American Naval History, 1607-1865: Overcoming the Colonial Legacy

1 The American Colonies and theBritish Navy, 1607–1775

i The naval great powers during the age of sailing ship warfare that ended in the middle of the nineteenth century were, with the exception of Great Britain, not those of the great age of battleship and aircraft carrier warfare during the first half of the twentieth century. The other great sailing navies, those of France, Spain, and the Netherlands, played a relatively minor role during the twentieth century. Instead the British navy was joined by three newly arrived naval great powers: Japan, Germany , and the United States. All three launched major building programs during the final decades of the nineteenth century and quickly became prominent once the United States defeated Spain in 1898 and Japan defeated Russia in 1904– 1905. The groundwork for this ascendancy was laid earlier, however. In the middle of the nineteenth century the governments of Germany, Japan, and the United States greatly increased their power. Henceforth they were able to use their economic growth to become naval great powers. The equivalent of the German unification of 1871 and Japan’s Meiji Restoration of 1867–68 was the American Civil War. one The American Colonies and the British Navy, 1607–1775 2 the american colonies and the british navy Although the two decades after the end of the Civil War were a period of naval retrenchment, the Civil War had laid the foundation for the United States to overcome the attitudes, practices, and conditions that had hindered the growth of its navy. These hindrances were part of the legacy of America’s colonial past. Between the founding of Jamestown in 1607 and the beginning of the American Revolution in 1775, Britain’s American colonies developed important shipping and fishing industries but undertook little independent naval activity. This period of subservience to the mother country and to the needs of the British navy was very influential, however, in the subsequent development of the American navy. The Revolution did not eliminate America’s colonial legacy. For the United States to become a naval power, it had to overcome a number of the things it inherited from its colonial past: a weak industrial base compared with naval great powers like Britain and France, a distrust of government and hence a reliance on private enterprise, sectionalism and a preference for state government rather than national government, an inability or reluctance to raise by taxation the money necessary for military and naval activity, and an obsession with internal expansion that necessitated a substantial investment on the frontier rather than on the sea. All of these obstacles were present almost from the beginning of English settlement in North America. ii The English colonization of North America began in 1607 (after earlier failures); the first permanent French colony was established a year later. Both Virginia and New France began as private business investments approved by the respective 3 the american colonies and the british navy crowns. This was a change from the sixteenth-century Spanish model in which the rulers of Castile and Aragon played (at least in theory) a direct role in exploration and colonization. Soon, however, the French colony was taken over by the royal government and administered from Europe. In contrast the more than a dozen English colonies established between 1607 and 1732 differed not only from the colonies of other nations but even from one another.1 Some colonies like Connecticut had their own charters and administered their own affairs under very loose government supervision. Others like Pennsylvania were run by proprietors, who had veto power over the decisions reached by their colonial assemblies. Still others like Virginia became royal colonies with a governor appointed by the crown. Even royal governors, however, had to share power with their locally elected assemblies, which, like the English House of Commons (or, after the 1707 union with Scotland , the British House of Commons), used their control over the budget to gain a share of political power.2 Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries , the struggle for power between assemblies and their governors or proprietors left many Americans distrustful of executive authority; even the inhabitants of Connecticut and Rhode Island, where governors were popularly elected, distrusted the kings of England, who might take their charters from them. Moreover, the British government exercised its own veto power over most colonial legislation, using it, for example, to control the issuing of currency by individual colonies . Until the middle...