Congress was spurred to finish the job by the actions of Revolutionary France during its war with Britain. French commerce raiders so terrorized American neutral shipping that in 1798 an angry U.S. government created the Navy Department and prepared for war. (There were a number of engagements at sea, but war was never declared.) Congress authorized funds to build, borrow, or accept as gifts 49 vessels, ranging from galleys to six 74-gun ships-of-the-line. The 74s were never built, but while the program was still alive, naval shipyards to build them were established in Portsmouth, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, and Norfolk. Boston, wrote Secretary of the Navy Benjamin Stoddert to President John Adams, from “the natural strength of its situation [meaning its large, deep, and defensible harbor], the great number of ship carpenters in its vicinity, and of its seamen, must always remain a building place and place of rendezvous for our navy of the first importance.” Thus in 1800 the Charlestown Navy Yard was established. For most of its history Charlestown’s primary mission was to keep the fleet sailing. That is not to say the yard wasn’t a shipbuilder; it built more than 200 warships over its 174 years of operation. But most of the new ships were built to meet the immediate demands of war. (Three quarters of them were launched during World War II alone.) For fully half of those years no new ships came down the ways. The pattern established in the yard’s early years was one of ongoing repair, outfitting, supply, and conversion work punctuated by occasional new launchings. The classes of ships that came down the ways at Charlestown and other naval yards were the outcome of strategic and political deliberations in Washington. U.S. naval policy devised during the first half of the 19th century had its roots in the War of 1812. Before the British blockade bottled up its warships, the tiny U.S. Navy had successfully fought a brief _guerre de course_ against Britain, using a strategy that emphasized single ship actions and raids on enemy shipping with relatively small, fast frigates and sloops-of-war. The early naval successes prompted Congress in 1813 to authorize six new frigates (three of which were built) and six sloops. These, and the nine frigates authorized in 1816 and laid down in the 1820s (including the Charlestown-built _Cumberland_), formed the backbone of the Navy until just before the Civil War. But the War of 1812, which helped shape a practical role for the 19th-century Navy, also led lawmakers into an expensive attempt to compete with European navies on their terms. Using the argument that large, powerful ships were essential to the defense of the nation’s shores (and perhaps remembering the crucial role of French 74s at Yorktown), Congress also authorized four 74-gun ships-of-the-line in the 1813 act.