Naval Vessel Named After Commodore Levy to Be Launched on Sunday

A destroyer escort vessel named after Commodore Uriah P. Levy, who served in the United States Navy from the War of 1812 until the Civil War and who was the highest ranking officer in the Navy at the time of his death in 1862, will slide down the ways in Port Newark this Sunday afternoon. It is to be launched by Mrs. Charles Mayhoff of New York City, a niece of the Commodore.

Levy, who is credited with being father of the law that abolished corporal punishment in the Navy, had a stormy career studded by a duel in which he killed his adversary and several court-martials. In 1844 he was retired from active service despite his bitter protests and it was not until ten years later that a special board of inquiry rendered a judgment in his favor and he was restored to duty. The evidence at the inquiry indicated that he had been retired because of anti-Semitic prejudice.

In the war of 1812 he commanded an American raider which destroyed more than twenty British vessels before it was captured by a larger English craft and Levy imprisoned until the end of hostilities. He led naval expeditions to suppress piracy in the Gulf of Mexico and to wipe out the slave trade along the coast of Honduras. He is buried in Cypress Hills cemetery in New York City.