SNAFU—The Day the Navy Nearly Wiped Out the U.S. Government

 

Currier & Ives made a lot more money on disaster pictures than on the Christmas Card scenes we associate with them.  The Explosion on the deck of the USS Princeton was naturally a big seller and hung on many American walls for years. 

The USS Princeton was supposed to be the future of the United States Navy.  Fairly bursting with new technology, it was likely the most advanced warship of its class in the world, surpassing even anything floated the British Royal Navy, then the undisputed master of the oceans of the globe.

She was the vision of Captain Robert F. Stockton, a politically well-connected former Senator from New Jersey and the beau ideal of a dashing officer.  After resuming a naval career interrupted by years in business and politics, he turned down an offer by President John Tyler to become Secretary of the Navy, preferring an active command, preferably on the new class of war ship he envisioned.

It was Stockton’s passion—and political clout—that convinced the Navy and a notoriously tight-fisted Congress to authorize the construction of a steam powered corvette armed by two heavy guns capable of throwing shot or shell up to five miles.  Her speed, punch, and long range would make her a threat to even the heaviest ship of the line.  

A breaktrough modern marvel and the pride of the Navy, the USS Pinceton.

She was designed leading naval architect and inventor of the era, Swedish-born John Ericsson, who would later win fame as the designer of the Civil War ironclad USS Monitor.  The sleek 969-ton ship had three masts with square rigging under sail.  But her breakthroughs were her engines and propulsion.  
Ericsson designed two vibrating lever steam engines built by Merrick & Towne, of Philadelphia. The advanced engines burned Pennsylvania hard coal rather than bulky and inefficient wood.  They were installed totally below the ship’s water line and turned a six-bladed screw propeller 14 feet in diameter mounted aft.  She would be the first warship in the world to abandon side or stern paddle wheels and be propelled by a screw.  Another innovation, the smoke funnel, could fold down when she was running under sail to get out of the way of the spars.

                           

Swede John Ericsson, a naval architect and inventor was the innovative genius behind the Princenton and one of her massive guns.  Too bad he didn't have input on the second.

The keel to the new ship, named for Captain Stockton’s home town, was laid at the Philadelphia Navy Yard on October 20, 1842.  Ericsson personally supervised the construction under the watchful and probably meddlesome eye of Stockton himself.

She was launched and commissioned in September 1843 with Stockton in command.  Following a test run on the Delaware River, the Princeton was taken out for sea trials in October.  After running up the coast to New York City, Stockton matched her in a race against the famed British steam packet SS Great Western which in those years perpetually held transatlantic crossing speed records.  It was a sprint rather than a long race, but the Princeton won handily making newspaper headlines and establishing her as a legitimate threat to the lumbering armadas of the world.

In January of 1843 she was ready for regular service and Stockton took her to New York to be fitted with her two massive guns.  Both were smooth bore muzzle loading 12” wrought iron cannons capable of firing a 225-pound shot 5 miles with 50-pound charge.  The guns were so impressive that each was given a name.

Despite their similarities, however, there was a critical difference.  The Orator, soon renamed the Oregon as a taunt to the British over the disputed boundary of that territory, was designed by Ericsson and cast at the Mersey Iron Works in England in 1841 and shipped to the states awaiting the ship who could handle it.  Critically, in a dramatic innovation the breech was re-enforced with a built-up construction application red-hot iron hoops which pre-tensioned the gun and greatly increased the charge the breech could withstand.

Unfortunately, the Navy did not have enough money to have two guns manufactured in England.  Instead Stockton sought to duplicate the capabilities of the gun by supervising the creation of the Peacemaker at Hogg and Delamater in New York City.  Stockton never consulted Erickson and did not appreciate the critical importance of the re-enforcing rings.  Instead he attempted to achieve the same results simply by making the breech thicker.  He did not realize that given the innate brittle nature of wrought iron, the new breech could not withstand the huge sudden build-up of pressure when being fired.  Sooner or later it would fail catastrophically.

Both guns benefited from another Ericson innovation, a re-coil absorption system that would keep the ship from being rolled by the power of its gun blasts.

After they were fitted, Stockton test fired the guns a few times before sailing to Washington to show off and to lobby for funds to build a whole flotilla of Princeton class corvettes.  After arriving in January of 1844, Stockton showed her off on several short cruises on the Potomac in February with Navy brass and important civilians as passengers.  On each occasion she fired her guns at least once.

An accidental President after the early death of William Henry Harrison, John Tyler was a Virginia Democrat on a Whig ticket.  His troubled presidency almost destroyed the Whigs.  He would later be the only former U.S. President to serve in the Confederate Congress. 

But the big day was February 28.  On that day she picked up President Tyler, his Cabinet, assorted politicians, and even iconic former First Lady Dolly Madison at Alexandria, Virginia.  The cruise was a gay affair as visitors crowded the deck to witness a firing of the two great guns.  After a break for an elegant lunch below decks most of the visitors returned to the deck for one more thrilling test fire.  President Tyler, who could not abide the noise, remained below.

On the second firing of the Peacemaker the breech exploded.  Killed instantly were Secretary of State Abel P. Upshur, Secretary of the Navy Thomas Gilmer, Chief of the Bureau of Construction Equipment and Repairs Capt. Beverly Kennon, Virgil Maxcy former Chargé d’Affaires to Belgium, Colonel David Gardiner of New York, the President’s slave and valet Armistead, and two sailors.  Several others, including Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton and Stockton, were injured by shrapnel.

President Tyler was enjoying some discrete private moments with Julia Gardiner below deck when the cannon exploded on deck.  The pair rushed to the scene to see her Congressman father among the dead and Tyler's cabinet and inner circle decimated.  Tyler was a recent widower whose first wife, an invalid, died while serving as First Lady leaving seven children.  Despite a thirty year age gap and perhaps united in grief, the two wed and she gave Tyler seven more children after he left office.  This is the first photograph of a sitting First Lady taken when she was 26 years old.

The President and the lovely Miss Julia Gardiner who had been sharing private time below, rushed to the deck to find a scene of horror and carnage.  When Miss Gardner discovered her father among the dead, she collapsed into the President’s arms.  The two were later married.

There was understandable public outrage at the accident that had nearly obliterated the whole administration.  Both Congress and the Navy launched investigations.  It would have meant the end of a career to any other officer, but Stockton was well protected politically.  A Court of Inquiry investigating the cause of the explosion exonerated Stockton by blaming the explosion on Ericsson who had nothing to do with the design or construction of the Peacemaker.  This understandably embittered Ericsson, who refused to work again for the Navy until the emergency of the Civil War.

In full heroic mode Robert Stockton as Commodore of the Pacific Flotilla which participated in the conquest of California in the Mexican War.  He bested swasbuckling adventurer John C. Fremont and the Regular Army under General Phil Kearney to assume political controle of the new territory and become first Military Governor. 

Stockton was promoted to Commodore and won fame in the Mexican War as the commander of the Navy squadron that helped seize California.  He was subsequently named first military governor and had a town named after him.  He later served as a Democratic Senator from New Jersey and attempted to mediate a peaceful solution to southern secession.  He was named commander of the New Jersey Militia when fears of a Southern invasion were at their height.  He died full of honors in 1866.

The once proud Princeton fared worse.  She served in the Home Squadron until 1847 and was then assigned duty in the Mediterranean which caused her to miss action in the Mexican war.  Upon return to the United States in 1849 her timbers were found rotting from poor maintenance.  She was decommissioned and broken up for scrap at the Boston Navy Yard on June 17, 1849 after less than six years of active service.

Congress never approved plans for a flotilla of Princeton class ships, which would have been invaluable in maintaining the blockade of the Confederacy during the Civil War.

A successor USS Princeton, a World War II Independence class light aircraft carrier, suffered heavy damage, fires, and ammunition explossons after multiple air attacks during the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944.  Having lost her stern and burning heavily, surivors abandoned the ship after a second attack and she was destroyed by U.S. naval torpedos.  An new Princeton carrier was built for service later in the war and was decommissioned in 1970 after seeing action in Korea and Vietnam.  A heavy guided missle cruiser now bears the Princeton name.

Two years later her innovative twin engines were used in a new Princeton, the first of five successors bearing that name including a famous World War II aircraft carrier lost at the Battle of Leyte Gulf in 1944 and a guided missile cruiser commissioned in 1989, currently in still in active service.

 

Pop Quiz—Who Rioted at the White House?

What may be the earliest photograph of the White House--an 1846 daguerreotype taken five years after the riot on the grounds of the mansion. 

The White House a/k/a The President’s Palace and Executive Mansion has seen its share of turmoil.

There was the time the British arrived uninvited and Dolly Madison had to abandon dinner and make a getaway with Washington’s Portrait rolled up in a rug.  The Redcoats burned the place requiring a fresh coat of white wash and earning the place a new name.

The Red Coats burning the Executive Mansion was a no-good-terrible-very-bad-day but it wasn't a riot.

It got pretty boisterous when Andrew Jackson was inaugurated and he invited the “plain people” over to the house.  Things got out of hand when thousands showed up, apparently very hungry.  They climbed through windows and broke furniture to get to the Enormous Cheese sent down from Vermont for the occasion.  But despite shocking the sensibilities of respectable folks, it was a friendly, if inebriated, crowd.

Then there was the day when Abraham Lincoln looked out the window and saw his Army running in a panic for their lives after being whipped at the First Battle of Bull Run.

Harry Truman was living across the street at Blair House while the old place was getting fixed up when Puerto Rican Nationalists tried to break in and shoot him.  They failed, but a White House Police Officer was killed.

This blog has covered all of those exciting events.

But today is the anniversary of the first, and as far as I can tell, only full scale riot on the White House grounds.  Can you guess who rioted and why?  Betcha can’t.

First let’s eliminate some possible candidates.

• Coxey’s Army—The first great “march on Washington” by the unemployed in 1894 during one of the nation’s recurring financial Panics.  It dispersed peacefully at the Capital and never targeted the White House.

• Suffrage Protests—Picketing of Woodrow Wilson’s White House during World War I was a first for public demonstrations there, but was entirely orderly.  Irked, Wilson ordered the arrest of the women, many of whom were sent to jail where they went on a hunger strike and were force fed by hoses shoved down their throats.  But no riot.

• The Bonus March—World War I Veterans demanding early payment of a promised bonus in 1932 marching up Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capital was dispersed by General Douglas MacArthur’s tanks and cavalry and chased across the river where he burned their shanty town.  Herbert Hoover, however, and the White House were never in any danger.

Since these events there have been many huge demonstrations in Washington for civil rights, for and against abortion rights, against several wars, and for numerous other causes.  The current Resident has drawn regular protests large, small, and creative.  But no riots at the White House.

Picketing now occurs almost daily for one cause or another and symbolic but peaceful civil disobedience there is so routine that it hardly merits any press attention.  The occasional loon tries to scale the fence or somehow gets on the grounds, but is always nabbed.

Give up?

On August 16, 1841 a mob of Whig Party members, likely fueled by generous supplies of alcohol by their backers, rioted on the grounds of the White House, pelting the building with stones and bricks breaking windows, fired guns into the air, and burned the President in effigy.  They never breached the doors, but John Tyler undoubtedly had some very anxious moments.

What were they so mad about?  Tyler had just, for the second time , vetoed a bill re-chartering the Second Bank of the United States.  This was a riot by business interests who had solidly backed the Whig’s against the firm Anti-bank policy of both Thomas Jefferson’s old Democratic Republicans and Andrew Jackson’s rebuilt Democratic Party.

Tyler was sitting in the White House, albeit accidently, as a Whig, so his opposition to the Bank was even more infuriating.

Tyler was a Virginia aristocrat and self-described “Old Republican”—a conservative opposed to creeping nationalism and an advocate of strict construction of the Constitution.  After a successful political career as a U.S. Representative, Governor, and Senator, like many southern politicians of his class, he broke with Andrew Jackson and the Democratic Party when Jackson backed a controversial Tariff and threatened to send Federal troops to South Carolina when it threatened to nullify the law.

Henry Clay of Kentucky--perhaps the most powerful of the Whig's three great national leaders including old Federalist Daniel Webster and pro-slavery firebrand John C. Calhoun.  Each represented faction of the party at war with each other from the beginning.

He was left with little other option than to join with other Jackson haters in the Whig Party.  The Whigs were a new party made up of the fragmentary remnants of the old Federalists in New England led by Daniel Webster and the western Nationalists and advocates of internal improvements led by Henry Clay.  Disgruntled southern aristocrats like Tyler added to the mix and were generally led by firebrand former Vice President John C. Calhoun. 

The Whigs were an inherently unstable alliance with the first two groups backing Northern business interests, strong central government, and Federal spending on infrastructure.  The old Federalists were generally opposed to slavery, or at least its expansion, while the Westerners were eager to add new states, slave or free.  The agrarian Southerners fought New England business interests tooth and nail, opposed spending on infrastructure as unconstitutional and likely to lead to Federal taxation, and were passionate advocates of slavery and its expansion.

An 1840 Whig ticket poster.

 Desperate to win the Presidency for the first time after failing to dislodge them under Martin Van Buren in 1836, the Whigs passed over their big three  leaders to run a military hero and “Man of the People” in the mold of Jackson in 1840.  They tapped William Henry Harrison, the vanquisher of Tecumseh and his federation of the tribes, hero of  the War of 1812 and former Governor of Indiana Territory.  The old general, although born a Virginia aristocrat, was portrayed as a simple frontiersman content to sit on his log cabin front porch with a jug of cider.  He was expected to be compliant to the wishes of Party leaders, especially Henry Clay.  Tyler was added to the ticket for balance and to attract votes in the South, where Democrats were the strongest.  The ticket prevailed under the banner of Tippecanoe and Tyler Too!

Tyler was expected to sink into honorable obscurity as Vice President.  But the old Indian fighter came down with pneumonia after giving the longest inaugural address in history in freezing rain and died just a few weeks later.  Tyler became the first accidental president.  He beat back attempts to characterize him as “The Vice President acting in lieu of the President” or as “Acting President” and insisted on assuming the full powers and title of the office.  He moved into the Executive Mansion and inherited Harrison’s Whig Cabinet.

The romance between the new president and his party was short lived.  Tyler remained ever an Old Republican at heart.  When Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky, as leader of Congressional Whigs, tried to move key elements of the party platform, he found himself stymied again and again by Tyler, who vetoed cherished internal improvement projects.  But the number one objective of the Party was re-chartering the Second National Bank of the United States which Jackson had killed in his first term with the strong support at that time from Senator Tyler of Virginia.

The bank was seen by commercial and industrial interests as key to stabilizing the chaotic currency system, becoming a repository for Federal funds, and having enough capital to invest in both infrastructure and private industry.  Tyler, in the tradition of Jefferson and Jackson, hated banks as usurers and deeply distrusted the power of a central bank to subvert republican virtues.  He vetoed the first attempt at a re-charter and sent Congress a list of his objections.

Clay re-crafted the charter incorporating many of Tyler’s objections and expected that he would sign it.  Tyler vetoed it for a second time.

John Tyler--a much un-loved President without a party.

 It was that veto that set off the riot on the White House lawn.  It was not the only outlet for Whig rage.  On September 11, Tyler’s entire Cabinet with the exception of Secretary of State Daniel Webster resigned in mass at the urging of Clay.  Webster refused to resign citing on-going treaty negotiations with Britain over establishing an agreed upon northern boundary and probably to tweak his party rival Clay.  The resignations were expected to force Tyler himself to resign.  He did not.  Days later he was officially expelled from the Whigs by the Congressional caucuses.

Tyler was now despised equally by most Whigs and Democrats who viewed him as a turn coat.  He managed to survive an attempted impeachment promoted in the House of Representatives by John Quincy Adams.  But government was essentially in stalemate.  Congress rejected 11 of his appointments to the Cabinet until he was able to attract Southern Democrats to back his choice of Calhoun for Secretary of State.

Tyler lost two members of the Cabinet he did manage to put together—and nearly his own life—when a cannon exploded on the deck of the U.S. Princeton in February 1844.  Many regretted that the President was not among the dead.

Tyler’s major accomplishment was the Treaty of Annexation of Texas.  Tyler, who was usually lukewarm to western expansion, was eager to add a slave state.  Northern Whigs were adamantly opposed and even the usually pro-expansion Clay was worried about upsetting the delicate balance of power between slave and non-slave states.  The Senate at first rejected the treaty.

Meanwhile, Tyler, a man without a party, attempted to create one around himself for a run for the Presidency on his own.  He patched together a party of sorts from the few loyalists he had in Congress, conservative southern Whigs, and officeholders who he had appointed.  They even held a convention and nominated Tyler.

The Whigs put up Clay, who was opposed to the treaty, but the Democrats abandoned early favorite Van Buren, also a treaty opponent, for Speaker of the House James Knox Polk of Tennessee, an ardent expansionist and supporter of Texas.  Tyler withdrew from the race and threw his support to Polk.  Polk won the election and pro-Texas Democrats picked up seats in Congress.

Although his treaty could not get through the Senate, the new Congress, with the support of the President, voted to accept Texas into the union by resolution.  Tyler signed the act three days before leaving office.

Rejected and unloved by anyone but his brand new bride, Julia Gardiner, the daughter of a New York Congressman also killed on the Princeton, Tyler returned to his Virginia plantation expecting to live out his days in obscurity.  He surely would have succeeded in this aim had he not sided with the Confederacy and been elected to the Rebel Congress from Virginia.  He died shortly after taking office in January of 1861.

Considered a traitor to the country he once led, he was the only former president not to be memorialized in Washington upon his death.

A frequent denizen of worst president lists, John Tyler, top row center, and all of the rest have new competition.

 Most historians place Tyler close to the top of any list of worst presidents.  He is certainly among the most obscure.  History relegates him to a virtual footnote.

 

But once upon a time he stirred enough passions to earn the only riot ever at the White House.  That ought to count for something.

 

And, by the way, the riot had one other lasting effect. It led Congress to form the Auxiliary Guard, the predecessor to today’s Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia.  Prior to that the only law enforcement in Washington was the single U.S. Marshall for the District.

The Day the Navy Nearly Wiped out the U.S. Government

Currier and Ives made a lot more money on disaster pictures than on the Christmas Card scenes we associate with them.  The Explossion on the deck of the USS Princeton was naturally a big seller and hung on many American walls for years.

The USS Princeton was supposed to be the future of the United States Navy.  Fairly bursting with new technology, it was likely the most advanced warship of its class in the world, surpassing even anything floated the British Royal Navy, then the undisputed master of the oceans of the globe.

She was the vision of Captain Robert F. Stockton, a politically well-connected former Senator from New Jersey and the beau ideal of a dashing officer.  After resuming a naval career interrupted by years in business and politics, he turned down an offer by President John Tyler to become Secretary of the Navy, preferring an active command, preferably on the new class of war ship he envisioned.

It was Stockton’s passion—and political clout—that convinced the Navy and a notoriously tight-fisted Congress to authorize the construction of a steam powered corvette armed by two heavy guns capable of throwing shot or shell up to five miles.  Her speed, punch, and long range would make her a threat to even the heaviest ship of the line.  

A breaktrough modern marvel and the pride of the Navy, the USS Pinceton

She was designed leading naval architect and inventor of the era, Swedish-born John Ericsson, who would later win fame as the designer of the Civil War ironclad USS Monitor.  The sleek 969-ton ship had three masts with square rigging under sail.  But her breakthrough was her engines and propulsion. 

Ericsson designed two vibrating lever steam engines built by Merrick & Towne, of Philadelphia. The advanced engines burned Pennsylvania hard coal rather than bulky and inefficient wood.  They were installed totally below the ship’s water line and turned a six-bladed screw propeller 14 feet in diameter mounted aft.  She would be the first warship in the world to abandon side or stern paddle wheels and be propelled by a screw.  Another innovation, the smoke funnel could fold down when she was running under sail to get out of the way of the spars.

Swede John Ericsson, a naval architect and inventor was the inovative genious behind the Princenton and one of her massive guns.  Too bad he didn't have input on the second.

The keel to the new ship, named for Captain Stockton’s home town, was laid at the Philadelphia Navy Yard on October 20, 1842.  Ericsson personally supervised the construction under the watchful and probably meddlesome eye of Stockton himself.

She was launched and commissioned in September 1843 with Stockton in command.  Following a test run on the Delaware River, the Princeton was taken out for sea trial in October.  After running up the coast to New York City, Stockton matched her in a race against the famed British steam packet SS Great Western which in those years perpetually held the speed records for transatlantic crossing.  It was a sprint rather than a long race, but the Princeton won handily making newspaper headlines and establishing her as a legitimate threat against the lumbering armadas of the world.

In January of 1843 she was ready for regular service and Stockton took her to New York to be fitted with her two massive guns.  Both were smooth bore muzzle loading 12” wrought iron cannons capable of firing a 225-pound shot 5 miles with 50-pound charge.  The guns were so impressive that each was given a name.

Despite their similarities, however, there was a critical difference.  The Orator, soon renamed the Oregon as a taunt to the British over the disputed boundary of that territory, was designed by Ericsson and cast at the Mersey Iron Works in England in 1841 and shipped to the states awaiting the ship who could handle it.  Critically, in a dramatic innovation the breech was re-enforced with a built-up construction application red-hot iron hoops which pre-tensioned the gun and greatly increased the charge the breech could withstand.

Unfortunately, the Navy did not have enough money to have two guns manufactured in England.  Instead Stockton sought to duplicate the capabilities of the gun by supervising the creation of the Peacemaker at Hogg and Delamater in New York City.  Stockton never consulted Erickson and did not appreciate the critical importance of the re-enforcing rings.  Instead he attempted to achieve the same results by simply by making the breech thicker.  He did not realize that given the innate brittle nature of wrought iron, the new breech could not withstand the huge sudden build-up of pressure when being fired.  Sooner or later it would fail catastrophically.

Both guns benefited from another Ericson innovation, a re-coil absorption system that would keep the ship from being rolled by the power of its gun blasts.

After they were fitted, Stockton test fired the guns a few times before sailing to Washington to show off and to lobby for funds to build a whole flotilla of Princeton class corvettes.  After arriving in January of 1844, Stockton showed her off on several short cruised on the Potomac in February with Navy brass and important civilians as passengers.  On each occasion she fired her guns at least once.

An accidental President after the early death of William Henry Harrison, John Tyler was a Virginia Democrat on a Whig ticket.  His troubled presidency almost destroyed the Whigs.  He would later be the only former U.S. President to serve in the Confederate Congress.

But the big day was February 28.  On that day she picked up President Tyler, his Cabinet, assorted politicians, and even iconic former First Lady Dolly Madison at Alexandria, Virginia.  The cruise was a gay affair as visitors crowded the deck to witness a firing of the two great guns.  After a break for an elegant lunch below decks most of the visitors returned to the deck for one more thrilling test fire.  President Tyler, who could not abide the noise, remained below.

On the second firing of the Peacemaker the breech exploded.  Killed instantly were Secretary of State Abel P. Upshur, Secretary of the Navy Thomas Gilmer, Chief of the Bureau of Construction Equipment and Repairs Capt. Beverly Kennon, Virgil Maxcy former Chargé d’Affaires to Belgium, Colonel David Gardiner of New York, the President’s slave and valet Armistead, and two sailors.  Several others, including, including Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton Stockton, were injured by shrapnel.

 

President Tyler was enjoying some discrete private moments with Julia Gardiner below deck when the cannon exploded on deck.  The pair rushed to the scene to see her Congressman father among the dead and Tyler's cabinet and inner circle decimated.  Tyler was a recent widower whose first wife, an invalid, died while serving as First Lady leaving seven children.  Despite a thirty year age gap and perhaps united in grief, the two wed and she gave Tyler seven more chuldren after he left office.  This is the first photograph of a sitting First Lady taken when she was 26 years old.

The President and the lovely Miss Julia Gardiner who had been sharing private time below, rushed to the deck to find a scene of horror and carnage.  When Miss Gardner discovered her father among the dead, she collapsed into the President’s arms.  The two were later married.

There was an understandable public outrage at the accident that had nearly obliterated the whole administration.  Both Congress and the Navy launched investigations.  It would have meant the end of a career to any other officer, but Stockton was well protected politically.  A Court of Inquiry investigating the cause of the explosion exonerated Stockton blaming the explosion on Ericsson who had nothing to do with the design or construction of the Peacemaker.  This understandably embittered Ericsson who refused to work again for the Navy until the emergency of the Civil War.

In full heroic mode Robert Stockton as Commodore of the Pacific Flotilla that participated in the conquest of California in the Mexican War.  He bestd swasbuckling adventurer John C. Fremont and the Regular Army under General Phil Kearney to assume political controle of the new territory and become first Military Governor. 

Stockton was promoted to Commodore and won fame in the Mexican War as the commander of the Navy squadron that helped seize California.  He was subsequently named first military governor and had a town named after him.  He later served as a Democratic Senator from New Jersey and attempted to mediate a peaceful solution to southern secession.  He was named commander of the New Jersey Militia when fears of a Southern invasion were at their height.  He died full of honors in 1866.

The once proud Princeton fared worse.  She served in the Home Squadron until 1847 and was then assigned duty in the Mediterranean which caused her to miss action in the Mexican war.  Upon return to the United States in 1849 her timbers were found rotting from poor maintenance.  She was decommissioned and broken up for scrap at the Boston Navy Yard on June 17, 1849 after less than six years active service.

Congress never approved plans for a flotilla of Princeton class ships, which would have been invaluable in maintaining the blockade of the South during the Civil War.

A successor USS Princeton, a World War II Independence class light aircraft carrier, suffered heavy damage, fires, and ammunition explossons after multiple air attacks during the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944.  Having lost her stern and burning heavily, surivors abandoned the ship after a second attack and she was destroyed by U.S. naval torpedos.  An new Princeton carrier was built for service later in the war and was decommissioned in 1970 after seeing action in Korea and Vietnam.  A heavy guided missle cruiser now bears the Princeton name.

Two years later her innovative twin engines were used in a new Princeton, the first of five successors bearing that name including a famous World War II aircraft carrier lost at the Battle of Leyte Gulf in 1944 and a guided missile cruiser commissioned in 1989, currently in active service.