Anglo-American Naval Cooperation, 1798-1801

The diplomatic rapprochement between Great Britain and the United States during the 1790s was central to the establishment of the United States Navy. The reconciliation of the two English-speaking nations, formalized in the Jay Treaty of 1796, provoked France to unleash its corsairs against American commerce. President John Adams, his cabinet, and the majority of Congress felt compelled to respond to this guerre de course with force, seeing in a closer association with Britain not the source of their dilemma, but the means of immediate national defense.

Between 1798 and 1801 France and the United States waged an undeclared maritime struggle, generally termed the Quasi-War, that catalyzed the creation and rapid expansion of a permanent American naval establishment, a development fostered and, to a great extent, made possible by Britain.¹ The latter supplied its former colonies with the strategic materials of the day and provided operational and logistical support. But whatever the intentions of the diplomats in London and Philadelphia (then the American capital), mutual suspicion, old antagonisms, and bureaucratic inertia threatened the quasi alliance, perhaps even to the point of war.

Britain’s policy toward the United States had shifted in the wake of the general European war that began in 1793. The former colonies, initially subjected to restrictive measures, found themselves prospering as neutrals in a belligerent world. Britain’s wartime commercial expansion, the Proceeds of which financed its own and its allies’ efforts Against the French, depended in part on neutral, especially American, carriers.²

But American vessels sailed unprotected on hostile seas. In the Mediterranean in 1793, Algerine corsairs Preyed upon Yankee ships. This crisis spurred Congress to Pass naval legislation to defend the nation’s commerce. Proposals to purchase warships abroad were rejected, the national mood of independence being reflected in a decision to construct six powerful frigates in American ports, all to be fitted out to the greatest extent possible with domestically produced materials.³

National self-sufficiency was a wise policy, but for the short term it remained elusive. American shipwrights were fully capable of constructing powerful, well-designed ships of war. Eighteen years after their keels were laid, the frigates begun in 1794 would shock Britain itself, inflicting three successive sharp defeats on Royal Navy fifth-rates.⁴ But in the 1790s the supporting manufacturing base, while expanding rapidly, was as yet unable to meet the demands of a naval program, however limited. The concurrent American commercial boom and the passage of additional naval legislation following the French crisis of 1797—measures that ultimately would expand the Navy to over 30 vessels—overtaxed nascent industries. The litany of shortages, too extensive to enumerate here, threatened to undermine the administration’s naval policy. 

Items critically important to navies at the end of the 18th century were armament—cannon and carronades—and copper sheathing and spikes. Americans had hoped that the former could be manufactured in the United States in time to line the decks of the frigates. But copper was another matter.

Uncoppered ships would be outclassed on an ocean where copper-sheathed men-of-war were state of the art.⁵ Rather than send completed frigates abroad to be careened and coppered, American policymakers counted on importing the sheathing and spikes and completing the hulls on the stocks, while mastering the technique themselves. The availability of English copper allowed this to happen, the first shipments arriving in the spring of 1795.⁶ But only in May 1799 did the United States launch a ship of war with domestically produced copper spikes. The French war was over when Paul Revere, who had manufactured the spikes, first rolled sheathing copper late in 1801.⁷

Not until 1798, after several American foundries had failed to meet the terms of their contracts, did the government in Philadelphia recognize that it faced an armament shortfall. A single acceptable carronade, meant to arm the upper decks of the new frigates, had yet to be cast. Heavy naval cannon, 18- and 24-pounders, were in short supply. There were insufficient quantities of even the smaller guns—4-, 6-, 8-, and 12-pounders—as domestic producers raced to meet the demands not only of a suddenly expanding Navy but also those of a commercial community permitted to arm their ships against French cruisers. Between July 1798 and March 1799, 365 merchant ships were armed with 2,723 cannon.⁸

Imports, which had been finding their way into the country long before the 1798 crisis, now became critically significant to the Navy. In July of that year. Secretary of the Treasury Oliver Wolcott, Jr., instructed Rufus King, the American minister to the Court of St. James’s, to draw up to £6,000 from a larger sum deposited with the House of Baring to purchase 4- to 24-pound iron naval guns. These were to be “of the same dimensions, weight & caliber, as those most approved and now used in the . . . Naval Service of Great Britain.”⁹ Wolcott noted that delivery of the guns was “of great importance,” the art of casting cannon not being “properly understood in the United States.”¹⁰

Soon, 225 cannon from Woolwich arsenal were on their way to the United States, where they joined other cannon and carronades imported privately, many for resale to the U.S. Navy. All of the carronades mounted by American warships during the Quasi-War were imported from Britain. At least a third, and perhaps as many as one-half, of the 900 guns carried at the Navy’s peak strength were British, and scores of merchant ships were permitted to arm in British ports for self-defense.¹¹

British willingness to provide assistance was not rooted in any paternalistic feeling toward former colonists. To London, any enemy of France was a potential ally, and in the spring of 1798 it appeared to British foreign secretary Lord Grenville that the Franco-American crisis would “ultimately lead to a state of general and open War.”¹² As he wrote to Robert Liston on 8 June 1798,

The American Government indeed seems prepared for this Result, and accordingly Mr. [Rufus] King has been instructed to solicit a Permission, (which will not be refused him, provided that it be compatible with the Exigencies of the Public Service of this Country) to procure a certain Quantity of Naval and warlike Stores here, of which the United States are represented to be in Want. He has also thrown out some Suggestions on the Possibility of establishing a naval Cooperation between His Majesty and the United States.¹³

Grenville was willing to offer the Americans the loan or sale of surplus Royal Navy ships and to allow Britain’s half-pay officers to serve in the United States Navy. But the Americans had decided in 1794 to build their own men-of-war, and there appeared to be no shortage of officers to command the ships. Moreover, Grenville’s quid pro quo—that “the American Government furnish ... a certain Number of Seamen”¹⁴ for service in the Royal Navy, Liston reported—stood no chance since the Adams administration possessed “no power to force seamen into the publick Service; and it is doubtful whether Congress could be brought to pass a law for that purpose.”¹⁵ On one important point the British and Americans did reach agreement. The latter intended to use their men-of- war to escort convoys of merchant vessels. Such procedures bordered on armed neutrality. Grenville instructed Liston to make clear that Britain would insist on the right to search neutral merchantmen and seize those carrying contraband, whether such ships had an armed escort or not. It was impossible “to authorize any Departure from Usages which have long been established on the Subject.”¹⁶ The Americans acquiesced; Secretary of the Navy Benjamin Stoddert ordered his commanders not to interfere with such searches and seizures by nations other than France, “for it is to be taken for granted, that such Nation will compensate for such Capture, if it shall prove to have been illegally made.”¹⁷

Britain’s full exercise of sea power nevertheless provoked minor crises. On 16 November 1798 off Havana, Cuba, a Royal Navy squadron, under the command of American emigre Commodore John Loring, stopped several American merchantmen escorted by the 20-gun sloop- of-war Baltimore. It was not Loring’s halting of the convoy that provoked the Americans, but his treatment of the Baltimore's commander, Captain Isaac Phillips, who had sailed in haste, without his own commission or that of his ship, a converted merchantman. Loring, short of hands, as were most Royal Navy warships in the Caribbean, pressed a third (55 men) of Phillips’s crew, returning 50 later in the day. Only Grenville’s assurance that Britain did not intend to extend the press to the decks of friendly warships, and the supine behavior of Phillips in the face of Loring’s demands (obvious to the Adams administration when the captain’s report reached Philadelphia), prevented a major crisis.¹⁸

Despite the harmony evident in Anglo-American relations during 1798, the formal alliance that many expected never materialized. Grenville’s grand European coalition appeared to offer a better chance of overthrowing the French Republic than did a colonial policy.¹⁹ For the Americans, British Admiral Horatio Nelson’s victory at the Nile made a larger French expedition to the New World seem unlikely. More important, President John Adams wished to limit his country’s involvement in the global struggle. He resisted domestic pressure that had seemed in the spring on the verge of forcing a call for a declaration of war. When pressed in the fall by Liston on the possibility of an alliance, Adams responded: “The people of this country are at present employed in deliberating upon that question; and it would not perhaps be wise to disturb their meditation—no doubt all will come right by and by.”²⁰ But the moment had already passed. There never would be a de jure alliance, nor would the navies of the two states cooperate as closely as might have been expected.

Nevertheless, both the United States and Great Britain were committed to a naval struggle in the Caribbean, a sea where Americans suffered 70% of their losses to the French guerre de course and the Royal Navy guarded the island possessions of the Empire.²¹ Anglo-American naval cooperation took many forms: signals, logistics, convoying, and policy toward Toussaint L’Ouverture, the black revolutionary leader on Hispaniola.

The need for a method of communication between the two navies intent on operating in the same theater was obvious. In July 1798 both Secretary Stoddert and Vice Admiral George Vandeput, commanding the North America station, independently drew up sets of signals. The latter’s were judged more practical and were adopted. By year’s end, American commanders sailing for the Caribbean were also provided with the appropriate private British signals for men-of-war.²²

Signal sharing prevented fruitless chases and mistaken clashes. The dangers inherent in misidentification were real. In July 1798 His Majesty’s schooner Mosquito chased the American Revenue Service brig Unanimity onto a bar off the South Carolina coast, mistaking her for a French privateer. Only the fortuitous appearance of a pilot boat prevented the destruction of the grounded brig.²³ Two days later the 44-gun American frigate United States, accompanied by the 20-gun sloop-of-war Delaware, nearly engaged the 38-gun British frigate Thetis. They were commanded by John Barry, Stephen Decatur, Sr., and Alexander Inglis Cochrane, respectively.²⁴

Grenville had proposed “joint Protection of the British and American Commerce,”²⁵ namely, escorted convoys- Discussion began in London early in 1798, but no governmental-level accord was ever reached. British escort commanders usually permitted Americans to join convoys! American officers reciprocated. In September 1798 Vandeput agreed to escort American ships bound for Britain from Halifax. But the fullest possible benefit from cooperative convoying was not attained.²⁶

At the operational level in the West Indies, Americans benefited from British logistical support, but not from any official division of labor. During the age of sail the Caribbean was a distant theater for the fledgling American Navy, little closer to the United States, in parts, in terms of sailing days, than was Europe. The major areas of operations and rendezvous were between 1,100 and 2,400 miles from Philadelphia. Early forays had demonstrated the impracticality of operating squadrons based in American ports at such distances; effective operations require local bases.

Most British Caribbean officials viewed an American presence as a source of additional security against the French and a benefit to the local economy. Secretary Stoddert sent virtually all the naval stores required by his squadrons in the West Indies in chartered ships to be warehoused ashore on grounds leased for that purpose. Provisions were also sent south from the United States, but fresh produce and water were drawn locally. Prince Rupert Bay, Dominica, and Basseterre Roads, St. Christopher (or St. Kitts), served as major American bases during the Quasi-War. The jail in Basseterre housed thousands of French prisoners captured by the American squadron during the course of the war.

Along with the supply of copper and ordnance, British logistical support was of critical importance to American operations. Effective prosecution of the war would have been impossible without such cooperation. But not all British officials were helpful. Vice Admiral Sir Hyde Parker, commanding the Jamaica station, denied an American request for a mainmast for the Constellation after her drawn action with la Vengeance in February 1800, a decision that disappointed both Captain Thomas Truxtun and Secretary Stoddert.²⁷ Shortly before, Captain Alexander Murray (commanding the frigate Insurgent) had been supplied with a puttied-up foremast from the Royal Navy arsenal at English Harbor, Antigua, that failed only hours after leaving port.²⁸

Despite the fact that Britain and the United States were fighting a common enemy, no division of labor was ever formalized, nor was operational cooperation established during the Quasi-War. While Liston was kept abreast of American intentions, the minister did not possess comparable information to share with Adams, Pickering, and Stoddert. Major British operations in the Caribbean—for example, the August 1799 attack on Dutch Surinam— came as complete surprises to Stoddert. The U.S. Navy Was forced to rely for cooperation on local British officials in the West Indies, especially Vice Admiral Sir Hyde Parker at Jamaica and Rear Admiral Henry Harvey commanding the Leeward Islands station. Such cooperation was not always forthcoming.

That the British were not coordinating their efforts with die Americans is apparent from Stoddert’s correspondence. He wrote Adams on 25 August 1798:

I know not how the British employ the immense force they have in the Islands—certainly not to afford much Protection to our Trade, nor to annoy much the Cruisers from any Island but that of [Santo] Domingo, where they have views of Conquest.—They some times indeed convoy a few of our vessels; I hope not merely that it may be talked about; yet I suspect we have ourselves alone to depend upon for the effectual Protection of our Commerce.—²⁹

The secretary was being less than fair. The Royal Navy captured two French ships of war and 78 privateers in the Caribbean during 1798. Between May and July, 70 of the ships in the Caribbean were concentrated under Harvey’s command. American losses in the vicinity of Guadeloupe dropped sharply. But by August the British were shifting their forces from the Lesser Antilles to Jamaica, a pattern that continued until 1801.

By the summer of 1799, the Jamaica station outnumbered the Leeward Islands command, although the British redeployment had nothing to do with the arrival of American ships to the islands.³⁰ The diminution of privateering activity at Guadeloupe and, primarily, a deteriorating situation on Hispaniola, dictated the shift of forces. But the effect on American commerce was marked. While four traders were captured by Guadeloupean corsairs in August, 18 were taken in September. From his sources Stoddert was aware of the movement of British strength from the Lesser to the Greater Antilles. In orders drawn up for Captain Alexander Murray late in September, the secretary wrote that he “presumed that the British will attend sufficiently to the island of [Santo] Domingo. . . .”³¹ Murray’s squadron was to cruise in the Leeward and Windward Islands.³²

By the summer of 1799, the Americans also began to shift their naval forces toward Hispaniola. As a result of a three-way diplomatic accord between Britain, the United States, and Toussaint L’Ouverture, President Adams lifted the embargo on trade with Santo Domingo. The task of the U.S. Navy was to protect this trade and to support the Haitian liberator.

Britain, too, was committed to supporting him, but the wisdom of this policy of conciliation with a former slave, principally the work of Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Maitland, escaped both Sir Hyde Parker and Alexander Lindsay, Earl of Balcarres, governor of Jamaica (1794- 1801).³³ These recalcitrants chose instead to pursue their own policy: namely, to perpetuate the civil war on Hispaniola lest a victor consolidate his power and turn his attention to Jamaica.³⁴ When Hispaniolan forces found themselves in need of assistance in 1799, Toussaint L’Ouverture, the Americans, and even Maitland requested that Parker use his naval forces to blockade Jacmel, the focal point of the struggle for control of the southern coast and, ultimately, the entire island. The port town lay besieged on the landward side by Toussaint L’Ouverture’s forces. But it was the latter who were starving and unsupplied because Hispaniola lacked good internal communications. Haitian General Andre Rigaud’s forces received a steady supply from neutral Danish islands, American smugglers, and even Jamaica itself, but Parker’s captains did little to halt this trade. When a desperate Toussaint L’Ouverture persuaded American and British officials to permit the movement of supplies by sea—proscribed by the agreement in force—several ships of the convoy were seized by the frigate Solebay, commanded by Captain Stephen Poyntz, as they rounded Cape Tiburon.³⁵

Parker and Lord Balcarres supported Poyntz’s action, and the Vice Admiralty court at Jamaica condemned the convoy ships. Lord Spencer at the Admiralty did the same (Poyntz was his nephew!), despite the fact that it was his government’s policy to support the black revolutionary and the seized ships carried passports signed by British diplomats. Ultimately, however, Britain paid an indemnity of 1.5 million francs to Toussaint L’Ouverture. It is probably no accident that in the same letter from Spencer to Parker in which he learned of the Admiralty’s support, he was also informed of his impending recall.³⁶

Thus it fell to the U.S. squadron based at Cap Frangois to provide Toussaint L’Ouverture with the necessary support. The frigate General Greene blockaded Jacmel and supported with her guns the desperate Hispaniolan assault in February 1800 that took the town and broke Rigaud’s resistance, and other American ships carried provisions and powder to Hispaniolan forces in the south.³⁷ The American naval schooner Experiment, commanded by Lieutenant Charles Stewart, captured the fleeing Rigaud, who was incarcerated before being exchanged with other American-held prisoners in the Basseterre jail on St. Kitts.³⁸ American naval support was as crucial for Toussaint L’Ouverture as it was extralegal for the Americans.³⁹ But the latter had supported their government’s policy; Parker and the Royal Navy had not.

Elsewhere in the Caribbean, while the Americans did not meet with a reception similar to Parker’s, they nevertheless did not develop operational coordination to any degree. On the whole, the Americans deployed most of their strength in the Lesser Antilles, the British theirs in the Greater Antilles. This seemingly sensible division of labor was not the result of any official or even unofficial agreement, however; the two nations simply chose to use their respective navies to meet their own perceived greatest challenge. For Britain, that was increasingly Hispaniola; for the United States, the French base at Guadeloupe. Nevertheless, Stoddert took British dispositions into consideration as he drew up his own operational plans, and the British were aware, of course, of American dispositions as they shifted their forces to the Jamaica station-

In the Caribbean, then, British and American commanders were left to their own devices. While Parker was notorious for his uncooperative approach, other British commanders and officials were generally helpful, though not prepared to enter into any specific operational plan- The extent of cooperation depended on the whim of the leaders involved. Lord Hugh Seymour, initially in the Leeward Islands and then Parker’s replacement at Jamaica, went to great lengths to smooth out problems that developed between his subordinates and Americans. Anh problems there were: at the time of the British seizure ft Dutch Surinam, and at Curasao, another Dutch possession surrendered to Britain in 1800.

Captain Frederick Watkins, commanding His Majesty’s frigate Nereid, accepted the surrender of Curaçao from a Dutch administration seeking British protection from a French invasion force that had landed on the island from Guadeloupe. But Watkins refused to risk his frigate in narrow St. Anna Bay, across which the invading French had to pass to capture the capital, Willemstad. Only the timely arrival of two American men-of-war—the Merrimack and Patapsco, dispatched from St. Kitts at the request of the American consul on Curaçao—saved the island from conquest and for Britain. Captain Moses Brown ordered the Patapsco into the harbor at night, breaking up the French attack, before landing marines from both ships to stiffen the resistance of the Dutch burgers.⁴⁰

As a reward for this cooperation, American merchantmen in the harbor were promptly seized by Watkins as Prizes, after Brown had been requested and had agreed to sail east to interdict a second French force believed to be on its way. The American consul, who had taken shelter with his family and valuables in the Nereid, had his specie confiscated. American trade was halted. Even the mention of American assistance was omitted from the announcement in the Naval Chronicle of Watkins’s conquest of the island. Seymour, by then at Jamaica, assuaged American anger and resentment, however, by releasing the consul’s money and suggesting that if the American ships were not released by the courts, an appropriate percentage of the Prize money ought to be shared by the American naval officers who had played such an important role in saving the island.⁴¹

British conduct at Surinam and Curaçao, and in continual impressment throughout the West Indies, created a dynamic toward the end of the Quasi-War that pushed the two nations not into closer alliance but toward war. Captains such as Truxtun and Murray, whose Anglophilia had been evident on several occasions, began to display opposite tendencies. Truxtun, taking over the St. Kitts station in the wake of the Curaçao affair, was mortified.⁴² Murray, who in command of the Insurgent in 1799 had escorted Lord Elgin from Lisbon to Gibraltar, put a broadside into a British ship on a dark night late in 1800, displaying no remorse after the event.⁴³

Political leaders, too, were taken aback by the change of mood. Supreme Anglophile Alexander Hamilton feared the effect British actions would have on the public mind as elections neared, for the ruling Federalists already faced a stiff challenge from Thomas Jefferson.⁴⁴ Even Stoddert, whose Navy had been built up with so much British assistance, was contemplating by war’s end the use of his now self-sufficient fleet against Great Britain.⁴⁵ Rather than drifting toward alliance, Britain and the United States were drifting, however slowly, toward war.

A review of Anglo-American naval cooperation during the Quasi-War demonstrates that despite the desire of diplomats to achieve rapprochement, unresolved issues of trade, neutral rights, and impressment aggravated incidents that arose under wartime pressures. Such aggravation could be overlooked by Americans as long as they focused on the French. But what would happen when the French war came to an end? What would happen when new administrations came to power in 1801 in both the United States and Great Britain? Placing Anglo-American relations on sound footing required more than mere desire; it necessitated action on outstanding issues. But between 1801 and 1812, such action was not forthcoming.

Nevertheless, Anglo-American diplomatic rapprochement, however short-lived, was extremely important to the United States. The quasi alliance with Britain permitted the Adams administration to weather a dangerous international crisis that threatened American political and economic independence. Anglo-American naval operations in the Caribbean secured the United States’ growing commercial trade in that region. And British naval assistance proved indispensable, for without Britain’s provision of arms, copper, and logistics support, the U.S. Navy’s expansion and effective operations would have been problematic. A smaller, uncoppered, domestically armed American Navy would have been far less productive, even if worth the effort to construct. Whatever the problems that continued to plague Anglo-American relations, the United States and its Navy owed a great debt, largely unacknowledged, to Great Britain and the Royal Navy.