[28] The 19th of February, 1795, was a day of National Thanksgiving ordered by proclamation of President Washington.
CHAPTER XII
THE BUILDING OF THE ESSEX
(1799)
Twentieth century battleships are built at a cost of six or seven millions of dollars with the likelihood of becoming obsolete before they fire a gun in action. It is a task of years to construct one of these mighty fabrics, short-lived as they are in service, and crammed with intricate machinery whose efficiency under stress of war is largely experimental.
One hundred and ten years ago there was launched from a Salem shipyard a wooden sailing frigate called the Essex. She was the fastest and handsomest vessel of the United States navy and a dozen years after she first flew the flag of her country she won immortal renown under Captain David Porter. There is hardly a full-rigged sailing ship afloat to-day as small as the Essex, and in tonnage many modern three-masted coasting schooners can equal or surpass her. Yet her name is one of the most illustrious in the list of a navy which bears also those of the Constitution, the Hartford, the Kearsarge and the Olympia.
It was the maritime war with France at the end of the eighteenth century which caused the building of the Essex. When American commerce was being harried unto death by the frigates and privateersmen of “the Terrible Republic” as our sailors called France, our shadow of a navy was wholly helpless to resist, or to protect its nation’s shipping. At length, in 1797, Congress authorized the construction of the three famous frigates, Constitution, Constellation and United States, to fight for American seamen’s rights. The temper and conditions of that time were reflected in an address to Congress delivered by President John Adams on November 23, 1797, in which he said:
“The commerce of the United States is essential, if not to their existence, at least to their comfort, growth and prosperity. The genius, character and habits of our people are highly commercial. Their cities have been formed and exist upon commerce; our agriculture, fisheries, arts and manufactures are connected with and dependent upon it. In short, commerce has made this country what it is, and it cannot be destroyed or neglected without involving the people in poverty or distress. Great numbers are directly and solely supported by navigation. The faith of society is pledged for the preservation of the rights of commercial and seafaring, no less than other citizens. Under this view of our affairs I should hold myself guilty of neglect of duty if I forebore to recommend that we should make every exertion to protect our commerce and to place our country in a suitable posture of defence as the only sure means of preserving both.”
The material progress of this country has veered so far from seafaring activities that such doctrine as this sounds as archaic as a Puritan edict for bearing arms to church as a protection against hostile savages. One great German or English liner entering the port of New York registers a tonnage equaling that of the whole fleet of ships in the foreign trade of Salem in her golden age of adventurous discovery. Yet the liner has not an American among her crew of five hundred men, and not one dollar of American money is invested in her huge hull. She is a matter of the most complete indifference to the American people, who have ceased to care under what flags their commerce is borne over seas.
On the other hand, the shipping of Salem and other ports was a factor vital to national welfare a century ago. But when John Adams preached the necessity of resorting to arms to protect it, the country was too poor to create a navy adequate for defense. Forthwith the merchants whose ships were being destroyed in squadrons by French piracy offered to contribute their private funds to build a fleet of frigates that should reinforce the few naval vessels in commission or authorized.
It was a rally for the common good, a patriotic movement in which the spirit of ’76 flamed anew. The principles that moved the American people were voiced by James McHenry, Secretary of War in 1789, in a letter to the Chairman of the Committee of the House of Representatives for the Protection of Commerce:
“France derives several important advantages from the system she is pursuing toward the United States. Besides the sweets of plunder obtained by her privateers she keeps in them a nursery of seamen to be drawn upon in conjunctures by the navy. She unfits by the same means the United States for energetic measures and thereby prepares us for the last degree of humiliation and subjection.