Before the war, the United States was talked of in the plural, afterwards in the singular. However it was the naval war of 1812 with Britain that recreated the nation. The Pope acclaimed a great Christian victory over Islam. The disaster of the capture of the USS Philadelphia and the holding hostage of its crew led to the USS Constitution taking the war into Tripoli harbour itself the campaign blooded the US Marines, with the clean-cut Stephen Decatur - a man so handsome young ladies lost consciousness when he came into the room - leading a commando raid to destroy the captured ship. But Jefferson was to send the navy into its first real war - against the Berber pirates and the rogue states of Algiers and Tripoli. The ships were designed to have the speed of a frigate and the gunnery of a battleship, a new class of fighting ship that the Royal Navy, with the arrogance of a superpower, when war with America came in 1812, could not at first comprehend.Īdams's strategy had been bitterly opposed by his rival and successor Thomas Jefferson, who promised in his inaugural address 'honest friendship with all nations, alliances with none'. They were built from the Quercus virginiana, oaks of 20-foot circumference that grew on the offshore islands of Georgia, the wood so hard that cannonballs would bounce off it. His six frigates were products of American technical genius. The second President, John Adams, determined to build six frigates to defend the integrity of the United States against its first perceived threat, the privateers of revolutionary France. As the United States fast found itself a global maritime trading power, so it inevitably collided with the conflicts it sought to avoid. America's economic boom depended on its ability to trade as a neutral while continental war ravaged Europe's economy. The creation of the United States Navy marked the first turning point in its national identity.

However, the prosperity of this fresh republic was founded on hard commerce with the world beyond the ocean.

The new capital, Washington, was no more than a terrain of bogs, meadows and copses between the newly finished White House and the building site of the Capitol here the President could ride out without encountering another human being.

In the 1800s, half of America's six million population lived on the edge of an undiscovered continent within a day's journey of the sea. He evokes the world of Patrick O'Brian, the salt-stained ruthlessness of naval commanders, the carnage of the broadside and the surgeon's saw, but also conjures a lost American landscape. Ian Toll writes with an arresting energy.

Six frigates by ian w toll