Congress votes to buy two ships and go after British supply boats
Boston sat under British martial law, and George Washington had already started commandeering ships on his own authority to choke off the Crown's supply lines. On October 13, 1775, the Continental Congress in Philadelphia authorized the purchase and arming of two vessels to cruise against British merchantmen, and formed a three-member Naval Committee to oversee them. It was a modest start, backed by a government with no treasury and no warships of its own. Within weeks the committee grew to seven members, and a navy existed where days earlier there had been none.
Congress had no money and no shipyards, and plenty of delegates thought the idea absurd. It voted anyway. That gamble on two borrowed-money merchant ships became the institutional root of the United States Navy, which traces its official birthday to this exact vote: a government deciding it needed a fleet before it had a flag.
