The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Wednesday, April 30, 2025

It was just this sort of thinking that lay behind the Democratic-Republicans’ excitement over the undersea warfare inventions of Robert Fulton. Fulton, who spent two decades abroad between 1787 and 1806 mingling with radicals like Thomas Paine and Joel Barlow, became convinced that submarines and torpedoes could revolutionize naval warfare. By being able to destroy warships “by means so new, so secret, and so incalculable,” submarines, said Fulton, would render conventional naval warfare impossible. Not knowing where the underwater attacks would come from, sailors would be demoralized and fleets would be “rendered worthless.” Without navies, nations, in particular Great Britain, would be compelled to liberalize their trade and practice the freedom of the seas that Americans had long advocated. This in turn would lead to the universal and perpetual peace that every enlightened person, but especially Americans, yearned for. Fulton built a prototype of a submarine and called it Nautilus . Although he knew his submarine was but an infant, he saw in it “an Infant hercules which at one grasp will Strangle the Serpents which poison and convulse the American Constitution.”23 Fulton returned to the United States eager to demonstrate his new invention. In 1807 he used one of his torpedoes, which were actually mines, to blow up a brig in New York Harbor, an experiment that Washington Irving’s Salmagundi mocked as the destruction of the British fleet in effigy. Nevertheless, the Republicans were excited. In a Fourth of July address in 1809 his friend and patron Joel Barlow declared that Fulton’s submarine project “carries in itself the eventual destruction of naval tyranny” and the possibility of freeing “mankind from the scourge of naval wars.”24 With this kind of support from a leading Republican intellectual and with the publication of his Torpedo War and Submarine Explosions in 1810, Fulton was invited to address the Congress and to conduct further tests of his underwater devices. The Republican Congress, despite its reputation for penny-pinching, even appropriated five thousand dollars to fund his experiments. Although Fulton had many doubters, especially in the navy and among the Federalists, Jefferson had nothing but praise for his devices. In April 1810 the former president told Fulton that he hoped that “the torpedo may go the whole length you expect of putting down navies.” Indeed, he wished the scheme to succeed “too much not to become an easy convert & to give it all my prayers & interest. . . . That the Tories should be against you is in character, because it will curtail the power of their idol, England.” Although most of Fulton’s torpedo experiments were unsuccessful, the Jeffersonian Republican dream of creating the conditions for a universal peace did not die.”

–From Gordon S. Wood’s Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (2009).