Speaking generally, the Secretary of Marine was to succeed to the duties and powers of the Board of Admiralty. It is, however, significant that the Secretary was not specifically charged with the ordering and directing of the movements of the vessels of war, as was the Board. The specified duties of the new office are largely secretarial. Congress was disposed to be less liberal in granting powers to a Secretary chosen outside its membership than to a Board partly composed of Congressmen. On February 9th the salary of the Secretary of Marine was fixed at $5000 per annum.[272] On February 27, 1781, Congress, with a promptness which was exceptional, elected Major-General Alexander McDougall of New York to be Secretary of Marine, for which position he had been recommended by Alexander Hamilton. McDougall’s qualifications for the office were above the average. In the French and Indian War he had been a commander of privateers. Later he became a merchant in New York City. He was a leader of the Revolution in that state, and had risen to the rank of a major-general in the Revolutionary army. McDougall declined to accept the position proferred him unless permitted to hold his rank in the army, and to retain the privilege of returning to the field when his services were required. He based this partial refusal on patriotic grounds. Congress did not wish a Secretary of Marine on these conditions; and it therefore voted that it did not expect the acceptance of Major-General McDougall, and that it had a due sense of his zeal “for the safety and honour of America, and applaud his magnanimity in declining ‘to retire from the toils and perils of the field in the present critical condition of the United States in general, and that of New York in particular.’”[273] Congress made no other choice of a Secretary of Marine. During the summer of 1781 the control of naval affairs gravitated towards Robert Morris. Soon after assuming the office of Superintendant of Finance in May, 1781, he was brought into close relation with the navy. He was invited to take upon himself more or less of the naval business by the urgent need of sending the cruisers on important errands, the helplessness of the Board of Admiralty, the inertia of Congress, and the interregnum in the headship of the Naval Department, which lasted from the discontinuance of the Board of Admiralty early in July, 1781, until the appointment of an Agent of Marine on September 7. The figure that Morris presents at this time is that of the strong and confident man of affairs, sagacious, expeditious, and painstaking, who is surrounded by weaker men, hesitating, vacillating, and procrastinating in their administrative attempts.