USS Brandywine (formerly named Susquehanna) was a wooden-hulled, three-masted frigate of the United States Navy bearing 44 guns which had the initial task of conveying the Marquis de Lafayette back to France.

Shortly before she was to be launched in the spring of 1825, President John Quincy Adams decided to have an American warship carry the Marquis de Lafayette back to Europe, in the wake of his visit to the land he had fought to free almost 50 years before.

Launched on June 16, 1825, and christened by Sailing Master Marmaduke Dove, Brandywine was commissioned on August 25, 1825, Captain Charles Morris in command.

[1] One of these young men selected as an officer on the Brandywine's maiden voyage was 19-year-old Virginian Matthew Fontaine Maury, who would eventually make great influences in the science of oceanography.

After a stormy three weeks at sea, the warship arrived off Le Havre, France, early in October; and, following some initial trepidation about the government's attitude toward Lafayette's return to a France now ruled by the ultra-royalist King Charles X, Brandywine's passenger and her captain disembarked, the former to return home and the latter to tour the country for six months to study shipyards, ship design and other naval matters.

Then, after being rendered more seaworthy, she resumed her voyage to Gibraltar on October 22, reaching the famed British bastion guarding the Mediterranean Sea's Atlantic entrance on November 2.

At the end of a fortnight in port, Brandywine sailed for the Balearic Islands in company with the ship of the line North Carolina and sloop of war Erie.

In February 1826, Porpoise arrived in Port Mahon with orders recalling Brandywine to the U.S., and the frigate set sail for home late in the month.

After passing the rest of spring and much of the summer in repairs and outfitting for duty in the Pacific Ocean, Brandywine departed New York City on September 3, 1826, as the flagship of Commodore Jacob Jones who was sailing around Cape Horn for the Pacific coast of South America to take over command of the American squadron in the region from Commodore Isaac Hull and his flagship, USS United States.

By the time the frigate joined the squadron on January 6, 1827,[2] Spain had abandoned her efforts to re-conquer her empire in the Western Hemisphere, so Brandywine's tour of duty in the Pacific proved far less troubled than that of her predecessor.

Her own relief—the frigate Guerriere—arrived in the summer of 1829 bringing Commodore Charles C. B. Thompson, the squadron's new commander, along with another crew for Dolphin; and Brandywine set sail for home.

Not a shot was fired and no explicit reference to the squadron was made during the negotiations; nevertheless, the unspoken message of power helped the king to see the justice of the American claims and prompted him to sign a treaty promising to pay 2,100,000 ducats to the U.S. over the next nine years.

Her remaining months in the Mediterranean proved less dramatic; and Brandywine sailed for the United States late in the spring of 1833, returning to New York on July 9 and going out of commission two days later.

Feelings on both sides of the Atlantic deepened during the spring of 1841, and the American minister to the Court of St. James's wrote to Commodore Hull urging him to leave the Mediterranean lest war break out and his squadron be trapped there.

After rounding the Cape of Good Hope, she reached Bombay, India on October 24 to pick up the special envoy to China, Caleb Cushing, and took him to Macau where he went ashore and began negotiations for a treaty.

Brandywine, on the other hand, remained in the Orient until departing Macau for Honolulu, Hawaii on December 2, carrying word of the Chinese privy council's approval of the treaty.

From Hawaii, she sailed to the west coast of South America where she made calls at several ports before setting out to double Cape Horn on her way home.

She spent much of that time anchored near Fort Monroe, her most conspicuous absence coming in the wake of CSS Virginia's attempt to break the Union blockade early in the spring of 1862.

Towed to Baltimore, Maryland by Mount Vernon, Brandywine remained there until early June 1862, by which time the danger posed by the Confederate ironclad had waned considerably.