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

by Ian W. Toll

The victory of the British fleet at Trafalgar was perhaps the most decisive in naval history. Eighteen French and Spanish ships were captured or destroyed. Six thousand French and Spanish sailors were killed or wounded, and twenty thousand taken prisoner. British casualties amounted to 1,700; and the Royal Navy did not lose a single ship.

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.

Hamilton’s warning in Federalist No. 11 now loomed as prophecy: “A nation, despicable by its weakness, forfeits even the privilege of being neutral.”

The Republicans were obsessed with restraining the size and reach of the federal government, and their campaign against the navy was one face of that obsession.

A South Carolina congressman, William Loughton Smith, likened the union of the states to a troubled marriage. “We took each other, with our mutual bad habits and respective evils, for better, for worse,” he said. “The northern states adopted us with our slaves, and we adopted them with their Quakers.”

Good officers and bad ships would make a better navy than good ships and bad officers.

The life of a naval officer, he said, was a life of unremitting toil, close attention to detail, and intense devotion to excellence in every aspect of his duty and deportment.

“Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad.”

“Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all republicans, we are all federalists.”