Honor, Courage, Commitment: A Museum to Inspire

On 13 June 1813, Captain James Lawrence, a 31-year-old naval officer from New Jersey, directed his 38-gun wooden-hulled frigate, the USS Chesapeake, at the Royal Navy’s HMS Shannon just outside Boston Harbor. The United States had been at war with Great Britain since the previous year, and Lawrence was eager to add his own name to the list of naval victories over the British by such storied American commanders as Isaac Hull and Stephen Decatur.

Instead, Lawrence’s ship was cut down by the Shannon’s devastatingly accurate broadsides. Mortally wounded on the deck of the Chesapeake, surrounded by dying Americans and ruptured rigging, Lawrence cried out, “Don’t give up the ship!”¹

Three months later, Master Commandant Oliver Hazard Perry raised a dark blue flag, sewn by a committee of women from Erie, Pennsylvania, to the main royal masthead of his 493-ton brig USS Lawrence, named after his fallen fellow officer and dear friend. With its white lettering spelling out Lawrence’s dying injunction, the simple blue flag signaled Perry’s hastily assembled rag-tag fleet of schooners, brigs and one sloop to battle a British force on the waters of Lake Erie. After the battle reduced his flagship to a floating wreck, Perry hauled down his battle flag and continued the fight aboard the USS Niagara, eventually winning a storied American victory.²

Seven months later, on 18 April 1814, Congress passed an act requiring the secretaries of war and the navy to collect and preserve the flags captured by the U.S. Navy from enemy ships during wartime.³ But the battle flags and trophies captured by the Navy during the War of 1812, which eventually grew to include Perry’s dramatic banner, never made it to the president’s decision desk. Perhaps fate helped preserve the flags, as only five months after Congress passed the legislation, British troops would set fire to the White House, the Capitol, and the Washington Navy Yard. 

Perry’s famous flag eventually found its way to the Naval Academy Lyceum. Much more than an institution for the preservation of the service’s trophies and relics, the Lyceum was entrusted with a unique mission: to preserve the living history of heroic Navy officers and display it to inspire honor, courage, and commitment. 

The Naval Academy Lyceum’s intellectual roots are connected to the national lyceum movement. This early 19th-century drive to educate and inform the public through lectures and public events was part of a broader movement for social reform with a focus on educating adults. In December 1833, a group of officers publicized their intent to “elevate and adorn the character of our navy” by establishing a formal repository for relics and trinkets gathered abroad, as well as a forum for intellectual cultivation, at the Brooklyn Navy Yard Lyceum.⁴ The Lyceum published its own periodical, and collected rare books, maps, and manuscripts until it was disbanded in 1888 and its collections were sent to Annapolis.

Some years after the Brooklyn Lyceum was founded, George Jones, a uniformed Navy chaplain and a professor of English at the newly opened United States Naval School in 1845, took an avid interest in establishing a lyceum at the school. Jones was an early naval reformer and an advocate for the moral and spiritual empowerment of seamen.⁵

“It is very desirable that a portion of the valuable specimens of natural history brought to the United States by the Exploring Expedition should be placed in the Lyceum of this school,” Jones wrote to Captain Franklin Buchanan in early 1847. Buchanan, the school’s first superintendent, forwarded Jones’ solicitation for artifacts to the Secretary of the Navy.⁶ The effort would bear results beyond Annapolis. In addition to being included in the Naval School Lyceum, a host of artifacts gathered by Lieutenant Charles Wilkes during an exploratory expedition from 1838-1842 would later comprise the first collection of the Smithsonian Institution, founded in 1846.  

Meanwhile, Perry’s gallant banner languished in an attic of the Navy Department building, along with other flags and trophies captured by the Navy. In his annual report of December 1848, Secretary of the Navy John Mason recommended that Congress grant the President power to place and organize the flags and trophies at the Naval School. “Under the act of the 18^th of April 1814, these trophies have not been displayed to the public,” wrote Mason. “The proposed disposition of them would have a good moral effect in exciting the youthful bosoms of the midshipmen who are to be the future commands of our ships of war, an emulation of the virtues and heroism.”⁷

Accordingly, on 9 February 1849, President James Polk ordered the various trophies in the Navy Department be preserved, writing: “The Secretary of the Navy is directed to take measures to cause the flags, standards, and colors, taken by the Navy of the United States, from their enemies in war, to be deposited . . . in the Naval School at Annapolis, under the care of the Superintendent thereof.”⁸  Mason took quick action, and the items in question were sent by express courier to the Naval School. “The flags have this day been received,” wrote Commander George Upshur, Buchanan’s successor as superintendent, the very next day. “We are much gratified by this flattering manifestation of the interest felt by the president and yourself in our infant institution.”⁹

Jones immediately began arranging the flags and trophies in the upper story of the Naval School’s new mess hall building. “[Chaplain Jones] considered it the proudest moment of his life when he became the bearer of this great national treasure to the Naval School,” wrote Thomas Forde.¹⁰ Jones also solicited American commanders of ships abroad, requesting artifacts and trophies to fill the Lyceum. He paid special attention to the flags granted by Polk. “These flags, many of which were mere wrecks of their former selves, we are now putting into such order, that with care, they may last for centuries,” wrote Jones, “and they are displayed so as to be ornamental in themselves, as well as honorable to the service in which we are engaged.”¹¹

During the waning antebellum years of national union, the inaugural classes of what was now the Naval Academy passed their final tests. They performed their graduating exercises while surrounded by the Lyceum’s historic holdings. “The examinations were held in the Lyceum, under the shadow of the naval flags and trophies captured in the several wars of the Republic,” wrote Forde of these events. “Veteran officers in full uniform sat as a board of visitors,” he described, as the young midshipmen “explained the theory of gunnery and the mysteries of seamanship and navigation, rattled off formulas in natural philosophy, and expounded the principles of maritime law.”¹² 

More than one midshipman sensed the moral impact of the Lyceum’s trophies and flags in times of great peril. On 2 November 1860, just four days before the momentous election of Abraham Lincoln, New York midshipman Oliver Ambrose Batcheller wrote his parents about the changes to the Annapolis grounds since the previous year: 

 “In our Lyceum we have all the flags, or nearly all of them, captured from the British ships in 1812, and also the identical flag displayed by Commodore Perry at the battle of Lake Erie. Thus you see we are getting along here in our little world just the same as though you outsiders were not quarreling.”¹³ 

But the tremors of national disunion did shake Annapolis, the capital of Maryland, a state where slavery was legal. Throughout the tense fall and spring of 1860-1861, midshipmen, officers, and even professors resigned, as one after another the southern states seceded from the Union. Distrust and tension filled the air, as did rumors of secessionist activities. The threat of an attack on the school and its training ship—the venerable USS Constitution—spurred the superintendent to action. “Even the peaceful assistant librarian,” Forde himself later reflected, “slept in the trophy room for the better protection of its treasures, and with a murderous horse pistol under his pillow.”¹⁴ Batcheller and his ranks of fellow teenage midshipmen found themselves armed to the teeth on roving patrols of the grounds and standing watches beside the Constitution’s guns. In the dark and chaotic times, one of Batcheller’s colleagues recalled the inspiring flag, with its field of white letters, hanging from the eaves of the Lyceum. “We youngsters felt as if we were really naval officers in earnest as we placed shot and stands of grape alongside each broadside gun,” wrote 17-year-old Kentuckian John C. Pegram. “We had seen the black flag with the white letters forming the gallant Lawrence’s legend, and whether from North or South, we felt bound by his dying injunction, ‘Don’t give up the ship!’”¹⁵

Events prompted the superintendent, Captain George S. Blake, to action. “Having the most reliable information that it is the determination of a great many people of this state that the Constitution shall be the first ship of war to hoist the flag of the Confederate States, and as she is in a very defenseless condition,” Blake wrote Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles on 22 April, “I have ordered Lieutenant George W. Rodgers to take her to New York the moment he is ready to proceed to sea.”¹⁶ After a dramatic final formation two days later, the midshipmen and their officers departed onboard the Constitution for New York, and thence to the school’s wartime berth at Newport, Rhode Island. “All the naval trophies, flags, etc., which were deposited in the lyceum of the academy, were carefully packed, and sent away in the Constitution,” Blake added.¹⁷

Admiral David Dixon Porter took command as superintendent of the Naval Academy in August 1865. A close confidant to President Lincoln and foster brother to Admiral David Glasgow Farragut, Porter was one of the leading figures of the Navy that had emerged victorious in the Civil War. Porter greatly supported the Lyceum. “I am gathering together at the academy, all the models of the vessels that have been built in the navy, or that are now building,” Porter wrote to the commandant of one of the navy yards in 1867.¹⁸ 

Soon the Lyceum, which had moved into the colonnaded building used as the academy’s first dedicated chapel, became filled with models of cannon, ordnance, wooden-hulled vessels, and ironclads. “These things lie in the lofts and are lost sight of, whereas if they were here, they would occupy a prominent position and be studied and known by every officer and midshipman who comes here,” Porter wrote in a letter to a prominent naval constructor.¹⁹ Porter also started an initiative to gather framed paintings of all the navy’s renowned officers. “Every midshipman who graduates here, should be familiar with the history of our old navy officers,” Porter wrote the following year, hinting at an implicit mission to use history to morally develop the students under his charge. “It will stimulate them to emulate their careers.”²⁰

After the Civil War, U.S. politics and society reeled through the years of Reconstruction and grappled with the issue of civil rights for freedmen—millions of African American citizens, many of them former slaves—still residing in the South. After passing the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery in 1865, Republican legislators interested in safeguarding the rights of the freedmen—legislators who were termed radical Republicans by Southern Democrats—passed a plethora of laws and amendments to secure equal protection under the law for African Americans, as well as to combat discriminatory voter-registration policies and mitigate violence against them.²¹

In this volatile political and social atmosphere, James Henry Conyers, a 16-year-old from Charleston, South Carolina, successfully entered the Naval Academy as a cadet-midshipman on 5 October 1872.²² Appointed by Robert B. Elliot, one of South Carolina’s first Black congressmen, Conyers’ first year as the first African American midshipman was plagued by a torrent of targeted violence. Socially ostracized and subjected to incessant insults, Conyers managed to stay at Annapolis until the following June. 

Shortly after graduation week that month, Conyers found himself locked in the school’s boathouse, where he was publicly derided, mocked, and even stoned by a group of raucous fourth-class turn-backs—midshipmen that, like Conyers, failed their annual examination. Days after testifying at a formal court of inquiry and watching nine of his attackers leave the vessel with dismissals in hand, young Conyers sat in his hammock aboard the USS Santee, a three-masted sailing frigate used as a brig and station ship.²³ There, the youth flipped through the pages of his copy of Stephen B. Luce’s Seamanship. Although anxieties doubtless troubled the young man, in that moment Conyers remembered the imposing blue flag that adorned the academy’s lyceum. On the flyleaf of the book, he inscribed the American Navy’s timeless battle cry: “Cadet Midshipman J. Henry Conyers, June 13, 1873, Written on board U.S. Ship Santee. “Don’t give up the ship.” Lawrence.”²⁴

The Lyceum was legally established by Congress in March 1938 as the Naval Academy Museum, and more than 90 years after its founding, it entered Preble Hall, its present premises on the school grounds. Writing several years after Preble Hall’s formal opening ceremonies on 27 May 1939, Captain Harry A. Baldridge, a Class of 1902 graduate, retired rear admiral, and permanent curator of the organization, jokingly wrote of his role and that of the Naval Academy chaplain in an article for Proceedings. “Chaplain Thomas and I refer to one another as the ‘Assistant Curator’ and the ‘Assistant Chaplain,’” wrote Baldridge, “for our missions are identical: the inculcation of moral and spiritual values in the midshipmen during their formative years.”²⁵ Relics evidencing the accomplishment of that mission during the Lyceum’s first three decades remain on display in Preble Hall. Today, the simple textbook bearing James Conyers’ inscription sits opened in a display case, 50 feet away from the flag that inspired him with the moral courage and commitment to persevere for the sake of his country. 

The Naval Academy Lyceum, the Navy’s first true centralized repository for the preservation and exhibition of the service’s sacred trophies and relics, was founded to fulfill a unique mission. “The mission of the Naval Academy Museum is, frankly, to inspire the midshipmen,” wrote Baldridge, “to give them a better appreciation of the brave deeds, the genuine sacrifices, the firm discipline, and the loyal adherence to traditions of a great fighting service of a peace-loving people.”²⁶ More than the preservation of the Navy’s relics and trophies, that mission is to use history—the living history of the U.S. Navy’s officer heroes—to inspire honor, courage, and commitment in the youngest of its aspiring leaders. Set on that course by the steady hand of Reverend George Jones, the Naval Academy Lyceum fulfilled that mission during the first three decades of its existence.