1833 view of one of the yard’s wharves, by William Bennett. Beyond, decommissioned Independence and Columbus are roofed over for protection.
Growth of the Yard
When Captain William Bainbridge arrived in Boston aboard U.S.S. (United States Ship) Constitution in February 1813, he had reason to be satisfied. While the U.S. Army faltered early in the War of 1812, a string of naval victories over British ships was boosting public confidence. Two months earlier, the big frigate commanded by Bainbridge had engaged H.M.S. (His Majesty’s Ship) Java off the coast of Brazil. Java was the faster ship, but Constitution had heavier guns. By skillful maneuvering. Constitution kept them trained on the British frigate, pounding Java with broadsides until its colors came down.
Crew and commander were met with parades in Boston, but Bainbridge had little time to enjoy the acclaim. He was immediately faced with a task that, if not as exciting as a sea battle, was nevertheless formidable. He had temporarily relinquished command of the Charlestown Navy Yard when he sailed on Constitution. While he was gone, Navy Secretary Paul Hamilton charged the yard with building one of the nation’s first ships-of-the-line—the battleships of their day. As things now stood, that was an impossibility: Charlestown simply lacked the facilities for such an undertaking.
Bainbridge, who at 37 had already seen extensive naval action and been imprisoned by Barbary pirates, wrote soon after becoming commandant in 1812: “No period of my naval life has been more industrious or fatiguing.” He was shorthanded and hampered by bad weather, conditions that must have sorely tested the endurance of a man with his temperament: aggressive, volatile, not noted for his patience. When he took command of the Charlestown yard, Bainbridge pressed the Washington bureaucracy to authorize improvements to a facility that suffered, in his words, from “mismanagement and neglect.”
Captain William Bainbridge was the Charlestown yard’s second commandant (1812-15) and captain of the first ship built there, U.S.S. Independence.
Years later, Bainbridge was typically blunt in depicting for the Secretary of the Navy what he saw as the Herculean task assigned him in 1812. The yard had been “in a state of perfect chaos. The public property in a state of ruin and decay ... a boat could not approach at certain periods of the tide within five hundred feet of the shore ... it was even exposed to the inroads of the cattle from [the] highway.”
Even allowing for Bainbridge’s penchant for the dramatic, his description was accurate. The buildings were too few, too small, and in need of repair. The timber needed to complete the repair of the frigate Chesapeake was decayed beyond use. But most pressing was the need for a large stone wharf and building slip. Here was a naval shipyard that could not service a sloop-of-war, let alone build a large frigate or ship-of-the-line. Small vessels could tie up at the modest wooden wharf, but the yard had to rent private wharves for repairing warships. Chesapeake had been languishing since 1809 in a rented berth at $1500 a year.