1790s naval mobilization
A01=Frederick Leiner
American maritime resistance
Author_Frederick Leiner
Category=JWCK
Category=NHW
citizen-funded naval defense
early American warship construction
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Frederick Leiner
French diplomatic crisis
French-American tensions
merchant-led shipbuilding
naval history early America
naval politics Founding Era
Newburyport naval effort
private funding for defense
public-private naval initiatives
Quasi-War with France
ship subscriptions 18th century
subscription warships
U.S. Navy origins
USS Boston
USS Essex
USS Philadelphia
Product details
- ISBN 9781612514932
- Weight: 127g
- Dimensions: 152 x 228mm
- Publication Date: 02 Oct 2014
- Publisher: Naval Institute Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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The title of this book comes from a toast popular with Americans in the late 1790s—“millions for defense, not a cent for tribute.” Americans were incensed by demands for bribes from French diplomats and by France’s galling seizures of U.S. merchant ships, and as they teetered toward open war, were disturbed by their country’s lack of warships. Provoked to action, private U.S. citizens decided to help build a navy. Merchants from Newburyport, Massachusetts, took the lead by opening a subscription to fund a 20-gun warship to be built in ninety days, and they persuaded Congress to pass a statute that gave them government “stock” bearing 6 percent interest in exchange for their money.
Their example set off a chain reaction down the coast. More than a thousand subscribers in the port towns pledged money and began to build nine warships with little government oversight. Among the subscription ships were the Philadelphia, later lost on the rocks at Tripoli; Essex, the first American warship to round the Cape of Good Hope; and Boston, which captured the French corvette Le Berceau.
This book is the first to explore in depth the subject of subscribing for warships. Frederick Leiner explains how the idea materialized, who the subscribers and shipbuilders were, how the ships were built, and what contributions these ships made to the Quasi-War against France. Along the way, he also offers significant insights into the politics of what is arguably the most critical period in American history.
Their example set off a chain reaction down the coast. More than a thousand subscribers in the port towns pledged money and began to build nine warships with little government oversight. Among the subscription ships were the Philadelphia, later lost on the rocks at Tripoli; Essex, the first American warship to round the Cape of Good Hope; and Boston, which captured the French corvette Le Berceau.
This book is the first to explore in depth the subject of subscribing for warships. Frederick Leiner explains how the idea materialized, who the subscribers and shipbuilders were, how the ships were built, and what contributions these ships made to the Quasi-War against France. Along the way, he also offers significant insights into the politics of what is arguably the most critical period in American history.
Frederick C. Leiner is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, he earned an M.Phil. in international relations from Cambridge as a Thouron Scolar and later received a law degree from the University of Virginia. The author of a dozen articles on maritime and legal history published in American Neptune, the Mystic Seaport Log, the American Journal of Legal History, and other journals, he was awarded the 1993-94 Vice Admiral Edwin P. Hooper Prize by the Naval Historical Center to support his research.
