Edward Preble: A Naval Biography 1761-1807

By Christopher McKee

Originally published in 1972, Christopher McKee’s biography of Edward Preble remains the most authoritative source on this influential early shaper of the U.S. naval tradition. McKee documents Preble’s rise from obscurity to become Thomas Jefferson’s chief administrator. He chronicles the officer’s relationship with Jefferson and outlines the president’s policies and strategies during the Barbary Wars. McKee also brings to light the Tripolitan activities and attitudes that confronted Preble as he sought to bring the war to an end.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Naval Institute Press
• Release date: Mar 15, 2014
• ISBN: 9781612513669

Book preview

Introduction

Edward Preble: A Naval Biography, 1761–1807 appeared in 1972. Republication in the Classics of Naval Literature series once again makes Edward Preble readily available for would-be readers. But a new edition of a book nearly twenty-five years old torments its author with temptations. If only I had known then what I know now! Rewrite here? Delete this? Add that? The danger lurking in such temptations is not unlike deciding to redecorate a single room at home. No sooner is one room done than a second, which looked just fine before, now demands redecorating too. Finish that, and a third suddenly seems shabby. And so one goes, room by room, until the whole house is redone.

Any book is shaped by the times in which it was written. It is also a child of a particular stage of the author’s mental life. Edward Preble was written during the Vietnam War years, and I found it impossible to avoid seeing in then-contemporary events a reappearance of some old problems that the United States had met as long ago as the Tripolitan War of 1801–5: frustration of a maritime power attempting to use force against a land-based power able to tap the resources of an inaccessible interior; temptation to back a friendly pretender to power who proves, in the test, weak and lacking in essential popular support; distrust of mediators; and failure to understand, appreciate, or accept other cultures and different ways of thinking. Although far from dead, such issues—the last excepted—are less pressing in 1996 than they were twenty-five or thirty years ago. Moreover, in the years since 1972 my interest has shifted away from the stand-out-in-the-crowd leaders to the mass of men, be they officer or enlisted, who made the U.S. Navy function as an organization or who were dysfunctional within it; from the navy’s quasi-mythic origins in the pre–War of 1812 years to the mature organization of the years between 1815 and the onset of the Civil War in 1861.

In 1996 it is not possible for me to return mentally to the late 1960s and be the person I then was, experiencing again the intensity of the concerns I felt and pursuing history in the particular way I did. To attempt to revise this or that paragraph or page or chapter of the Edward Preble of 1972 would be to compromise the book’s integrity. In the end a complete rewriting in my 1996 style and with my 1996 historian’s concerns, interests, and insights would be mandatory. The essential story might remain the same, but the result would be a second, and possibly quite different, biography. Consequently, a small number of now-corrected errors apart, Edward Preble reappears here as it was originally published. But I will take advantage of this introduction to report on Preble-related matters that I have uncovered during the past twenty-five years and to add my post-1972 thoughts on Edward Preble, the human being and the naval officer.

Preble’s biographer confronts a critical problem: excellent as the documentation may be for Edward Preble the mature merchant captain and naval officer, only the skimpiest of personal records exist for the first thirty-plus years of the man’s life, the time when he developed into the person known to history. One key strand in that development must have been young Edward’s relationship with his powerful and remarkable if somewhat obscure father, Jedidiah Preble. A fascinating glimpse of the parent turns up in the reminiscences of a certain David Perry, who—as a young man just shy of seventeen—served in Jedidiah Preble’s regiment during the abortive British attack on French-held Fort Ticonderoga in July 1758:

It was the first engagement I had ever seen, and the whistling of balls and roar of musquetry terrified me not a little. At length our regiment formed among the trees, behind which the men kept stepping from their ranks for shelter. Col. Preble, who, I well remember, was a harsh man, swore he would knock the first man down who should step out of his ranks; which greatly surprised me, to think that I must stand still to be shot at.¹

Like father, like son! Coming to terms with so formidable a parent as Jedidiah Preble must indeed have been a challenge. Speculation on the basis of slender evidence is often a foolhardy historical enterprise. But with Edward Preble it is hard not to interpret certain ingrained habits of the adult’s behavior as the unselfconscious products of a young person’s (perhaps unsuccessful) search for a difficult parent’s approval. Not only does the son replicate the father’s command personality, but there are also clue-bearing phrases and sentences in Edward Preble’s writings; this, in a 1799 letter to his future brother-in-law, James Deering, is typical: "The Pickering sails as fast as anything in the West Indies, and if she was somewhat larger I should be very well satisfied with her for the present. I was much pleased with Commodore Barry, and am quite a favorite with him."² Here, in that last sentence, is a recurring theme in Preble’s letters and diaries: the almost naive pleasure he takes in recording how well he stands in the opinions of those he perceives as superiors on the political or social ladder—whether it be President Thomas Jefferson, Secretary of the Navy Robert Smith, or Sir Alexander Ball at Malta. Old needs die hard.

Just as opaque to the historian is the private essence of Edward Preble’s marriage to Mary Deering. After Edward Preble appeared in 1972 I serendipitously discovered the likely reason why Mary Deering was past thirty and perhaps teetering on the edge of spinster-hood when she married Edward: she had earlier been engaged to William Lithgow (1750–16 February 1796), the first United States attorney for the district of Maine, who died before they could be married.³ But that still leaves the essential problem.

Edward’s letters to Mary have survived to form one of the most important sources for this book.⁴ Throughout those letters Edward writes of his love for Mary, but when he speaks of their relationship he is usually responding to something that Mary has written to him. Here is the not-to-be-overcome difficulty. Although Edward carefully saved Mary’s letters, they have since vanished—almost certainly destroyed by Mary at some point during her long widowhood. To have only Edward’s letters to study is akin to overhearing one-half of a telephone conversation. The eavesdropper does not know what is being said at the other end of the line and often forms an incorrect or badly distorted idea of the full two-person interaction. Another historian might have made a different decision, but I declined to speculate about the Prebles’ marriage with only half of the essential evidence available. The risk of misinterpretation was too great. That is still my best judgment.

Because my research and writing since Edward Preble have focused on the navy’s cast of supporting characters more than on the big stars, I regret that I was not better informed about some of the interesting people who have small roles in Edward Preble, but who deserved more lines. This regret is especially keen respecting two of Preble’s key subordinates during his yearlong cruise to Java in Essex.

David Phipps, the frigate’s second lieutenant (p. 68), had been one of the wheelhorses of the Continental Navy during the American Revolution: sailing master of Alfred with Commodore Esek Hopkins, and lieutenant in the sloop Providence, the brig Cabot, and the frigates Trumbull, Warren, Raleigh, Boston, and Confederacy. In the 1790s Phipps persistently sought a captain’s appointment, either in a revenue cutter or a ship of the Quasi-War navy; but the evidence suggests that, in a lieutenant’s berth, David Phipps had reached his level of competence. An able second- or third-in-command, he lacked the inner drive to assume successfully the lonely ultimate responsibility.

Naturally enough, Phipps preferred to attribute his exclusion from the captain’s cabin to his political affiliation with the Jeffersonian Republicans rather than to any personal deficiency. He was nearly sixty years old when he served in Essex and possessed few, if any, financial resources apart from his naval pay. Although he was discharged as a lieutenant when the navy was downsized at the end of the Quasi-War, the incoming Jefferson administration almost immediately reappointed Phipps as a sailing master. In this capacity—more a recognition of services past than an anticipation of services future—David Phipps, his performance increasingly compromised by age and poor health, continued to serve in one low-challenge assignment or another until his death at the age of eighty-four.⁵

A sadder case was that of William Mumford, Essex’s purser, the money man who proved such a cross to the irritable Preble (pp. 68, 80). The reasons for Mumford’s fall in the world are not entirely clear, but fall he did. A native of Newport, Rhode Island, Mumford had begun his working life before the American Revolution as deputy marshal for the vice-admiralty court in his hometown. At least by his own account, young Mumford did almost all the work the marshal was supposed to be doing because this officer actually lived in Boston. In 1772 Mumford left Newport for Providence to study law with his uncle. Once his legal training was completed, Mumford was admitted to practice in March 1775. He barely had time to bask in his new status as attorney-at-law before the incipient American rebellion went hot with the outbreak of fighting in Massachusetts. Almost immediately Mumford secured a government job as deputy to Henry Ward, secretary of state for Rhode Island. In this post, which he held from 1775 until 1783, Mumford once again claimed that he did most of the office’s real work, this time because of Ward’s poor health. During part of these busy and exciting years Mumford also found the time and the energy to serve as clerk to the Rhode Island Council of War and as deputy intendant of trade for the port of Providence.

At war’s end a new government appointment beckoned in Philadelphia, where Mumford became principal clerk in the office of Benjamin Stelle, the commissioner for settling Pennsylvania’s Revolutionary War accounts. This position kept bread on the Mumford table for about four years. Then, after what he calculated as sixteen years of government service, William Mumford found himself on the street without any permanent employment, a situation that continued until he received his purser’s warrant late in 1799. During the interval Mumford tried his hand at business and failed financially. His brother sent him money from Rhode Island until brotherly patience and pocketbook ran out. With his wife, Sarah, he eked out an existence of genteel poverty by boarding members of Congress in the Mumfords’ rented Philadelphia home. All the while he was a persistent (and unsuccessful) applicant for this or that federal job until a highly placed friend suggested that he apply for a navy pursership and offered to speak to President John Adams on his behalf. Mumford drafted yet another letter of application, and his sponsor delivered it to Adams. As Mumford later told the story, After having read it, the President observed he had heard an excellent character of Mr. Mumford but did [not] think he would have accepted of such an office or he might have had it long ago and immediately made the appointment.

At the conclusion of Essex’s 1800 Java cruise Mumford, whose surviving personal writings are almost invariably self-serving, unexpectedly changes character and—in a letter I wish I had found during my research for Edward Preble—creates a memorable record of the ship and her voyage:

The Essex has been much admired at all the ports we touched at. In the Cape of Good Hope she was visited by the [British] navy officers generally, who all agreed in pronouncing her to be the most complete and beautiful frigate they ever saw, and one of the officers observed to the Captain [Preble], If you will build such handsome frigates, you must not think hard that so many officers come on board to look at her. And, as to her sailing, she has beat every vessel she has ever had a trial with. We sailed from the Cape of Good Hope in company with the Rattlesnake sloop of war, commanded by a son of Admiral Sir Roger Curtis. She got under way at the moment we did for the express purpose of beating us, but to their great mortification we ran her hull down in about four hours; and, when we arrived in the Straits of Sunda, we had a fair trial with the Arrogant, a 74, and the Orpheus frigate, two of the fastest-sailing vessels in the British navy, and we beat them above one-half. We passed the Arrogant so close that Captain Osborn look[ed] at us out of his quarter gallery with a degree of astonishment and observed to Captain Preble that she was the fastest-sailing vessel he ever met with.

In light of Preble’s poor opinion of the man and his performance, it comes as no surprise that William Mumford was one of the pursers selected for discharge when the officer corps was cut back at the end of the Quasi-War. After Mumford’s accounts were closed in the fall of 1801, the trail of historical bread crumbs becomes more difficult to follow than it is for his pre-Essex life. But as late as November 1820 William Mumford was still applying for—and still failing to receive—federal jobs.⁶

Since 1972 I have twice returned to Edward Preble to study aspects of his life from fresh perspectives. In Edward Preble and the ‘Boys,’ I cast a skeptical eye at Fletcher Pratt’s well-known assertion that, Oliver Hazard Perry’s victory on Lake Erie aside, all the American naval victories in the War of 1812 were won by Preble’s former subordinates—even though Preble’s junior officers from the Tripolitan War accounted for only one-third of the navy’s command-rank officers in 1812. This remarkable (but misleading) statistic Pratt attributed to Preble’s example. My essay questioned Pratt’s numbers and his reasoning, not Preble’s exemplary influence. I had explored Preble’s disciplinary practices in detail in Edward Preble (pp. 221–24), but I came back to the subject twenty years later in A Gentlemanly and Honorable Profession so that I might compare Preble’s discipline with that of other captains of the pre-1815 navy. The results challenged old assertions about corporal punishment—and not to Preble’s discredit. Both texts are essential supplements to Edward Preble.⁷

How do I see Edward Preble now, after nearly twenty-five additional years of studying the nineteenth-century U.S. Navy? In the process by which the United States created (more or less out of nothing) a professional naval officer corps between 1798 and 1812, Preble was an important, an admired, and even a heroic role model for younger career officers. A harsh disciplinarian and a man of violent and poorly controlled temper—cross, peevish and ill-tempered, surly and proud in Sailing Master James Trant’s memorable eight-word character sketch (p. 98)—Preble earned first the grudging and then the enthusiastic admiration of his subordinates by his decisiveness and vigor, by his unhesitating use of prudent discretion and initiative, by his willingness to delegate important assignments to promising younger men, by his fervent defense of what he held to be the national interests and honor of the United States, but most of all by his refusal to give up in the face of severe reverses and depressing odds.

By temperament Edward Preble was a man of action, not a military intellectual. Consumed by an intense desire to leave a famous name, he consciously sought that fame through self-sacrifice in his country’s cause. I invite you to read this volume to find out how he achieved his dream.

Christopher McKee

Notes

1.David Perry, Recollections of an Old Soldier: The Life of Captain David Perry, a Soldier of the French and Revolutionary Wars (Windsor, Vt., 1822), 9.

2.Private collection: Preble to James Deering, 2 Apr. 1799.

3.Society of the Cincinnati, Massachusetts, Memorials of the Massachusetts Society of the Cincinnati, by Bradford Adams Whittemore (Boston, 1964), 372–73.

4.Rear Adm. Dundas Preble Tucker, USN (Ret.), the last direct descendant of Edward Preble, died at La Jolla, California, in October 1978. By the terms of Admiral Tucker’s will, the letters from Edward to Mary—so often quoted in Edward Preble—together with the other Preble manuscripts in his possession were given to the Library of Congress as an addition to the Edward Preble Papers.

5.Harold C. Syrett, ed., The Papers of Alexander Hamilton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961–87), 7:206; TJ Mss: R. Smith to Jefferson, received 25 Oct. 1804; NA, RG 45, Miscellaneous Letters: Jared Mansfield to James Madison, 26 Oct. 1809; NA, RG 45, Officers’ Letters: O. H. Perry to Paul Hamilton, 31 May 1812.

6.LC, George Washington Manuscripts: Mumford to Washington, 9 May 1789, 1 Aug. 1789, 2 June 1790, and 7 July 1790, all partially or wholly printed in Dorothy Twohig, ed., The Papers of George Washington: Presidential Series (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1987–   ), 2:240–42; Papers of Alexander Hamilton, 12:423; NA, RG 59, Applications and Recommendations for Office, John Adams’s Administration, William Mumford File: Theodore Foster to Adams, 12 Sept. 1797; Applications and Recommendations for Office, Monroe’s Administration: Mumford to James Monroe, 6 Nov. 1820; Philip C. F. Smith, The Frigate Essex Papers: Building the Salem Frigate, 1798–1799 (Salem, Mass.: Peabody Museum, 1974), 189.

7.Edward Preble and the ‘Boys’: The Officer Corps of 1812 Revisited, in James C. Bradford, ed., Command under Sail: Makers of the American Naval Tradition, 1775–1850 (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1985), 71–96; A Gentlemanly and Honorable Profession: The Creation of the U.S. Naval Officer Corps, 1794–1815 (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1991), 237–40, 242–47, 478, 480–81, and 543. I also wrote brief sketches of Preble for two biographical reference works: Roger J. Spiller and Joseph G. Dawson, eds., Dictionary of American Military Biography (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984), and American National Biography (forthcoming, Oxford University Press). My retrospective assessment of Preble is taken from these two sketches.

PREFACE

During each of the distinct periods into which historians divide the development of the early U.S. Navy one officer emerged from the crowd of his fellows and became the man with whom that period will always be associated. In the Quasi-War with France, 1798-1801, Thomas Truxtun personified the professionalism and the aggressive spirit of the newly established Federal Navy. From 1807 until 1837 – years that encompassed maritime friction with Great Britain, the War of 1812, and his long service as Chairman of the Board of Navy Commissioners – John Rodgers used his influence on and control of the sources of political and administrative power at Washington to dominate the naval scene.

Between those two men, the strong figure was Edward Preble. In 1803, when President Thomas Jefferson’s administration was searching for a leader who could bring the inconclusive naval war with Tripoli to an acceptable termination, Preble came from comparative obscurity to synthesize the talents of a corps of outstanding young officers and to demonstrate that, in spite of monumental handicaps, objectives could be at least partially won and honor wholly sustained. The significance of Preble’s life is simple and enduring: a man’s moral fibre and his actions when confronted with difficulties are more important than his failure, or his success, in overcoming those difficulties.

Edward Preble was the great naval leader of the Tripolitan War years for three reasons. First, his intellectual endowments enabled him to understand the several military, diplomatic, and commercial responsibilities of an American squadron, and to harmonize those responsibilities with the administration’s policy. Second, he possessed the strength of character and force of personality to translate intellectual analysis into effective action. Third, Preble was lucky: the times in which he lived and his position in society gave him an opportunity to use his abilities in a memorable way.

But Edward Preble’s biography is more than the story of an outstanding man. Early in the research for this book it became apparent that the historically important years of Preble’s life, 1801-1807, could be fully understood only in conjunction with a study of the naval policy of Jefferson’s presidency, and particularly the administration’s objectives and strategy in the Tripolitan War. There is a well-imbedded mythology regarding President Jefferson’s attitude towards the Navy. But until quite recently there has been no scholarly research into the most obvious source for learning what his naval policy really was: the correspondence between Jefferson and Secretary of the Navy Robert Smith.* Jefferson was a vigorous executive, Smith a man of strong convictions; their exchanges provide a full and fascinating record of a period in U.S. naval history that has been poorly understood.

Investigation of Jeffersonian naval policy led to extended exploration of the activities of Commodore Richard V. Morris, Edward Preble’s predecessor in the Mediterranean command. Morris’s failure and the administration’s disgust with him prepared the way for Preble’s appointment to the command of the Mediterranean squadron. Many of the tactical and diplomatic problems that Morris encountered prefigured those that Preble met – problems that suggested the limits of what American policy could expect to accomplish in the Mediterranean.

Heretofore American histories of the Tripolitan War have been one-sided. Little or nothing has been said about Tripolitan activities or attitudes. To obtain the view from the Pasha’s Castle, considerable use has been made of the dispatches of Bonaventure Beaussier, the French consul at Tripoli. The attitude of cultural and moral superiority over opponents that has influenced American histories of certain U.S. wars – particularly the Indian Wars, the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, and the Barbary Wars – is overdue for retirement. Every effort has been made to understand Yusuf Caramanli and his ministers, and to present them as subtle and skillful representatives of a different, but by no means inferior, culture.

Quoted passages in Edward Preble have been handled according to the rules for the modernized method, as set down in the Harvard Guide to American History (Cambridge, 1955) : save for one or two cases in which it seemed desirable to follow the original, spelling, punctuation, and capitalization have been modernized; abbreviations have been spelled out; over-long sentences and paragraphs have been broken up; however, the exact words used by the person quoted have been faithfully reproduced.

Most of this book was written while I was a member of the faculty of the Edwardsville Campus of Southern Illinois University. The University provided financial support for some of the research and, more important, several periods of time, including a sabbatical leave, during which I was able to devote my full attention to the manuscript. The value of the encouragement that I received from my friend and supervisor, John C. Abbott, is greater than anyone, except perhaps the author, realizes. Rear Admiral Dundas P. Tucker, U.S. Navy (Retired), Edward Preble’s great-great-grandson, has waited patiently for a long time to see this biography completed. Besides supplying me with copies of Edward Preble manuscripts in his collection, Admiral Tucker has always been enthusiastic about the project, enthusiasm that was a great stimulus to me in moments of discouragement. While I was engaged in the research for Edward Preble my cousin, Mrs. Margaret V. Lanahan, of Washington, D.C., had me as a houseguest for a total of several weeks. Her contribution to the completion of the book is a substantial one. Linda McKee is also a naval historian, and her help was crucial in so many ways that it is hard to enumerate them all: she aided my search for Preble manuscripts, found several elusive and important documents that would otherwise have escaped me, read the entire book many times, and offered criticisms and suggested improvements which – if not always welcome – were almost always accepted.

These persons, organizations, and institutions graciously made manuscript documents available, provided photocopies of many papers, and, when necessary, granted permission to quote: Archives Diplomatiques, Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, Paris; Boston Athenaeum; Boston Public Library; British Museum; William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan; Essex Institute; Governor Dummer Academy; Haverford College Library; Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery; Library of Congress; Lilly Library, Indiana University; Longfellow House, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Maine Historical Society; Archives Division, Office of the Secretary, Commonwealth of Massachusetts; Massachusetts Historical Society; New-York Historical Society; New York Public Library; North Carolina Department of Archives and History; Nova Scotia Public Archives; Historical Society of Pennsylvania; Peabody Museum, Salem, Massachusetts; Free Library of Philadelphia and Mrs. Marjorie Ellis; Public Record Office, London; Franklin D. Roosevelt Library; Earl Gregg Swem Library, College of William and Mary; United States National Archives; United States Naval Academy Museum; University of Virginia Library; G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport; Collection of American Literature, Yale University, and Professor James Franklin Beard.

Quotation from the microfilm edition of the Adams Papers is by permission of the Massachusetts Historical Society; and from The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, edited by Kathleen Coburn, Volume II, copyright 1961 by the Bollingen Foundation, by permission of Princeton University Press, the Bollingen Foundation, and Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ltd.

* Joseph G. Henrich’s Ph.D. dissertation The Triumph of Ideology: the Jeffersonians and the Navy, 1779-1807 (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University Microfilms, 1971) became available after Edward Preble had been set in type.

EDWARD PREBLE

CHAPTER1AUGUST 1761–APRIL 1783

Will you not have more men?

Enoch Preble claimed that a British lieutenant named Henry Mowat and potatoes had a lot to do with it, but – really – it was inevitable that sooner or later his brother Edward would go to sea.

Those who live there probably do not notice it, but in Portland, Maine, the smells of the sea fill the air. The town itself is nearly surrounded by salt water. Portland was called Falmouth when Edward Preble was born there on 15 August 1761. The family home on Thames Street fronted on the water. Across Thames Street were the wharves. Beyond them lay Casco Bay, its islands, and the ocean.¹

If Maine had a first citizen during the years of the American Revolution it was Edward’s father, Jedidiah Preble, known to family and townsmen as The Brigadier from the rank he had attained in the Massachusetts provincial forces during the Seven Years’ War.² Jedidiah was born in York, Maine, in 1707. He went to sea while still in his teens and, within a few years, had worked his way up to master and owner of coasting vessels. The elder Preble’s military career began in King George’s War. He participated in the capture of Louisbourg by William Pepperrell in 1745 and remained on active service until the conclusion of an uneasy peace in 1748. Some months before he was mustered out, Jedidiah Preble shifted his residence to Falmouth; earlier he had moved from York to Wells. On the approach of the Seven Years’ War, he became a soldier once more, campaigned in Maine and Nova Scotia, and built a reputation as one of the ablest of the provincial officers, a distinction not lightly awarded by professional British commanders. In 1758 Colonel Preble and his regiment participated in Major General James Abercromby’s disastrous campaign against Ticonderoga. The final years of the French and Indian War found him commanding Fort Pownall on the west bank of the Penobscot River, a position that involved considerable responsibility for Indian affairs. Military talent brought its rewards: by 1759 Jedidiah Preble, who had set off for war in 1745 as an ensign, was a brigadier general.

The Brigadier’s military career should not conceal his economic rise. Throughout the years he steadily added to his holdings – ships, farms, back-lands, houses, shops, and wharves – and by the early 1770s he was one of the wealthiest men in Falmouth. From this wealth, and the abilities which enabled him to acquire it, came social prestige and opportunities for community leadership. The most important service he rendered his town and Maine, then a district of Massachusetts, was as a member, first of the provincial legislature, and then of the Massachusetts General Court, or legislature. He started in 1753 as a representative from the town of Falmouth and, with some interruptions, ended thirty years later, as state senator from Cumberland County. The years of experience in the General Court piled up, and Jedidiah Preble became an increasingly powerful spokesman for Maine interests – an asset he did not hesitate to use to help his sons’ careers.

Jedidiah’s first wife, Martha Junkins of York, died in March 1753, leaving him with five children: Samuel, William, Jedidiah, Jr., John, and Lucy. About fourteen months after Martha’s death, Jedidiah married, on 9 May 1754, Mehetable (Bangs) Roberts, a widow whose husband had died during the first year of their marriage. Widow Roberts was no gray-haired lady, matronly and sedate: she was only 26 years old. Jedidiah was 47, at the crest of his vigor, on his way up economically, and, clearly, looking for more than just a housekeeper and mother-substitute. Jedidiah’s and Mehetable’s first child, Martha, was born in November 1754. After Martha, came Ebenezer in 1757, and Joshua two years later. Edward, born in 1761, was followed by Enoch in 1763, Statira in 1767; and the baby of the family, Henry, was born in 1770. Mehetable is reported to have been an impressive woman physically. No mean businesswoman, she was fully the equal of her husband in energy. As he grew older and devoted more and more of his time to his role as a community leader, she took over the day-to-day management of his extensive properties, made capital improvements, and increased his holdings. One wonders to what extent Edward’s austerity and formality, precision and efficiency, were inherited from his mother. Jedidiah’s wit and joviality were traits almost wholly lacking in Edward, whose sense of humor – rarely evidenced – was sardonic. But the father’s hot temper, intense determination, and talent for seamanship and military life are discernible in the son.

As a child Edward was subject to temper tantrums. One incident his brothers and sisters remembered took place when he was about ten years old. Jedidiah Preble and some of his friends were going on a hunting or fishing trip among the islands of Casco Bay. Edward kept asking to be allowed to go along. Jedidiah, anxious to cut off the nagging, told the boy that if he could get a certain chore done before the boat left, he might go. The Brigadier thought he had been clever in picking a job that Edward could not possibly do before the men got away on their junket. But Edward flew at the work, and, just as the party was shoving off from the wharf, there was Edward saying the job was done and he was ready to go. The senior Preble, still unwilling to have his outing spoiled by a boy, said there was not room in the boat. At this Edward broke into a rage. He began to pick up stones from the wharf and hurl them at father, friends, and boat until Jedidiah surrendered. Edward had shown he had the right stuff in him.

It was being excluded from a hunting or fishing party that put Edward in a rage. He had already developed a passion for those sports. Alone or with friends he would spend hours roaming the woods and fields near Falmouth or boating on the bay, the rivers, the ponds. By the time he was in his teens, practice had made him an expert marksman. Going out into the woods with his dogs and his guns remained a favorite form of escape all his life.

But school, not the woods, is where the Preble boys had to be most of the time. The first of Edward’s teachers who can be definitely identified was his brother-in-law, Jonathan Webb, who had married Lucy Preble in 1763. Webb had graduated from Harvard in 1754 and, after failing as a businessman, had taken up schoolteaching. He lacked both ability and strength of character, and was nicknamed Pithy Webb by his students because, whenever he cut a quill pen, he popped the pith into his mouth and chewed on it. Edward, who cannot have been more than eight years old and was something of a troublemaker in the school, decided it would be great fun to take advantage of this disgusting habit. He removed Pithy’s quills from his desk and injected something exceptionally foul-tasting – possibly excrement – into the piths. The spectacle of Webb’s face and his behavior when next he put a pith into his mouth are said to have been well worth the hiding he administered to his little brother-in-law.³

Jedidiah Preble wanted his son to attend Harvard and prepare for one of the professions, but he knew that even if Edward did not go to college he would need a good education if he were to do well in business. There may have been some semiliterate, self-made businessmen in eighteenth century New England – but not many. Whether Harvard or countinghouse was in Edward’s future, the next step was preparatory school, and Dummer School * in Byfield, Massachusetts, was chosen. Ebenezer had already been a student there, and Enoch Preble would, in 1776, follow the tradition established by his two older brothers and enroll at Dummer.

Dummer School operated in a red, two-room schoolhouse and was run by a remarkably able and dedicated teacher, Samuel Moody. At the core of the curriculum were Master Moody’s specialties, Greek and Latin, but the boys also learned French. Moody did not like mathematics, so he employed an assistant to teach that subject while he concentrated on the literary studies. Ballroom dancing was also probably part of the Dummer School program of studies while Edward was in attendance. As important as the subjects taught, were the habits of promptness, exactness, thoroughness, and intellectual independence, that Samuel Moody tried to instill in his pupils.

It is impossible to be certain of the exact dates of Edward’s attendance at Dummer School. He was definitely there from 6 November 1775 through 3 April 1776, during which period he boarded with Joseph Hale, whose home served as a dormitory for students at the school. That was Edward’s last year with Samuel Moody. By that time he was fourteen, the age at which most Dummer pupils completed their studies and either moved on to Harvard or went into business. The tradition that Edward did not like school and was not brilliant academically is probably exaggerated. He obviously profited from Dummer as well as from the schools he had attended earlier. It is clear that, by the time he started writing letters and keeping accounts, he had a thorough knowledge of arithmetic, spelling, grammar, and rhetoric. As an adult he certainly realized that education was the base for getting ahead socially and financially. He liked to find promising boys whose families could not afford to send them to preparatory school, informally adopt them, pay for and supervise their education. Preble helped put at least one boy through his alma mater, Dummer Academy.⁴

The Revolution began while Edward was attending Dummer School, but only one event in the early years of that war affected him personally. At the beginning of October 1775, British Vice Admiral Samuel Graves, acting on the assumption that the destruction of their homes and property would crush the spirit of insurrection in the people of New England, ordered a small squadron of warships under Lieutenant Henry Mowat to proceed north from Boston and chastise Marblehead, Salem, Cape Ann, Ipswich, Newburyport, Portsmouth, Saco, Falmouth, and Machias by burning the villages and seizing or destroying all the shipping in their harbors. Of this ambitious punitive program only the destruction of Falmouth was actually carried out. At 9:40 a.m., 18 October, after a warning the previous day for the inhabitants to evacuate the town, Lieutenant Mowat’s squadron began firing on Falmouth. Within twenty minutes, part of the village was blazing. A landing party from the British flotilla fired other buildings. By 6:00 p.m. the job was done. More than half the houses – including the Preble home on Thames Street – were afire. Eleven merchantmen were smoking derelicts and two were prizes. Two days later the ruins of Falmouth were still burning.

Jedidiah Preble purchased a house, with adjoining shop, barn, and outbuildings, in a rural section of Falmouth called Capisic, about three miles west of the burned-out village, leased some nearby farmland, and moved his family out to the country.⁵ Sixty years later Edward’s brother Enoch recalled that during the summer of 1778 he and two of his brothers – Edward, 17, and Henry, 8 – were at the Capisic farm. Edward was somewhat at loose ends. He had completed the work offered by Dummer School two years before, but lacked the motivation to go on to Harvard. In wartime, subsistence farming became a necessity in Maine, and the husky Preble lads – all grew to be at least six feet tall – were expected to help out on the farm. Because Edward was the oldest boy at home, much of the management and the physical labor at Capisic fell on him.

At first farming bored Edward, and then he hated it. He was out in the hot sun all day. The woods looked cool, but he could not go there. The weeds had more vitality than the crops: it seemed as if the boys just got them out of a plot when they were shooting up again. At night, a deer or a woodchuck would slip into the garden to eat the plants so painfully tended during the daylight hours. Finally it all got to Edward. One day when the brothers were hoeing potatoes his temper exploded. He hurled down his hoe and shouted that, by God, he would do no more of this work. He started walking down the road towards Falmouth.

The next thing anyone knew Edward had signed on a ship. There was nothing new about that in the Preble family. Leaving home and going away to sea was something all the Preble boys did. By 1781, if not earlier, Ebenezer had enough experience to command his own coaster, the 30-ton schooner Hazard. Joshua occupied a mate’s berth when he was 18 years old. Enoch made his first voyage at the age of 16, and Henry was 11 when he shipped as a boy in the Continental frigate Deane.

Enoch’s recollection was that when Edward got to Falmouth he found a privateer brig from Newburyport, commanded by Captain Friend, looking for hands. The brig made a voyage to Europe and had an extraordinarily rough passage home when she encountered headwinds and severe cold off the New England coast. The privateer referred to by Enoch could only have been the 110-ton brigantine Hope, 12 guns, 40 men, commissioned 16 September 1778, and commanded by William Friend.⁶

Perhaps that was the ship in which Edward Preble first went to sea. All that can be said for certain is that he was home at Falmouth early in December 1778 when his father wrote from Boston and asked Edward to send him some papers he needed. But, beginning in 1779, there is no longer any need to depend on family memories. Edward Preble’s life as a sailor became a matter of record. The articles of the sloop Merrimack of Falmouth, Henry Ellwell, master, show that on 22 June 1779 Edward signed on for a trading voyage to the West Indies. Then approaching 18, he was rated as a seaman in a ship’s company that consisted of master, mate, and five hands.⁷ It was probably in small, hometown traders, such as the Merrimack, that Edward Preble learned the basic seamanship that prepared him to enter the state navy of Massachusetts as an officer when opportunity came in the spring of 1780.

II

The disastrous Penobscot expedition of 1779, in which Massachusetts state forces tried to expel the British from Fort George, their newly occupied post at Bagaduce or Majabagaduce,* Maine, ended in the destruction of a number of ships, including the three oceangoing cruisers of the Massachusetts state navy. During the latter half of 1779 and early 1780 the state service was reduced to one active naval vessel, the Lincoln Galley, a ship used principally for inshore and errand work. But the state’s high-seas navy was almost immediately reborn – and in a more glamorous form – with the launching of its largest ship and only frigate.⁸ She was the Protector, 26 guns, 250 men, authorized by the General Court in April 1778, launched at Newburyport during the summer of 1779, and outfitted at Boston during the winter of 1779-80.⁹

John Foster Williams, who since 1776 had built a solid reputation as a wartime leader in both state ships and privateers, was chosen as her captain. At 36 years of age, he was a skilled seaman and a courageous officer. One had only to meet him or correspond with him to realize that he was no rough sea dog, but a well-educated gentleman with considerable knowledge of mathematics and nautical science. Put another way, he was a man whom gentlemen would want to train and educate their nautically-inclined sons, and there were apparently more candidates for midshipman warrants than could be satisfied. Because an important part of the midshipmen’s duties would be taking command of any prizes the Protector might capture, Williams decided to award warrants only to young gentlemen with considerable experience at sea. In addition to the six warranted midshipmen that the General Court had authorized for the Protector, Captain Williams was permitted to take along six young gentlemen who did not qualify for warrants, but who might thereby gain the experience necessary to fill any vacancies that occurred in the corps of official midshipmen. These aspirants appeared on the ship’s roll as acting midshipmen.

At eighteen and with relatively little sea service behind him, Edward Preble was not considered qualified to be granted a midshipman’s berth. All his father’s influence could not help. The best he could get was one of the acting appointments. Even that did not come through till the last minute. Edward hurried to Nantasket Road, near Boston, where the Protector lay windbound, and joined his ship on 4 April 1780, only hours before she sailed. That first cruise was a short one. On 7 April the Protector reached Falmouth and landed Brigadier General Peleg Wadsworth, the newly appointed military commander for that section of Maine. After inspecting the defenses of the area, Wadsworth embarked in the Lincoln Galley, Captain Joseph Ingraham, which the Protector then escorted to the mouth of the St. George River. There, during the evening of 10 April, the two ships parted company, and the Protector sailed for the entrance to Penobscot Bay, where she was to cruise.

It looked as though the new frigate might be a lucky ship. Henry Mowat, the British officer responsible for the burning of Falmouth in 1775, was at this time the naval commander at Bagaduce, where one of two British transports that had sailed from Halifax under convoy of the sloop of war Nautilus, 16, anchored during the forenoon of 9 April. Mowat feared that the second transport, the Eolus, might be wandering among the islands at the mouth of the bay in need of a pilot, a possibility heightened by the rain, sleet, and fog that were beginning to envelop Penobscot Bay. He put the sailing master from his own sloop of war, the Albany, 14, and twenty-five picked men into the Albany’s tender, the 8-gun sloop Bagaduce, and sent her off to search for the Eolus.

The following morning the Eolus appeared, safe and sound, off the mouth of the Bagaduce River, but the Bagaduce was not with her. In the low visibility the two vessels had missed one another. Nothing was seen of the tender until nine o’clock on the morning of the 11th, when the fog lifted enough to reveal the little sloop hustling up the bay with the Protector hard on her heels. About an hour later there were one or two shots from the Protector, and Henry Mowat had the mortification of watching the Bagaduce strike her colors to John Foster Williams. Then frigate and prize turned and stood out to sea. Accompanied by the Nautilus, the Albany immediately came out of the Bagaduce in pursuit of the Protector. A light-wind chase lasted all through 12 April and into the 13th and took the pursuers past Monhegan Island before it was finally abandoned. Even though the Protector frequently had to heave to for her slower-moving prize, she and the Bagaduce easily outran the pursuing sloops of war.

Captain Williams returned to Nantasket Road on 20 April to receive orders from the Massachusetts Board of War for a longer cruise.¹⁰ If Edward Preble had any doubts about his desire to spend his life at sea, the Protector’s second cruise surely erased them.

Williams was instructed to run down the Maine coast, clearing it of any armed vessels, then take station athwart the sea lanes from Europe to New York and the Carolinas. After cruising seven days in latitude 38°-39°, he was to steer for Cape Race, Newfoundland. The Board of War assumed that most ships from England bound for Canada attempted to sight Cape Race, which should make that a prime area for taking prizes. Next, after cruising to the south of the Newfoundland Banks for 20 days, Williams was to return to the Maine seaboard and patrol there before running southward as far as the route taken by vessels plying between the West Indies and England. Before returning to Boston, he was to make a third call on the Maine coast.¹¹

These orders attempted to combine the protection of the state’s trading vessels and coasts – particularly the vulnerable Maine seaboard – with cruises in the principal sea lanes in search of prizes. This strategy reflected a tension that runs through the history of the Massachusetts state navy. If the coasts were not protected, public unhappiness in the exposed area was quickly translated into pressure on the General Court. Yet, coastal patrol work kept the state ships away from the great sea routes where the rich prizes were to be had, and without the prospect of prize money it was difficult to recruit crews in competition with lucrative privateers.¹²

Departing Nantasket Road on 7 May 1780, the Protector convoyed a sloop and the schooner Two Friends to Machias, Maine.¹³ That extreme northeast section of Maine was under Massachusetts control, but the British presence at Fort George and the privateering base at Bagaduce made the link between Boston and Machias a tenuous one. Four days after leaving Nantasket Road the Protector stood to the southward from the mouth of Machias Bay. Between 14 and 20 May she chased five promising-looking sail in the area of longitude 38°-39° North, latitude 61°-62° West, but three of them turned out to be friends and the other two escaped without identifying themselves. Disappointed, Captain Williams bore away for Newfoundland.

Cape St. Mary’s was sighted on 26 May, and later in the day the Protector’s lookouts saw Cape Race, but the only ships in sight were a few small shallops close inshore. Then a period of thick, dirty weather settled in, and the Protector could only beat about in an apparently empty sea while boredom ate away at crew morale. After a month and two days of bootless cruising and chasing, excitement ran high on the morning of 9 June when a large ship showing British colors was sighted to windward bearing down on the Protector, which thereupon hoisted British colors, too. The stranger was big enough to be a seventy-four, but, as the two ships closed, her unprofessional maneuvers told Captain Williams and his first lieutenant, George Little, that she was a heavily armed merchantman. The Protector cleared for action.

The wind was blowing from W.S.W., and the enemy ship was running before it. Williams’s Protector steered in a generally north or northwestward direction. The stranger approached and passed ahead of the Massachusetts frigate, then hove to under the Protector’s lee. Captain Williams kept under way, crossed his antagonist’s stern, and came to on his lee quarter. It was about 11:00 a.m. Lieutenant Little called on the stranger to identify herself. From Jamaica was all the answer given – or all that could be heard. The British master demanded the Protector’s identity, and Little, affecting not to hear the question, put his trumpet to his ear, and signalled for a repeat. The ruse gave Williams time to determine the number of the Protector’s guns bearing on the enemy. Then Williams called out three orders to be executed simultaneously: Strike British colors! Raise the United States jack and ensign! Fire all guns bearing on the British ship!

The two antagonists came broadside to broadside – the Protector to leeward, her enemy to windward – and perhaps as close as 50 yards from one another. This short range gave the Protector an advantage, for her antagonist, a large and burthensome cargo ship, carried her guns so high that most of her shot went into the Protector’s rigging rather than her hull. The Protector possessed a second advantage in her marines, who displayed considerable skill in gunning down men in the enemy’s tops and on her exposed deck.

Around 12:30 p.m., when the Protector had been slugging it out in a fairly even match with her antagonist for an hour and a half, the enemy ship was seen to be afire. The blaze spread rapidly, there was a terrific explosion, and the British ship began to sink. As fast as the carpenter’s gang could patch the shot holes in them, the Protector’s boats were hoisted out to pick up survivors. Fifty-five men, most of them burned and wounded, were pulled from the water and from floating wreckage. Lieutenant Little recalled that many of the survivors were so excited by the bloody conflict or crazed by its macabre finale and the pain of wounds and burns that they fought the men who were trying to rescue them. Several tried to jump into the sea again from the boats that had picked them up. The only officer saved was the third mate, and from him Williams learned that his late antagonist was the letter of marque ship Admiral Duff, 32, bound from St. Christopher and St. Eustatius to London with a cargo of sugar and tobacco.

Damage to the Protector was quickly repaired, and she continued on her cruise, but Surgeon Thomas Leverett faced a major health problem. The Admiral Duff was infected with a West India fever and, within a month, death claimed fifteen of the fifty-five prisoners on board the Protector. Fever spread to the Protector’s crew, and the number of men on the sick list grew day by day.

At 5:00 a.m. on 1 July, the frigate’s lookouts sighted two ships, one bearing S.E. and the other N.W. and both moving towards the Protector. Light airs were blowing from W.S.W. Williams decided to stand up towards the sail in the N.W. and have a closer look. By 10:00 a.m. the ship sighted to the S.E. had disappeared astern. An hour later the stranger in the N.W. came to life and – aided perhaps by a slightly stronger breeze than Williams enjoyed – began steering down for the Protector. Williams computed his noon position to be latitude 43° 34′ North, with Halifax Light bearing N. by E. The stranger was figuring his noon position was latitude 43°42′ North. While the two captains made their calculations, the ships held their respective courses and continued to close one another. At 2:00 p.m., Captain Williams recognized the stranger as a British frigate – one that mounted perhaps as many as 32 guns, or six more than the Protector carried. Furthermore, fever had cut into the number of Massachusetts men who would be able to go to quarters when the drum beat.

For these reasons, John Foster Williams decided it would be imprudent to take on the British frigate, if an engagement could be avoided. With the British ship in pursuit, the Protector tacked and stood away to the S.E. As she ran off she raised United States colors. About that moment she sighted two more ships, one bearing N.W. and the other W. Both were making for her. If they were consorts of the British warship, the Protector was in a tight spot. The wind had risen to a light westerly breeze. At 3:00 p.m. Williams altered course more to the east to run directly before this breeze and set studding sails alow and aloft. Still the British frigate came on fast. Minutes before four o’clock the enemy warship made a series of four signals. Hearts sank in the Protector. Those signals must be instructions to the two ships that had been sighted two hours earlier, and that still seemed to be pursuing the Protector. Were three British frigates closing in on the lone Massachusetts ship?

By four o’clock, the British frigate had closed the gap between herself and the Protector to less than 1,800 yards. She opened fire with one of her bow guns. The Protector had already trundled two (or perhaps four) stern chasers into position and immediately returned the British fire. During the next four hours the two ships maintained the same relative positions, the Protector firing to cut the enemy’s masts or rigging, the British frigate replying with her bow chasers. The Protector’s gunnery seemed the better: several of her shot cut her antagonist’s rigging, tore holes in his sails, and one broke his foreyard.

At 8:00 p.m. the British ship was working up on the Protector’s quarter. But the advantage was shifting to the fleeing Protector. It was almost dark, and night would increase her chances for escape. The enemy commander decided to take a