The American ships of the line authorized in 1816 never fired a shot in anger. Though a few of them were dispatched one at a time to cruise the Mediterranean, they were afterward mostly laid up in ordinary. The kinds of tasks assigned to the U.S. Navy after 1820 were simply inappropriate for such huge—and expensive to operate—warships. The day-to-day duties of the U.S. Navy involved dealing with smugglers, pirates, and the illegal slave trade, and deploying ships of the line to deal with such issues was like hitting a tack with a sledgehammer. In addition the crumbling economy during the Panic of 1819 made the continued expenditure of $1 million a year for ships of the line seem foolish. The successful completion of treaties with both England and Spain demilitarized the Great Lakes and stabilized the country’s southern border, which eased concerns about a future foreign war, and the petition of the Missouri Territory for admission to the Union as a slave state that same year turned the attention of the country inward to the West rather than outward toward the sea.
As a result of all these factors, in 1821 Congress halved the annual appropriation for the big ships of the line and committed the money thus saved to the construction of sloops and even smaller schooners. That same year Congress also passed legislation to construct large covered sheds where the ships of the line and frigates, stripped of their masts and rigging, could be housed. Though the navy was permanently established, U.S. policy continued to reflect a Jeffersonian view that the big ships should be held in reserve as a kind of militia navy, while the daily activities of a peacetime navy were carried out by small squadrons of sloops and schooners acting as a constabulary force on distant stations abroad.
The first and foremost of these overseas stations was in the Mediterranean. While the Barbary peril had been all but eliminated by 1830, the United States continued to maintain a Mediterranean squadron, though its role became more ornamental than functional. One by one the big new ships of the line made their debut as flagships of the American Mediterranean squadron, and when combined with two or three frigates plus an equal number of sloops, the U.S. Navy could make quite a show. Using Port Mahon in Spanish Minorca as their base, the ships of the squadron cruised the periphery of the Mediterranean from Suez to Gibraltar. At each stop the local authorities were likely to host a dinner or a ball to honor the officers of the squadron while the sailors enjoyed shore leave in the way of sailors everywhere. As one officer recalled, orders to the Mediterranean were much like an invitation to “a perpetual yachting party.” Other, much smaller squadrons operated in the West Indies, off Africa, in the Pacific, off Brazil, and in the East Indies to protect American trade and act as a kind of diplomatic presence to oversee U.S. interests abroad.
The greatest threat to American trade continued to be from pirates, now in the Caribbean rather than the Mediterranean. Pirates had always been a concern in the West Indies, but their numbers increased dramatically during the 1820s due to special circumstances. Beginning in 1810 several of Spain’s unhappy colonies in Central and South America initiated efforts to win their independence via wars of liberation. These revolutionary governments were generous in passing out letters of marque to prey on Spanish trade. Operating mostly in tiny single-masted cutters and schooners—even the occasional rowboat—these privateers found slim pickings in targeting Spanish vessels, and they soon began to seize any merchant ship they could catch. By 1820 most of them had metamorphosed from licensed privateering into open piracy, and in 1822 the U.S. Navy established the West Indies Squadron to deal with them.
The first commander of that squadron was Commodore James Biddle, who established his headquarters at Key West, Florida. Biddle found that the four big frigates assigned to him were all but useless against the small, shallow-draft pirate vessels, and it became evident that the task of combating the pirates could be accomplished more effectively and more cheaply by smaller and handier schooners and sloops, often operating independently.
The young lieutenants who commanded the ships of this “mosquito navy,” as it was sometimes called, were endowed with broad responsibilities. Since it could take months to communicate with the government in Washington, or even with their commodore at Key West, they often had to make decisions on their own based on the circumstances of the moment. In September 1822 Lieutenant Stephen Cassin, commanding the sloop Peacock, discovered five pirate vessels taking shelter at Bahia Honda on the north coast of Spanish Cuba. He captured all five of the pirate vessels and then destroyed the settlement that had sheltered them even though it was in Spanish territory. Six months later, in the spring of 1823, Lieutenant Cornelius Stribling also attacked pirate vessels in Cuban waters not far from Havana, landing a shore party to pursue them when they fled inland. And three months after that two U.S. Navy schooners shelled a pirate fort on the south coast of Cuba, landing a shore party under twenty-two-year-old Lieutenant David Glasgow Farragut to complete the destruction. The Navy Department subsequently approved and even applauded all of these actions.
There were limits to what a U.S. Navy officer might do, however. In 1824 Captain David Porter, who had replaced Biddle as commander of the West Indian Squadron, sent two officers ashore in Spanish Puerto Rico to investigate whether the pirates were using the town of Fajardo to house some of their captured booty. The two officers wore civilian clothes, and Spanish authorities, suspicious of their activities, detained them, though only for a day. Nevertheless Porter believed this was an intolerable discourtesy, and he responded by landing two hundred sailors and marines, taking possession of the town, and threatening to destroy it if the Spanish did not issue a formal apology. Porter got his apology, but upon his return to the United States the next year he was court-martialed and suspended from duty for six months for exceeding his orders. To Porter this was an insult to his honor, and he resigned his commission, later accepting an admiral’s commission from the government of Mexico. This episode reflected the fact that what naval officers in the Age of Sail called “honor” was often a kind of personal touchiness that led to both duels at home and international incidents abroad.
Pirates were a problem in other parts of the world too. One trouble spot was in the Far East, especially in the much-traveled Straits of Malacca between Malaya and Sumatra. In 1831 three boatloads of armed natives attacked the American merchantman Friendship near the village of Quallah Battoo on Sumatra (now Kuala Batu in Indonesia). The crew of the Friendship successfully fought off the pirates, but three of their number were killed in the struggle. President Andrew Jackson had a low threshold of tolerance for what he perceived to be insults to the national honor, and when he learned of the attack on the Friendship, he ordered the frigate USS Potomac to “chastise” the guilty parties. The Potomac, commanded by Commodore John Downes, arrived in the area a year later, in February 1832. Downes dispatched a landing party of 282 men, who burned the ships in the harbor and seized the forts on shore. Then he opened a general bombardment of the town until local leaders raised the white flag. The chiefs pledged never again to interfere with American shipping, but occasional piratical attacks continued, and six years later, in January 1837, a second expedition to Quallah Battoo by the frigate Columbia and the sloop John Adams produced similar results. These punitive expeditions were generally popular in America, when they were noted at all. In the nineteenth century few Americans mourned the deaths of a few hundred natives in a faraway place they had never heard of.
If duty in the Mediterranean was the most pleasant, and service against pirates was the most exciting, duty in the African Squadron was the most despised. This was due mainly to the uncomfortable and even perilous conditions along what was called the Guinea coast, where the weather was oppressive and disease was rampant. Malaria in particular, then believed to be carried by the hot winds blowing off the African coast, was responsible for scores of deaths on U.S. ships. In addition the duty itself—stopping and searching slave ships filled with their human cargo—was repellant, even if it occasionally meant liberation for those on board.
Congress had declared the importation of slaves from Africa illegal after January 1, 1808, though there was no serious effort to interdict that human traffic until 1821, when the navy established an African Squadron. Almost at once, however, its mission became controversial. In part this was because the navy found the work so revolting, but an additional factor was the sectional dispute over the Missouri Compromise (1819–21), which made southern representatives sensitive to implied criticisms of slavery as a labor system. After only two years Congress withdrew its support, and the African Squadron ceased to exist. After that only the Royal Navy made any serious effort to suppress the slave trade. The owners of the illicit slave ships saw an opportunity in these circumstances. Aware of how sensitive the Americans were about interference with their ships, slavers of every nationality—or no nationality at all—began flying the Stars and Stripes in order to deter inspection by the British. When the British saw through this ruse and stopped the ships anyway, the United States objected on principle.
This Anglo-American dispute was resolved in the Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842, which, in addition to settling several outstanding border issues between the United States and Canada, also dealt with the situation off Africa. By its terms the British pledged to stop searching vessels flying the American flag, and the Americans pledged to police those vessels themselves by maintaining a naval squadron off Africa that consisted of a force of “not less than eighty guns.” In 1843 Oliver Hazard Perry’s younger brother, Matthew Calbraith Perry, commanded the first American squadron sent to Africa under this new requirement. While Perry’s ships did stop and search a number of illegal slave ships, his orders from the secretary of the navy made it clear that his primary mission was to ensure that the British kept their word and left American merchantmen alone. Moreover, like U.S. Navy squadron commanders elsewhere, Perry also punished local rulers who, in his view, infringed on American rights or attacked American citizens.
In addition to suppressing pirates and protecting American interests around the world, the U.S. Navy of the early nineteenth century also engaged in exploration and scientific investigation. Lieutenant Matthew Fontaine Maury, barred from sea duty by a leg injury, spent most of his career studying ships’ logs in order to track the oceans’ currents and prevailing wind patterns. His resulting charts brought him international recognition as the Pathfinder of the Seas. The U.S. government also sponsored a number of voyages aimed at advancing geographic and scientific knowledge.
The largest of these was the Great United States Exploring Expedition, which got under way in August 1838 and spent four years circumnavigating the globe. Lieutenant Charles Wilkes commanded the expedition, and though he proved to be an unpopular martinet, it resulted in a number of signal accomplishments. One was confirmation that there was a seventh continent at the South Pole, and a section of Antarctica is still named Wilkes Land. Another was the acquisition of a large number of curious specimens from the South Seas that subsequently made up much of the original collection of the new Smithsonian Institution, established in 1846. Overall the expedition covered eighty-five thousand miles and charted 280 islands, most of them in the South Pacific, as well as mapping about 1,500 miles of the Antarctic coastline.
Commercially the most important of the navy’s overseas expeditions in this era was the one led by Matthew Perry to Japan in 1852–54. In command of two steam frigates, the propeller-driven Mississippi and the paddle-steamer Susquehanna, plus some smaller ships, Perry demonstrated that the navy could serve not only as a tool for chastising natives but also as an effective instrument of American diplomacy. By exercising a combination of firmness and patience, Perry successfully concluded an agreement in which the reclusive Japanese government pledged to protect shipwrecked mariners, to allow foreign ships to re-coal at selected ports, and to open conversations about establishing commercial relations. The ensuing Treaty of Kanagawa (1854) proved to be the opening wedge that brought Japan into the modern world.
Several events in this era contributed to a modest sea change in the character of the officer and enlisted force. Until the 1840s a young man became an officer in the U.S. Navy by being appointed a midshipman as a teenager and learning on the job while at sea. When he felt ready, he took an exam, which, if passed, made him a passed midshipman eligible for appointment to lieutenant when a vacancy occurred. With the emergence of steam engines as well as larger and more complex ordnance, aspiring officers had to master more technical and theoretical subjects. It was partly because of this that the U.S. Naval Academy was established at Annapolis, Maryland, in 1845, forty-three years after the U.S. Military Academy at West Point opened its doors, though the Naval Academy did not initiate a four-year program until 1853.
The enlisted force too was changing. From the very beginning the only qualification for service as a sailor in the U.S. Navy was a strong back. Most of the work on board ships in the Age of Sail consisted of moving heavy objects either by block and tackle or by brute force, and anyone who could pull on a rope or wrestle with a gun—and who could tolerate the severe discipline—was welcome. This often made for a polyglot crew, and U.S. Navy ships generally had large contingents of foreigners, Native Americans, and free blacks, as well as American citizens. The numbers are hard to pin down with precision, but during the Age of Sail perhaps 15 percent of the navy’s enlisted force was African American. During the sectional feuding of the 1830s and 1840s, pressure from southern congressmen reduced the number of blacks in the navy to around 10 percent, but it rose again during the Civil War to as high as 20 percent.
Another change during the 1850s was the abolition of flogging, the beating of a bound sailor by a petty officer who wielded a short whip with nine knotted ropes called a cat-of-nine-tails. Given the rough character of the enlisted force, physical punishment was the standard penalty for a wide variety of major and minor infractions, and ship captains could prescribe anywhere from a dozen to a hundred lashes depending on the seriousness of the offense. For most such punishments all hands were called to bear witness in the belief that this offered a profound deterrent to future misconduct. It was unquestionably barbarous, but also effective, and it had been a part of naval life for more than a century. Nevertheless in September 1850 Congress declared it illegal. Though many senior officers grumbled about the ban, it stuck, and punishments afterward consisted of the denial of shore liberty, confinement in irons, or a loss of pay.
A decade later, in the midst of the Civil War, the U.S. Navy abolished another long-standing tradition, this one much beloved by the enlisted sailors. This was the daily grog ration: a half pint of rum or whisky, cut with water, that was issued to every sailor on board, even teenagers, once a day. Though the tradition was common to all navies and predated American independence, the United States was the first nation to abolish it, on September 1, 1862. Spirits continued to be served in the officers’ mess until 1914, when Navy Secretary Josephus Daniels put a stop to that too, and the U.S. Navy became “dry.”
The years between 1820 and 1850 also marked a surge in American nationalism. The perceived victory in the war with Britain and the so-called Era of Good Feelings that followed fed a national consensus that the United States occupied a special place in history and was destined to be both an example for the world (the City on a Hill) and master of the western hemisphere. This latter notion contributed not only to a general westward migration but also to active efforts to consolidate and expand American sovereignty generally.
In Florida, which the United States obtained from Spain in the Adams-Onis Treaty of 1819, the United States fought a messy and frustrating war with the Seminole Indians between 1835 and 1842. The navy’s role in that conflict was mostly to move troops along the coast and up various rivers, though it also conducted expeditions deep into the interior, including one into the heart of the Everglades, where these swamp sailors encountered swarms of mosquitoes and what one described as “a sea of mud.” After years of frustrating and costly combat, the war ended in a draw. The government decided simply to ignore those elusive Seminoles who refused removal to the West and declared the war at an end.
While the United States fought the Seminoles in Florida, Texans won their independence from Mexico, and almost at once they began to petition for admission to the Union. Aware that Mexico had never fully accepted Texas independence and concerned that adding Texas to the national domain would reignite the sectional dispute over slavery, Congress demurred. In 1845, however, the expansionist James K. Polk administration pushed through a Texas statehood bill. In the aftermath the Mexican government disputed the location of the Texas-Mexico border, insisting that the Nueces River, and not the Rio Grande, was the actual boundary. When patrols from the two countries collided in the disputed area, Polk called for war.
The Mexican-American War (1846–48) was essentially a land war. Indeed the tiny Mexican Navy consisted of only two seagoing warships, and recognizing that they could have no possible impact on the war, the Mexicans sold them to Britain when the war began. The U.S. Navy thus found itself in the unprecedented position of being a superior naval power in a foreign war. One large naval squadron, initially commanded by Commodore David Connor but subsequently and more effectively under Matthew Perry, operated along the Gulf coast of Mexico, while another, much smaller squadron operated along the California coast.
The largest and most important naval operation of the war was the successful landing of an American army that eventually numbered some ten thousand men on the coast of Mexico near Vera Cruz in the spring of 1847. In the first large-scale amphibious operation in American history, soldiers from army transports climbed down into smaller surfboats and were rowed to the beach by navy sailors. Vera Cruz surrendered after a two-week siege, and Major General Winfield Scott began a decisive campaign to Mexico City, where U.S. Marines from the fleet stood guard in the “halls of Montezuma.”
The success of American arms in the war with Mexico added more than half a million square miles to the national domain, including all of what is now California, Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico, plus parts of Utah and Colorado. It did little, however, to affect American military or naval policy. Though professional officers had commanded the American armies, volunteer soldiers did most of the fighting, which confirmed the American commitment to a militia army. Similarly, though the U.S. Navy had performed satisfactorily, there had been no celebrated naval triumphs, and the navy remained both small by European standards and marginal to American policymakers.