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CAPT Kenneth J. Hagan, USNR (Ret.)
The pattern of wartime building and postwar reduction of U.S. naval power painfully evident in 1992 is as old as the nation itself. In 1775, under the inspired genius of John Adams, the Naval Committee of the Continental Congress outlined a strategy to guide the fight for independence from imperial Britain. With a handful of frigates and other small ships, the colonial sailors would raid enemy commerce and thereby divert the attention of the Royal Navy. The British Admiralty would have liked to devote its resources exclusively to blockades and to the logistical support of the army, but the mercantile interests of London demanded protection for the ships that made them wealthy.
Intimately familiar with the risks and allures of oceanic maritime trade, Adams and his colleagues realized that they could not break the British merchant marine, but they could inconvenience it and in the process obtain some vital supplies for the
U.S. NAVAL ACADEMY MUSEUM
Lieutenant Stephen Decatur’s 1804 burning of the captured 36-gun frigate Philadelphia in Tripoli harbor ushered in “the Golden Age of frigate diplomacy.” Western powers collaborated with “superpower” Great Britain in policing global maritime trade. That era may hold a key to coping with the post-Cold War world.
revolutionary forces. This was the mindset behind the exploits of the most illustrious Revolutionary War naval officer, John Paul Jones. Naval lore justly immortalizes him for his victory over HMS Serapis, but Jones in essence was a raider of commerce. The engagement between the Bonhomme Richard and
the 44-gun Serapis was more an anomaly than an epitome of pre-Mahanian naval operations.
After the Revolution, Jones was cast aside by his American patrons. He died deserted and destitute in Paris exactly 200 years ago. Also discarded was his fledgling navy of frigates and smaller ships. The one remaining naval vessel, the frigate Alliance, was sold in 1785. From that date until 1794 Congress declined to build a single warship. The result was predictable. Unprotected by any Western naval force, U.S. merchantmen who dared to venture into the Mediterranean—and by Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson’s estimate, about 100 did so each year—ran the gauntlet of North African pirate-states. Yankee merchant skippers who resisted demands for tribute risked the loss of their ships and an indefinite incarceration in a Tripolitan or other North African dungeon.
By 1794 Jefferson had persuaded President George Washington to seek congressional approval for construction of six frigates to deter the North Africans. Two years later Washington proclaimed a short-lived peace with “Barbary.” Immediately, the pattern of reflexive reduction of naval force threatened to assert itself. Washington, however, induced Congress to continue a modest building program aimed at three stout frigates able to resume the intimidation of the Barbary states on a moment’s notice. The frigates also would serve notice to the warring Anglo-French navies that the Americans were prepared to protect their own commerce and to threaten that of the British and French if the irritating harassment of U.S. “neutral rights” on the high seas boiled over into actual war.
War in fact came in 1798, when President John Adams concluded that French depredations against U.S. commerce in the West Indies and elsewhere had become intolerable. The Quasi War (1798-1800) was never declared, thus marking another instance in which Adams set a lasting precedent for national policy and naval strategy. But in its limited and tentative form the conflict incited Congress to establish a Navy Department, and John Adams named Benjamin Stoddert to fill the new office of Secretary of the Navy in June 1798.
Stoddert was a classic big-ship, big-navy man. He wanted a fleet of ships-of-the-line, mostly 74-gun Goliaths whose primary purpose was to stand in line-of-battle and contest for local mastery of the seas against similarly deployed enemy line-of- battle ships. To Stoddert’s regret, the Quasi War was too brief to permit construction of a ship-of-the-line navy. The glory of the U.S. Navy between 1798 and 1800 emanated from bold frigate skippers like Thomas Truxtun, who specialized in commerce-raiding and one-on-one duels with enemy vessels mounting not more than 50 guns to a U.S. frigate’s 36 or 44. Their exploits firmly established the primacy of the frigate in the naval arsenal.
In the aftermath of the Quasi War the pattern of postwar reduction of naval force reappeared. But this did not mean that the new Navy was a decrepit or ineffectual element of U.S. foreign policy. Historians have viciously maligned President Thomas Jefferson (1801-1809) for allegedly allowing the Navy to deteriorate and for placing his trust in small coastal defense gunboats. It is true that Jefferson was reluctant to build a fleet of large warships to challenge either the British or the French, both of whom continued to harass U.S. maritime commerce in the course of their seemingly interminable struggle. But it is equally true that Jefferson was resolutely hawkish toward the North African pirate-states.
Beginning with his inauguration in 1801, Jefferson initiated
Naval Forces In Perspective
a policy of chastising and intimidating the North African states of Tripoli, Tunis, and Algiers. His instrument was the relatively overwhelming Mediterranean frigate squadron, whose most inspiring commodore was Edward Preble, tutor and patron of Stephen Decatur. Decatur’s burning of the captured U.S. frigate Philadelphia in Tripoli harbor in February 1804 set an ineradicable standard of swashbuckling audacity eulogized at the time by British Admiral Horatio Nelson as “the most heroic act of the age.” Not until 1807, when HMS Leopard attacked the hapless frigate Chesapeake, was Jefferson forced to redirect his attention to the intractable Anglo-American conflict over neutral rights on the high seas. That tawdry episode compelled the President to call home his frigates so they could patrol the U.S. coast and discourage British intrusions in and along coastal waters.
Five years of frustration elapsed before Jefferson’s protege, James Madison, went to war in defense of the merchant marine, and at the conclusion of the War of 1812 the perennial postwar question of a proper size for the Navy was resurrected. The division of opinion in Congress was simple and straightforward. One faction would build a navy of ships-of-the-line to deter a British attack on the coast or the merchant marine. The opposition would maintain a much less expensive and smaller navy of frigates, sloops, and brigs, whose purpose was to show the flag on distant stations in support of U.S. merchant sailors, whalers, entrepreneurs, and other bold souls seeking adventure or fortune. The small-navy men won, and a bipartisan policy of frigate diplomacy ensued.
The nation placed its trust in a frigate navy with remarkable consistency until the Spanish-American War of 1898, even though the Mexican War (1846-1848) and the Civil War (18611865) punctuated the era. During this protracted period, which extended from the presidency of James Monroe to that of William McKinley, the U.S. Navy was characterized as having a global reach and global effectiveness. Special-purpose expeditions roamed the oceans seeking scientific knowledge and the expansion of commerce. The three best-known voyages Were those of Lieutenant Charles Wilkes to the South Pacific (1838-1842), Commodore Matthew C. Perry to Japan
Commodore Matthew C. Perry’s expedition from 1852 to 1854 opened commerce between the United States and Japan. One of several 19th-century naval trade voyages, Perry’s set a precedent followed by Commodore Robert W. Shufelt’s visit to Korea in 1878-1882. This print depicts Perry’s landing in Yokohama on 8 March 1854.
(1853-1854), and Commodore Robert W. Shufelt’s circumnavigation that eventuated in a trade treaty with Korea in 1882.
More routinely, ships of the Navy’s four or five small squadrons continuously patrolled every ocean and sea of the world, usually in close formal and informal cooperation with European naval squadrons whose purpose was nearly identical: protect Westerners and their investments from intimidation and confiscation at the hands of “native” peoples outraged by the incursions of these advance agents of “western civilization.” Although it was abandoned as archaic about 100 years ago, this global policy of European-American naval patrols in uncertain waters set a precedent that is relevant to the late 20th century.
In the 1890s the nations of Europe once again began to polarize around two rivals for preeminence, one continental and the other maritime. As before, England was the maritime giant, but a new major continental power was emerging: post-Bismarck Germany. Against this backdrop of European military-naval and imperial rivalry, the United States abandoned its historic policy of maintaining a small frigate navy for duty on distant station. It turned instead to the doctrines of Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, an anglophilic advocate of achieving command of the sea through construction of a large navy of battleships intended to fight enemy battle fleets in a Trafalgar-like showdown.
The outcome of the Spanish-American War (1898), especially the Sampson-Schley victory over the Spanish fleet off Santiago de Cuba, seemed to give credibility to Mahan's theories; and in 1902 President Theodore Roosevelt brought Mahan’s concepts to the White House. For the first time in U.S. history, large-scale naval expansion—rather than stagnation or outright reduction-in-force—marked a postwar period.
Neither World War I nor World War II led to a similar consolidation of naval power. To this day, U.S. naval circles widely regard the Washington Naval Conference of 1921-1922 as a political sellout, because it set severe limits on the construction of “capital” ships. Likewise, after World War II, the U.S. Navy experienced a very dicey five-year period in which the U.S. Air Force and its political supporters threatened to absorb the very core of the modern big-ship navy, carrier- based naval aviation.
The Korean War (1950-1953) elevated defense spending to unheard-of “peacetime” levels and put an end to the challenge from the Air Force. Then, under the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953-1961), the Cold War—of which the Korean War was but the opening salvo—hardened to the point that the Navy was able to win appropriations from Congress for the continued construction of large-deck carriers, whose aircraft in theory could attack the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons.
Congressional support for a neo-Mahanian naval strategy and construction program lapsed periodically, most notably in the latter stages of the Vietnam War and in its aftermath. That period of retrenchment, however, passed quickly. In 1981 President Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of the Navy, John F. Lehman, Jr., a staunch advocate of naval air power, began to create a 600- ship navy centered on the attack aircraft carrier.
But Lehman’s policy began to unravel in the latter days of his tenure. It was simply too expensive for a nation spending much of its accumulated wealth on the high-rolling hedonism of the Reagan era. Then, with the future of the United States clouded by a weakened national treasury, the old nemesis—the Soviet Union and its empire in Europe—suddenly and simply dissolved between 1989 and 1991.
Forty years of rationale for a large standing military and naval force built around strategic or nuclear weapons crumbled with the Berlin Wall. For a moment, Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm gave a reprieve to the old Cold War force structure, but by the time the presidential primaries began in 1992, deep cuts in defense spending were imminent, regardless of the outcome of the November elections.
In this broad context, the task for a historian of the U.S. Navy is to ask whether a meaningful precedent exists which by analogy and metaphor can offer guidance in a world where great power rivalry no longer exists on the scale that characterized the century from about 1890 to 1989. Any answer, of course, must be problematic and controversial. But it is arguable that the golden age of frigate diplomacy—the century from the end of the Quasi War until the opening of the Spanish-American War— may hold a key.
In that epoch a modestly scaled U.S. Navy sent proportionately sized ships on global patrols in support of discrete national interests that generally coincided with those of the major western European nations. This was a policy of coalition naval diplomacy no less effective than President George Bush’s recent policy of coalition warfare in the Arabian Gulf. And the success of frigate diplomacy did not depend on budgetary deficits the economy could not bear.
It is time to pay renewed attention to the exploits of Preble and Decatur in the Mediterranean, Perry in Japan, and Shufelt in Korea. If indeed the wheel has come full circle, the heritage of the Navy under sail has regained a relevance that seemed forever lost in the age of the Oregon, the Missouri, and the Forrestal.
Dr. Hagan is the author of This People’s Navy: The Making of American Sea Power (New York: The Free Press, 1991).
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