by Michael A. Palmer
The North American colonies of Great Britain
developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as parts of a powerful
European maritime empire. Americans provided the mother country with
a variety of export goods, among them naval stores, and
even constructed ships. American sailors, some by choice, some as the
result of the efforts of British press gangs, served in the
men-of-war of the Royal Navy. Continental navy Captain Nicholas Biddle,
for example, served as a youth in the Royal Navy
alongside Horatio Nelson.
During the colonial wars of Great Britain with
France and Spain, Americans took part not only in the campaigns fought
in
the west along the frontier but also in the North Atlantic and Caribbean.
Americans, among them Lawrence Washington, the elder
half-brother of George Washington, served in Admiral Edward Vernon's
abortive Central American expedition (1739-1741). In
1745 New England sailors and troops landed on Cape Breton Island and
besieged and captured the French fortress of Louisburg,
which guarded the approaches to the Saint Lawrence River. American
merchants armed scores of ships as privateers and
operated them against the commerce of Great Britain's enemies.
Thus, in 1775, Americans were no strangers
to the ways of the sea, either in peace or in war. In the years immediately
before the outbreak of the rebellion, Americans demonstrated their
growing disenchantment with British rule by taking action
against ships collecting revenue or delivering tea in Boston Harbor.
Once the revolution began, Americans recognized that events
in the Atlantic Ocean theater would have a major, and potentially decisive,
impact on the course of the war in North America. In
the fall of 1775, Americans initiated a privateering campaign against
British commerce, and on 13 October the Continental
Congress, after some difficult political debate, also established a
small naval force, hoping that even a diminutive navy would be
able to offset to some extent what would otherwise be an uncontested
exercise of British sea power.
The Continental Congress had a very limited
role in mind for the navy. It was not expected to contest British control
of the
seas, but rather to wage a traditional guerre de course against British
trade, in conjunction with the scores of privateers outfitting
in American ports. The Continental navy's ships were to raid commerce
and attack the transports that supplied British forces in
North America. To carry out this mission, the Continental Congress
began to build up, through purchase, conversion, and new
construction, a cruiser navy of small ships--frigates, brigs, sloops,
and schooners. For the most part, Continental navy ships cruised
independently or in pairs in search of their prey, avoiding whenever
possible fights with Royal Navy men-of-war.
The record of the Continental navy was mixed
during the revolutionary war. Its cruisers ranged far and wide and
demonstrated that British commerce was nowhere safe, not even in British
home waters. Few of the navy's larger ships ever put
to sea, however, because most of the frigates Congress authorized to
be built were either destroyed by British forces or burned by
the Americans to prevent capture. There were occasional triumphs in
single-ship engagements--for example, the capture by
Captain John Paul Jones's Ranger of the British sloop of war Drake
in April 1778. Jones gained international notoriety for his
operations against the British in the North Sea and raided the coast
of Great Britain itself. The navy was somewhat less
successful in small-squadron actions. Its successes included the 1776
amphibious raid against New Providence in the Bahamas,
but there were even more failures, most notably the ill-fated Penobscot
expedition of 1779. While the Continental navy had its
share of tactical triumphs, not once did its efforts cause the British
an operational or strategic check.
Many of the failures of the Continental navy
were directly attributable to the uneven and uncertain quality of the highly
politicized officer corps. Mediocre officers vied for rank and privilege.
Many commanders lacked drive, and others, while perhaps
excellent seamen, were simply incompetent warriors. Even highly successful
officers, such as Jones, labored under marked
character deficiencies. Nevertheless, whatever the shortcomings of
the Continental navy, the course of the war demonstrated to
Americans the importance of sea power. The control of the Atlantic
by the Royal Navy allowed Great Britain to transport a large
army to North America and to sustain it there. French sea power, allied
with the American cause after 1778, enabled General
George Washington to isolate and destroy the British army of Lord Charles
Cornwallis at Yorktown in 1781. One of the decisive
battles of the war, it ended Great Britain's hope of crushing the rebellion.
While sea power clearly had played an extremely
important role in the Revolution, the years immediately following the war
were difficult ones for the Continental navy. Under the Articles of
Confederation, the Congress reserved for itself greater control
over the nation's naval than its land forces, but this had less to
do with a judgment of the importance of sea power than with the
traditional Anglo-American fear of standing armies. The national government
could be trusted with control of less politically
dangerous, and more expensive, naval forces. Two years after the end
of the war, the money-poor Congress sold off the last ship
of the Continental navy, the frigate Alliance.
The failure of Congress to maintain a naval
force was understandable. Navies were, and remain, expensive instruments
of
national power. Moreover, there were virtually no roles or missions
that a small American navy could realistically be expected to
play in the mid-1780s. The primary threats the new republic faced were
to be found along the western frontier. In the Northwest,
the native American tribes and the British, who refused to complete
their withdrawal, challenged U.S. sovereignty and control of
potentially valuable western lands. In the Southwest, the Spanish and
their tribal allies held a lock on the lower Mississippi and
disputed the southern boundary of the United States. Naval power could
do little to change these balances of force.
A navy also could not remove the major impediments
to the complete recovery of U.S. commerce. The problems the
United States faced in its relations with Great Britain, Spain, and
France were rooted in the philosophy of mercantilism and, as
such, were more likely to be settled diplomatically than through the
application of military force. Although a small effective navy
might have been a source of national pride and an international display
of nationhood, most congressmen were understandably less
than eager, given the rather mixed record of the Continental navy,
to embark on an expensive naval program.
Conditions began to change when the question
of a proper response to aggressors became a national issue. In the
Mediterranean, the corsairs of the Barbary states began to prey on
U.S. merchant ships, no longer protected by the Royal Navy.
Ships and cargoes were captured, and U.S. seamen were ransomed or sold
into slavery. Although the number of ships and
seamen actually lost were few, the psychological effect on Americans
was marked. Among the possible responses that the United
States debated were paying the Barbary states to spare U.S. commerce
from attacks and building a small navy to protect trade.
The debate over naval policy was both economic
and philosophical. Many Americans, among them Thomas Jefferson, later
minister to the French court from 1785 to 1789, favored a naval response.
Jefferson wrote in the fall of 1784: "We ought to begin a
naval power, if we mean to carry on our commerce. Can we begin it on
a more honorable occasion, or with a weaker foe?" Other
Americans feared the establishment of a navy, which they viewed as
an instrument that, while less politically dangerous than a
standing army, nevertheless could lead the United States into innumerable
foreign embroilments. Still others, such as John Adams,
took the exceedingly practical position that the American people had
had their fill of war and that a negotiated settlement--that is,
payment for protection-- was the best course to pursue. Moreover, given
the fiscal weakness of the Confederation Congress, the
United States lacked the resources to undertake the establishment of
a navy. In fact, Congress lacked the funds to offer a
negotiated settlement.
While the Barbary depredations did not lead
immediately to the resurrection of U.S. naval power, they did highlight
the
apparent helplessness of the country in the international arena and
helped shape a consensus in the United States for the
establishment of a stronger national government. In Philadelphia in
1787, delegates drew up a constitution, which was adopted in
1789. As part of that debate, the Federalists, the nationalists who
supported the new scheme of government, envisioned a state
powerful enough to maintain a navy capable of protecting U.S. commerce.
Some Federalists went even further. Alexander
Hamilton argued that while the United States could not challenge Europe's
principal maritime powers on the seas, in the event of a
European war pitting France against Great Britain, a small fleet of
American battleships would allow the United States to play the
makeweight in the balance of power in the Western Hemisphere. For Hamilton
and his supporters, a navy could play a broad
national role in pursuit of the interests of the United States, and
not just a limited role protecting the ships and cargoes of U.S.
merchants.
The U.S. Constitution gave the government the
power to play such a role. In language that reflected the Anglo-American
antiarmy tradition, Congress was given the right "to raise and support
armies" but "to provide and maintain" a navy. Nevertheless,
no consensus yet existed to support a large national navy. In fact,
until the mid-1790s, the United States continued as it had under
the Confederation Congress--without any naval force at all. Potential
challenges to U.S. interests were many, but actual threats
addressable by naval forces were few.
The outbreak of war in Europe in 1793 dramatically
altered the equation. For Americans, European war presented the
United States with opportunities. Both the French and the British began
to rely heavily on U.S. shipping and, under the pressures
of war, began to relax many mercantile commercial restrictions that
had hindered the recovery of U.S. commerce. U.S. trade and
the shipping industry expanded accordingly. Along with these opportunities,
however, came great hazards. As more and more U.S.
ships took to the seas, the possibility increased of depredations against
them by the European powers. The British, for example,
were more than happy to see U.S. ships plying the sea-lanes in service
of the interests of Great Britain, but did not look kindly on
Yankee vessels trading with France or its colonies.
The initial challenge to the rapid expansion
of U.S. commerce, however, came not from London or Paris but from the
corsairs of the Barbary coast. In the 1790s the Algerians again began
to prey on U.S. commerce in the Mediterranean. Once
again, Congress debated whether the nation ought to buy protection
or establish a navy to safeguard shipping. In March 1794
Congress decided to respond with force and passed a naval act that
called for the construction of a half-dozen frigates.
The United States again had a navy. The new
frigates were to be well built and heavily armed, akin to twentieth- century
battle cruisers-fast enough to run from European ships of the lines,
powerful enough to overwhelm any European or Barbary
cruiser in a single-ship duel. Work began on the forty-four-gun frigates
Constitution, United States, and President and the
thirty-six-gun frigates Congress, Constellation, and Chesapeake. Successful
diplomacy, however, cut short the program. The
demonstrated willingness of the United States to respond militarily
helped American diplomats negotiate a more reasonable
financial agreement with Algiers in 1796, and the naval building program
was put on hold, its future uncertain. U.S. diplomats were
likewise able to negotiate successful treaties with Spain and Great
Britain that secured the Northwest and Southwest frontiers and
temporarily ended British harassment of U.S. trade.
In 1797, however, the French, enraged by their
former ally's agreement with Great Britain, retaliated by striking at U.S.
commerce. Hundreds of ships and cargoes were seized worldwide, although
most were taken in the Caribbean. The United States
responded as it had in 1794 to the Algerian depredations, by offering
to negotiate, while work resumed on the frigates already
under construction. Since the bulk of the French navy was blockaded
in its home ports by the Royal Navy, the prospect of a
limited U.S. naval response to depredations primarily in the Caribbean
appeared to be realistic. When the negotiations with the
French collapsed, in what has become known as the XYZ Affair, Congress
between 1798 and 1800 passed a series of bills
expanding the navy to a force of more than thirty ships and, on 30
April 1798, passed an act that established the independent
executive Department of the Navy.
Between 1798 and 1800, this new, jury-rigged
navy fought the undeclared Quasi-War with France. For the United States,
this was not another guerre de course. Because the Royal Navy had all
but swept French commerce from the seas, there were
few targets for U.S. privateers or navy cruisers. Instead, the navy
found itself protecting U.S. ships from French corsairs.
Operations were centered in the Caribbean, although during the course
of the war U.S. Navy ships operated along the American
coast, in the approaches to the Mediterranean, and in the Indian Ocean
basin, cruising as far as the Sunda Strait.
The Quasi-War was a limited conflict. Congress,
in an effort to protect U.S. commerce, allowed the navy to operate only
against armed French ships on the high seas. Directed by its first
civilian secretary, Benjamin Stoddert, the navy employed a
variety of techniques to carry out its congressional mandate. Warships
convoyed merchant vessels and patrolled the shipping lanes
on the lookout for French privateers, but Stoddert also chose to employ
his small force as offensively as possible. He dispensed
with escorts for convoys and patrolling and, in a move that carried
the war to the Caribbean, sent virtually the entire navy south,
where French privateers operated, and eliminated the French threat
along the coast.
Stoddert also excelled as a manager, weeding
out many of the service's mediocre officers, among them more than a few
Continental navy veterans, and establishing a pipeline of young midshipmen
and lieutenants who made the navy their career and
would become the future "ornaments" of the service. The U.S. Navy managed
during the Quasi-War to do what the Continental
navy had failed to do during the American Revolution, that is, to emerge
from the conflict with an excellent reputation and broad
political support. Stoddert and other U.S. navalists used wartime political
backing in an attempt to build not only a small force to
protect commerce but a larger battle fleet that would be able to play
the broader national role envisioned by Hamilton. Congress
initially supported Stoddert's ambitious programs, and in 1799 and
1800, construction began of six powerful ships of the line. In
1801, however, waning political support for a large navy, discontent
over the high taxes necessary to complete the program, and a
change in administration ended the effort.
If Stoddert's hopes of building a U.S. battle
fleet were doomed by the election of President Thomas Jefferson in 1800,
the
future of the U.S. Navy was not in doubt. Jefferson took office in
March 1801 as a crisis with Tripoli loomed on the horizon, and
the U.S. Navy found its squadrons en route to the Mediterranean. Between
1801 and 1805, the U.S. Navy protected U.S.
commerce from Tripolitan corsairs, but Jefferson did not limit the
navy to patrolling and convoy escort. He used sea power in a
forward, offensive manner, blockading and bombarding Tripoli, and supporting
the march of an army of mercenaries in 1805 from
Egypt to Derna in an effort to topple the dey of Tripoli from his throne
or force him to negotiate.
The successful application of naval power during
the Quasi-War and Barbary Wars by the Federalist administration of
Adams and the Republican administration of Jefferson marked the political
coming of age of the U.S. navy. By 1807 there existed
in the United States a clear political consensus supporting a naval
establishment. Its role was circumscribed, being restricted to
protecting the nation's commerce and not the nation itself. Primary
responsibility for coastal defense rested, and would continue to
rest, primarily with the U.S. Army and its coastal fortifications and
the state militias, although the navy's fleet of gunboats,
principally the brainchild of Jefferson, were expected to play a supporting
role. This was not by any means a witless policy, given
the nature of the threat and the nature of the newly established federal
government. While the small but powerful navy envisioned
by Stoddert might have been able to play a role in national policy,
perhaps even deterring Great Britain from harassing Americans
on the seas during the years leading up to the War of 1812, the United
States in 1800 possessed neither the fiscal resources nor
the manpower necessary to provide and maintain such a force. Already
saddled with an enormous debt from the Revolution, the
country could not afford the additional cost of Stoddert's naval program.
Nor could the nation, which at the time filled the ranks of
its navy with volunteers, have found the thousands of seamen and officers
necessary to man such a fleet. Ships were generally
undermanned during the Quasi-War by about 10 percent, and the officer
corps was barely up to the demands imposed by a small
force.
The second war with Great Britain--the War
of 1812--led to a resurrection of the naval debate in the United States.
As it
had during the wars with the French and the Tripolitans, the U.S. Navy
found itself fighting a guerre de course, this time not to
protect U.S. commerce but against British shipping. The frigates built
in the 1790s, commanded by officers who had begun their
professional careers under Stoddert, scored numerous successes. In
1812 the Constitution, commanded by Captain Isaac Hull,
destroyed the Royal Navy frigate Guerriere. The United States, commanded
by Captain Stephen Decatur, Jr., captured then
scuttled the British frigate Macedonian. Late in the year, the Constitution,
commanded by William Bainbridge, captured the
Java. U.S. men-of-war won many other single-ship engagements, although
several were also lostfor example, the Chesapeake
was captured by the Shannon in June 1813.
Despite the brilliant victories, and despite
the successes of the campaign waged by the U.S. Navy and hundreds of
American privateers against British commerce, the costs to the United
States because it lacked adequate naval power were
quickly driven home. Great Britain was able to send numerous naval
squadrons and several armies across the Atlantic. The United
States found its ports blockaded and its trade all but destroyed. The
British raided the coast at will. In the summer of 1814 a small
British force captured Washington, the national capital, and burned
many public buildings and facilities, including the navy yard and
the White House.
Command of the sea also allowed Great Britain
to build up powerful forces along the Great Lakes. During the campaigns
fought along the lake frontier between 1812 and 1814, Americans struggled
to keep pace with the British in naval building races
that consumed enormous amounts of money, manpower, and resources. Dramatic
U.S. victories on Lake Erie (September 1813)
and Lake Champlain (September 1814), unfortunately, were not matched
on Lake Ontario, the most important of the lakes, and
there, at the end of the war, the Americans faced a difficult dilemma.
When he resigned in late 1814, Secretary of
the Navy William Jones informed President James Madison that Great
Britain's ability to move resources, including partly disassembled
ships, across the Atlantic to the lakes, principally to Lake Ontario,
made loss of control by the United States inevitable. Jones suggested
that the lakes be abandoned, the ships already constructed
burned, and the frontier defended inland. Fortunately, Great Britain
had no desire to continue the struggle and signed a treaty of
peace late in the year.
For U.S. navalists, the course of the War of
1812 appeared to be a clear lesson of the importance of sea power. The
commerce of the nation had been swept from the seas and its coast blockaded
and subjected to raids and invasions, despite the
presence of an enormous fleet of gunboats and an extensive, and expensive,
network of fortifications. As the need for a seagoing
battle fleet to keep the enemy at bay became increasingly obvious,
navalists found themselves in the political ascendancy, with a
national consensus to support the creation of a powerful battle fleet,
much like that envisioned by Hamilton and Stoddert in the
1790s.
The crash naval building program that began
in 1812 could not, of course, reach fruition before the end of the war,
but this
time the consensus for a strong navy survived the peace, and the program
continued in the postwar years. Ironically, by the time
the first of the ships took to sea, they were no longer needed. The
century-long era of Anglo-French wars ended in 1815 with the
Congress of Vienna and opened a new age of "free security" for the
United States. The prospect of a British, French, or Spanish
invasion of the United States was virtually nil, and the U.S. Navy
did not need battleships to protect commerce from pirates or to
suppress the slave trade.
Moreover, the United States, along with the
rest of the industrializing world, had entered an era of rapid technological
transformation that would shortly bring about enormous changes in warship-building
technology that had heretofore been in a
period of relative stasis for more than a century. For the most part,
the powerful, beautiful, and expensive ships of the line
constructed by the United States during and after the War of 1812 proved
to be all but useless.
The major post-War of 1812 mission of the U.S.
Navy remained commerce protection. Not long after the ink had dried
ending the war with Great Britain, a squadron sailed for the Mediterranean,
where it blockaded and bombarded Algiers (1815). In
the decades after the War of 1812, the navy kept small squadrons in
the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, off the west African
coast, and in the Pacific. While its ships supported commerce and diplomacy
in the far flung corners of the world and suppressed
piracy in the Caribbean and the slave trade off the African coast,
as before, the navy was limited to support of the merchant class,
and it was still not assigned any broad national roles during peacetime.
The U.S. Navy struggled during the decades
following the War of 1812 to keep up with rapidly changing technology.
While
the navy was not in the forefront of technological change, it experimented
with steam-powered propulsion systems, armor plating,
breechloaders, shell guns, and the telegraph. The service also organized
an engineering-oriented naval academy in 1845 at
Annapolis, Maryland, in an effort to enhance what was already a well-established
professionalism.
During the Mexican War (1846-1848), the U.S.
Navy again demonstrated the value of sea power and, for the first time,
proved itself to be a national asset. Along the California coast and
in the Gulf of Mexico, U.S. naval forces blockaded Mexican
ports and supported operations ashore. When President James Polk found
himself confronting a weak Mexican government
unable to negotiate a peace settlement, he turned to sea power as part
of the answer. At Polk's direction, Major General Winfield
Scott's army in 1847 moved by sea to Veracruz, Mexico. From there it
marched inland on the Mexican capital, Mexico City,
ultimately forcing an end to the war.
The Civil War, which began in 1861, also highlighted
for the United States the potential national virtues of sea power. The
Union had a near monopoly on naval power during the war. Naval officers,
more so than army officers, remained loyal to the
Union. The majority of the U.S. Navy's men-of-war were in northern
ports. The absence of Confederate oceangoing sea power
initially gave the Union de facto control of the seas.
As the war progressed, the Confederacy managed
to purchase several swift cruisers with auxiliary steam power that
wreaked havoc on commercial shipping in the North, although the Confederates
were never able to challenge northern control of
the seas, and warships such as the CSS Alabama were eventually run
down and destroyed by Union men-of-war. Union control
of the sea allowed the North to blockade the coastal ports of the South.
Historians continue to debate the effectiveness of the
blockade, and many now doubt whether it was as decisive as initially
believed. Innumerable Confederate blockade runners evaded
capture and carried critically needed supplies into southern ports.
Without doubt, however, the blockade handicapped the southern
war effort and was yet another advantage enjoyed by the North in the
secession struggle.
Control of the sea and possession of strong
naval forces also allowed the North to apply military force against the
entire
coastline of the South. Confederate commanders had to maintain tens
of thousands of troops to guard against Union forays from
the sea, a burden that northern leaders did not share. As had Scott's
army in 1847. Lieutenant General George B. McClellan's
Army of the Potomac moved by sea in 1862 to the James River to strike
directly, although unsuccessfully, against an enemy
capital, in this case Richmond. Two years later, Lieutenant General
Ulysses S. Grant directed the operations against Richmond of
two Union armies, both supplied by sea.
The North also flexed its naval muscles along
inland waters. Armor-clad gunboats fought their way south with army ground
operations and safeguarded river routes that usually became major conduits
for supply. In the critical battles fought along the
Mississippi River, Union oceangoing and inland-water naval forces combined
in a classic campaign to cut the Confederacy in two.
The victory of the North in the Civil War might
have been expected to further cement the political position of pronaval
forces in the United States. Union superiority on the seas had played
a large role in assuring northern victory. Moreover, the
quickening pace of technological change, epitomized in the May 1862
clash between the Confederate ironclad Virginia (actually
the captured and rechristened Union Merrimack) and the Union ironbuilt
Monitor, demonstrated that henceforth it would be
increasingly difficult to create the jury-rigged naval forces that
the United States had relied upon in its previous wars.
Nevertheless, after 1865 the U.S. Navy entered
a generation-long period of decline. The reasons for the deterioration
of
the service were many. Americans, North and South, were tired of war
and struggled to reconstruct the nation politically and
socially. The Civil War had challenged the country's belief in preordained
progress. Almost a generation would pass before
Americans recovered from the conflict and began to shape a new national
consensus.
There also were no obvious threats to the nation's
security in the decades immediately following the Civil War. Once the
French had been chased from Mexico, there existed no foreign peril.
No European struggle threatened to spill across the Atlantic
or onto the ocean that might endanger U.S. commerce. American merchants
and missionaries continued their work abroad in an
era of relative global security and order.
On distant stations the U. S . Navy recommenced
its pre- 1861 roles and missions--commerce protection and support for
diplomacy, likewise aimed at expanding U.S. markets. U.S. naval forces
returned to the Mediterranean, the Pacific, the Indian
Ocean, and the Persian Gulf. The ships of the navy were aging and not
always gracefully. In addition, as the pace of technological
change accelerated, the service fell even further behind the navies
of Europe. By the 1870s, the U.S. Navy was a collection of
antiquated, obsolescent men-of-war, notable for their quaintness rather
than their prowess as warships.