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| President Washington requested |
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| a Naval Academy |
The United States Navy was officially founded on October 13, 1775,
when the Continental Congress authorized the outfitting of two vessels "of ten carriage guns...for a cruise of three months"
against British supply ships. A Naval Committee of three men-Silas Deane, Christopher Gadsden and John Langdon- was appointed
to supervise the project.
The Continental Congress had a very limited role in mind for the Navy. It was not expected
to contest British control of the seas, but rather to wage a traditional guerre de course against British trade in conjunction
with privateers outfitting in American ports. The Continental Navy's ships were to raid commerce and attack the transports
that supplied British forces in North America. To carry out this mission, the Continental Congress began to build up a cruiser
Navy of small ships - frigates, brigs, sloops and schooners. For the most part Continental Navy ships tried to avoid fights
with Royal Navy men-of-war. Few larger ships, in fact, ever put to sea.
| The U.S.S. Ranger raided England |
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| Commanded by Captain John Paul Jones |
During the Revolution, there were occasional triumphs in single-ship
engagements - the capture, for example of the British sloop-of-war Drake by Captain John Paul Jones' Ranger. Jones also operated
against the British in the North Sea itself, and actually raided the coast of Great Britain. Jones, born a Scot, had actually
fled to Virginia originally to avoid prosecution by Great Britain for murder. He also captained the Bonhomme Richard and is
known as the father of the American Navy.
The Navy also employed the first undersea combat submarine during the Revolution, the Turtle,
designed by David Bushnell of Connecticut. This was a one man submersible with two hand-held propellors and an outside
screw designed to place a plug in the bottom of British ships with an explosive barrel attached which would then explode
after its fuse burned. The Turtle was employed in action on only one date, September 6,1776, in New York Harbor,
against the H.M.S. Eagle. It failed to explode the Eagle, but is reported to have scared the devil out of
the British sailors on board the attacked ship.
As expected, though, the Continental Navy never became a strategic
check for the British fleet.
But the course of the War did demonstrate to America the importance of sea power. New
York, for example, has one of the biggest and deepest harbors in the world. And Lord William Howe, the British commander,
wanted New York City because it protected the British power base (2/3rd's of the City's inhabitants were loyalists) and because
its capture meant the Royal Navy could sail up the Hudson River into the heart of rebel territory. The Britsih had a
powerful navy, and they knew we did not have much of one. They knew, given all that, it was a must for them to maintain their
occupation of New York City for the duration of the Revolution, which is exactly what they did. And the control of the Atlantic
by the Royal Navy allowed Great Britain to transport a large army to North America and to sustain it there.
And French sea power, allied with the American cause after 1778,
allowed Washington to isolate and destroy the British army of Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown in 1781, ending Britain's hope of
crushing the Revolution.
While we had differences during the Revolution over taxation, and the right of a king to rule by
divine authority, the fact is, America has taken many of the fundamental principles of its democracy from Britain, and that
the British and American peoples have always had a special relationship and more in common than that which might divide them.
| President Thomas Jefferson |
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| Had strong ideas on the role of the Navy |
Two years after the end of the War, however, the money-poor Congress
sold off the last ship of the Continental Navy.
The refusal of Congress to embark on even a minimum naval program
began to change when the question of aggressors, such as the Barbary Muslim states in North Africa preying on U.S. merchant
shipping in the Mediterranean, became a national issue. Jefferson had said, as early as 1784 that: "We ought to be a naval
power, if we mean to carry on our commerce." Alexander Hamilton argued that while the United States could not challenge Europe's
principal maritime powers on the seas, in the event of a Franco-British war, a small American fleet could play the makeweight
in the balance of power in the Western Hemisphere. Hamilton and his Federalists in fact felt that a Navy could play a broad
national role in projecting the interests of the United States, and should not be limited to merely protecting American commerce.
In the 1790s the Barbary Algerians again began to prey upon American merchant ships in the Mediterranean and, this
time, Congress responded by passing a naval act that called for the construction of six frigates. As these large frigates
were being built - Constitution, President, United States, Congress, Constellation, and Chesapeake - Napoleon's France struck,
by seizing hundreds of U.S. commercial ships and cargoes, mostly in the Caribbean. Congress responded by passing legislation
expanding the Navy to 30 vessels and by creating an independent executive Department of the Navy. These ships aggressively
began to patrol the Caribbean, effectively protecting U.S. merchantmen, gaining the Navy an excellent public impression by
1800.
Jefferson won the election of 1800, but was immediately confronted by more depredations aimed at U.S. commerce
in the Mediterranean by the Dey of Tripoli, the leading Barbary state. Jefferson decided to use the new Navy in an offensive,
forward way, by blockading and bombarding Tripoli and providing support and logistics for a force organized from Egypt to
march on Tripoli and topple the Dey. By 1807 there existed in the United States a clear political consensus supporting a naval
establishment, but the primary, and limited, theme of that Navy was still the protection of U.S. maritime commerce, and not
the projection of American power, or even the protection of vital national interests.
The War of 1812 with Great Britain
resurrected the naval debate in the United States. The Navy was forced, in this War, to fight large British naval ships, and
scored some tremendous victories for so small a force. In 1812, the Constitution, commanded by Captain Isaac Hull, destroyed
the Royal Navy frigate Guerriere. The United States, commanded by Captain Stephen Decatur, Jr., captured then scuttled the
British frigate Macedonian, and late in the first year of the War the Constitution, then commanded by William Bainbridge,
captured the Java. U.S. men-of-war won many other single ship engagements.
| By the dawn's early light |
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| Our Flag was still there |
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Despite these victories, the cost to the United States of having a comparatively
weak Navy were quickly driven home. Great Britain was able to send numerous naval squadrons and several armies across the
Atlantic. The United States found its ports blockaded and its trade all but destroyed. The British raided the coast at will.
In the summer of 1814 a small British force captured Washington and burned the Navy Yard and the White House. British victories
on Lake Ontario gave Britain effective control of the Great Lakes. The British, however, had no desire to continue this struggle
and signed a treaty of peace late in 1814. Word of this treaty reached New Orleans late where, in 1815, General Andrew Jackson,
with an American force consisting largely of Tennessee volunteers, blacks, creoles, cajuns and privateers, scored
a major victory over a British army advancing down the Mississippi, killing over 2,000 British troops at Chalmette Field in
a battle lasting 50 minutes, and losing only 7 American dead. Thus was destroyed forever British chances of blocking
our way westward by controlling the Mississippi River.
In 1839, the Navy's first steam powered vessel was built, creating the need for
engineers as well as sailors.
| The U.S.S. Constitution engages H.M.S. Cyane |
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| During the War of 1812 |
In the spring of 1841, our first wagon
trains set out for California and America's Pacific Ocean, from Independence, Missouri. These folks, who composed the trains,
were desperate people on a search for gold or land because they could not pay their debts at home, or, in many cases, crooks
and thieves, or even worse, on a desperate journey from a crime. They referred to the place they had left behind
as 'the States,' from whence the term was coined.
To us, this Association, they are neither crooks nor thieves nor criminals.
They are American pioneers and American patriots.
And they were then, and are today, part of our manifest destiny.
In the period after the War of 1812, the
consensus for a strong Navy survived the peace. In the postwar years the Navy blockaded and bombarded Algiers and kept small
ongoing squadrons in the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, off the west African coast, and in the Pacific.
The Navy also
struggled during this period to keep up with rapidly changing technology which was quickly making the men-of-war built during
the War, and all ships like them, obsolete. The Navy experimented with steam-powered propulsion systems, armor plating, breech-loaders,
shell guns, and the telegraph. An engineering-oriented Naval Academy was also established at Annapolis, Maryland, on the site
of the former Ft. Severn, in 1845. President George Washington had asked for it, a long time previously. The Naval
Academy's first class was made up of fifty students, and taught by seven teachers.
During the Mexican War (1846-1848),
the Navy blockaded Mexican ports and supported operations ashore both along the California coast and in the Gulf of Mexico.
The Navy also transported General Winfield Scott's Army to Veracruz in 1847, from where it marched inland to capture Mexico
City, thus ending the War.
The Mexican-American War represented the
first major projection by sea of American military power abroad. Transported and supplied in large part by the Navy, General
Scott's Army, outnumbered five to one in every engagement with Santa Anna's forces, won every battle, took Chalpultepec
Castle, and conquered Mexico City, bringing the war to a close with a speed that amazed knowledgeable military veterans of
the day.
By 1860, four million black Americans, 1/7th of the entire population, were slaves. From the
election of George Washington to the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 - a period of 72 years - for 50 of those years,
a slaveholder had been President of the United States, and slavery - free labor - accounted for the millionaire status of
a handful of Southern slave owners. Slavery was the flame that lit the fuse of America's Civil War.
'For I have seen the affliction of my people in Egypt, and I have heard their cry caused by their
taskmasters...and I am come down to deliver them....'
During the War Between the States (1861-1865) the Union had a near monopoly on naval power. Naval
officers, more so than Army officers, remained on the Union side.
That statement is not meant to disparage the Army:
The average Union trooper was paid $4.00 a day for his service.
At the beginning, in 1861, so many southerners volunteered for Confederate service that 1/3rd of
them had to be turned away. By the end of the war that would change, as would many things.
When the South seceded in 1861, at the United States Military Academy in New York, the Superintendant
of Cadets asked those Army cadets loyal to the Confederacy to fall out and re-form, which they did. They then paraded off
the Plain at West Point to join the war with the South. As they marched, the story goes, the United States Military Academy
Band played "Dixie" and the Southern cadets did an eyes-right to Old Glory for the last time, as their Union cadet brethern,
to them, for the last time, presented arms.
Over the next four years, at Bull Run, Manasses, Winchester, Chancellorsville, Vicksburg, Gettysburg,
Chickamauga, Franklin, Cold Harbor, Forts Henry and Donaldson, Nashville and throughout the forests and hills of
Northern Virginia, most of those young men would die.
(In 1913, the United States Government sponsored a 50-year reunion of Civil War soldiers
at Gettysburg, where 43,000 American boys were killed in 1863, which climaxed with a re-enactment of Pickett's charge by the
now aged Confederate surviving veterans, without arms. A great gasp went up from the aged Union veterans "defending" Little
Round Top, and then they spontaneously rushed forward to embrace their fellow countrymen with brotherly love, and affection.)
The Naval Academy was moved to Newport, Rhode Island in 1861 because of fear of a Confederate
attack. It was returned to Annapolis in 1865.
The
majority of the U.S. Navy's men-of-war also were in northern ports and the absence of Confederate oceangoing sea power
initially gave the Union de facto control of the seas.
| Our Flag restored, Ft. Sumter, April 14, 1865 |
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| While Union ships in the harbor fired in celebration |
Click for Judy's "Battle Hymn"
Union control of the seas allowed the North to blockade
the coastal ports of the South, severely handicapping the Southern war effort.
It is only emerging now, in the early 21st century, that Southerners, given the Union blockade,
were right and left improvising the building and operation of a number of naval submersibles since the first year of the war,
1861, especially in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
One battle, in 1862, caused by the blockade, took place at the mouth
of the Chesapeake Bay where a Confederate ironclad, C.S.S. Virginia, was attacking Union blockade ships. The Virginia was
in turn attacked by a new Union ironclad, a true semi-submersible, the U.S.S. Monitor. In four hours of fighting, neither
ship seriously damaged the other, but the Virginia withdrew.
A Swedish-born inventor, John Ericcson, had created the Monitor. Ericcson
actually hated the Navy because he felt it cheated him out of a contractor's payment years before. But he was urged to build
a ship designed specifically to counter the Virginia, which, it was feared, would cruise up the Potomac and shell the White
House.
Confederate commanders had
to maintain tens of thousands of troops to guard against Union forays from the sea. In the critical battles fought along the
Mississippi River, Union oceangoing and inland-water naval forces combined in a classic campaign to cut the Confederacy in
two. By the time General William Tecumseh Sherman marched his 62,000 troops to the Atlantic from Atlanta in 1864, the South
had been cut up at least three ways by Union forces, and its armies were falling apart. General Robert E. Lee signed the instrument
of surrender with Genral Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia in April, 1865. The costliest war America would
ever fight was over.
| The U.S.S. Monitor and C.S.S. Virginia engage |
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| The first ironclads |
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On April 15, 1865, at 7 in the moring, Abraham Lincoln
died in a boarding house in Washington, our Nation's capital, where he had attended a play across the street at Ford's
Theatre the night before, Good Friday, of gunshot wounds inflicted by the assassin and
well known actor John Wilkes Booth.
His body was carried back to the White House on what was then,
and will forevermore be, known as Black Easter.
He was the 16th President of the United States,
and was 56 years old.
No President of the United States had ever been
murdered.
On his funeral cortege home to Illinois, in Cleveland,
Ohio, 10,000 Americans filed by his coffin each hour.
"Now he belongs to the ages."
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| Lincoln was, after Washington, |
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| our greatest President |
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Joe Johnston, the last Confederate general to surrender to Sherman, served in honoring the cortege of General
Sherman in New York City in 1891, on a day of freezing cold. Ten days later, Johnston died of pneumonia.
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Ulysses S. Grant became a two-term President of the United States. He died in 1885 of cancer of the
throat.
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Robert E. Lee, the greatest general, and most brilliant strategist, of the Confederacy, became president
of Washington College in Virginia at the war's end, which was re-named Washington & Lee University after his death.
He died in 1870.
He is loved and respected, throughout the United States, even today, as a man of honor.
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| Last of the sailing ships recruitment posters |
After
1865 Americans were tired of war and were struggling to reconstruct the nation and the Navy entered a 20-year period of decline.
There was no obvious threat of a European invasion during this time and our Navy was allowed to age into obsolescence. By
1880, in terms of manpower, number of ships, and technology, the Navy was far behind all the major navies of Europe.
During
the 1880s, when Americans looked abroad, they saw a technologically superior Europe on the march with a new imperialism. The
Ottoman and Chinese empires, for example, long the target of U.S. commercial and missionary interest, were under severe and
steady pressure from the European powers and at times appeared to be on the verge of collapse. Europeans were expanding their
political and economic control into the hearts of Africa and Eurasia. In the Western hemishere, the European powers became
increasingly involved in the internal affairs of Central America and South America.
A strong Navy would allow the
United States to prevent European powers from threatening the United States or the Western Hemisphere and a renewed consensus
began growing supporting the development of naval power. Among those who worked to shape this new Navy as an agressive force
to project American power were civilian leaders, such as President Benjamin Harrison, William McKinley, and Theodore Roosevelt
and, most notably, historian and former U.S. Navy Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan.
The U.S.S. Maine exploded in Havana
Harbor at 9:40 p.m. on the night of February 15, 1898. Costing an impressive $2.5 million to build, the battleship Maine had
been in commision for only 29 months and had originally been sent into Caribbean waters to prevent Americans from the Florida
Keys, called "filibusterers," from invading Cuba in support of the Cuban insurgents' uprising there against Spanish imperial
rule.
The explosion took place as the sailors of the U.S. Navy aboard were retiring to their hammocks for the night, killing
266 of our men, out of a total crew of 392.
| The Maine's explosion was the provocation |
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| which led to the end of Spain's world empire |
The destruction of the Maine was America's first experience with
faceless terrorism, and "Remember the Maine" became a naval, and American, battlecry in a Spanish-American War (1898-1899)
which would redefine the new roles of the U.S. Navy.
Far in the Pacific, Rear Admiral George Dewey's Asiatic Squadron
quickly entered Manila Bay and annihilated the Spanish fleet. In the Atlantic, other Navy squadrons blockaded Spanish naval
forces based in Cuba, and transported U.S. troops to the island. Ultimately the Navy destroyed Spanish naval power in the
western Atlantic, sealing the fate of Spain's now forgotten New World empire.
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| Arlington National Cemetery |
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| Burials of the U.S S. Maine Crew |
| Dewey at Manila Bay |
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| 1 May 1898 |
| The Rough Riders |
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| on San Juan Hill, Cuba |
After the Spanish-American War, the United States continued to expand
its naval forces. In 1907 and 1908, President Theodore Roosevelt sent the Great White Fleet of sixteen new battleships on
a global cruise to demonstrate U.S. naval power to the world, and especially to Japan. Under the Administrations of both Roosevelt
and William H. Taft, the United States continued to build battleships. The U.S. Navy had become the Nation's first line of
defense, defending a line now drawn far from American shores. In 1914, when the Panama Canal finally opened, allowing our
Atlantic and Pacific Fleets to become mutually reinforceable, World War I began in Europe.
| The beginnings of the modern Navy |
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| Recruitment poster, 1908 |
| Teddy Roosevelt |
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| was and is the father of the modern U.S. Navy |
The Great War threatened U.S. freedom of
the seas, as German submarines struck at Allied and neutral shipping indiscriminately. Great Britain also exploited its control
of the seas to the detriment of U.S. commerce. In 1916, increasingly frustrated, President Woodrow Wilson and the U.S. Congress
responded to these actions by launching a massive naval building program designed to make the U.S. Navy second to none. The
following year, when the Germans resumed unresricted submarine warfare, the U.S. declared war on Germany. Wilson then sent
the U.S. Navy and the American Expeditionary Forces across the Atlantic in a move that ensured Allied victory in 1918.
| Navy Recruiting Poster |
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| 1917 |
A widespread desire to reduce military expenditures
set into both the Democratic and Republican parties after World War I. This fiscal conservatism was coupled with a desire
for disarmament and, while a series of naval treaties signed in Washington in 1923 ensured parity between the United States
and Great Britain, they also provided for reduced navies and gave Imperial Japan, already casting its eyes on East Asia, veritable
naval dominance in the western Pacific. There was also a debate over the type of ships the Navy should have. Old timers favored
the battleship, while Young Turks argued that technology made them vulnerable and therefore obsolete. These modernists argued,
instead, for destroyers and other smaller warships, and the creation of aircraft carriers to project naval air power, as a
counter to the technological threats then existing and to come. The Association, unlike almost every other staid Navy group
at the time, was firmly on the side of the modernists in its advocacy and, unlike those same groups, also vigorously opposed
the pacifism seemingly prevalent in the country, as well as the fiscal conservatism prevalent in Congress as applied to military
forces.
The Navy's first airfield was built at Annapolis in 1911, and the first naval air station was established
at Pensacola in 1916, but it was not really until the late 1930s, after the threat of Hitler's and Japan's militarism became
apparent, that the U.S. began to re-arm. By 1939, the Navy finally had begun building long-range submarines and carriers armed
with sea-based aircraft whose capabilities approximated those of land-based aircraft.
In the period 1940-41, President Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to use U.S. naval power to deter war. The Pacific Fleet was moved from California to Hawaii in an attempt to discourage
further Japanese expansion. In the North Atlantic, Roosevelt waged an undeclared naval war against German U-boats.
| U.S. Lend Lease Destroyers |
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| being transferred to the Royal Navy, 1940 |
| The West Virginia burning at Pearl Harbor |
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| December 7, 1941 |
On December 7, 1941, without warning, Japanese
carrier-based aircraft attacked the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. The Fleet's battleline was all but incapacitated. On December
10, Hitler declared war on the United States and the country immediately faced a two-ocean war.
| "Remember Pearl Harbor" |
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| Recruitment Poster, 1942 |
The initial phases of World War II went poorly
for the United States, and especially the Navy. We were defeated in Bataan, and lost the Philippines. In the Atlantic, U-boats
torpedoed Allied commercial shipping within sight of the eastern seaboard. Victory in the Battle of the Atlantic was essential
if the manpower and the products of the U.S. arsenal of democracy were to be transported to Britain and brought to bear
against the Axis.
| World War II Convoy |
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| Protected by the U.S. Navy |
By the middle of 1943 The U.S. and the Navy had
largely controlled the U-boat threat through technological advances, codebreaking, and the produc
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Site Index and Guide to the Site ************************* 
(1) Pages About the Association: ***************************************************************** ***************** Mission Statement: Who We Are and What We Do ************************ ***************** Homeport: A History of the United States Navy Veterans Association *************** *********** Veterans Outreach Programs **************************************** ****************** Current Advocacy and Achievements: Legislation and U.S. Government Policy ****** ************* Convention, Membership and Contributions Information/Do Not Call List **************** ******* Navy Eagle Circle ************** ************************* Navy Community Foundation Fund Awards, Endorsements and Compliments ************************************************ State and Overseas Chapters/Contribution Processing Centers ******************************* Membership Application *************************************************************** Governmental Disclosures ************************************************ * Annual Report 
(2) Pages About the U.S. Navy: ***************************************************************** **************** History of the United States Navy *************** ************************* News of the Navy U.S. Navy Enlisted Personnel and Officers' Insignia ***************************************** A Brief History of the United States Naval Academy ***************** United States Navy Seabees United States Navy Seals ********************* *********************** Virtual Navy Wall 
