Patriot Pirates (12 page)

Yet no amount of resiliency could fully offset the loss of sea access. Even the canniest entrepreneurs couldn’t sustain the economic boom that had propelled Providence between March and December of that year, that is, in the period beginning with Congress’s legalization of privateers and ending with Newport’s fall. All of Providence’s merchant clans—Bowen, Howell, Clark, Nightingale—had prospered in that period, but the Browns dominated. Though their candle business collapsed from the war’s effect on the whaling industry (candles were rendered from the “head matter” of sperm whales), their shipping expertise, ironworks, and market savvy aligned perfectly with wartime developments that put Providence, for those nine months in 1776, at the forefront of frenetic expenditure from Congress and private speculators.

An early inquiry from the General Assembly into the possibility of their manufacturing cannon had set John, Nicholas, and Joseph Brown to a rapid conversion of the Hope furnace to military production. (Moses, dedicated to spiritual and altruistic endeavors, including the charitable support of seven thousand civilians impoverished by the war, kept apart from his brothers.) They consulted experts in the process, financed “the necessary additional works” with earnings from their West Indian powder voyages, and in January 1776 declared the facility open for business. They priced their cannon at £35 per ton with three contractual conditions: clients supplied the powder to test the guns; the Browns were not liable for faulty guns that, once purchased, exploded under use; and payment was due in full even if hostilities ended and the guns were no longer needed.

Congress immediately ordered sixty twelve-and eighteen-pounders for two frigates being built in Rhode Island as part of the effort to launch thirteen such vessels from shipyards up and down the coast. In what would prove a frustrating effort, none of the thirteen sailed before 1777; four never got to sea at all; two were sunk in battle; and the rest were captured by the enemy one by one after spotty careers in which their few prizes barely dented Congress’s huge investment in the enterprise. At one point before the last vessels were completed, Washington advised Congress to scuttle them rather than waste more money on the project.

Construction of the Rhode Island frigates was especially onerous. Bloated costs and suspected graft dogged the process. The Rhode Island Frigate Committee was no help in correcting problems because, conveniently, the targets of most of the allegations, John and Nicholas Brown, were the Committee’s leading members.

Their fiercest critic was one of their gun factory’s first customers. John Langdon, former member of Congress now back running his Portsmouth wharf, had sought the post of New Hampshire’s maritime agent specifically to keep shady officials from “doing wrong or unjust things.” He became suspicious when his order for twenty-six cannon from the Browns for the Continental frigate
Raleigh
being built at Portsmouth went unfilled for months. He traveled to Providence several times to verify their excuse that Rhode Island’s frigates were almost finished and therefore first in line for the guns. Finding this to be untrue, he protested to Congress. “There seemed to be a secret determination not to let me have the guns at any rate whatever.” Not even, he said, at the “extortioners” price of £100 per ton.

Congress scolded the Browns for acting “against the public good” and ordered the immediate delivery of Langdon’s cannon. John and Nicholas balked, claiming they were working “to the prejudice of their own interest” on behalf of the government. Facing congressional charges of “interested motives” that “bear hard on the characters of the committee men,” the Frigate Committee formed a commission to investigate. John Brown headed the inquiry and duly exonerated himself and his brother, freeing them to scrap the deal with Langdon. The Frigate Committee, to bolster its case for keeping the guns for use within the state, resorted to unseasoned lumber and novice craftsmen to expedite production, ultimately turning out “the two worst of all our frigates,” according to Robert Morris.

Langdon was similarly snubbed by suppliers in Massachusetts and Connecticut. He accused officials of refusing to help him for fear of losing sales commissions. A principled patriot, the thirty-five-yearold Langdon discounted or refused entirely any fees for himself on government purchases. “If these guns belong to the Continent how they can be sold on commission I know not unless the Continent is to pay for them twice.” He raged at the greed of his colleagues. “My blood now boils.”

Most irksome was the actual abundance of guns—a “considerable number,” he wrote, but they were earmarked “for private ships.” This was the root of the problem. Unlike Congress, whose dilatory accounting meant bills got paid months late in depreciated dollars, civilians paid in advance for guns and often kicked in extra upon delivery to compensate for inflation. Too, a “jealousy of one state against another” inclined suppliers to favor local buyers.

Through the fall of 1776, Langdon’s
Raleigh
, which Morris rated “a very fine ship,” languished in Portsmouth while the agent scrounged for arms. The delay drove five hundred potential navy crewmen to enter “on board privateers very fast, all this for want of guns for our ship. The people do not like to enter without guns, as they want to be out after prize money.” In the meantime sixty-five Rhode Island privateers were commissioned with full complements of cannon, almost all of them provided by the Browns—“my worthy friends at Providence,” Langdon wrote sarcastically.

With efficiency gained through long commercial experience, the brothers outfitted their own ships and marketed them as well. They hired street musicians to sing of quick fortunes (“come all you young fellows of courage so bold / come enter on board and we will clothe you with gold”) and posted broadsides promising congenial captains, ample alcohol, and a thrilling opportunity to smite “the tyrant’s pilferers.”

They matched the best crews with the fastest boats and dispatched them with crisp instructions. Operating in packs had become the privateers’ preferred tactic. That June, for instance, an armed British transport passing through Massachusetts Bay had fended off twelve marauders over seven hours until finally surrendering with “six soldiers killed outright and nine more wounded, our ammunition mostly expended.” Brown-owned privateers, on the other hand, were told not sail in packs lest they have to split prizes taken in joint captures, “but if it cannot be well avoided to agree to share according to right.” And since demand had driven up values enormously, their captains were always to be on the lookout for better ships to which they could upgrade.

In addition to voyages they funded themselves, John and Nicholas engaged in countless partnerships to spread out their risk exposure. (A sixteenth share of a small privateer went for £56 at the time.) They pushed the Providence prize court to speed up trials, and in contrast to Massachusetts, where privateers that captured African slaves were “forbidden to sell them or in any manner to treat them otherwise than is already ordered for the treatment of prisoners,” the Browns applauded Rhode Island’s policy of pricing slaves as part of a prize’s usual “appurtenances and cargo.”

Their maritime ventures supplemented an array of other projects, including attempts to corner the regional market for flour and, crucial for its qualities as a food preservative, salt. They’d begun stockpiling the stuff in 1775 as trade bait for gunpowder and European goods. After government price controls were imposed in 1776 to protect “humbler folk” from the “oppression of rich merchants,” the Browns refused to sell until price ceilings were raised. Shortages became so acute they were legally compelled to offer the commodities “at the price affixed by law.” Sales revenues were three times costs, even so.

Their privateering profits are harder to measure. But the forty-one prizes brought into Providence between April and November 1776 were appraised in excess of £300,000, a value “double the property of the whole town two years ago,” and the Browns were the biggest beneficiary. Moreover, John was sufficiently enthused by the enterprise—and sufficiently flush with money even after the lengthy British occupation of Newport—to consider building a massive thousand-ton privateer in 1779. He would abandon the project only after the state’s other ironworks, whose pig iron he needed to produce the cannon required for his vessel’s multiple gundecks, refused to give him a bargain price.

E
sek Hopkins, a former slave ship captain who’d come out of retirement in December 1775 to command the small Continental fleet at Providence, initially deemed privateers inconsequential to naval operations. He dismissed the warnings of John Paul Jones and others to expedite government prize payouts or else face dire manpower shortages. “As for the division of the plunder it gives me no concern,” Hopkins sniffed, “and I take notice that those who are most clamorous about the matter least deserve it.”

The commodore’s laissez-faire attitude extended to combat operations. Instructed by Congress to clear Chesapeake Bay of enemy warships, he took to heart a line in his orders advising him to risk getting trapped in the bay only if the enemy were “not greatly superior” in strength. Sailing south from Providence in frigid January weather, he elected even before reaching the Chesapeake to proceed instead to the warm Caribbean and raid the British island of New Providence (Nassau). The
London Chronicle
subsequently broke the news that “a British fleet was totally defeated by Admiral Hopkins after a dreadful slaughter on both sides.”

Not quite. The island was lightly defended, and the Americans seized 78 cannon and a small supply of gunpowder with no casualties except sailors felled by too much celebratory drinking. Hopkins expected this happy boost to the patriot armory to mollify Congress’s irritation at his freelancing. Sighting HMS
Glasgow
off Block Island on the last leg of his voyage home, he tried to further polish his image by attacking the cruiser with a five-to-one advantage.

“Good News for America!” headlined the
Salem Gazette
in reporting the battle. The
Newport Mercury
sang the same song, mocking the beaten British vessel “yelping from the mouths of her cannon (like a broken legged dog) in token of her being sadly wounded.” But as details emerged, the story took a different look.

The purported three-hour battle had lasted a fraction of that time before the ships broke contact.
Glasgow
suffered one man killed. Three Continental warships were left shattered with ten dead and fourteen wounded, while the two others, from ineptitude or cowardice, had never entered the fight at all.

Hopkins, after initially claiming that his obligation to safeguard the “precious cargoes” seized in New Providence “was the sole cause of
Glasgow
making her escape,” soon had to admit that he’d quit the fight because his flagship’s rudder had been shot away and “some that were on board had got too much liquor out of the prizes to be fit for duty.” In a flash his reputation slid from golden hero to cantankerous bungler.

Congress held an inquiry while he awaited judgment in Providence. The wait coincided with the explosion of Rhode Island privateering and opened his eyes to its drain on recruitment. His plea to the General Assembly to freeze privateer activity until his fleet was fully manned failed, he wrote, “owing to a number of members being deeply concerned in privateering.” Retained in command thanks to the influence of John Adams, who defended his support of the commodore as a necessary stand against “that anti-New England spirit which haunted Congress,” Hopkins prepared his ships to sail again.

December came. British forces launched their amphibious invasion. “The inhabitants of the town of Newport favored their operation I believe too much” was Hopkins’s excuse for the astonishing ease of the enemy victory, which had, in a stroke, trapped the Continental fleet (“as they term it,” the British leadership sneered) up the bay in Providence. Nicholas Cooke, who as Rhode Island governor had helped stonewall outside requests for cannon, was furious that his desperate call on the eve of the attack “for the assistance and aid of our sister states” had not prompted enthusiastic compliance. But Congress focused its wrath on Hopkins for his fleet’s lack of resistance and sacked him within a few weeks.

John Langdon followed the letter of the law in seeking to outfit the Continental frigates under construction in New Hampshire. Thwarted at every turn by the popular lure of privateers and the unwillingness of weapons manufacturers to sell at government prices, he tried to recoup his losses by funding a private warship, a lapse in principle that earned John Paul Jones’s contempt but made Langdon a wealthy man.

One ship of the fleet was safely at sea at the time of the Newport invasion—John Paul Jones’s
Alfred
, a merchant vessel refitted for twenty-six guns. Jones had captured sixteen prizes during a six-week cruise out of Providence earlier that fall. By good fortune he’d left port again in November to keep his men from the lure of privateering. With Narragansett Bay now inaccessible, he shifted his base to Massachusetts in early 1777 before ending up in Portsmouth that spring to take command of
Ranger
, an armed sloop being built by John Langdon.