By “ship of the line” I mean a 100% sail, relatively big ass vessel with two or three decks full of bug guns. Something like the HMS Victory.
According to my cursory googling, the US Navy had the HMS Franklin, 74, which was broken up in the 1820’s and didn’t really do anything. Other than that, it looks like the US Navy relied on frigates and smaller vessels until the Civil War, when steam powered, iron-hulled vessels took over.
Anyway, is there any explanation for the apparent lack of American ships-of-the-line?
Power projection across the ocean and major naval engagements with neighbours weren’t big concerns of the US at that time.
The British, French and Spanish did because they wanted to project power over long distances and because they were close rivals.
Good point. The Constitution sorta blended the line between “heavy frigate” and “full battleship”. Maybe that’s why the American navy seemed content with its inventory during the first half of the 19th century.
The USS Constitution would have been blown out of the water in a fight with a real Ship of the Line. The USN superfrigates had great success against RN frigates during the War of 1812, but toe-to-toe with HMS Victory or its like? Not a chance. Of course, frigates, even large ones like Constitution, could sail rings around the big ships, and so any sane captain would just stay out of range.
Ships of the line needed huge crews, were expensive to operate and you’d need a lot of them to be able to go toe-to-toe with the other big sail navies of the day, so the U.S. tended not to build them. They didn’t meet operational needs. The Pennsylvania, the biggest sailing ship ever to serve in the U.S. Navy, took only a single cruise.
Right. Until the Civil war the USA just wasn’t a world power, and thus we couldn’t really build a “line”. True occ we tried but really they would be/were a waste of money. It’s not enough to have just a couple of Ships of the Line, you need a good dozen or more to fight a enemy fleet. The Super Frigates were perfect for the early US Navy.
Also note that the “big” navy that John Adams championed during his presidency was opposed by Jefferson, so there wasn’t much political support for much of a navy at all after Adams and the Federalists lost big in the 1800 election.
The Constitution really wasn’t a ship-of-the-line, it was a heavy frigate. Wikipedia lists it as a 44 gun frigate, and while that’s pretty heavy for a frigate, it wouldn’t stand a chance against a real ship-of-the-line of that time period. French and British ships-of-the-line were much, much larger. Consider H.M.S. Victory– laid down in 1759, it still had more than twice as many guns as the Constitution. The early U.S. Navy was not trying to compete with the European powers in terms of ships-of-the-line because the British had a centuries-long head start and used it to protect their colonial holdings. The U.S. had no colonies and no need to protect them, so a group of tough, fast frigates allowed the U.S. to fight an irregular sea war by capturing enemy shipping and running from larger ships.
Naval battles with ships-of-the-line involved dozens of ships lining up in a column (the “line of battle”) and sailing past each other. This allowed each ship to protect the vulnerable stern and bow while presenting the heavily armed sides to the enemy. You needed dozens of ships to do this effectively, and the side with the most firepower and the heaviest ships tended to win. The U.S. simply didn’t have the resources to produce enough ships-of-the-line to fight any European power, so they elected (probably correctly) to produce heavy frigates that would be able to go toe-to-toe with small British and French frigates and avoid larger engagements.
Well, I’ll posit that one could get by with fewer than “dozens.” But your essential point is right – “ships of the line” work best in a line of battle, so you need to build multiples of them to be useful, and the costs add up quickly for any nation. There’s a reason they’re called capital ships. The early US decided not to foot that bill.
Then, too, a line of battle can only be in one place at once. If you wanted to be able to wage full-on naval war on multiple fronts, you’d have to multiple the number of ships in a line by the number of places you wanted them. Small, fast, independently-operating ships have the advantage there, too.
To elaborate, the Constitution was particularly heavily armed, even for a “44-gun” frigate. It was armed with thirty 24-pounder long-range heavy cannons, and twenty 32-pounder carronades (short range heavy cannons). The frigates of other nations were typically armed with lighter, shorter-ranged 18-pounders, and fewer carronades. Thus, the Constitution had significantly more firepower than the British frigates it encountered, the fifth-rate, “38-gun” Java and Guerriere. It was roughly equivalent to the fourth-rate 50-60 gun ships – the lightest “ship of the line”.
Of course, ships of the line like the Victory were armed with a mix of 24 pounders and yet heavier 32 pounders.
But, in essence, those US heavy frigates could outfight anything short of a ship of the line. Which was plenty for any nation that didn’t want to, say, invade England.