Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy

"Ian Tolls is a wonderful writer. Six Frigates is the story of the Navy before and during the war of 1812. One might think: Why read about a war which had little impact on the course of American history? Six Frigates is fascinating, though, and it’s an important read because the US Navy’s DNA comes out of this conflict. Six Frigates highlights an interesting fact: that the US Navy’s ship design was extraordinarily innovative from its inception. The title, Six Frigates , is a reference to the Naval Act of 1794. After the American Revolution , as part of that boom-bust process we talked about, the Navy was eliminated. It had to be restarted by the Naval Act of 1794. The bill called for construction of six frigates, which are intermediate-sized ships. These new American ships were far superior, technologically, than virtually anything built by other navies at the time. They were faster than any ship that could outgun them. If they encountered an opponent with with bigger guns, they could simply run away. And if any ship was fast enough to catch one of them, the US frigates could outgun it. The white oak used in construction was incredibly hard and durable. The result was a class of magnificent fighting ships. The USS Constitution , which is still moored in Boston Harbor, is the most famous of the six frigates. The values that still shape the Navy also come from the War of 1812, in which the US Navy was clearly the underdog. The famous saying of James Lawrence, the Captain of the Chesapeake —“Don’t give up the ship!”—remains the governing mantra of the US Navy. It represents a commitment to never quit, to be willing to make great sacrifices to achieve victory. That principle is beaten into students’ heads at the US Naval Academy. So, S ix Frigates is a wonderful read that will help you understand the values of the Navy. This quote became famous because it was considered normal in many navies to strike your colors and surrender to greater force. Fighting to the finish when you were overmatched was not common in Enlightenment Era naval wars. Surrender was much more common. So yes, this is something special about American naval culture. The other thing that is unique about US Naval culture is, again, that the Navy has been ignored for long periods in our history. You can see this today, despite the Navy’s importance to our defense. If you ask the average American even the most basic questions about the navy, they would have a hard time giving you an answer. The size of the US Navy hasn’t been a political issue in a presidential campaign since the Reagan Administration, even though the US is a major maritime nation. So our Navy often has the unenviable task of preparing for war without enough resources. That creates a culture that emphasizes adaptation and rapid innovation in the face of long odds. The United States military has four major branches—Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marines—but there are only three military departments: Army, Air Force and Navy. The Marines are an integral part of Navy Department. This has many ramifications. For example the Marines don’t have their own military academy. Budding Marine Corps officers go to the Naval Academy and Navy Reserve Officers Training Corps. The relationship between the Marines and the Navy is a byproduct of two historical developments. One is that the Marines began as sea soldiers—sharpshooters who would man the crow’s nests high up in the rigging of our sailing ships and shoot down at the crew of opposing ships. And during World War II, the naval identity of the Marines was reinforced by the fact that the Marines pioneered and specialized in amphibious assault. The Marine Corps remains very much part of the Naval service today. The Corps developed as a separate service in part because Marines did not need to be sailors. They did not need to know how to handle sailing craft. They only needed to understand their piece of naval warfare, which was combat. So, it’s a separate service, with its own budget, but it’s very deeply integrated into the Navy. As a Marine, I had two long deployments on Navy ships, and that’s very common in a Marine Corps career. Today, the Marines engage in joint planning with the Navy to prepare for potential maritime conflicts in the Baltic Sea, Black Sea, and the Pacific. What an interesting question! Historically, sailors were sailors, interchangeable. For a big chunk of the 19th century, a commercial sailor and a member of the Navy had similar sets of skills and some sailors might move back and forth between the private sector and public service. That changed when we moved from the age of sail to the era beginning with the Civil War when naval technology became much more advanced. You start getting armaments and propulsion systems that are unlike anything used in commercial craft, and that made the Navy a thing apart. Today, for example, a naval officer used to commanding subs and ships powered by nuclear propulsion are not likely to seek work commanding a non-nuclear civilian ship. There is no longer much intersection between those two worlds."