IT WAS, AT FIRST, George Washington’s navy. In September 1775, the frustrated commander of the Continental Army paid out of pocket to charter a schooner to harass Britain’s Royal Navy in Boston harbor. Weeks later, the Continental Congress was shamed into ponying up enough money to convert two small merchant vessels into warships and to form a naval committee. This the Congress did on October 13—the day that would later be selected to mark the founding of the United States Navy.
On Sunday, October 5 of this year, President Donald Trump trekked down to the Naval station in Norfolk, Virginia—the world’s largest—to commemorate the birth of the U.S. Navy at what is considered the service’s capital. But 250 years ago, Norfolk itself was the target of the first mission of what became the Navy, an irony lost during what Trump acknowledged was a political rally and which featured a blaring rendition of the Confederate hymn “Dixie.”
By the arrival of autumn in 1775, New Englanders like John Adams were urging the delegates at the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia to support funding for a maritime force to combat Britain’s overwhelming naval superiority.
Southerners, however, balked at paying for a fleet they feared would only benefit New Englanders and which they doubted could stand up to the might of what was then the world’s most formidable fleet. “The maddest idea in the world,” is how Maryland’s Samuel Chase put it. A compromise was worked out in which individual colonies would outfit armed vessels.
Then a new threat emerged. That summer, Virginia’s royal governor, Lord Dunmore, had abandoned the colony’s landlocked capital of Williamsburg for the booming city of Norfolk, a deepwater port close to Chesapeake Bay. With money borrowed from local Scottish merchants, he converted several merchant ships into warships to complement his handful of Royal Navy vessels. He then set about seizing patriot smugglers carrying desperately needed supplies like gunpowder and arms. The patriots were defenseless.
On October 6, Chase complained on the floor of Congress that Dunmore had broadened his attacks to include Maryland vessels, blaming Virginians for inaction. Richard Henry Lee responded that his colony “is pierced in all parts with navigable waters” and that “his Lordship knows all these waters.” The result, he acknowledged, could be “decisive destruction to Maryland and Virginia.” That alarming prospect turned the tide in favor of the naval advocates—and, within a week, the Navy was born.