United States, which had limped through the post-Revolution years under the anemic Confederation government with an empty treasury, no military force, and no taxation authority. All of that would change quickly. While neither Jefferson nor Adams was directly involved in drafting the new republic’s framework—Hamilton and Madison were the unlikely collaborators who had seen to that—the government required the services of the two founders, and they sailed home across the Atlantic, Adams to become vice president and Jefferson to be secretary of state.
Nearly four million people lived in the United States in 1790. The most populous region lay south of the Potomac River, with 1.8 million inhabitants, inflated by hundreds of thousands of slaves; one slave equaled three-fifths of a white man under the census’s bizarre calculus. One million people lived in New England, and 958,000 in the Middle Atlantic region.
The economic depression had ended, yet the economy remained flat. The new constitutional government had recently begun taxing distilled liquor and imports, but the taxes so far had produced only a trickle of revenue for the threadbare national treasury. Revolutionary War debt—$71 million in 1791, after all state and federal obligations were tallied—still hung over the government. Trade continued to lag behind pre-Revolution levels: U.S. exports totaled just $20.2 million in 1791, and imports $23 million. Wheat and corn were the top exports. Cotton, which would make the Southern planters rich in fifty years, scarcely registered as an export—just 3,135 bales were shipped in 1791.
Mediterranean trade in 1790 was no better than during the abysmal 1780s, when the United States had neither money nor a navy to forge diplomatic relations with Algiers, Tripoli, or Tunis. The sixteen surviving Maria and Dauphin crewmen—five had died from disease and mistreatment—were no nearer liberation from Algiers’s dungeons, with negotiations stalled since Lamb’s failed 1786 mission.
With Portugal at war with Algiers, U.S. shipping in the Atlantic was safe for the moment; Portuguese cruisers at Gibraltar barred Algerian corsairs from the Atlantic. But everyone knew that an Algiers-Portugal treaty would reopen the shipping lanes to Algerian depredations, imperiling America’s nascent Atlantic trade. The dismal Mediterranean situation inspired no bold government initiatives, or brainstorms by the emerging generation of leaders, wholly absorbed with the business of launching the fledgling constitutional republic. Jefferson, however, was returning to America with an advanced international perspective from his five years in Europe, steadfast in his conviction that war was the only means to achieve a lasting, honorable peace with the Barbary States.
Jefferson never coveted Jay’s foreign secretary position, or any job in George Washington’s administration. He had sailed from France intending to settle his daughters in Virginia and then to return to France as minister, or, preferably, to retire from public life to his diverse, absorbing interests. At forty-six, he had spent half his life in public service and now craved the quiet of his farm and experimenting with crop rotation and hybrids; building, tearing down, and rebuilding Monticello, his lifelong passion; indulging his fascination with gadgets and tinkering; and adding to his massive library, which later, when he became strapped for cash, he would sell to the government. (It became the basis for the Library of Congress.) But Washington and Madison cajoled him into coming to Philadelphia to serve in Washington’s Cabinet as secretary of state. After swallowing his disappointment, Jefferson attended to family matters in Virginia and then headed north to the capital city. At the very least, he would have a bully pulpit for urging action against the Barbary States. He used it for this purpose just weeks after joining the new administration.
The occasion was his December 30, 1790, message to Congress, in which he coolly analyzed the Mediterranean situation and the possible responses to Algiers’s demand for $59,496 ransom for the Maria and Dauphin captives, who by then had been held for five years.
Besides being at war with the United States, Algiers also was in the midst of hostilities with Russia, Austria, Portugal, Naples, Sardinia, Genoa, and Malta, and was temporarily at peace with France, Spain, England, Venice, Holland, Sweden, and Denmark. None had bought peace cheaply, Jefferson pointed out carefully. Spain’s peace had cost a staggering $3 million to $5 million, plus $100,000 annual tribute; the ghosts of the exiled Moriscos must have shouted for joy. The treaties signed by the Dutch, Danes, Swedes, and Venetians committed each to yearly payments of $24,000 to $30,000, while Britain’s “presents” to the Barbary rulers ran to $280,000 a year. It went without saying that those sums were beyond the cash-poor United States’s resources.
He laid out the alternatives in the Mediterranean. For liberating the captives under the current circumstances, they boiled down to ransom or a prisoner exchange, but he added discouragingly that the Algerians often were loath to trade even one Christian for five or six Moors. The long-range policy options were more intriguing. The United States could risk trade in the Mediterranean without treaties and simply ransom future captives. It could buy peace through treaties and tribute. “For this, we have the example of rich and powerful nations, in this instance counting their interest more than their honor,” he said scornfully.
He then dangled a third option, obviously his preference: “to repel force by force.” He warned that once Portugal made peace with Algiers, the corsairs bottled up in the Mediterranean for five years would come after American Atlantic shipping. What would the United States do then, without a navy? A stable Mediterranean trade depended on America’s beginning a navy, he said, estimating its initial cost at $400,000 and an annual expense of $125,000 to maintain it. Congress listened to Jefferson’s message with little enthusiasm, although a Senate resolution was drafted to establish a navy when finances permitted. But the resolution died in committee.
Jefferson wracked his brain for creative ways to strike back at Barbary without going deeper into debt and came up with a scheme that would pay for itself while applying pressure on Algiers. His “Proposal to Use Force against the Barbary States” called for three frigates to be deployed against Algerian ships in the western Mediterranean. They also would capture Turkish and Greek vessels in the Levant, answering seizures with seizures. The Moslem captives would be sold in the slave mart in Malta, just as Christian captives were sold in Algiers—an interesting proposition from a man who favored eventual emancipation of all U.S. slaves (but not in his lifetime) and a ban on importing new slaves. The losses would impel the Ottoman sultan to pressure Algiers to make peace with the United States and release the hostages, Jefferson expostulated. The retaliatory attacks would command the Moslems’ grudging respect and enable Americans to obtain a treaty without presents or tribute, while recovering the captives and their ships, and earning the regard of the other Barbary States. Jefferson warned that Congress must act swiftly before Algiers and Portugal made peace and Algerian corsairs poured into the Atlantic. His unconventional plan evoked no congressional response.
After Washington’s second inauguration in 1793, Jefferson ardently wished to leave government and begin his postponed retreat into private life in Virginia. Washington persuaded him to hang on for six months while he sought a successor, but when fall arrived with no replacement in sight, his longing for a quiet rural retirement won out. Assured that his public life was over, Jefferson departed Philadelphia early in 1794 to immerse himself in the pursuits of a horticulturalist, scholar, inventor, architect, naturalist and philosopher.
A new dey ascended the Algerian throne. Hassan Pasha was the latest in a long line of despots who, nearly as often as they rose to power, were deposed bloodily. Richard O‘Brien, captain of the captured Dauphin, wrote from his seven-year captivity that the timing was ideal for reopening negotiations. American leaders agreed that John Paul Jones, the iconic naval hero of the Revolutionary War, would be an ideal ambassador, commingling diplomacy and the suggestion of force. Jones had spent the previous three years in Russia as Catherine the Great’s admiral, but now was barely scraping by in Paris. He accepted the mission. But before he could embark for Algiers, he died on July 18, 1792. The assignment next was entrusted to Thomas Barclay, who had negotiated the U.S. treaty with Morocco, but he, too, was carried away by illness before reaching Algiers. Finally the commission fell to David Humphreys, the minister to Portugal and Washington’s aide during the war and his early presidency. Humphreys arrived in Algiers in the fall of 1793, just as catastrophe struck.
The British had been making trouble for the United States again. Logie, the London consul in Algiers who supposedly had urged the 1785 depredations that resulted in the loss of the Maria and Dauphin, had secretly persuaded the dey to make peace with Portugal, whom the British coveted as an ally against France. It also didn’t hurt—at least from Britain’s standpoint—that the removal of Portugal’s Gibraltar blockade would severely damage American trade. Logie’s machinations proceeded in such velvet silence that until the very last minute, even the Portuguese were unaware he was negotiating on their behalf Yet when the treaty was presented to them as a fait accompli, costing a shocking $3 million, the Portuguese didn’t blink. They signed it in October 1793, and the Algerian corsairs streamed through the Straits of Gibraltar in search of American loot, lending credence to Richard O‘Brien’s wry observation about the Algerians: “Money is the God of Algiers and Mahomet their prophet.”
News of the treaty rang like a fire bell in the U.S. consulates throughout Spain and Portugal. The consuls flashed word to merchantmen in Spanish and Portuguese ports of the imminent danger. But there was no way to warn ships already at sea that they were sailing into peril.
Its hold filled with flour, the Polly had cast off from Baltimore and sailed down the Chesapeake in September 1793. Passing the Virginia Capes, the brig, out of Newburyport, Maine, entered the Atlantic, bound for Cadiz. The Atlantic crossing was uneventful until October 25, when the Pollywas 100 miles west of Cape St. Vincent, and Captain Samuel Bayley and his eight crewmen spotted a strange vessel. The British ensign fluttering over the stern eased their apprehensions. The English might stop and search the Polly, but not make her a prize—if the stranger really were British, for Algerian corsairs often sailed under false colors. The vessels drew closer, and the ship’s captain and crew could be seen on deck wearing English-style clothing. The Americans relaxed their guard a fatal instant. Then armed men in turbans and robes boiled out onto the main deck. The Polly was caught. Algerian pirates swarmed over Bayley’s ship, rifling clothing, trunks, and cargo holds. In minutes, the Polly’s crewmen were shivering on deck, stripped of their clothing. In their underwear, they were ordered around the deck and up into the chilly rigging to work the canvas.
When the Americans complained about their inconsiderate treatment, they were rudely acquainted with the facts of their new life. The corsair captain, Rais Hudga Mahomet, said they were lucky to have been permitted underwear. “He answered in very abusive words that we might think ourselves well used that they did not take them,” wrote crewman John Foss. “And he would teach us to work naked. And ordered us immediately to our duty.”
Off the coasts of Spain and Portugal in the Atlantic, the corsairs had fallen upon American trading vessels like hungry lions. The reports filtering back to the consuls in Spain and Portugal were all bad. The captive ships included the Hope and Minerva from New York; the Prudent and Minervaof Philadelphia; the George of Rhode Island; the Thomas, a Newburyport vessel like the Polly; the Olive Branch, of Portsmouth, New Hampshire; the Jane of Haverhill, Massachusetts; the Jay of Colchester, Connecticut; the Dispatch of Petersburg, Virginia—counting the Polly,eleven ships with 104 crewmen, making 119 American prisoners of Algiers.
In Algiers’s dungeons, the stunned prisoners encountered the survivors of the Maria and Dauphin and despaired. The fifteen remaining crewmen were rail-thin from their meager diet, broken in body and sometimes spirit, too. “All my hopes are blasted,” wrote Samuel Calder, master of the Joy,“& whether ever I shall get away from this is entirely uncertain, indeed if I may judge by unfortunate Capt. O‘Brien & Stevens who have been nine years here & most of their Crews are already Dead ... we have no reason but to expect more.”
But as the newcomers lost hope, the Maria and Dauphin survivors took heart as they scanned the fresh American faces. With so many of her countrymen in chains, America would surely act now.
Throughout December 1793, reports of the shocking losses, carried by the slow medium of ship and courier, trickled into Philadelphia, a city mourning its dead. Yellow fever had cut down 5,000 of the 30,000 inhabitants of the nation’s capital. The epidemic began in the summer heat; by September, at least 200 people were dying every week. Believing that the fever was spread by contact, Philadelphians stopped shaking hands and walked in the middle of the streets. Businesses closed. “Everyone is getting out of the city who can,” Jefferson wrote on September 11 before leaving for Monticello. The fever had struck down Alexander Hamilton, but he was recovering. President Washington had departed for Mount Vernon, War Secretary Henry Knox for Massachusetts. “When we shall reassemble again may perhaps depend on the course of this malady.” Since antiquity, yellow fever and malaria [Latin for bad air] had been vaguely attributed to heavy, stifling air; consequently, Philadelphia’s sultry summers were thought to be somehow responsible for the 1793 epidemic. It didn’t abate until the November frosts. Doctors valiantly applied their well-meaning but bumbling treatments—bleeding and purging—in trying to save lives, unnecessarily ending some by sapping their patients’ strength. Why such deadly outbreaks began or ended remained mysteries until the great discovery of the lowly mosquito’s essential role more than a hundred years in the future.
When they reached Algiers, the American captives were crawling with lice, flea-beaten and filthy from their confinement in the verminous Algerian ship holds, where many were transferred after their own vessels were seized. They were herded by soldiers through Algiers’s streets to the dey’s palace. It was a demoralizing trek. “As we passed through the streets, our ears were stunned with the shouts, clapping of hands, and other acclamations of joy from the inhabitants, thanking God for their great success, and victories over so many Christian dogs, and unbelievers, which is the appellation they generally give to all christians,” Foss, the Polly crewman, wrote in the remarkable Journal of the Captivity and Sufferings of John Foss, Several Years a Prisoner in Algiers, published in 1798. Hassan Pasha extinguished any lingering hopes of the prisoners receiving humane treatment with his chilling greeting: “I have got you, you Christian dogs, you shall eat stones.”
Hassan’s hard words were prophetic. The captives were organized into slave gangs that blasted and dragged huge rock slabs from the jagged mountains outside the city. Before dawn, their taskmasters rousted them from their miserable sleeping quarters on the damp ground in the city’s prisons and distributed breakfast: a fourounce loaf of black bread with a little vinegar—the thrice-daily ration—and marched them in columns to their soul-murdering workplace in the dusty mountains, each loaded with twenty-fiveto forty-pound ankle chains to make escape impossible.
The prisoners used gunpowder to blast loose crushing stone slabs all week long, rolling them to the base of the mountains, where they collected in a heap. On Fridays, the Islamic day of rest, Moslem overseers indulged in sport at the Christian slaves’ expense, forcing them to lift the slabs weighing twenty tons or more onto sledges, then harnessing the slaves like mules and driving them the two miles to the quay. The “drivers” flogged their crews in a race to reach the quay first with the most stones. It was a game for the Tripolitans, agony for the Americans. “They are continually beating the slaves with their sticks, and goading them with its end, in which is a small spear, not unlike an ox goad.... If any one chance to faint, and fall down with fatigue, they generally beat them until they are able to rise again.” The massive boulders were loaded at the quay onto barges and transported to the harbor mole, where more slaves dumped them as fill. Slaves did all of Algiers’s heavy lifting. “... every article that is transported from one part of the Marine to another, or from the Marine to the city or from the city to the Marine or elsewhere must be carried by slaves, with poles upon their shoulders.”
Of all the taskmasters, one named Sherief was the worst. Foss observed that he “never appeared to be in his element, except when he was cruelly punishing some christian captive.” To the Americans’ delight, cosmic justice was meted out to Sherief one day in April 1795. Sherief had taken twenty slaves to a city wall to remove a pile of boards, “and having beat several unmercifully without provocation; an American exclaimed in the English Language, which the Turk did not understand, ‘God grant you may die, the first time you offer to abuse another man.”’ With Sherief, that time wasn’t long coming. Only a few minutes later, he swung his stick at a slave who hadn’t moved fast enough. His intended blow was off the mark, and he was thrown off-balance. With satisfaction, Foss described what happened next. “His stick gave him such a sudden jerk, that he fell from the planks, between the planks, and was dashed to pieces.”
The Americans’ inhuman labors might have earned them their daily twelve ounces of bread, but not shelter for the night. They had to pay for that. If they didn’t, they had to sleep on the ground in the bagnio’s open courtyard, which was enclosed by the squalid, tiered rooms where the paying prisoners were allowed to sleep on the floor. Slaves caught sleeping indoors without paying were chained to a pillar every night until they did.
The Americans especially dreaded the end of Ramadan, a time of feasting for the Moslems—and near-starvation for the captives. During the monthlong Ramadan fast, the Moslems eschewed eating, smoking, or drinking between sunup and sundown. When it ended, they celebrated with two days of feasting. The captives were required to give their taskmasters presents and then were locked in the bagnio while the Moslems ate and drank. To underscore their lowly status as despised Christians, the slaves’ meager daily ration was slashed from three tiny loaves to one.
The Algerians’ “tenderest mercies toward Christian captives,” Foss wrote, “are the most extreme cruelties; and who are taught by the Religion of Mahomet (if that can be called a Religion which leads men to the commission of such horrid and bloody deeds) to persecute all its opposers.” While terrible indeed were Barbary’s capital punishments, the base currency of discipline was the bastinado, painful but nonlethal. The prisoner’s hands were tied behind him, and he was laid on his stomach. Loops attached to long poles were wrapped around his feet, which then were drawn up by the poles. When all was in readiness, the prisoner was beaten on the soles of his feet and his buttocks with inch-diameter poles, the number of lashes ranging from a dozen or two for mild or imagined infractions into the hundreds for serious offenses. Fourteen slaves caught attempting to escape from Algiers late in 1793 were each administered five hundred bastinados and loaded with fifty pounds of chain, attached to a seventy-pound weight. Bowed beneath their crushing burden, they ate, slept, and toiled in the quarry with the seventy pounds balanced on their shoulders. The breakout leader was beheaded, an arguably more humane punishment, and more merciful than the Moslems’ array of other capital punishments reserved for Christians— impalement, burning, or being flung onto the sharp hooks projecting from the city walls, to die in agony over days.
Moslems who committed capital crimes were usually strangled at a wall reserved for this purpose. They sat on the ground between two holes a neck-width apart. Rope was fed through one hole, around the victim’s neck, and out the other hole. The executioner, seated on the other side of the wall, twisted the knotted rope ends around a stick until the victim died.
The massive Algerian raid prompted Congress for the first time to seriously consider establishing a navy, but the issue, as many like it in the future, divided representatives along geographical lines. Rural Southern Republicans opposed any foreign entanglements or standing military force, while Northern Federalists believed a navy was indispensable to a vigorous foreign trade. After lurking behind a dozen debates for a decade without breaking cover, the subject finally was out in the open in 1794. For the first time, nothing prevented Congress from acting. Tariff and whiskey tax revenues were streaming into the U.S. Treasury, and there was money for a navy if Congress elected to build one.
One measure above all was responsible for the improved revenue situation: the Merchant Marine Act of July 4, 1789, the so-called “second Declaration of Independence.” Its 10 percent tariff differential favoring goods carried by American ships caused merchant tonnage to soar from 123,893 in 1789 to 529,471 in 1795. In 1789 only 17 percent of imports and 30 percent of exports were carried in U.S. ships; by 1795, U.S. ships carried 92 percent of imports and 88 percent of exports. Consequently, shipyards were booming up and down the East Coast. While U.S. ports were enjoying their first postcolonial boom, Eli Whitney was patenting the cotton gin, which soon would enable the South also to join in the prosperity.
Unlike Pearl Harbor in 1941 or the World Trade Center and Pentagon terror attacks sixty years later, Algiers’s brazen piracy didn’t cause the Republicans and Federalists to paper over their ideological differences. The Senate was 17—13 Federalist-controlled; the House, where the issue would be decided, was 57—48 Republican. As a result, even the question of naming a nine-man committee to make recommendations about a naval force resulted in a close House vote: 46—44 to proceed.
The navy debate began on Friday, February 7, 1794, when the committee chairman, Thomas Fitzsimons of Pennsylvania, read a resolution recommending a six-frigate naval force. The debate lasted a month, with James Madison, the Republicans’ point man and Jefferson’s closest confidant, leading the navy opponents, who were Southerners for the most part. Notably absent was Jefferson, who had resigned from Washington’s Cabinet and left Philadelphia a month earlier with all his possessions, bound for Monticello and retirement—but only temporary retirement, as events would prove. His timely departure spared him the discomfort of having to choose between his Republican allies and a cherished project: building a navy.
Six frigates were too few, and yet the timetable for building them was too long to meet the current crisis, Madison argued. He proposed that the money for a navy instead be spent on a treaty with Algiers. He reasoned that the Algiers—Portugal truce likely would be broken before a U.S. navy was afloat, and, if negotiations with Algiers failed, America could use the treaty money to pay Portuguese warships to protect U.S. merchantmen.
Fitzsimons said it was presumptuous of Madison to so casually dismiss his committee’s long and careful study of the issue. Algiers, he said, jeopardized all the recent advances in American trade, even its trade in commodities as prosaic as salt. Two million bushels of salt were imported from Europe each year, and if Algiers’s warships curtailed that commerce, it would cost $1 more per bushel to import it from elsewhere, or $2 million—three times the $660,000 estimated cost of building a frigate navy. The similarly inflated cost of other commodities would ratchet the total severalfold, making a navy seem like a bargain by comparison. Benjamin Goodhue of Massachusetts attempted to knock down Madison’s assertion that six frigates couldn’t stand up to Algiers’s navy; the committee, he said, had studied intelligence reports showing the force was adequate to the purpose. Fisher Ames of Massachusetts made alarmist predictions about what would happen if Congress failed to act. “Our commerce is on the point of being annihilated, and unless an armament is fitted out, we may very soon expect the Algerines on the coast of America.”
The Republicans fell back to their second line of defense, the British question, another fault line between them and the Federalists, who wished to reestablish friendly relations with their former mother country. The Republicans, who with good reason distrusted Britain, favored closer ties with France, although the French Revolution’s excesses were beginning to dampen the enthusiasm of even Francophiles. Britain, said John Nicholas of Virginia, not only had brokered the Algiers—Portugal truce, but had tried to discourage the Portuguese from convoying American merchantmen. Other Republicans warned that Britain would continue secretly to encourage Algiers to prey on American trade to prevent U.S. goods from reaching Britain’s enemy, France. “Algiers was but the instrument, Britain was the cause,” said William Giles of Virginia. Madison asserted that if America built a navy, Britain would urge Algiers to harass U.S. shipping. “In the same way that they give underhand assistance to the Indians, they would give it to the Algerines, rather than hazard an open war.”
British interference was not well documented, argued Congressman William Vans Murray of Maryland, and it would be foolhardy for America to depend on Portugal for protection. “It would create a disgraceful dependence on a foreign power, and weaken the spirit of our marine; whereas, if you fit out frigates, you employ your money in nourishing the roots of your own industry; you encourage your own shipbuilding, lumber and victualing business.” A U.S. squadron could blockade Gibraltar without fear of being confronted by Algiers’s navy, because the corsairs “wanted plunder, not glory; when they discovered they had to get the first by hard fighting, they would listen to peace, accompanied by money.”
The House passed the momentous Act to Provide a Naval Armament, 50—39, with congressmen from the rural South and West opposed and able at the last minute to attach an important amendment. Peace negotiations must be pursued with Algiers while shipbuilding went forward, and if a treaty were signed, construction must cease. President Washington signed the act into law on March 27, 1794. It allocated $688,888.82 for six frigates mounting at least 32 guns each.
War Secretary Henry Knox was a former artillery officer who had learned all that he knew about naval affairs from Plutarch’s Lives. Now suddenly in charge of building a navy from scratch, he picked the brains of shipbuilders, businessmen, ship captains, and congressmen, and a vision of a fleet of “super frigates” began to take shape in his mind. The ships, Knox concluded, “should combine such qualities of strength, durability, swiftness of sailing, and force, as to render them equal, if not superior, to any frigate belonging to any of the European Powers.” Given the job of designing the frigates and seeing them built was the esteemed shipbuilder Joshua Humphreys, who had designed the Continental Navy’s 24-gun frigates at the age of twenty-four. Humphreys, who would become known as “the father of the U.S. Navy,” was to be assisted by thirty-year-old Josiah Fox, who would transform Humphreys’s ideas into blueprints that would guide the shipwrights in their work. Fox, a wealthy Englishman, had been traveling in America scouting timber for his family’s shipyard when his extraordinary talent caught the attention of Knox and Humphreys. He enthusiastically accepted the challenge of helping build a navy from the ground up. Curiously, both Humphreys and Fox were Quakers.
Knox, Humphreys, and Fox were determined to build the best frigates in the world. Since the United States couldn’t afford to match the imposing men-of-war of the first-rate European powers—mammoth two- and three-deck fighting ships with 64 guns or more—they reasoned that it was better to build ships swift enough to get out of their way, yet packing enough firepower to whip anything lesser. With only France possessing frigates in any number among the European powers, the United States could distinguish itself by building frigates unequaled anywhere in speed and firepower. Humphreys rhapsodized to Senator Robert Morris of Pennsylvania that the frigates “in blowing weather would be an overmatch for double-deck ships” and in light weather would be able to evade them. “No ship under sixty-four now afloat, but what must submit to them.”
A decade had passed since the United States could claim to have a navy, but even during the Revolution, its warships were outclassed, outgunned, and outcaptained. They had contributed little to the war’s outcome. Except for John Paul Jones’s stunning victory over the Serapis, and few other wartime exploits, the Continental Navy had performed dismally. It had been launched with two armed merchant ships, two brigs, and a sloop, its crews filled out by press gangs. They sailed under the Grand Union flag, a knockoff of the British flag, until Congress adopted the Stars and Stripes in June 1777. The cobbled-together fleet and the small frigates Humphreys had designed all were sunk or captured—all but one of the thirty-five—while the British lost only five ships. At Yorktown, it was the French fleet that sealed off Chesapeake Bay. The last Continental warship, the Alliance, had been auctioned for $26,000 on August 5, 1785.
Knox parceled out the frigate—building among six shipyards from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to Norfolk, Virginia—an early pork-barrel project benefiting the coastal states. He overconfidently predicted the frigates would be completed by the end of 1795, underestimating the time needed by years. But the delays and cost overruns were of his own making. First, while spreading the work among six shipyards might have been politically shrewd, it complicated the logistics of bringing together all the materials to make a ship. Then Knox also made the frigates bigger, displacing 300 tons more than the ships Congress had authorized. Finally, he had insisted they be framed in live oak—not the typical white oak—because ships made of tough, durable live oak would last at least half a century instead of the usual dozen years or so. But that meant work crews would have to be sent to the sweltering Georgia Sea Islands to harvest the live oak. Malaria decimated them, and white replacement workers couldn’t be found to brave the intense heat, humidity, fever, snakes, and bugs. Black slaves cut the live oak.
Humphreys and Fox first drew up blueprints for the three 44-gun frigates they intended to build: the Constitution, President, and United States. The other three warships would be smaller, 36-gun frigates: the Constellation, Chesapeake, and Congress. The Constitution , “Old Ironsides,” built at 1,576 tons in Boston—and anchored there today, still a commissioned naval vessel—was built by Colonel George Claghorn, a Revolutionary War veteran, at Edmund Hartt’s Boston shipyard, using Humphreys’s design. Humphreys personally oversaw construction in Philadelphia of the United States, the first completed frigate, in July 1797. Forman Cheesman supervised the building of the President in New York. The Congress was built in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and the Constellation, in Baltimore, by David Stoddert, under the watchful eye of Captain Thomas Truxtun, one of the early Navy’s warriors who would bring the ship credit during the Quasi-War with France in the late 1790s. The unlucky Chesapeake, being built in Norfolk, was destined to be memorably surrendered twice: by Captain James Barron to the HMS Leopard in 1807, and six years later by Captain James Lawrence to the HMS Shannon, despite Lawrence’s dying words to his crew: “Don’t give up the ship.”
The frigate builders looked across the Atlantic for inspiration, to France’s powerful fleet. Not able to afford a navy like England’s, the French, too, had chosen to build large frigates because they were cheaper and faster than the towering, heavily armed ships of the line with their three gundecks. Like the French ships, the American “super frigates” were copper-bottomed and on their two gundecks carried long guns that fired solid shot. Carronades were mounted on the spar deck, for clearing enemy decks with shrapnel. The long guns were standard on warships everywhere. Solid shot’s chief purpose was smashing holes in enemy hulls and killing enemy gunners. A crude measure of cannon caliber was the weight of the shot that it fired; there were 36-pounders, 24-pounders, 18-pounders, 12-pounders, 9-pounders, and 6-pounders. The carronade was relatively new, named for the foundry in Carron, Scotland, that designed it in 1779. It was a light, maneuverable, short-barreled gun that could fire a large round or belch a cloud of wicked projectiles—nails, chain, odd metal bits—that eviscerated anyone in its path, or could shred an enemy’s sails, leaving him dead in the water.
Copper bottoms repelled barnacles, increasing ship speed, and also made it unnecessary to “careen” the vessel—tip it on its side—every six months or so to scrape off barnacles and repair holes bored by toredo worms. The British Royal Navy sheathed all its warship bottoms in copper, starting with a crash program in 1778.
While they were built upon the French model, the frigates’ operations followed the Royal Navy’s worthy example. Americans copied English shipboard organization, discipline, and all manner of daily operations, down to the rum ration. The 44-gun super frigates were crewed by 356 seamen, and the 36-gun ships by 306 sailors. They enlisted for 12 months. Able-bodied seamen were paid $14 a month, and ordinary seamen received $10. While they earned less than merchant seamen, the sailors could share in booty during wartime. The typical American seaman was twenty-two. Often, he was English. Nearly half of the sailors came from the cities—at a time when America was only 5 percent urban. Each day, they stood at least one of the five four-hour watches and two two-hour watches. They spent long hours scrubbing decks and brightwork, whitewashing ceiling planking, repairing rigging, patching small boats, and practicing gunnery.
There were rules for practically everything, and harsh consequences for breaking them. For serious infractions, miscreants were slapped in irons, put on bread-and-water rations—and, mostly, punished with the cat-o‘-nine-tails. Less draconian punishments were meted out for lighter offenses. Quitting watch before relief arrived was punishable by three hours on the “spanker boom” and no rum ration for three days. Jutting over the ship’s stern, the spanker could be a sickeningly rough ride in stormy weather.
David Humphreys and Joel Barlow opened negotiations with Algiers in 1795 as the frigate navy slowly came together. Humphreys and Barlow were former Yale classmates, Revolutionary War veterans, and, strangely enough, poets. Before becoming a diplomat and minister to Portugal, Humphreys had served as George Washington’s secretary during the war and commanded a Connecticut regiment that in 1786 helped suppress Shays’s Rebellion, a rural uprising over Massachusetts taxes. Barlow, who fought alongside Washington at Long Island, was a well-known literary and social figure. A third negotiator, Joseph Donaldson, Jr., worked alongside Barlow under Humphreys’s direction. James Leander Cathcart, a prisoner since the Maria was captured in 1785 and the dey’s secretary, served as mediator and translator.
The dey opened the parley by announcing that a treaty and ransom would cost the United States $2,247,000 cash and two frigates worth roughly $248,000. America could well afford it, the dey said, for hadn’t a Spanish newspaper reported that U.S. exports totaled $28 million a year? Donaldson and Barlow hastened to assure the dey that was a gross exaggeration. Further meetings brought the price down. On December 22, 1794, Algiers and America struck a deal: $642,500 cash—about $10 million in today’s dollars—for the captives’ release; $21,600 worth of powder, shot, oak planking, and masts in annual tribute. The Americans sweetened the agreement by throwing in a 36-gun frigate, which would be called the Crescent. Thirty-four captives had died, but Algiers required ransom for them, too, although their bodies were not shipped home. Barlow borrowed the cash at high interest from Miciah Bacri, the dey’s chief moneylender; Bacri simply drew the money from the national treasury and redeposited it. The eighty-five surviving prisoners shipped out on the unfittingly named Fortune, owned by Bacri.
The Fortune was one of the unluckiest freedom ships that ever sailed. No sooner had it left Algiers and entered the Mediterranean than plague erupted on board. It carried off Samuel Bayley, Foss’s old captain on the Polly, leaving only four of the nine original Polly crewmen alive. The ship was placed in quarantine for eighty days in Marseilles, where the captives marked time until the plague had run its course and they were cleared to go ashore. Embarking again for Leghorn, Italy, the Fortune was stopped and boarded by the British, who robbed the captives of their clothing and money and claimed the ship for a prize. Barlow bitterly complained that the Fortune sailed under an American flag, and England could not simply appropriate U.S. property without cause; the British replied that the ship was Algerian, and they could do as they pleased. On top of everything else, Barlow later had to pay Bacri $40,000 for his ship.
Foss and some of the other captives transferred to another ship embarking for America that was even more ill-starred than the Fortune. A Spanish privateer captured her. After she was cleared in Barcelona, she was captured by a French privateer and released, seized by the British, and then by Spanish privateers again. Another Spanish privateer boarded her and stole all the provisions and clothing. After being captured and released once more by the British, the cursed ship finally reached America.
The Algerian treaty encouraged American diplomats to open negotiations with the other Barbary States. Hassan, momentarily pleased with the ransom and tribute he had gotten, helpfully supplied the American negotiators with supporting letters and cash advances. Moroccan Emperor Maulay Sulaiman, Sidi Muhammed’s successor, quickly reratified the 1786 treaty after accepting a $20,000 gift. Tunis’s treaty, signed in August 1797 for $107,000, contained no annual tribute, but required periodic gifts. Tripoli signed in January 1797 for $56,486 and no annual tribute. This agreement would begin to act on Bashaw Yusuf Karamanli like a sharp pebble in a shoe when he learned what Algiers and Tunis had gotten.
The diplomats shuttled back to Algiers, which was threatening war again because the promised naval stores were long overdue. Envoys placated the dey by announcing the United States would give him another 36-gun frigate. He was so happy that he placed orders for two more new American ships, promising cash on delivery. Peace might be at hand, but the United States had just spent nearly $1 million to secure it.
And it was just the beginning.