Stephen Pleasonton

After one more day, Pleasonton became fearful that the British would destroy a nearby cannon foundry and possibly even the grist mill if they were to come to Washington, and procured wagons to take the material another thirty-five miles to Leesburg, Virginia, where they were stored in an empty stone house.

As a bureaucrat with little knowledge of maritime matters, and the Lighthouse Establishment being an additional concern, he delegated much of the responsibility of his office to the more directly involved local collectors of customs.

In 1826, the Diamond Shoals Lightship, off the coast of North Carolina, slipped her moorings in a storm; her anchor and chain were ripped from her hull and fell to the sea floor.

Lewis, a sometime engineer and inventor, had previously developed a new lighting system and won monopoly contracts for their use and the supply of spermaceti oil in American lighthouses along the east coast.

According to Robert Browning, chief historian of the United States Coast Guard, it is possible that Pleasonton continued to rely on Lewis's lamps instead of adopting Fresnel lenses at least partially due to the nature of the existing lighthouses.

Evidence exists that with the Earth's curvature, the Fresnel lenses would have proved no better than Lewis's paraboloid lamps due to the low height of the lighthouse towers themselves and would not be able to be seen at much greater distances.[3]: Ch.

This, coupled with his support for Lewis' outdated methods, led to further investigations by Congress; eventually, the United States Lighthouse Board was formed to remove Pleasonton's influence from the system altogether.

Still, many historians have criticized Pleasonton's administration, holding that his frugal nature and willingness to cut costs wherever possible did great harm to the Lighthouse Establishment's credibility.