Preble, Edward

▪ United States naval commander

born Aug. 15, 1761, Falmouth, District of Maine, Mass. [now Portland, Maine, U.S.]

died Aug. 25, 1807, Portland, District of Maine, Mass. [now in Maine], U.S.

      commander of U.S. naval forces during the most active portion of the Tripolitan War (1801–05).

      The son of provincial military officer, merchant, and political leader Jedidiah Preble and of Mehetable Bangs Roberts, Edward Preble received his early education in his native Falmouth and later attended Dummer School in Byfield, Mass. During the American Revolution, he began his naval career as a midshipman in the Massachusetts state navy's frigate Protector, which was captured by British naval forces in 1781. Upon his release, Preble returned to action as first lieutenant of the Massachusetts state sloop Winthrop, distinguishing himself by his daring capture of the Loyalist privateer Merriam under the guns of Fort George at Bagaduce (now Castine), Maine.

      After the war, Preble pursued an unexceptional career in the merchant service until the outbreak of the undeclared naval war with France (1798–1801) led to his commissioning in the newly established federal navy. As captain of the frigate Essex, he provided valuable service in protecting U.S. merchantmen from French privateers, and he extended the U.S. Navy's presence beyond the Cape of Good Hope for the first time in a convoy mission that showed the flag as far east as Batavia, Java (now Jakarta, Indon.).

      Preble's defining naval accomplishment was his command of the navy's Mediterranean squadron during some of the most heated months of the 1801–05 diplomatic and military conflict between the United States and the Islamic states of North Africa (Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli). In 1803 Preble sailed to the Mediterranean in the frigate Constitution as commander of a naval squadron charged with a mission to bring the thus-far inconclusive war with Tripoli to a satisfactory end. He arrived at Gibraltar to find Morocco embarked on an unanticipated and undeclared naval conflict with the United States. Preble was able to resolve the conflict through diplomatic means, backed by a show of overwhelming naval force, before moving against his primary adversary, Tripoli.

      Before Preble reached his destination, he learned that the other large ship of his squadron, the frigate Philadelphia, commanded by Capt. William Bainbridge (Bainbridge, William), had run aground off Tripoli and been captured by the enemy. To ensure that the vessel would be of no use to the Tripolitans, Preble conceived a daring solution, the execution of which he entrusted to Lt. Stephen Decatur (Decatur, Stephen). In a surprise attack during the night of Feb. 16–17, 1804, Decatur overwhelmed the defenders and destroyed the captured U.S. ship at her moorings in Tripoli harbour.

      Insensitive to Islamic culture and distrustful of the mediation of Bonaventure Beaussier, the French consul at Tripoli, Preble made little progress in his diplomatic efforts to end the war and release the captive crew of the Philadelphia. Instead, he focused his efforts on a naval offensive against the city of Tripoli in the summer of 1804. To this end, he obtained the loan of six gunboats and two bomb ketches from the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (Two Sicilies, Kingdom of the) to supplement his own squadron of one frigate, three brigs (brig), and three schooners (schooner). With this force, Preble launched a series of six attacks on the city and harbour of Tripoli, of which the first (August 3) was the most successful, resulting as it did in the capture of three Tripolitan gunboats in fierce hand-to-hand combat.

      Preble continued his attacks into early September, when the arrival of reinforcements, dispatched from the United States as a result of the capture of Philadelphia, led to his unavoidable replacement by a senior officer. Bitterly disappointed at not having been allowed to bring the war with Tripoli to a successful conclusion, Preble returned to the United States in 1805 to find himself a popular hero—in spite of the early loss of one of the two large ships of his squadron—for his daring and persistence in the seemingly impossible task of defeating a land-based power (Tripoli) with purely naval means.

      During the final two and a half years of his life, Preble served as a respected senior adviser in naval matters to the administration of Pres. Thomas Jefferson (Jefferson, Thomas). He succumbed to a longstanding stomach or intestinal disorder at the early age of 46. In spite of a violent and poorly controlled temper and his well-deserved reputation as a harsh disciplinarian, Preble gained the respect and admiration of younger subordinates, such as Isaac Hull (Hull, Isaac), through vigorous and decisive conduct during his Mediterranean command, by his keen defense of U.S. interests, and most of all because of his refusal to give up when confronted with severe reverses and depressing odds. Preble's reputation lives on as an important role model for officers of the U.S. Navy, exemplified in the 2002 commissioning of the sixth U.S. naval ship to bear his name, the USS Preble, a guided missile destroyer.

Christopher McKee

Additional Reading

Christopher McKee, Edward Preble: A Naval Biography, 1761–1807 (1972, reissued 1996), is an illuminating biography.

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