HC Time Machine - USS Constellation Battling for Freedom (2006)

The long nightmare of the trans-Atlantic slave trade had multiple dimensions and phases, from the first forced arrivals of Africans in the New World in the 17th century through the outbreak of civil war and abolition of slavery. Even after the international slave trade became illegal in the United States in 1808, slave traders violated the law fifty years later in order to bring highly profitable human cargo across the ocean for sale. The paths of these human beings into slavery comprise a collection of countless interlocking and horrific stories. USS Constellation Battling for Freedom tells one of them – the dramatic and little-known tale of a flagship U.S. Navy vessel's dogged pursuit of the Cora, an illegal carrier attempting to transport over 700 slaves to the United States. This gripping two-hour feature-length documentary opens in 1859, with the United States bitterly divided over the issue of slavery. A small fleet of U.S. naval ships known as the African Squadron had been charged with the task of policing illegal slave ships off the coast of Africa. In a fast-paced chase at sea, the drama of their efforts to halt the slave ship Cora is recounted in rich detail, showing what it was like to exchange firepower with the slave smugglers during some of the heated battles at sea. First-person stories from the journals and letters of sailors aboard the Cora paint a vivid portrait of the chase. Woven into the story is the plight of a young hunter captured from his village. We follow his journey from the Congo interior to his imprisonment with 700 other Africans on the slave ship Cora, and see the harrowing methods through which Africans were captured, enslaved, and transported abroad as human cargo. Program provides a human perspective on the complex realities of the slave trade, from its origins in Africa to its ramifications overseas. Filmed on location in the UK, we realistically recreate the horror of the slave trade and Constellation's heroic effort to put an end to the trade in human lives.

Snippet from Wikipedia: USS Constellation (1797)

USS Constellation was a nominally rated 38-gun wooden-hulled, three-masted frigate of the United States Navy.

The ship was built under the direction of David Stodder at The Joseph and Samuel Sterett shipyard on Harris Creek in Baltimore's Fell's Point maritime community, and was launched on 7 September 1797. Constellation was one of the original six frigates whose construction the Naval Act of 1794 had authorized.

The name "Constellation" was among ten names submitted to President George Washington by Secretary of War Timothy Pickering in March 1795 for the frigates that were to be constructed. The Flag Act of 1777 speaks of how the stars in the flag are "representing a new constellation".

Joshua Humphreys designed these frigates to be the young Navy's capital ships, and so Constellation and her sisters were larger and more heavily armed and built than standard frigates of the period. The Constellation's first duties with the newly formed US Navy were to provide protection for American merchant shipping during the Quasi-War with France and to defeat the Barbary pirates in the First Barbary War.

Design and construction

American merchant vessels began to fall prey to Barbary Pirates, along the so-called "Barbary Coast" of North Africa, Morocco, Tunis (in future Tunisia), Tripoli (in future Libya), and most notably from Algiers (in future Algeria), in the Mediterranean Sea during the 1790s. Congress responded with the Naval Act of 1794. The Act provided funds for the construction of six frigates to be built in six different East Coast ports; however, it included a clause stating that construction of the ships would cease if the United States agreed to peace terms with Algiers.

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