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The Continental Colors |
Two important new USA museums opened within two weeks of each other in April
2017: The American Revolution Museum at Yorktown, Virginia, and The Museum of
the American Revolution in Philadelphia, neither knowing about the existence of
the other until it was too late to change course. NEITHER of them says a single
word about the Continental Navy, so I asked their respective officials why that
should be so. They both replied that the Navy was a complete waste of money,
building expensive new frigates, which then surrendered without firing a shot.
Any adult in the street, when asked ‘What is the purpose of a wartime navy?’ would answer correctly that it is to beat up the other guy’s navy and merchant marine. But that was not the purpose of the Continental Navy. Their top job was to go abroad and purchase, beg, borrow, or steal all the gunpowder needed by American land forces to make progress in the war.
gunpowder |
Gunpowder was one-third sulfur, which (they thought) came exclusively from 3 Italian volcanoes. So, yes, if you were a frigate loaded to the back teeth with gunpowder, you would surrender without firing a shot, and the one Continental frigate (32-gun Randolph, Captain Nicholas Biddle) that insisted on fighting, exploded with 250 men killed and only 4 survivors. It is a measure of how successful the Navy was at their top job that the land forces never ran short of gunpowder in the whole war. Both museums now need to amend their exhibits to explain all that. (Helen: and their excuse is a poor one - even if a failure a musuem should reflect all history!)
The most important leg on which the Continental Navy was founded was in
tiny Rhode Island, founded on the principle of complete religious freedom by
Episcopal priest, the Reverend William Blackstone and his congregation of about
thirty in 1634 (two years before the more famous Baptist leader Roger Williams
arrived there; Blackstone also gets no credit for having founded Boston in
1623, seven years before John Winthrop arrived). Almost three decades later,
Rhode Island officials went to London to ask King Charles II for a Charter
which recognized complete religious freedom as the main and unique purpose of
the colony. Charles was excited to watch such an experiment that had never been
tried before anywhere in the world, so the Rhode Island officials pushed their
luck. They asked Charles to think: if the King appointed a governor over Rhode
Island who did not believe in the experiment, surely that would ruin the
experiment? Charles then rewrote the Charter so that every Rhode Island
official from the governor on down would be elected by the voters of Rhode
Island – which essentially meant that Rhode Island was an independent nation
from the beginning!
British law in the 18th century stated that British colonies could not
purchase sugar, molasses, or rum except from other British colonies (by which
they meant Caribbean islands, such as Jamaica, Barbados, Antigua, Saint Kitts,
and a few others, although they did not actually name them). Molasses is the
by-product of refining sugarcane juice into sugar. Molasses is also what is distilled
in order to make rum. The French passed a very different law for their biggest
sugarcane producer, Haiti, then known as Saint-Domingue. Haiti was told to
produce as much sugar as possible, but they said that the molasses derived from
that process was not to be distilled into rum, because cheap rum flooding into
France would hurt the brandy industry. After a few
years of burying their molasses in the soil, Haitians decided to offer it as a
gift to North American merchants who were buying mahogany and other Haitian
products. The idea was that since the British law prohibited British colonies
from purchasing French molasses, surely making a gift of it was acceptable. All
the British-appointed governors in North America told the merchants that such a
gift was not acceptable after all, but Rhode Island’s elected governor urged
Rhode Island traders to bring back as much free molasses as they could carry,
so that Rhode Island distilleries could turn it into rum to export to all the
other North American colonies – because Rhode Island was one of the other
British colonies, and so purchasing rum from Rhode Island was entirely legal.
Rum was of course a popular drink, but its main purpose was as a food preservative. Even a poor person’s house had five barrels of rum in the larder, in which food could be submerged indefinitely: one for meat, one for fish, one for vegetables, one for fruit, and one for flour. Modern flour is irradiated before it arrives at the supermarket, so it is sterile, but colonial-period flour would get up and walk away after a few weeks on the pantry shelf (from all the creepy-crawlies hatched in it). Flour was therefore placed in cloth bags and submerged in rum so that the creepy-crawlies could not hatch. Yes, it would get soggy, but the cook is going to make it soggy in the recipe anyway, so that was not a problem. Rhode Island quickly cornered the rum market for North America, and by 1764 the tiny colony had amassed enough money to found a college, later given the name of Brown University.
The British could
see what was happening and they did not like it, but it was entirely legal.
In 1764, George III was outraged at Rhode Island’s major industry, even though it was technically legal, so he sent a series of warships to stop the colony from continuing the trade. The first one arrived at Newport (America’s fifth-largest town) in June, a 65-foot schooner mounting only six cannons, called Saint John. She arrested Rhode Island merchant ships bringing molasses into the colony or rum out of the colony. Rhode Island’s elected Governor Stephen Hopkins (1707-1785) had himself rowed out to where the Saint John was at anchor, climbed up the side of the schooner and told the captain that the schooner had not been invited to the Colony, was not welcome, and was therefore ordered to depart and never return.
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Stephen Hopkins |
The captain was a nineteen-year-old lieutenant,
who had all the authority that nineteen-year-olds think they have, so he
threatened to order the crew to throw Hopkins in the harbor. Hopkins returned
to his rowing boat, but instead of rowing back to Newport, he ordered the
oarsmen to row to Goat Island in the middle of the harbor. Goat Island is now
covered in condos, timeshares, and a resort hotel, but back then it was the
location of Fort George guarding the harbor with heavy cannons.
Hopkins ordered the master-gunner in the fort to sink the schooner. The
master-gunner asked Hopkins if he had been drinking too much rum, but Hopkins
explained the situation, so the master-gunner ordered his men to load the
massive fort cannons and open fire on the schooner. Two shots hit the schooner
and turned big chunks of her into splinters, so the lieutenant cut his anchor
cable and the schooner sailed away, never to return. Those were the
first shots of resistance fired against British authority in America on 9 July
1764, twelve years before the Declaration of Independence.
The next year, the British sent another schooner to do the same job, but
the people of Newport rowed out in the middle of the night, took the crew off,
and burned it. After that, the next British ship was the sloop Liberty
(ironic name for a ship that was trying to take liberty away) in 1769 – and
they burned her as well. That same year, former Governor Stephen Hopkins opened
America’s first-ever cannon-foundry near Providence, because he could see that
a war was unavoidable.
The
next British warship to arrive was the schooner Gaspee in 1772. Gaspee
was chasing a potential molasses carrier towards Providence, but Gaspee
ran aground on a falling tide. Large rowing boats assembled in the night from
many of the colony’s ports, and destroyed the hapless schooner, setting her on
fire.
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The burning of the Gaspee |
Each time these incidents occurred, authorities in Britain heard about
it two or three months later, and would write a blistering letter to the
governor to ask for an explanation. He would blithely reply that he knew
nothing about it, because he had not been governor back then, but he would
appoint a commission to look into it. The resulting commission would report to
England that persons unknown, believed to have come from Connecticut, had done
it. After Gaspee had been burned, the British decided to get to the bottom of
it themselves, so they sent their own commission to Newport, with a reward in
today’s money of about $2.5 million for information leading to the arrest and
conviction of anyone involved in burning the schooner. Almost 300 people had been
involved in the event, and every resident of the colony knew at least one
participant, so it is remarkable that no one came forward to claim the reward.
Stephen Hopkins, who was now the colony’s Chief Justice, demanded from
the British commission an explanation about why they were not following the
law. Hopkins pointed out that the English Bill of Rights of 1689 guaranteed
anyone accused of a crime the right to a trial by jury (in this case, the
commission were going to use only a judge), and the right to a trial in the
closest courthouse, meaning in Newport, not in London the way the commission
intended. When they told Hopkins to jump in the harbor with his Bill of Rights,
he took matters into his own hands again, and wrote letters to people he knew
in all the other colonies in 1773. He proposed that they establish a network of
Committees of Correspondence, so that they could draft a joint response to the
over-reach of London officials.
One year later, the Committees of Correspondence had still not produced
such a document, so Hopkins proposed that all the colonies should send
delegates to meet face-to-face in Philadelphia to draft the response, and the
meeting would be called the Continental Congress. Nearly all modern history
books state that the Continental Congress was founded as a result of the Boston
Tea Party, but it was all Hopkins’ doing.
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Benedict Arnold |
Meanwhile, another leg of founding the Navy came from New Haven,
Connecticut (sixth-largest town in America). Wealthy sailing merchant Benedict
Arnold (1741-1801) made a lot of his fortune from illegally importing Haitian
molasses. It occurred to him that if a war came, a huge British army based in
Quebec City could come charging down 110-mile-long Lake Champlain and
completely defeat any army the Americans could cobble together. In late August 1774,
Arnold took a couple of friends with him and baskets full of molasses-ginger
cookies, and they rode their horses to the modern town of Whitehall at the
southern end of the lake. There they saw a 65-foot-long square-rigged trading
ketch, suitable for arming with 10 or 12 cannons. They also noted a battery of
10 appropriate cannons nearby. Then they visited the three British forts along
the edge of the lake to see how well prepared they were, Forts Ticonderoga,
Crown Point, and Saint-Jean. They handed out the cookies to the soldiers so
that they could more easily ask them pointed questions. They found that the
morale of the garrisons was low, that between them the forts were armed with
about 70 very heavy cannons (24-pounders), and that a shipyard at the northern
end of the lake was constructing warships for use on the lake.
When Arnold returned to New Haven in the autumn of 1774, he founded at
his own expense the New Haven Company of the Governor’s Footguards, numbering
just over 100 men, and he paid for their uniforms – red coats with black lapels
and silver buttonholes, with buff small-clothes and double-breasted waistcoats.
In spite of their name, they were to be a mounted unit, and they had to be
ready to deploy at a moment’s notice. They were to make themselves familiar
with the road to Lake Champlain and the road to Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Hopkins returned to Rhode Island from the First Continental
Congress in the autumn of 1774, and reported that the delegates had voted to
return to Philadelphia in the spring for the Second Continental Congress if the
situation with Britain had not improved. In the meantime, William Legge, Earl
of Dartmouth, Secretary of State for the Colonies, sent an important letter to
all the governors, explaining that British forces would confiscate all public
supplies of gunpowder in the colonies in the spring of 1775. The governors
(including Lord Dunmore in Virginia) had no role in the operation, but it was
important that they knew about it in advance, so it would not be a surprise.
One of these letters came about 1 December to Joseph Wanton, elected Governor
of Rhode Island. He showed the letter to Hopkins, who suggested that Rhode
Island take all the powder out of the Fort George magazine in Newport and hide
it in several places. Hopkins said that Wanton should use the Committees of
Correspondence to inform leaders in all the other colonies, suggesting that
they hide their powder as well. In Massachusetts, a small amount of that powder
was hidden at Concord, the rest being safer at distant Worcester.
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Replica 'Rose' (now known as Surprise |
A
few days after all the Rhode Island powder had been hidden, the 20-gun frigate Rose
arrived, commanded by Captain James Wallace. She was sometimes described as
a 24-gun frigate, so she was so
big and powerful that there was no chance that any Rhode Island rebels could
burn her. She set about ending the molasses and rum trade. In the following
months, many Rhode Island residents moved to Connecticut to look for work, and
the colony’s income plummeted. As time went by, Rose’s mission in Rhode
Island changed: she started purchasing food supplies to feed the besieged British
garrison in Boston, and if the farmers refused to sell the food, she would take
it anyway. In the interest of full disclosure, in 1969, the author raised the
money, did the research, and supervised construction of a full-size,
operational copy of Rose so that people could see what ships of that period
looked like. After 16 successful years doing East Coast sail-training cruises,
she was bought by Fox Pictures to star with Russell Crowe in ‘Master &
Commander: The Far Side of the World,’ before becoming a permanent exhibit at
the San Diego Maritime Museum. Rose’s original 1756 plans are preserved
at the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich, London.
(Helen: and Rose/Surprise is the template ship for my Sea Witch Voyages)
British forces struck first to remove the
gunpowder from the fort at Pownalborough, Maine on 15 April, followed by an
attack on Concord on 19 April. A fast messenger brought the news to New Haven,
so Arnold mobilized his men. One-third of them were ordered to Lake Champlain
to seize the merchant ship, rig her and arm her with the nearby cannons, and
rename her Liberty as the first armed vessel in Continental service, all
of which was complete by 28 April. Was this the founding of the Continental
Navy? Maybe, but Congress really ought to be involved, and they were not even
in session at that time.
The other two-thirds of Arnold’s men came to
Cambridge, where Arnold met Massachusetts Major-General Dr. Joseph Warren.
Arnold and Warren agreed about all of Arnold’s plans to seize the three British
forts on Lake Champlain. Warren made Arnold a colonel with authority over
troops from New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New
York. Arnold picked up hundreds of men along the way. Then, using the ketch Liberty,
he demanded and received the surrender of each of the three Lake Champlain
forts in turn. At Saint-Jean, he captured the 12-gun sloop George, which
he renamed Enterprise, the first purpose-built naval vessel in
Continental service, to be joined soon afterwards by a second purpose-built
naval vessel, the 14-gun schooner Royal Savage. Between the vessels that he
captured and others that he commissioned to be built, Arnold was responsible
for 26 ships in the fresh-water navy on Lake Champlain. The four largest, each
capable of mounting 16 guns, were the two-masted Washington, Gates,
Congress, and Trumbull. One of the smallest, named Philadelphia,
was dredged up in 1935 from where she had been sunk in battle in late 1776, and
has been on display at the Smithsonian. Arnold also arranged to send almost 70 large cannons (each
weighing several tons) from the Champlain forts to Massachusetts forces, who
arranged them in a ring around Boston. That caused the British to evacuate
Boston on 17 March 1776 – the first American triumph of the war. Arnold’s
emphasis on Lake Champlain delayed the British Army’s advance southward until
autumn 1777, when American forces were ready for them at the two battles of Saratoga.
The American victory at Saratoga was responsible for persuading the French and
the Spanish to enter the war on the American side, thus paving the way for
ensuring independence.
Back in Rhode Island, James Wallace
understood that he could not cover all the ports in the colony at once with a
single frigate, so he received Royal Navy reinforcements, and seized some small
Rhode Island merchant vessels as well. The Rhode Island General Assembly
understood that they lacked the power to fight Wallace and his Royal Navy
vessels, but they could go after the smaller vessels. Therefore, on 12 June
1775, they established the Rhode Island Provincial Navy (the first state navy
of the Revolution) with two rented sloops, the larger of which (65 feet long on
deck) was Katy. Three days later, Katy, commanded by
Abraham Whipple (1733-1819), captured the British auxiliary vessel Diana,
the first enemy vessel captured by any salt-water American Navy in the
Revolution. Georgia founded its navy in late June 1775; Connecticut on 1 July;
Pennsylvania on 6 July; South Carolina in late July; Virginia in early
December; North Carolina 21 December; Massachusetts 29 December; New York and
Maryland early in 1776; New Hampshire early in 1779; Sussex County, Delaware
1777, and New Jersey never had a navy.
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George Washington |
Congress decided it should take control over
the various colony forces besieging Boston, and they sent George Washington (1732-1799)
from Virginia to be commander-in-chief in the middle of 1775. One army cannot
effectively besiege another if that other can readily be resupplied by sea.
Washington decided he needed a naval force to choke off some of that resupply,
but he knew that Congress would not approve letting him have a navy, so he
simply went ahead without authorization on 2 September 1775. He rented in turn a
series of Marblehead and Beverly, Massachusetts fishing boats about 50 feet long
apiece, the first being named Hannah, commanded by Nicholas Broughton. Washington
armed these small schooners typically with four small cannons, and although
they were not spectacularly successful, they did accomplish Washington’s main
goals. Hannah had a narrow escape on 10 October 1775 from capture by the
much more powerful British warship Nautilus. Washington’s little navy
was not the Continental Navy, which required authorization from Congress, but,
like Arnold’s fresh-water navy, it is one of the legs on which the story of the
founding of the Navy stands.
While Stephen Hopkins was back in Rhode Island in mid-1775 (Congress preferred not to remain in session during the hottest days of summer), he talked with his friends in the Rhode Island General Assembly. They thought that some sort of national navy ought to be established in order to drive away Commodore James Wallace’s fleet of the frigate Rose and at times up to five similar ships, so they passed legislation to that effect, and Hopkins brought it to Philadelphia. Congress could see a problem with that: if you have an army, and then you decide that you have made a mistake, you can simply send all the soldiers home. However, if you have a navy, you cannot dismiss the ships. Therefore, Congress adopted the maxim, ‘the smaller, the better.’ As a result, Hopkins introduced a bill for a Navy of only 2 small ships (one of which turned out not to be available), and the bill passed on 13 October 1775.
The first ship authorized for the new Continental Navy was the
Rhode Island Navy’s 12-gun sloop Katy, renamed Providence for the
occasion. She was one of three vessels in the Continental Navy to bear that
name, all at the same time. In the interest of full disclosure, the author
raised the money, did the historical research, and supervised construction of a
full-sized, operational copy of the sloop Providence in 1974. She is now
on permanent display on the waterfront of Alexandria, Virginia. Three period
eyewitness portraits of Providence have been identified.
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Katy, renamed Providence |
Hopkins was very clever: every few days, he
introduced supplemental legislation to add more ships to the Navy. By
Christmas, he had thirty ships authorized for the Navy, of which thirteen were
purpose-built frigates (authorized on 13 December, two of them to be built in
Rhode Island). The rest were merchant ships with gunports cut in their sides.
He also introduced the bill that founded the Marine Corps on 10 November. The
thirteen frigates were: Raleigh, 32 (NH); Hancock, 32, and Boston,
24 (MA); Warren, 32, and Providence II, 28 (RI); Trumbull,
28 (CT); Congress, 28, and Montgomery, 24 (NY); Randolph,
32, Washington, 32, Effingham, 28, and Delaware, 24 (PA); Virginia,
28 (MD). Before Hopkins retired from Congress due to ill health, he introduced
further legislation to construct additional warships: America, 74, and Ranger,
18 (NH); Alliance, 36, General Gates, 18, and General Arnold,
18 (MA); President, 36, General Washington, 18 (RI); Confederacy,
36, and Bourbon, 36 (CT); Saratoga, 18 (PA); Chesapeake,
36, Virginia II, 28, and Morgan, 18 (VA); Deane/Hague, 32
(France).
Hopkins wrote all the bills that authorized
the Continental Navy’s legal constructs, such as how to adjudicate prize money,
and he designed the officers’ uniforms (enlisted men were not given uniforms
until the mid-nineteenth century), and the flag that was officially named
Continental Colors (sometimes wrongly called the Grand Union Flag) that was not
replaced until mid-June 1777 by the Stars & Stripes. Lieutenant John Paul
Jones from Scotland claimed to be the first to hoist the Continental Colors up
the 24-gun flagship Alfred’s ensign staff on 10 January 1776 in Philadelphia.
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The Continental Colors |
Rhode Island’s slavery rules were different
from those of the other colonies. Once an adult slave had served for seven
years, he was eligible for obtaining freedom from a justice-of-the-peace, who first
wanted to be sure that the slave had lined up a good paying job, so he would
not be on the public dole. Any slave who had finished his seven years, offering
to join the military, was automatically approved (hence the all-Black Rhode
Island Regiment that fought at Yorktown and elsewhere). It is estimated that
Rhode Island Blacks accounted for between ten and twenty percent of all the
enlisted men in the Continental Navy.
Congress asked Hopkins to find the right man
to command the Navy, but at the same time, they added many burdensome
qualifications. They offered him the rank of commodore, which is no better than
first among the captains, and captains were the same level as a colonel in the
army; there was no navy rank of admiral, equivalent to a general, and yet there
were dozens of generals in the army. Moreover, the commodore was forbidden to
take any initiatives without having the various captains and commanders sign
off on it first. Hopkins and his former law student, John Adams, had early in
the crisis come to the conclusion that if any war were a New England affair,
the British would be able to overcome it. Virginia was by far the richest and
most populous colony, so they decided to offer all the top jobs to Virginians
in order to persuade other colonies to join in the struggle. The top three
generals were from Virginia: Washington, Lee, and Gates, and the commander of
all riflemen was Morgan. The first President of Congress was Randolph. Another
Lee was designated as the man to introduce an independence resolution, and
Jefferson was chosen to write the Declaration of Independence. Virginia had no
outstanding sea commander, so Hopkins offered the job to one or more American
officers serving in the Royal Navy, but he was turned down. Eventually, he
turned to his younger brother Esek Hopkins, who had commanded a privateer ship
in the previous war and was a colonel of Rhode Island land forces at the
beginning of the Revolution.
The first eight ships of the Navy were ready
for sea in ice-choked Philadelphia by the 10th of January 1776. Flagship Alfred
had 24 guns, and Columbus had twenty guns. A pair of brigs, Cabot
and Andrew Doria each mounted 14 guns. Three sloops came next: Providence
(12 guns), Hornet (10 guns), and Fly (8 guns), and finally the
schooner Wasp (8 guns). Congress gave the Navy a list of four things
those ships were expected to do. First, they were to go to Rhode Island to get
rid of Rose and her consorts, but the captains noted that the British
ships heavily outgunned the American fleet, so they ruled against that choice.
They were told to go to the Chesapeake Bay to get rid of Royal Governor Lord
Dunmore’s fleet (Virginia Colonel William Woodford had previously on New Year’s
Eve overseen the complete destruction by fire of Norfolk, America’s 8th-largest
city, in an effort to get rid of Dunmore), but the captains learned that Dunmore’s
fleet had been reinforced so that they outgunned the Americans, so the captains
voted against that choice. They were told to go to Charleston, South Carolina
in order to inhibit the British from invading there, but the American captains
could not find any charts of the dangerously difficult approaches to the harbor,
so they had to abandon that idea. Fourth, they were asked to sail to Nassau in
the Bahamas to bring back British gunpowder there. Now, who would not want to
sail to the Bahamas in the depths of winter? Two additional larger vessels were
commissioned in the young Continental Navy, intended to cruise independently: the
narrow 16-gun brig Lexington, and the 18-gun brig or ship Reprisal.
American sailors and marines made their
first ever amphibious landing at Nassau on New Providence Island on 3 March
1776. When they reached the fort, they found that the staff of the fort had
asked the townsfolk to help roll the barrels of powder down to the harbor,
where they were put aboard our old friend the schooner Saint John (which
had been repaired). She was able to transport the gunpowder to the British fort
at Saint Augustine, Florida, where it was entirely safe. The American fleet
took on as cargo all the 18-pounder cannons from the two forts at Nassau. Those
cannons were used aboard the two Continental Navy frigates being built in Rhode
Island, so that they were the most heavily-armed frigates of their size in the
world, and a few of the cannons were sent to Lake Champlain to help arm
Arnold’s four largest vessels there. The
Americans arrested the British governor of the Bahamas so that he could be
traded for an American general captured by the British.
Then they set sail for Rhode Island, where they arrived on 8 April. Rose and her consorts had just left on the seventh. The Rhode Island General Assembly was watching this. They noticed that there were no longer any British warships in Narragansett Bay, and there was an American fleet to protect them if anything went wrong. Therefore, in an effort to give the British no legal reason to return (as it happened, British naval and army forces returned anyway in late 1776 for a 2 ½ year occupation), the Rhode Island General Assembly declared independence from Great Britain in the handsome 1740 Old Statehouse in Newport on 4 May 1776, two months before the national declaration. Hopkins in Philadelphia made sure that knowledge of the Rhode Island declaration was available to inspire Congress to issue its own declaration. Rhode Island Independence Day is now a state holiday, with flags, speeches, and parades, even if the rest of the country is completely unaware of the event. There is a sense in which the former Rhode Island Statehouse in Newport is America’s true Independence Hall.
The Continental Navy went out of business ten years after its founding, because Congress lacked the money to keep it going. Significantly, the US Constitution, which says little about an army, states that a navy will always be kept operational. The United States Navy was not founded until 1797. North African pirates were seizing American merchant ships in the North Atlantic at an insupportable rate, so the British Navy, which was already successfully guarding British merchant ships from those pirates, undertook to guard US interests at sea in the 12-year meantime (thanks to Benedict Arnold asking George III to do that), until a United States naval force was in being.
Of the Continental Navy’s five founders,
Stephen Hopkins died in 1785, the same year that the Continental Navy went out
of business. George Washington died in 1799, two years after the United States
Navy had been founded with a small frigate named after him. Benedict Arnold,
who was there at the beginning and persuaded the British to guard American
merchant ships after the Continental Navy went out of business, died in 1801,
but Arnold never wrote an explanation of his ‘treachery,’ because members of
the British cabinet, who had voted in 1779 to offer America independence, could
still have been arrested by George III and hanged. Esek Hopkins died in 1802,
and Abraham Whipple died in 1819. Four Continental Navy captains also served in
the United States Navy, Samuel Nicholson of Maryland (1743-1811), John Barry of
Philadelphia (1745-1803), Silas Talbot of Rhode Island (1751-1813), and Joshua
Barney of Maryland (1759-1818).
In order to celebrate the ratification of
the Constitution in 1788, the various seaports from New Hampshire to Georgia
built a series of more than 20 reduced-size (about 50 feet long on deck) copies
of various ships that had fought in the Revolution. These full-rigged ships,
with sails set and cannons firing, were towed on giant wheels through the
streets in parades, and after the parades were over, the ships were ballasted
and launched so that they could take part in a sail-training program. There
being no American Navy at the time, many future officers of the United States
Navy received their training aboard these small-ish ships. Engravings of two
different views of the 44-gun Hamilton making her way through the
streets of New York City are widely known, and other engravings show Norfolk,
Virginia’s New Constitution and Portsmouth, Virginia’s Federalist.
A movement is afoot to build copies of some of these ships for use in modern
sail-training, which, among other things, is very good for character-building,
and for calming PTSD.
© John F Millar
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Work In Progress (final content might change) |
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