Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy

by Ian W. Toll

It would be no exaggeration to say that England’s naval supremacy in the early years of the nineteenth century was unlike anything the world had ever seen before, or has since.

The Continental Navy, with few exceptions, was a wasteful and humiliating fiasco.

Of the thirteen American frigates built during the Revolution, seven were captured and taken into the Royal Navy, and another four were destroyed to prevent their falling into enemy hands.

The Algerian peace would cost Americans nearly a million dollars in bribes, ransom, and payments of tribute. Particularly humiliating was a stipulation that the United States would build a 32-gun frigate for the Dey and deliver it to him as a gift. The cost of the treaty was equivalent to 13 percent of the total annual expenditures of the federal government in that year. The Senate ratified it without debate.

The three men on the dais—the retiring president, the incoming president, and the incoming vice president—were the three most prominent American statesmen of the revolutionary generation. The ceremony would mark the nation’s first peaceful transition of power. It was, Adams later said, strange and affecting to witness this essential ritual of democracy—to see the “sight of the sun setting full-orbit, and another rising (though less splendid).”