[A fine article authored by our member, John Millar, concerning Benedict Arnold, Virginia, and the Continental Navy. Enjoy!]
Benedict Arnold established the fresh-water
Continental Navy on Lake Champlain at the end of April 1775, only ten days
after the events at Concord and Lexington. Most of the various states
established their own navies, Rhode Island being the first on 12 June 1775. The
salt-water Continental Navy was founded as a result of Rhode Island’s
intercession with Congress on 13 October 1775. Virginia, arguably the
wealthiest of all the original states, established her own navy close to
Christmas 1775.
Virginia
may have been the wealthiest state, but most of that value was in real estate,
which was very difficult to tax. As a result, the vessels of the Virginia Navy
at first were small – schooners about 50 feet long on deck with only
swivel-guns. Finally, in 1780, Governor Thomas Jefferson was able to finance
the construction of a naval force that looked quite formidable, at least on
paper. Four frigates of 20 to 24 carriage guns (essentially, the same size as
the British frigate Rose that had plagued Rhode Island 1774-6, or the
ancient Fowey that had served as the British flagship in Virginia at
that same time). These four Virginia frigates each measured about 100 to 105
feet long on deck, 30 feet in breadth, and needed about 13 feet of water to
float. Each could set about 30,000 square feet of sail with 10 square sails
plus 10 fore-and-aft sails. These four ships sported classical Greek names (as
one might expect from Jefferson): Thetis, Poseidon, Nereus, and
Artemis, of which only Thetis was able to get under sail.
The four
frigates were backed up by 18-gun corvettes, about 90 feet long on deck, Apollo
and American Fabius, to which was added the corvette Cormorant
captured from the British. Still less expensive were five 16-gun corvettes,
about 75 feet long on deck, Renown, Tartar, Tempest, Gloucester, and Morningstar.
A few additional smaller ships,
rigged as 14-gun brigs, were added to the mix. Tidewater Virginia is riven by a
number of substantial rivers on which these ships could be constructed in
part-time shipyards: the James, the Chickahominy, the York, the Rappahannock,
and the Potomac.
Jefferson had been able to come by enough money to construct and fit out
these warships, but crewing them was a different matter. Each of the frigates
was expected to have a crew of 150 men, and the corvettes appropriately smaller
numbers, but Jefferson was unable to recruit more than 150 men in total to be
spread between all the ships, by the time that General Benedict Arnold arrived
in Virginia in January 1781 with almost 2000 British troops. Arnold, who carefully
picked Portsmouth as his base, across the Elizabeth River from Norfolk (which
the Patriots had burned to the ground on New Year’s Eve 1775-6 so that the
British would not be able to use it as a base), had been issued clear orders.
He was not to bother any peaceable Virginians, but if he encountered warlike
supplies, he was to destroy them, and then he was to capture the Virginia House
of Burgesses without harming anyone (the idea being that the captured
legislators could then be talked into signing a generous peace treaty with the
British). The House of Burgesses was meeting in a tobacco warehouse in the tiny
village of Richmond when Arnold made two unsuccessful attempts to capture the
legislators there in January and May 1781, and he made a third almost successful
attempt in June with the help of 300 cavalry under Colonel Banastre Tarleton,
after the House of Burgesses had hurriedly moved 60 miles west to
Charlottesville.
Of
course, Arnold could not ignore all the newly-constructed Virginia warships.
Some of the ships (including three of the frigates) had not yet been launched
at their shipyard on the Chickahominy River, so Arnold made quick work of
burning them in place. Most of the rest of the ships, with their greatly
under-strength crews, were drawn up at anchor across the James River with their
guns loaded and run out. Arnold sent detachments of troops with field-guns to
the bluffs at each end of the line of ships, and they systematically destroyed
or captured almost the entire fleet.
In
Richmond, Arnold destroyed a wealth of naval stores, including some
freshly-harvested hemp for making cordage, and there is anecdotal evidence of resulting
wild hemp plants growing out of cracks in the sidewalks of the Shockoe Bottom district
of Richmond well into the twentieth century!
The
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City owns a folk-art painting of a
frigate the size of Thetis, #63-201-3, which used to be called The
Plantation. According to Met Curator Ashley Williams, their staff believes the
painting to have been executed in the 1820s. However, evidence in the ship
herself suggests strongly that it was painted early in the 1780s. First, the
ship lacks a ‘dolphin-striker’ below the bowsprit, invented in 1792, and almost
all images of ships after 1792 contain that spar. Second, the stars-and-stripes
ensign is flown from an [outrageously tall] ensign staff, whereas from the
mid-1780s on, the ensign was flown from the gaff. Third, the color of the
ship’s hull is mostly buff or yellow-ocher, as it would have been in the 1780s,
not mostly black as it would have been in the 1820s.
Is it
possible to identify the ship depicted? Assuming a date from the early 1780s,
it may be possible. First of all, the ensign flown by the ship is the
Stars-and-Stripes, a flag that was limited by law to ships of the Continental
Navy or the various state navies. Privateers and merchant ships were required
to use a flag of thirteen red and white stripes, with no stars, although some
ship owners and captains may have been indifferent to or unaware of those rules.
At this stage of its life, The Continental Navy lacked the money to acquire
such ships, so this ship is not in the Continental Navy. Of the state navies,
those in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and South Carolina had ships of
this size, but the painting shows the frigate under way close to shore.
Virginia, with its powerful rivers, was the only state where a ship could sail
that close to a river bank.
Ms. Williams
remarked that the substantial building behind the frigate looks Germanic, and
that may indeed be a clue to the identity of the painting. German-born and
educated Revolutionary War scholar Dr Robert A Selig came across a remarkable
document in Germany. It was the journal account in German of the career of
Private Georg Daniel Flohr (1756-1826) in the Royal Deux-Ponts or Zweibrucken
German-speaking French regiment that was brought to America in 1780 by General
Donatien de Vimeur, Comte de Rochambeau. Flohr illustrated his journal with
folk-art paintings, many of them showing towns that he visited, including
Boston, Providence, Newport, Philadelphia, Annapolis, Yorktown, and
Williamsburg. Dr Selig published many of Flohr’s illustrations in the October
1994 issue of American Heritage Magazine (vol. 45, #6). Flohr made notes about
the buildings shown in each town, so that he generally got the sizes and
numbers of windows correct, but he waited until he had returned to Europe
before finishing the paintings. Of course, the only buildings that he could see
in the German section of France were German buildings, so his paintings of
American towns were populated with Germanic buildings, even if they had the
correct numbers of windows.
Many
commentators over the years have remarked that the Met’s painting represents
Turkey Island Plantation House, which had been built in the late 1760s for the
prestigious Randolph family on the east bank of the James River a short
distance upriver from the well-known Shirley Plantation. Turkey Island had been
destroyed in the American Civil War in the 1860s, but it is described in
insurance documents and travel diaries. Its foundations have also been
investigated, and, allowing for the folk artist’s exuberance, the painting
matches the foundation. The house was crowned, we are told, by a particularly
large cupola that was popularly known as ‘the bird-cage,’ and in fact the
painting shows the cupola as looking like a giant period bird cage.
Flohr
was based at Williamsburg for about a year, so it would have been simple for
him to have sailed up the James River and seen Turkey Island Plantation House.
The frigate Thetis, however, is another matter, because she was no
longer in the James River after Arnold’s raid on the ships. The only thing I
can think of is that some local artist painted the ship while she was sailing
in the James, and donated his little work to Flohr when he saw Flohr making
such detailed notes about the buildings and vegetation of Virginia; Flohr then
painted his copy of the portrait of the ship into the painting of the
plantation house.
As for
Flohr, he returned home to his German-speaking district of France when his
regiment was no longer needed (and you can imagine that he was not permitted to
serve even another day after he arrived home, because the French government was
found to be insolvent). The insolvency led to the King’s arrest and
imprisonment. Flohr was in Paris and witnessed the guillotining of Louis XVI on
21 January 1793. The incident turned his stomach, so he packed his bags and
moved back to Virginia. There, he managed to be ordained as a German-Lutheran
pastor. He was assigned to St John’s Lutheran Church, Wytheville, Virginia,
where many of the parishioners were German-speaking, and where he spent the
rest of his life.
Thomas
Jefferson wanted the world to know that he had written the national Declaration
of Independence and the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, and that he had
founded the University of Virginia in 1819, and those three things are the only
achievements inscribed on his gravestone. His having served as Governor of
Virginia, Ambassador to France, Secretary of State, President of the United
States, and purchaser of Louisiana were not mentioned. If this paper’s
supposition about the ship in the Met’s painting being the frigate Thetis is
true, this is the only surviving period image of any ship of the Virginia Navy
in the entire Revolution, those ships being, in spite of their sad fate, yet
another feather in Jefferson’s cap. While several period images have survived
of ships in the Continental Navy, very few images survive of ships of state
navies (New Hampshire, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina,
and now Virginia, are all that come to mind). A handful of period images of
privateers are also known.
