John Brown and the U.S. Navy
No, the other John Brown.
I was privileged yesterday to kick off a new lecture series organized by the Rhode Island Historical Society. I spoke at the John Brown House Museum in Providence on the subject of John Brown’s relationship to the U.S. Navy. (This is the Rhode Island politician John Brown, not the antebellum abolitionist John Brown.) The talk will eventually go up online, and I’ll try to remember to post the video when it’s available. In the meantime, here’s some of what I had to say:
In December 1797, John Brown offered his 800-ton ship, the George Washington, to the U.S. Navy. He knew that the Navy was desperate for ships to protect American trade, which was being attacked by our erstwhile allies, the French. (This was the conflict later known as the Quasi-War.) Brown was acting characteristically, which is to say, he was acting both patriotically and selfishly. He wanted to strike back against the French, and when he was elected to Congress about a year later, he pushed that position aggressively. The United States had to defend its merchant fleet! But he also saw a business opportunity. He had a lot of ships; the U.S. Navy needed ships. He offered the George Washington to the Navy for $40,000. He said the ship was well-built, copper-sheathed, and “one of the best sailors in America.”
The Navy hesitated, hoping instead that Brown, who was probably the richest man in Rhode Island, would lead the merchants here to build a ship at their own expense and donate it to the Navy. Two hundred and some odd years later, I can almost hear Brown laughing at that, perhaps even in this room. Brown instead wrote to President Washington and other dignitaries, advocating for his ship to be purchased. Eventually, in August 1798, as the Quasi-War was escalating, the Navy was so desperate that the Secretary of the Navy Benjamin Stoddert caved. But the Secretary knew with whom he was dealing. He warned his ship-buying agent, “Mr. Brown, who seems to be a complete master of the art of bargain-making, will probably ask more. You must do the best you can with him, and let the public be screwed as little as possible.” Sure enough, the George Washington proved to be a lemon, a miserable ship, described by one of its captains as “worse than useless.” The Navy sold it in 1802—it wasn’t worth the upkeep cost. But John Brown got his money.
I then rewound the story to the American Revolution to look at John Brown’s role in lobbying for the establishment of the Rhode Island Navy. That small force fought ships from the British Navy in Narragansett Bay in June 1775 in one of the first naval engagements of the war. And in October, delegates from Rhode Island helped convince the Continental Congress to establish the Continental Navy. That’s why the U.S. Navy says that its birthday is October 13, 1775, which means it turns 250 this year. That anniversary is the reason I was asked to give the lecture.
It was an intellectually challenging talk to design because I had to connect John Brown (whose house I was in) to the Rhode Island Navy (which he did not found) to the Continental Navy (for which he was a contractor) to the U.S. Navy (which he ripped off in 1798, as described above). If that all sounds a little dubious, well, it probably was. The exercise made me think about how historians tell stories at different levels, and what the risks are when you try to move from one to another. Here’s what I mean:
John Brown is a captivating individual. He was a slave trader, a patriot, and a corrupt contractor. His biography engages an audience, especially when that audience is sitting in his house. His famous family lent their name to Brown University and then went on to become one of the richest families of the Gilded Age. There’s lots to unpack about John Brown, and it’s easy to maintain a narrative thread with a life as full as his.
But in order to really understand what John Brown was doing and why, you have to provide your audience with context. Every biographer does this, of course, though each does it to different degrees. It was natural that my talk would start with John Brown and then move to discuss the Continental Navy, privateering, and other aspects of sea power in the last quarter of the eighteenth century.
The problem I ran into was that I couldn’t help myself—I couldn’t stop there. I don’t think you can understand “the Continental Navy, privateering, and other aspects of sea power in the last quarter of the eighteenth century” without understanding the international context. Moreover, that’s the expertise that I was able to bring to this talk. Everything I knew about John Brown and the Continental Navy I got from secondary sources, but I’ve been thinking and writing about British and French perspectives on sea power in the last quarter of the eighteenth century for much of my academic life.
If I was going to leverage my expertise, though, I was at risk of ending up a very long ways away from John Brown. The question was whether I could connect two layers of context (context for John Brown and context for the context for John Brown) back to John Brown.
What I ended up with was a story about the British perspective on the Continental Navy. The British Navy was massively larger than the Continental Navy, but the colonies still won their independence. I looked at some of the reasons why, focusing mainly on the challenges that the British faced in fighting insurgent colonists across an ocean without spooking the French and Spanish into joining the war. Here’s how I tried to tie it all together at the end:
So we should celebrate the founding of the Continental Navy this year in October, and we should highlight the specific contribution that John Brown and other Rhode Islanders made to making the Continental Navy a reality. We should also be aware of the Continental Navy’s strengths and weaknesses, and its loose connection to today’s U.S. Navy (which, whisper it, wasn’t really founded until ~1794). But ultimately, what I hope I’ve shown today, is that we should also be realistic about the challenges that the British faced. It was not obvious then, and indeed it’s not obvious now, how the British could have won the war. That’s not the same as saying that American independence was inevitable. People like John Brown had to go win it, and he played an important if complicated role in making that happen. But I hope the next time you read that our scrappy Founding Fathers overcame the most powerful military force in the world, you’ll pause to reflect on the difficulties that force faced in trying to suppress someone like John Brown.
In the business, that’s known as forcing a connection.
But I’m still glad that I tried to pull it off since every biographer has to decide how much context to give. This was good practice, if nothing else. It was also a lot of fun to give the talk, and I had some great chats with the audience afterwards about my distinct lack of a Rhode Island accent. As I said, I’ll post a link to the video when I have it.