In 1833, when the old war ship Constitution, unfit for service, lay in the navy yard in Charlestown, the Secretary of the Navy decided to sell her or to break her up. On the appearance of this bit of news in a Boston paper, Oliver Wendell Holmes, a law student at Harvard, scribbled some verses and sent them to the editor. This poem of twenty-four lines was at once published, and was soon copied into the leading newspapers of the country. In our large cities, the poem was circulated as a handbill. Popular indignation rose to a white heat, and swept everything before it. The order was at once revoked, and Congress decided that the old frigate, so dear to the hearts of the American people, should be rebuilt. Why did the people care so much about "Old Ironsides"? [Illustration: "Old Ironsides"] For twenty-five years after the adoption of the Constitution, we had a rough road to travel. We were {170} nearly crushed by our foreign debts, and could do little to defend ourselves on the high seas. England boarded our ships and carried off our sailors, and France captured our vessels and stole their cargoes. Even the Barbary pirates, when they spied the new flag, began to plunder and burn our merchantmen, and sell their crews into slavery. In the fall of 1793, eight Algerine pirate craft sailed out into the Atlantic, and within a month had captured eleven of our ships and made slaves of more than a hundred of our sailors. Think of our consul at Lisbon writing home, "Another Algerine pirate in the Atlantic. God preserve us!" In behalf of American citizens held as slaves by these pirates, a petition was sent to Congress. A bill was then passed, allowing President Washington to build or to buy six frigates. It was a fortunate day for our nation when the plans of Mr. Humphreys, a shipbuilder of Philadelphia, were accepted. He was directed by Congress to prepare the models of six war ships, to be built in different towns on the coast. The design of the Constitution was sent to Boston, and her keel was laid in Hartt's Naval Yard, near what is now Constitution Wharf. The ideas of Mr. Humphreys were carried out to the letter. The new frigate was to have better guns, greater speed, greater cruising capacity,--in fact, was to be a little better {171} in every respect than the British and the French ships of the same rating. The Constitution was called a forty-four-gun frigate, although she actually carried thirty twenty-four-pounders on her main deck, and twenty-two thirty-two-pounders on her spar deck. She had one gun deck instead of two, and her cannon were heavier than were usually carried on foreign war ships of her own class. She was twenty feet longer and about five feet broader than {172} the far-famed thirty-eight-gun British frigates. In comparison with a modern war ship, she was less than one half as long as the armed cruiser New York, and not far from the size of one of our gunboats.