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9  1 “To raise his voice to defend the right” É tienne Decatur’s fever was a stroke of fortune for the U.S. Navy. A lieutenant in the French navy, Étienne nearly died in the West Indies. Too ill to cross the Atlantic, he was fortunate that his fever came during a brief interlude of peace between the French and British empires . His ship dropped him ashore in a British colony—Newport, in Rhode Island—and sailed home without him. Étienne Decatur’s career in the French navy had ended. A local family named Hill took in the nearly dead French lieutenant. He recovered sufficiently by September 1751 to marry their daughter Priscilla in Newport’s Trinity Church. By this time Étienne was calling himself Stephen; he gave his birthplace as Genoa. He and Priscilla baptized their only son— named Stephen for his father—at Trinity Church in June 1752. The family then moved to Philadelphia, where Stephen Sr. found work on American merchant ships.1 Philadelphia was the British Empire’s second-largest city. People from all over the world came to Philadelphia—from Germany and Sweden, from Africa and Ireland. It was home to St. Joseph’s, the only Roman Catholic church in Britain’s American empire. Immigrants arrived to farm in the rich countryside or to work in the busy seaport. From Philadelphia’s docks were shipped wheat and meat to feed the labor force of the West Indies, and wood and iron to make barrels and ships to carry the empire’s goods. Philadelphia owed its broad streets to the vision of its Quaker founders, and its dynamic energy to the men and women who came there to work. Stephen was dead within a year of reaching Philadelphia. It is unknown whether Priscilla and her baby stayed on or returned to Newport. She may have kept boarders, or she may have been provided for by the merchants who had employed her husband. We do know that by the time the American-born Stephen Decatur turned twenty-one, he was already captain of a Philadelphia merchant ship. His earliest surviving letter reveals that at twenty-two he had little education but did have the judgment, character, and experience to command a ship. On “February the 27th, 1774,” he wrote to the ship’s owner, Joseph Cowperthwait, “sorre to in form” him that the “ise in the Rever” had caused “a grate Deel of trubel” and done great “Damedg” to the ship. He asked Cowperthwait to come as soon as possible, though Decatur had already begun making repairs on the “advice of a Carphinder.”2 10 chapter one Decatur could not spell, but he knew what needed to be done. Presumably he was able to repair the ship. He continued in the merchant service until 1775, the year the strained relationship between Britain and its American colonies snapped. American merchants had a choice: remain loyal to their king and empire and continue receiving the benefits of British trade in the West Indies and protection by the British fleet around the world, or support an uncertain rebellion against that empire. Decatur sided with the rebels. His merchant backers supplied him with a privateer, the Royal Louis, named in hope of winning support from the French Crown; the following year he was given command of the Fair American. Decatur used these ships to attack British merchant vessels. Under the rules of war a successful privateer captain and his crew would have shared the spoils of victory over these merchant ships. Stephen Decatur was a successful captain. At some point in this lucrative but dangerous period Stephen married Ann Pine, from one of Philadelphia’s Irish families, and in early 1777 their first child, a daughter, was born. The child, named Ann Pine Decatur, was still an infant when they had to flee Philadelphia as the British army occupied it. Stephen probably took his two Anns, wife and daughter, by sea to a temporary home, a two-room cabin on the coast at Sinepuxent (now Berlin), Maryland. Ann stayed in Sinepuxent even after the British left Philadelphia in the summer of 1778. She was now pregnant with her second child; her husband was at sea when she gave birth to a son in January 1779. She named the boy Stephen, for his father and grandfather. Captain Decatur was still at sea harassing British merchant ships when Ann and her two children returned to Philadelphia that...

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