Six Frigates Quotes

“The french Captain tells me, I have caused a War with France,” Truxtun wrote Stoddert. “If so I am glad of it, for I detest Things being done by Halves.” The”
― Ian W. Toll, Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy

“Stoddert named Joshua Humphreys Chief Naval Constructor of the United States, and authorized him to oversee naval shipbuilding operations throughout the country. But Humphreys’s efforts to impose his authority on shipwrights in other cities met with strong resistance. Different techniques, styles, and designs prevailed in the various seaports, and much of the terminology had evolved into regional dialects that outsiders found unintelligible. To ask a master builder to take direction from another master builder, in another region, was contrary to every tradition of the profession. Humphreys now proposed to bring openness and transparency to an enterprise that had always been shrouded in the medieval secrecy of the craftsmen’s guild. Shipbuilding is a “noble art,” he told a colleague. “I consider it my duty to convey to my brother builders every information in my power.”
― Ian W. Toll, Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy

“the British would get off two or three broadsides to the enemy’s one, and the ratio would continuously improve in their favor as the battle wore on toward its inevitable conclusion. The Royal Navy owed its advantage in gunnery to its commitment to intensive”
― Ian W. Toll, Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy

“In the past two decades, especially, scholars and biographers have given emphasis to a pattern of hypocrisy and duplicity in the president’s life and career. Affecting the modesty and frugality of a simple country farmer, Jefferson’s private tastes ran to fine food, fine wines, fine homes, and fine horses. He criticized government waste, overspending, and public debt, but his profligate spending habits kept him buried under a mountain of personal debt all his adult life. He was enthralled by mechanical contrivances and innovations, but an enemy of industrialization. He denounced financial speculators while speculating aggressively in real estate. Deploring the smear tactics that were so pervasive in the 1790s, he arranged to have his political adversaries smeared. He declared that “If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all,” but he was the first acknowledged leader of a major American political party. Jefferson was his country’s greatest spokesman for liberty—swearing “eternal hostility to every form of tyranny over the minds of men”—and also the deeded owner of more than two hundred men, women and children, some of whom were his blood relations. As Dr. Samuel Johnson had asked: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”
― Ian W. Toll, Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy

“keep faith in “the advantages to be expected from perseverance…so long as any chance for success may remain.”
― Ian W. Toll, Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy

“That day buried levees, birthdays, royal parades, and the arrogation of precedence in society by certain self-styled friends of order, but truly styled friends of privileged orders…. In social circles all are equal, whether in or out of office, foreign or domestic, & the same equality exists among ladies as among gentlemen. No precedence therefore, of any one over another, exists either in right or practice at dinners, assemblies, or any other occasions. “Pell-mell” and “next the door” form the basis of etiquette in the societies of this country.”
― Ian W. Toll, Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy

“United States sailed on November 3, reaching the port of Lisbon three and a half weeks later.”
― Ian W. Toll, Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy

“Admiral Cochrane’s nephew, Thomas Cochrane, was the famed fighting captain whose Mediterranean cruises in the HMS Speedy would be the inspiration for Patrick O’Brian’s novel Master and Commander (1970).”
― Ian W. Toll, Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy

“King, Dean. Harbors and High Seas: An Atlas and Geographical Guide to the Complete Aubrey-Maturin Novels of Patrick O’Brian. New York: Owl Books, 2000.”
― Ian W. Toll, Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy

“How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”
― Ian W. Toll, Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy