Navy Clause

Original public meaning

The clause's text changed once, and deliberately. The Committee of Detail's draft gave Congress power "of equiping a Navy" and, separately, "to build and equip Fleets." On 18 August 1787, the Convention replaced "to build and equip fleets" with "to provide & maintain a navy," agreed to nem. con. as, in Madison's account, "a more convenient definition of the power" — broader than shipbuilding alone, reaching maintenance, manning, and operation as well as construction. Unlike the Army Clause passed the same summer, the Navy Clause records no floor fight over a standing-force check; Story's Commentaries §1189 notes the grant "seems not to have been questioned" in the Convention itself.

The ratification-era objections came later, in the state conventions, and ran on cost and provocation rather than liberty. Story's Commentaries §§1189-91 catalog them: a navy's expense would be "enormous; and wholly disproportionate to our resources," and the Southern states in particular would "share a large portion of the burthens of maintaining a navy, without any corresponding advantages." Story treats these as answered by the power's necessity to protect fisheries, the carrying trade, and the "whole Atlantic frontier" from both regular invasion and "the attacks and incursions of every predatory adventurer," and credits the navy's performance in the War of 1812 with converting skeptics who had until then kept the nation's naval policy in what he calls "lethargy." Story closes by adopting Blackstone's description of the Royal Navy as England's "floating bulwark," an "army, from which, however strong and powerful, no danger can be apprehended to liberty" — the sentiment every American citizen ought to hold toward the American navy, marking the clause as the one military power the Founders' Constitution materials treat as never having posed the standing-army problem in the first place.

The Virginia convention, 14 June 1788: Grayson's cost and sectional objections

Unlike the Federal Convention's own floor debate (above), the Navy Clause drew a sustained ratification-era objection at the Virginia convention. William Grayson argued that "[t]o have a fleet, in the present limited population of America, is, in my opinion, impracticable and inexpedient," and — distinct from every cost argument already on this page — itemized the expense of a single ship of the line:

"A seventy-four gun ship will cost you ninety-eight thousand pounds, including guns, tackle, &c. According to the usual calculation in England, it will cost you the further sum of forty-eight thousand pounds to man it, furnish provisions, and pay officers and men... so that, in all, the expenses of such a vessel would be one hundred and forty thousand pounds in one year." — William Grayson, Virginia Convention, 14 June 1788

Grayson also pressed a sectional objection distinct from the fisheries-and-commerce case Story's Commentaries (above) treat as the clause's settled justification — that shipbuilding capacity itself was concentrated in the North, so that a national navy would concentrate national wealth and power there as well:

"All the vessels of the intended fleet would be built and equipped in the Northern States, where they have every necessary material and convenience for the purpose... The consequence will be that the Southern States will be in the power of the Northern States." — William Grayson, Virginia Convention, 14 June 1788

George Nicholas answered that the power was discretionary rather than mandatory, and that a Congress accountable to the whole Union could be trusted to defer building a fleet "until it be proper":

"Congress, says he, has a discretionary power to do it when necessary. They are not bound to do it in five or ten years, or at any particular time. It is presumable, therefore, that they will postpone it until it be proper." — George Nicholas, Virginia Convention, 14 June 1788 (recorded in Elliot's indirect narration)

key-insight

Grayson's sectional objection anticipates, on the convention floor, a real division of naval-industrial capacity that persisted well into the nineteenth century — this wiki holds no source yet confirming or refuting whether Nicholas's discretionary-power answer, rather than any textual amendment, is in fact what left the objection unresolved rather than adopted into the clause's text.