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A Nantucketer's Influence on the Navy in the War of 1812 BY RICHARD C. MALONEY
IN AN AGE when specifications and negotiations for defense equipment are enormously complicated and there is intense rivalry among contractors — and indeed, among various sections of the country — for the awarding of aircraft and shipbuilding con tracts, it is interesting to read and analyze a letter written in 1813 by Nantucketer Jacob Barker, now in the collection of Nan tucket's Peter Foulger Museum. The letter indicates, among other pertinent points, that though specifications for building a war ship were relatively simple and could be described comprehen sibly in a personal letter in 1813, the rivalries among shipbuilders and between sectional interests were perhaps as vigorous a hundred-and-sixty years ago as they are today. Jacob Barker was one of the several versatile, talented men who derived from Nantucket in the 18th and early 19th centuries. His life story is worthy of a complete biography; but to put it briefly here, he was descended from the same ancestral stock as Benjamin Franklin,' and numerous references have been made to the close resemblence between portraits of the two men.2 Though he was born at Kennebec, Maine, on December 17, 1779, during during his parents' "temporary" visit to that area, he "returned" to Nantucket with his widowed mother and others of the family when he was six years old and spent his boyhood years on the island. Accordingly, he considered himself to be a Nantucketer.3 In manhood, Jacob Barker became the second largest ship builder of the nation; 4 he was, for a time, the most successful financier of his day; 5 and to a great extent he personally financed the cost of the War of 1812.6 He conducted his extensive business operations at various times in New York, Philadelphia, and New Orleans — and he suffered his share of financial difficulties. How ever, in 1813, his base was in New York, and it was from that city that he wrote, on May 17, a letter to the Hon. William Long, Secretary of the Navy, urging that contracts to build a sloop of war and a frigate be awarded to the shipbuilder brothers, Adam and Noah Brown, of New York. The Brown brothers, with Henry Eckford, were the most efficient shipbuilders of that period.7 They had performed an extraordinary feat in building ships on the Great Lakes which enabled the American navy to control the lakes and prevent the British from invading the North and Northwest. So it was, in January 1813, with the British fleet blockading most of the American Atlantic ports, that the Congress author ized the building of three 44-gun frigates and six 18-gun sloops of war,8 and Jacob Barker sought to persuade the Department
