This entry is a subentry of U.S. Navy.
At the end of the Revolutionary War Americans had yet to form a political consensus for a strong nation and saw little need for an expensive and unnecessary navy. In 1785 the Confederation Congress sold off the frigate Alliance, the last ship of the Continental navy.
In the late 1780s, when Barbary corsairs preyed upon Yankee ships, Americans discovered that their vision of a new world order dominated by concepts of limited government and free trade was not universally shared. The Confederation Congress, without the power to tax, lacked the money to pay the tribute demanded by the Barbary states and lacked the ships to respond to force with force. This powerlessness contributed to a movement for a stronger national government and the ratification of the federal constitution in 1789.
When new Barbary troubles arose in the 1790s, the new U.S. government possessed options, and Congress and President George Washington responded in classic fashion, following the Roman maxim “if you wish peace, prepare for war.” Congress negotiated, but simultaneously passed the Naval Act of March 1794 calling for the construction of six large frigates. The Algerians signed a treaty in 1796.
American determination failed to deter the new French Republic, which angered by the Anglo‐American Jay Treaty of 1795, unleashed a war against U.S. commerce in 1797. When the French rebuffed the negotiators sent to Paris, the Federalist‐dominated Congress, with a core of six frigates built or being built (including the USS Constitution, completed in 1797), voted to expand the navy to a force of over thirty ships. To oversee the expansion, Congress established a separate Department of the Navy on 30 April 1798.
Between the spring of 1798 and 1801 the navy waged an
For the navy, the Quasi‐War was a formative experience. The disappointments of the Continental navy were forgotten. The new American marine force emerged from the war with an excellent reputation, a core of powerful frigates, and a cadre of young officers including Edward Preble and Stephen Decatur.
Despite the efforts of Stoddert and other navalists, the United States did not emerge from the war with a big‐ship navy. Construction of a squadron of seventy‐four‐gun battleships began in 1799, but none was completed. The nation possessed the means to build such ships, and could have made good use of them in 1812. But for a navy that was usually 10 to 15 percent understrength, manning might have been a practical and political impossibility in a nation unwilling to resort to the press gang.
The electoral victor of President Thomas Jefferson's Democratic‐Republicans in 1800 terminated the building of the program. In Jefferson's scheme, army fortifications and an army and navy militia bore primary responsibility for national defense. The navy played a subsidiary role, protecting commerce and supporting coastal defense efforts with a fleet of small harbor gunboats. Jefferson's was in many ways a sensible policy, though he could have spared the nation the cost of the gunboat fleet.
Jefferson considered economic sanctions the chief weapon in his arsenal, a weapon he and his successors employed against Britain between 1807 and 1812 to no avail. Republican embargoes sent the American economy into a depression from which the commercial sector did not fully recover until the 1830s. James Madison and a frustrated Republican Congress declared war in 1812.
In the War of 1812, the nation's small navy achieved some notable successes, capturing three Royal Navy frigates in the first months of the war. But the navy could not prevent the British from blockading and raiding the coast. At Baltimore and New Orleans, Republican defense policies succeeded; but the British marched into Washington and burned the “President's Mansion.” Along the frontier with Canada, the navy achieved mixed success, winning significant battles on Lakes Erie and Champlain, but not on the most important of the lakes—Ontario. For the navy, war ended none to soon.
After 1815, the Democratic‐Republicans (soon to be simply Democrats) embraced many Federalist naval policies. They built more and larger ships, just in time for the “era of free security.” Many of the big ships were soon laid up, while the smaller vessels operated globally in support of American commerce, suppressing piracy in the Caribbean and conducting anti‐slavery patrols off the African coast. In 1854, Commodore Matthew Perry opened Japan to American trade. The navy also undertook scientific and geographic missions. Matthew Fontaine Maury broke ground in ocean science; William Lynch explored the Dead Sea, and Charles Wilkes the Pacific.
The post‐1815 era was also one of administrative reform and technological advance. Congress established the Board of Navy Commissioners (1815), the Navy Bureau system (1842), and the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis (1845). Other reforms included the prohibition of dueling (1857) and flogging (1850), and (unsuccessful) attempts to limit the spirit ration. The navy experimented with and embraced myriad new technologies—shell‐firing cannon, heavy guns, armor plating, steam power, and screw propulsion.
During the Mexican War (1846–48) the navy played a subsidiary, but important, role. The few American warships executed a big‐navy strategy—blockading the Mexican coasts, helping defeat the Mexicans in California, and transporting Gen. Winfield Scott's army to Vera Cruz in an amphibious operation that ultimately brought the war to a successful conclusion.
At the start of the Civil War, the U.S. Navy's officer corps suffered fewer defections than that of the U.S. Army. Employing many new technologies, the Union navy performed well, blockading the Confederate coast, supporting amphibious operations around the Confederate periphery, and conducting critically important riverine operations in the west. The navy did have a difficult time tracking down the handful of Confederate naval commerce raiders, although the Union cruiser Kearsarge destroyed the Alabama off Cherbourg, France, in 1864.
By 1865 the navy had reached a peak of efficiency and was one of the largest in the world. But many of its ships were hastily built or poorly suited for service beyond American coastal waters. Moreover, the immediate postwar decades were years of national reconstruction and introspection during which American naval policy atrophied.
The years 1783–1865 marked a formative period for the U.S. navy. The service's roles and missions were limited, in that the government assigned the navy the roles of safeguarding overseas commercial and diplomatic interests, and not the defending the nation itself. Nevertheless, the navy performed well and earned a reputation for excellence, despite its diminutive size. Over the decades American naval officers gained experience in all the corners of the globe and through their efforts, and those of a handful of competent civilian secretaries, laid the foundation for the establishment of a larger, more powerful, truly national navy in the 1880s and 1890s.
[See also Continental Navy.]
Bibliography
- Theodore Roosevelt, The Naval War of 1812, 1882.
- Alfred T. Mahan, Admiral Farragut, 1892.
- Craig L. Symonds, Navalists and Antinavalists: The Naval Debate in the United States, 1785–1827, 1980.
- John Schroeder, Shaping a Maritime Empire: The Commercial and Diplomatic Role of the American Navy, 1829–1861, 1985.
- Michael A. Palmer, Stoddert's War: Naval Operations during the Quasi‐War with France, 1798–1801, 1987.
- David F. Long, Gold Braid and Foreign Relations: Diplomatic Activities of American Naval Officers, 1798–1833, 1988
