Constitution

CONSTITUTION

CONSTITUTION, an American forty-four-gun frigate authorized by Congress on 27 March 1794. She was designed by Joshua Humphreys, built in Edmund Hartt's shipyard, Boston, and launched 21 October 1797. In the naval war with France she served as Commodore Silas Talbot's flagship, and in the Tripolitan War as the flagship of Commodore Edward Preble, participating in five attacks on Tripoli from 25 July to 4 September 1804. The Constitution was victorious in several notable single-ship engagements in the War of 1812. During the fight with the British frigate Guerrière on 19 August 1812, a seaman gave her the nickname "Old Ironsides" when, seeing a shot rebound from her hull, he shouted, "Huzza, her sides are made of iron." While cruising off South America four months later, Commodore William Bainbridge on the Constitution sighted the British Java. After a battle of about two hours, the British ship surrendered. On 20 February 1815, the Constitution met the British frigate Cyane and the sloop-of-war Levant some two hundred miles northeast of the Madeira Islands and forced both ships to surrender.

Ordered broken up in 1830 by the Department of the Navy, the Constitution was retained in deference to public sentiment aroused by Oliver Wendell Holmes's poem "Old Ironsides." She was rebuilt in 1833 and served as a training ship at Portsmouth, Va., from 1860 to 1865. She underwent a partial rebuilding during the 1870s and was restored in 1925 and again during the 1970s and the 1990s. From her berth next to the USS Constitution Museum in Boston's Charlestown Navy Yard, the still un-beaten Constitution once again sailed under her own power to mark her bicentennial in 1997, reminding Americans of their rich naval history.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hollis, Ira N. The Frigate Constitution: The Central Figure of the Navy under Sail. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1900.

Horgan, Thomas P. Old Ironsides: The Story of USS Constitution. Boston: Burdette, 1963.

Louis H. Bollander / a. r.

See also Barbary Wars ; Navy, United States ; Warships .