Competitive rivalries grew. Jonathan Glover tried to poach a successful skipper out of Beverly, William Bartlett’s territory. “I am informed that Captain Waters has not employed any person as agent for him and his officers,” he wrote a mutual friend. “As I am agent for Captain Manley, I should be glad to serve them likewise.” Such tactics were a natural consequence of privateering’s rising stakes. In time they became cutthroat.
Nancy’s capture mortified Britons. Of the challenge of supplying a distant army by sea, a London newspaper conceded, “Providence militates for the Americans.” Publicly dismissing the loss as “a mere misfortune,” the admiralty quietly ordered transports to sail in armed convoys from now on and moved to replace Admiral Graves with the former governor of Newfoundland, Molyneux Shuldham.
Loyalists in America applauded the move. “What excuse can be found for a British admiral who tamely and supinely looks on and sees fishing schooners, whaleboats and canoes riding triumphant under the muzzles of his guns and carrying off every supply destined for your relief?”
Skeptical members of Parliament claimed Graves was a scapegoat for the navy’s administrative failings. They accused the Earl of Sandwich, whose inept leadership of the admiralty would benefit the American cause throughout the war, of giving orders so “artfully discretional” that any setbacks could be “laid upon the admiral.”
Graves maintained that his performance had been exemplary, that Shuldham, a vice rather than full admiral, lacked the stature for the job, and that his dismissal was unjust. Graves’s wife, on the other hand, welcomed their return to Britain, claiming that the pressures of foreign command had “rendered him good for nothing.”
Shuldham directed the naval evacuation of Boston and, in July, the one-hundred-vessel armada that landed the British Army at Staten Island, New York. With Boston no longer a British stronghold, much of the war’s maritime activity shifted south. Rebel merchants had been swapping commodities for European munitions at neutral islands in the West Indies for more than a year. Now Britain began funneling troop supplies to America through its colonies at Jamaica, the Bahamas, and primarily Antigua, where it maintained a shipyard and an admiralty court.
Waters from Trinidad to Canada teemed with warships and transports under opposing flags chasing or fleeing one another. Captured British prizes were sailed to Massachusetts for trial, American prizes to Antigua or Halifax. On the way, all were vulnerable to recapture and redirection to an enemy port; and all, quite commonly given the great distances involved, might be recaptured yet again, requiring courts to balance claims and counterclaims in order fairly to distribute prize money.
George III’s midwinter decree that any American vessel seized “during the continuance of the rebellion” would bring rewards to its captors further crowded the scene, invigorating Royal Navy crews and eventually tempting British sympathizers in New York and the West Indies to launch privateers of their own. The aggressiveness paid off. A loyalist crowed that rebel shipping was being decimated. “There is not one in ten that escapes, coming or going.” A patriot merchant concurred. “More than half the American vessels that have sailed since the middle of February are taken.”
Congress’s Robert Morris, a marine administrator and major arms merchant, was unfazed. “We must expect many more losses and think ourselves happy if a sufficient number does but return to keep the Continent supplied.” Meanwhile Massachusetts lawmakers continued to receive applications for privateer commissions and for “Letters of Marque and Reprisal,” the latter a permit for trade ships to mount heavy weapons in order to snap up any British transports encountered under sail. One man generously informed the General Court that he was preparing a fishing trip “for the good of the country and especially for the poor” but would appreciate a letter of marque and “eight swivel guns” just in case.
Joseph Reed, George Washington’s secretary, advised his boss that most American commerce raiders and the investors behind them remained confident in the wake of the king’s decree, but some were having second thoughts due to “old prejudices and new fears.” The prejudice stemmed from privateering’s seedy reputation, the fear from its newly manifest danger.
Forty-five American vessels fell to Shuldham’s North American squadron between January and April 1776. The admiral praised his men’s performance through “this long and severe winter” but warned his superiors that “however numerous our cruisers may be, it has been found impossible to prevent some of our ordnance and other valuable stores in small vessels falling into the hands of the rebels.” His candor wasn’t appreciated, and in June he was replaced by Richard Howe, brother of the army’s commander.
Admiral Howe was sympathetic to the colonists and as interested in conducting peace talks as in controlling the seas. The peace commission he immediately undertook with his brother lacked authority to speak for the crown and ultimately was spurned by Congress, but the combination of his diplomatic distractions and the continued shift of maritime activity to the south brought another commander, Vice Admiral James Young of Antigua, to the forefront of the Royal Navy’s interdiction efforts.
In a testament to the importance of Dutch and French islands as magnets for American powder voyages, Admiral Young’s mere eight warships captured thirty-one blockade runners in two months of operation that spring. The admiral perceived better than anyone the scale on which those supposedly neutral governments were tacitly allowing the sale of strategic supplies to the rebels. In March he presented French officials with detailed intelligence, including names and cargo lists, of multiple American vessels that had loaded up with munitions at the port of Saint-Pierre on Martinique.
Young challenged the island governor, “I cannot suppose a person of your high rank and equitable way of thinking would act with duplicity in a matter of such consequence.” The governor, “astonished” by the allegation, assured Young that Martinique merchants dealt in “grain, flour, and vegetables,” and that any suggestion of illicit arms sales could only have reached the admiral “through means which I flatter myself to believe that his delicacy would not permit him to make use of,” that is, by the vulgar tactic of spying. This exchange of archly polite charges about violations that were blatantly obvious to all sides would continue for two years.
On March 23, 1776, Congress issued a proclamation formally targeting “all vessels” belonging to Britain as fair game for civilian and Continental warships. After months of deliberation during which time New Englanders had leaped into privateering, leaders in Philadelphia finally embraced the enterprise in a big way, going so far as to distribute preprinted, preauthorized commission forms complete with blank spaces where names of ships, captains, and owners could be inserted with minimal fuss. John Adams was jubilant. “It was always a measure that my heart was much engaged in.”
This latest shot in the ongoing tit-for-tat signaled open season on British shipping. From Antigua, Admiral Young entreated his superiors for reinforcements, stressing the threat indicated by “intelligence from America that ships of force are arming there which are said to be intended to intercept the homeward bound West India ships both from these islands and Jamaica.”
His point, dismissed by the admiralty, was that rebel mariners no longer would limit themselves to powder voyages and hijacking inbound supplies to British forces in America. With the entire ocean now in play, they would prowl the European coast and the mid-Atlantic for British vessels bearing goods from anywhere in the world, further pressuring a British economy already squeezed by the loss of its American market.
In response to Young’s plea came a single armed sloop which carried word from London that no others were forthcoming. Blind to the impending onslaught, the admiralty informed him that that HMS Shark would be sufficient “to reinforce your squadron, intercept the ships and vessels belonging to the North American colonies in rebellion, and also to give proper protection to the homeward bound trade.”
By the time these orders arrived in May, more than a hundred p
rivateers had launched from New England and set course for the West Indies. Young’s squadron had only four vessels on active duty due to maintenance breakdowns caused by heavy service. Shark brought that number to five.
His orders concluded with a stern warning to steer clear of “foreign islands” so as not to give “just cause of complaint” to France or the Netherlands, a condition the admiral can only have found exasperating given his knowledge of their flourishing trade in munitions meant expressly to spill British blood. But with its empire strained and its military overstretched, the crown chose to balance strategic and diplomatic priorities with the result that it fell short in both. Young in his Antiguan outpost sensed this early on. So did British merchants abroad and at home.
The potential trade loss due to the war was estimated at £6 million annually. Little wonder, then, that the merchants’ response to their government’s rosy posturing was cynical and shrill. They peppered newspapers and politicians with dire alarms that “the precarious and defenseless situation of His Majesty’s servants will entirely ruin the people and trade of this government.” And despite admiralty claims of the rebels’ maritime impotence, they began collecting “private surveys and attestations” of rampant enemy privateers to absolve them from liability should their cargoes start disappearing at sea.
The Royal Navy captains “on cruising station” in North America privately shared the same foreboding about the enemy’s spreading ocean insurgency. “Time is drawing fast,” one of them wrote a colleague in August 1776, “that requires our presence in the English Channel.”
1776
BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS
His capture of Nancy in November 1775 made John Manley famous throughout Massachusetts. “As many towns contend for the honor of his birth as there did for that of Homer’s,” wrote one fan. A Salem pub was named after him, and he was the subject of a popular drinking song with the refrain, “And a’privateering we will go.” Washington gave Manley the honorary title of commodore so that it “could inspire,” he wrote, “the captains of the other armed schooners.”
The first to fulfill that hope was James Mugford, a twenty-six-year-old Marblehead seaman. In the final days of the British occupation of Boston he’d been pressed into service aboard HMS Lively, gaining release after his wife persuaded the captain that the newlywed couple should be reunited. He then talked his way into command of a Continental schooner, Franklin, on the basis of having overheard his captors discussing late-arriving British supply ships that were unaware of Boston’s recent evacuation.
Royal Navy frigates still patrolled Massachusetts Bay. Within sight of their anchorage just south of Boston’s main channel, Mugford intercepted Hope, a three-hundred-ton transport, and brought it into the harbor after threatening to execute its crewmen if they didn’t sail where he directed them. Its cargo of a thousand muskets, ten cannon, and seventy-five tons of powder made it the richest prize of the Revolution.
British frigates had been unable to prevent Hope’s capture due to “the wind being easterly.” Their commanders therefore were “intolerably vexed and chagrined that the above ship should be taken and unloaded in their open view” and were ready when Franklin and its crew of 16 returned to sea two days later.
Hugging the shore in order to elude capture, the schooner ran aground at the north end of the harbor. Five longboats carrying one hundred armed soldiers bore down from two frigates hovering in deeper water. According to the Boston Gazette, Mugford surprised “our base and unnatural enemies” by cutting his anchor cable to let the current swing his vessel perpendicular to their approach. He got off a broadside of grapeshot at point-blank range with “two boatloads killed” as a result. His men hacked with cutlasses as boarders climbed over the rail, strewing the deck with severed fingers and hands. Mugford himself was seen “righteously dealing death and destruction” to five redcoats with his pike.
Night fell. A small privateer, Lady Washington, joined the fight, in the darkness confusing the British into thinking they were outnumbered and prompting their retreat. The Americans claimed “fifty or sixty” enemy killed. British officers listed seven in their logbooks. Aboard Franklin, Mugford and one crewman lay dead. He received a grand burial in Marblehead complete with muffled drums and poetic elegies. “Don’t give up the vessel, you will be able to beat them off,” went down in local lore as the dying words of a fallen hero.
John Skimmer was Franklin’s next skipper. In 1777 he was upgraded to a fourteen-gun Continental brig called General Gates in honor of the victor at Saratoga. The last of his many sea battles was against Montague, a loyalist privateer.
Prowling the sea without international license, the loyalists feared that capture meant a pirate’s noose. Consequently, they fought “with ferocity rather than bravery” through three hours of beam-to-beam volleys. When Montague ran out of ammunition, its gunners jammed every available piece of metal down their cannon barrels, “including jackknives, crowbars, and even the captain’s speaking tube.” A double-headed shot (used to shred an opponent’s rigging) that had torn through its main cabin was retrieved, loaded, and fired back at General Gates. The shell struck a swivel gun and sent its shattered pieces through Skimmer’s skull, the happy sight of which inspired the loyalists to fight for two more hours until the last of them surrendered.
James Mugford captured the supply ship, Hope, from under the guns of Royal Navy frigates. His gallantry in defending his schooner made him a local hero. But the cutthroat maneuvering by maritime agents to profit from Hope’s sale would bring scorn from the privateering community.
Skimmer had seized twenty-two prizes in his career, yet few had paid out due to muddled prize procedures, leaving his widow and eleven children destitute. Their plight came to the attention of Robert Morris, who demanded of his congressional colleagues that “something must be done for poor Captain Skimmer’s family.”
In September the captain’s survivors were awarded an annual pension of $400, a generous sum. Wartime inflation would cut its value by more than 90 percent by the time the pension, for budgetary reasons, was terminated three years later.
Three
Those who have been engaged in privateering are making large fortunes in a most rapid manner. I have not meddled in this business which I confess does not square with my principles.
—Robert Morris to Silas Deane, September 1776
I propose this privateer to be one third on your account, one third on account of Mr. Prejent and one third on my account. I have not imparted my concern in this plan to any person and therefore request you will never mention the matter.
—Robert Morris to William Bingham, December 1776
The patriot expedition against Fort Ticonderoga in May 1775, which secured the artillery pieces instrumental in driving the British from Boston a year later, had been financed with £300 surreptitiously drawn from the Connecticut treasury by Silas Deane, the colony’s thirty-seven-year-old representative in Congress. He left promissory notes for the money that later were honored, and any fallout from his disregard of proper accounting procedures vanished in the euphoria of the expedition’s success. But as an episode in which a desirable end justified dubious means, the affair exemplified Deane’s lifelong penchant for improvisation and hustle.
His Yale education had brought into tantalizing reach the advantages of status and wealth not always available to the sons of blacksmiths. Left sole guardian to six siblings while still in his early twenties, he added an e to the Dean name to distance the family from its middling roots. He engaged in constant legal disputes with relatives and business partners, and ascended in society via two “brilliant marriages” to women from prominent families. His first wife, with whom he had a son, died in their fourth year of marriage, his second while he was abroad in 1777.
Deane liked luxury and stylish company, and wasn’t one to cut his personal spending even when money was tight. He called it “a peculiar fatality” that he bounced from “one scheme and adventure after anothe
r,” but his expensive tastes and the expediency of many of his dealings made his fate by and large his own fault.
In early 1776 Deane was chosen to be Congress’s undercover emissary to Paris. He got the job through the influence of Robert Morris of the Secret Committee for trade and the Committee of Secret Correspondence, the latter a foreign relations group seeking to establish a formal alliance with France. Like Deane, Morris had no patience for bureaucracy. “How tedious and troublesome it is,” he wrote the new emissary, “to obtain decisive orders on any point wherein public expense is to be incurred.”
In observing that war’s chaos and devastation “are circumstances by no means favorable to finance,” Morris meant public finance. On a personal level he thrived, ascending from “a leading young merchant from Philadelphia” in 1775 to the so-called “financier of the Revolution” by war’s end. Early on he helped equip Washington’s army through his business contacts in Europe. Later as Superintendent of Finances he would keep the American economy afloat by stabilizing its worthless currency through a juggling act of monetary austerity, foreign trade, hat-in-hand international borrowing, and cash infusions from his own holdings.
In an era of widespread belief that all procurement officials speculated with government money and manipulated prices to increase commissions, Morris’s critics took little regard of his contributions. John Adams weighed his “vast designs in the mercantile way” against a “masterly understanding, an open temper, and an honest heart.” But others placed him among a supposed cabal of merchant-dignitaries whose public service disguised, in the ominous insinuation of Virginia-born diplomat Arthur Lee, “some deep design against our independence at the bottom. Many of the faction are, I know, actuated by the desire of getting or retaining the public plunder.” Such suspicions were fostered by the fiscal contrivances of men like Morris and Deane no matter the benefit they often rendered the cause.
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