So, I'm reading American Heavy Frigates 1794-1826 and it jogs my memory into recollecting that the Continental Navy had an actual American-built ship-of-the-line. (Which makes one wonder how you can have just one ship-of-the-line. Wouldn't that be a ship-of-the-point?)
Congress authorized the building of America's first battleship, to be predictably-if-prosaically named the America, on November ninth of 1776. There immediately followed a multi-year saga of cost overruns, design changes, naval politics, design re-changes and un-changes, budgetary shortfalls, shortages of materials and skilled labor...
The thing was finally launched just four days short of six years later, but Congress had already voted to give her to France two months earlier as repayment for a French 74-gunner that had gone to Davy Jones' locker in Boston Harbor after doing the nautical equivalent of jumping a curb.
After flying the tricolour for only three years, she was scrapped when it was found she was all ate up with dry rot and nothing but a giant floating metaphor for the future military-industrial-congressional complex.