There is something in all of us that thrills to the sea. The vast oceans cover 70% of Earth's surface, eternal and everchanging. They are the highways of the world's commerce, the source of a great power's strength and prosperity, and a site where desperate battles fought, and heroic deeds done. In a swift and deeply sourced history, Toll brings alive the character of the period, and the role of the American Navy at the dawn of this country.

The Navy is specified in the constitution, but a naval build-up was controversial from the get-go. While Federalists saw a navy as a key protector of trade and defender of national honor, the agrarian Jeffersonian Republican party saw the navy as a useless expense that would incur ruinous debts, entangle America in European wars and benefit New England merchants at the expense of the common man. As Barbary corsairs began to prey on unescorted American traders, the Washington administration ordered the construction of six frigates to serve as the capital ships of the American Navy.

The six frigates, designed by renegade Quaker shipwright Joshua Humpfrey, proved controversial from the start. Humpfrey's design was larger than European frigates, with exceptionally heavy framing of southern live oak. Finely cut and powerfully armed, the frigates were intended to outrun lumbering ships of the line and overpower lesser frigates and brigs. Philadelphia, then the capitol and commercial center of North America, was the logical place to build the ships, but in an early example of pork barrel defense procurement, the actual job of construction was split to separate cities up and down the Atlantic sea coast, increasing cost and complexity.

The ships served with both success and catastrophe in the quasi-war with France and the initial retaliatory raids against Tripoli. The USS Philadelphia ran hard around outside Tripoli and was forced to strike her colors, before being destroyed in a daring raid. Ships were only one part of the American navy. The officers and sailors were even more important, and Tolls describes an alien martial culture of dueling and high honor.

The key conflict of the era was over impressment of American sailors. The British Navy faced a personnel problem of epic proportions as it waged war against Napoleon, and the burgeoning American merchant fleet was full of sailors, some deserters from the British Navy, but many Americans. The British were cavalier in stopping American ships and topping up their crews, no matter the legalities. British merchantile interests resented the Americans, who were prospering on trade with embargoed France as Britain bled. Through 1811, diplomacy failed and bellicosity increased, with the Chesapeake incident, where British ships attacked, boarded, and impressed sailors from an American man-of-war, tilting the balance towards outright war.

The six frigates earned their place in the history in the war, with a series of sharp single-ship actions against British frigates that showed that the Americans could fight and defeat the seemingly invincible British Navy. These battles had little strategic impact, the loss of four ships was a pin-prick, but the battles had an outsized effect on morale. American spirits soared, the British despaired, and large and expensive forces were used to tie the frigates down in port, while hundreds of American privateers sallied from smaller ports and devastated British merchants worldwide. The war ended two years later in exhaustion, with Washington DC burnt and the status quo ante restored.

But the six frigates proved their worth, and laid a tradition of victory. Toll closes with a historiographic review, discussing hooary 19th century American myth-making, an influential but libelous British account that was the standard work, and finally a young Theodore Roosevelt's The Naval War of 1812, which put seapower in a proper historical context. Roosevelt of course saw the birth of the American Navy as major power, with the Great White Fleet and the Panama Canal.

Six Frigates lives up to every accolade as one of the finest general histories and military histories I have ever read!