In the first days of September another attack in force was determined upon. It was the third in which the Constitution had taken an active part, and the magnificent way that the stout and beautiful frigate withstood the bombardment of all the guns of the forts and vessels, gained for her the name of “Old Ironsides”—a name she has now borne gloriously for nearly a hundred years. At daylight on the 4th of September the Tripolitans were awakened by the roar of a cannonade, and the eyes of the captive officers and men of the Philadelphia were gladdened by seeing the gunboats advancing boldly in the first flush of dawn, supported by the brigs and schooners, while Old Ironsides was standing in, her men on the yards shortening sail as deliberately as if she were working into a friendly port. Arrived at a point opposite the mole, she backed her topsails and then let fly her thirty great guns in broadside. In vain the forts pounded her. Moving slowly, and occasionally throwing her topsail aback, she skillfully avoided being raked, and, except for some slight damage aloft, she came out of the action without injury and without losing a man.
Meanwhile the Tripolitan gunboats had advanced to the reefs, and just as the sun rose the divisions under Somers and Decatur went at them fiercely. The brigs and schooners also directing their fire toward the Tripolitan flotilla, Commodore Preble was sanguine that it would be utterly destroyed. The Tripolitans, though, whose vessels drew less water than the Americans’, and who knew the intricate maze of reefs and shoals perfectly well, ran into shoal water, where they could not be followed. Somers sank two boats, while Decatur managed to bring off three. As soon as the frigate hauled off and made for the offing, the gun-vessels were towed off, and when they were well out of gunshot the whole squadron came to anchor, about three o’clock in the day.
Somers was the first captain to report on board the flagship. As soon as he caught sight of “Old Pepper” on the Constitution’s quarter-deck he knew that something had gone wrong. The commodore, while fighting his own ship, could give but little attention to the boat divisions, but seeing the Tripolitans almost surrounded by the American boats, with the brigs and schooners closing up, he had expected the whole flotilla to be captured. When, therefore, he saw it making back into the harbor with the loss of only five boats, and not knowing the shoalness of the water at that point, he could not understand the conduct of the American boats, and was deeply disappointed for the first time in his “boy captains.” As Somers approached and made his report in a few words, he was received in angry silence, and the only words the commodore said were, “I shall have something to say on this matter when Captain Decatur reports.”