The oldest commissioned warship afloat anywhere in the world is a wooden sailing frigate tied up at Pier 1 in Charlestown, Boston. USS Constitution was launched on October 21, 1797. She has a crew of about 75 officers and sailors, all active-duty US Navy. They fire her gun at 8am and again at sunset.
She was meant to last 10 to 15 years. She is now past 228.
Built thicker than a frigate should be
The Naval Act of 1794 paid for six frigates to deal with the Barbary corsairs, who were taking American merchant ships in the Mediterranean and holding the crews for ransom. In 1793 alone they took 11.
Joshua Humphreys designed the six to be bigger and more heavily built than a normal frigate. The idea was simple: outgun anything that could catch you, and outrun anything that could outgun you. Constitution’s keel went down on November 1, 1794, at Edmund Hartt’s shipyard in Boston’s North End. Her hull was 21 inches thick. She was 204 feet overall.
The key wood was southern live oak, cut at Gascoigne Bluff on St. Simons Island, Georgia. Live oak is dense, heavy and hard to work. The trees were felled by enslaved laborers, a detail the USS Constitution Museum now includes in its own telling. About 60 acres of trees went into the ship.
Her first jobs were the Quasi-War with France and then the First Barbary War off Tripoli. Useful work. Not the reason anyone remembers her.
August 19, 1812
Captain Isaac Hull had already gotten away with something. In July 1812 a British squadron caught Constitution in light winds off New Jersey. With no breeze to use, Hull’s crew rowed boats ahead with anchors, dropped them, and hauled the ship up to them, over and over, for about two days. It is called kedging. They also pumped ten tons of drinking water over the side. The British never closed.
A month later, in the North Atlantic, Hull found a lone British frigate. At 2pm on August 19 Constitution sighted HMS Guerriere, 38 guns, Captain James Richard Dacres. A year earlier Dacres had written a challenge to any American frigate that cared to meet him.
The numbers were not even. Constitution threw a broadside of about 754 pounds against Guerriere’s 526, and carried roughly 480 men to Guerriere’s 272. Her main guns were 24-pounders. Guerriere’s were 18s.
Dacres opened fire early, at long range, and mostly missed or did little. Hull held his fire and closed. When the two ships were finally side by side at what Theodore Roosevelt later called “half pistol-shot,” Constitution started firing. After about 15 minutes Guerriere’s mizzenmast went over the side. The ships fouled each other, both crews called away boarders, and musket fire killed Constitution’s Marine lieutenant, William S. Bush. Then Guerriere’s foremast and mainmast came down too.
She was left a hull with no masts, rolling in the swell. Dacres, himself wounded, came aboard Constitution to hand over his sword. Hull refused it.
The final count: Constitution 7 killed and 7 wounded. Guerriere 15 killed and 78 wounded. Hull tried to keep the prize, but by morning she was sinking. He took the prisoners off and set her on fire at 3pm on August 20. She blew up.
Her sides are made of iron
During the fight, British round shot was seen bouncing off Constitution’s hull and dropping into the sea. According to the account that has followed the ship ever since, an American sailor shouted, “Huzzah! Her sides are made of iron!”
Nobody recorded the sailor’s name, and the line comes to us through retelling, not a logbook. The nickname is not in doubt. “Old Ironsides” was in use within months, and the National Park Service still explains it the same way: enemy shot did not seem able to get through her oak.
There is a less romantic version of the same fact. Constitution was simply a heavier ship with thicker timbers and bigger guns, fighting a lighter frigate that had been at sea a long time. Roosevelt said as much in 1882. That does not make the sight of shot bouncing off her any less real. It explains it.
The win mattered more than the tonnage. The American land war in Canada had gone badly, and here was a single-ship victory over the Royal Navy. Hull came home to Boston on August 30 to crowds. Under William Bainbridge, Constitution beat HMS Java that December, and the Admiralty told its frigates not to take on the big American frigates alone.
The poem that went national
By 1830 the hero ship was old and tired. Charles Morris, commandant of the Charlestown Navy Yard, put the cost of repairing her at more than $157,000.
On September 14, 1830, the Boston Daily Advertiser reported that the Navy meant to scrap her. Oliver Wendell Holmes, 21 years old and recently out of law studies, read it and wrote a poem. It ran in the Advertiser on September 16:
Aye, tear her tattered ensign down! Long has it waved on high
Its last stanza says she would be better off sunk at sea than broken up, and ends: “And give her to the god of storms, / The lightning and the gale!” Newspapers across the country reprinted it. Holmes became famous almost overnight.
Here is the part the usual version skips. The Advertiser story was wrong. Secretary of the Navy John Branch had ordered routine surveys of the reserve fleet, and he went on to approve the repair money. Some historians think the plan to keep her was already in motion before Holmes wrote a line. The poem did not overrule a decision. It made scrapping her politically impossible, which may be a stronger thing.
She went into dry dock on June 24, 1833, with 30 inches of hog in her keel, and came out a year later fit to sail. Isaac Hull had the old planking made into walking canes and picture frames. Souvenirs from her timber have been a habit ever since.
Still on the Navy list
Constitution went on to sail around the world in the 1840s, served as a training ship for the Naval Academy in the Civil War, and carried exhibits to the Paris Exposition of 1878. She left active service in 1881 and became a museum ship in 1907. After a restoration from 1927 to 1931, she made a three-year, 90-port tour of the country. Every gun on board today is a replica.
She sailed under her own power for her 200th birthday in 1997, and again in August 2012 for the 200th anniversary of the Guerriere fight. Her sailors still take her out into Boston Harbor a few times a year with tug help and fire a salute off Castle Island before turning back.
Other ships on this site were saved as museums and quietly decommissioned, like USS Olympia in Philadelphia, or ended up as something stranger, like the carrier that became a casino plan. Constitution never stopped being a warship. Her British near-contemporary, HMS Victory, is older but sits in dry dock in Portsmouth. And for another wooden ship that turned a single fight into public spectacle, see CSS Alabama off Cherbourg.
You can walk aboard for free. She is at the Charlestown Navy Yard, on the Freedom Trail, and the USS Constitution Museum is a few yards away.
Sources
- National Park Service, Boston NHP: USS Constitution
- New England Historical Society: Old Ironsides, the poem
- Wikipedia: USS Constitution
- Theodore Roosevelt, The Naval War of 1812, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1882
- Ian W. Toll, Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy, W. W. Norton, 2006
