By Todd DePastino
On October 13, 2025, the United States Navy marks its 250th birthday, celebrating the day the Continental Congress first authorized a few modest ships in 1775.
To commemorate this milestone, the Veterans Breakfast Club is hosting a special Navy Birthday Conversation with veterans sharing sea stories and reflections on the Navy’s unique mission, culture, and tradition.
We also encourage everyone to look back at how the Navy began. One of the best accounts of that epic origin story is Ian W. Toll’s Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy (2006). Toll’s book reads like a thrilling cross between a scholarly history and adventure novel. It’s popular history that makes the past come alive.
“Before the ink was dry on the U.S. Constitution,” Toll writes, the founders of the young republic faced a divisive question: should the United States have a standing military at all? In the 1780s and 90s, figures like Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and John Adams fiercely debated the wisdom of creating a Navy and an army for the new nation. Many feared that a permanent military could become the “thin end of dictatorship”, threatening the liberty they had just fought for. Others argued that without a Navy, American commerce would remain at the mercy of foreign powers and pirates. Would a Navy protect U.S. ships from predators or would it merely drain the treasury and provoke the great European navies into hostility? These questions split the political leadership, with even Jefferson and Adams switching sides at times as events evolved.
By the early 1790s, the costs of not having a navy were mounting. American merchant ships, no longer under the umbrella of the British Royal Navy after independence, were being preyed upon by the Barbary pirate states of North Africa, which captured U.S. crews for ransom. At the same time, Britain and France, locked in their own war, harassed American shipping with impunity. A chorus grew louder that the U.S. needed warships to defend its interests. Still, opposition in Congress feared a runaway arms program. As a compromise, when Congress finally approved constructing warships in 1794, they inserted a clause that construction would halt if peace was reached with the Barbary powers. Despite all the political angst, President George Washington signed the Naval Act of 1794, authorizing what would become the U.S. Navy’s first six frigates. This was the new government’s first major military appropriation.
The six frigates became the foundation of the United States Navy. Naval constructor Joshua Humphreys proposed a radical design: American frigates would be big, tough, and heavily armed for their class. They were “powerful enough to engage any frigates of the French or British navies, yet fast enough to evade any ship of the line.” In other words, each U.S. frigate could outgun other nations’ frigates and outsail their larger ships-of-the-line.
President Washington’s Secretary of War (and interim Navy organizer) Henry Knox set these plans in motion, and soon shipyards from Philadelphia to Boston to Norfolk were laying keels. Knox thought that the ships be built at six different construction sites, one for each ship, rather than building at one particular shipyard. Each ship would help a different local economy and not bestow favor on one location. Building the frigates became a nationwide effort: timber was hewn from New England forests, iron fittings forged by Pennsylvania smiths, canvas woven for sails, and cannon cast for armament, The massive project spurred new domestic industries, truly a national undertaking to create a blue-water navy from scratch.
By 1797–1800, all six warships slid into the water: the USS United States, USS Constellation, USS Constitution, USS Congress, USS Chesapeake, and USS President. The most famous of them, USS Constitution, was launched in Boston in 1797. At around 44 guns and over 200 feet long, Constitution and her sisters were among the largest frigates afloat. They soon would be tested in battle. The Constitution still survives today. “Old Ironsides” remains a commissioned Navy warship, the oldest afloat in the world.
In 1801, President Jefferson, who had once doubted the need for a Navy, dispatched the frigates to confront the Barbary pirates on the “shores of Tripoli.” The conflict, known as the First Barbary War (1801–1805), was a proving ground for the Navy’s officers and ships. It was a daring enterprise: a squadron of American frigates and smaller vessels sailed to the Mediterranean to protect U.S. commerce and put a stop to the piracy and ransom demands. The campaign had moments of triumph and tragedy that Toll recounts in vivid detail.
One dramatic episode came in 1804. The frigate USS Philadelphia ran aground off Tripoli and was captured by the enemy. But 25-year-old Navy Lieutenant Stephen Decatur led a night raid to burn the captured Philadelphia in Tripoli’s harbor. Disguising themselves and slipping past harbor defenses, Decatur’s men boarded the Philadelphia, overpowered its guards, and set the ship ablaze in a spectacular explosion. The Barbary War tested the young Navy’s mettle and produced national heroes like Decatur. By war’s end, the United States had proven that its new warships and sailors could fight far from home, matching strength and wits with Old World adversaries.
The War of 1812 elevated the Navy to savior of the nation. When the United States took on Great Britain in that conflict, it was like a David versus Goliath matchup. Britain’s Royal Navy had hundreds of ships to America’s few. Yet in a series of single-ship duels on the high seas, the U.S. Navy’s heavy frigates stunned the world. The most famous battle occurred in August 1812, when USS Constitution met HMS Guerriere in a close-range cannon duel. British shot reportedly bounced off Constitution’s stout oak hull, earning her the nickname “Old Ironsides.” In a matter of half an hour, Constitution reduced Guerriere to a dismasted hulk and forced its surrender.
The victory electrified the American public. As historian Henry Adams later observed, the Constitution–Guerriere fight “raised the United States in one half hour to the rank of a first class power in the world.” Such triumphs were as much psychological as they were material – they showed that the U.S. Navy, though tiny, could hold its own against the greatest navy on earth. Other frigates like USS United States and USS Constellation also notched victories in this period, spreading panic in British maritime circles. By war’s end, even though the overall war was indecisive on land, America’s Navy had earned a lasting reputation.
Ian Toll’s Six Frigates narrates this whole saga – from the early political infighting to the shipbuilding drama, from Mediterranean exploits to Atlantic showdowns. Toll examines the debates in Philadelphia and the personalities of leaders like Jefferson, Adams, and Hamilton, giving context to why the Navy was born the way it was. At the same time, he brings to life the battles and bold maneuvers at sea, showing the human quirks and harsh demands of life at sea.
For anyone who enjoys naval history or the Revolutionary era, Six Frigates is a great read, deeply researched and never dull.
