Though he downplayed his improved situation to his wife (“My fortune will be small but I trust by good economy we may live respectably”), they were doing better than ever before. When visiting Greene in the field, the twenty-five-year-old Caty socialized with the loftiest couples in the army, including Martha and George Washington, who joked of stealing Caty from her “Quaker preacher” while they danced for hours at a time. When in Rhode Island, she and their children lived in a large farmhouse in Westerly. There, she wrote, “I have been visited by the finest circle of ladies I have seen for a long time.”
Because he was paid in Continental dollars, which could lose half their value in a month, Greene was compelled to spend his money as soon as he got it. Without banks or stocks available as investment vehicles, and with government loan certificates paying a negligible return in those same plummeting dollars, his best options were real estate, ships, and commercial ventures. With no time to manage his affairs, he depended on his brothers and cousin to arrange deals. In addition, he formed partnerships with his aides, Pettit and Cox; with Samuel A. Otis, an emerging leader in Massachusetts privateering; and with the army’s commissary general, Jeremiah Wadsworth, a merchant and former seaman one year younger than Greene.
In 1779 Wadsworth and Greene put up the capital behind Barnabas Deane & Company. Barnabas Deane was Silas’s brother, and like his sibling had more ambition than cash. He and Wadsworth were longtime associates whose careers, typically of the era, combined self-interest with significant contributions to the Revolutionary cause, including shipbuilding, powder voyages, and iron production.
Placing the company in Deane’s name was an acknowledgment that even honest officials often found their public service rewarded with criminal investigation. “However just and upright our conduct may be,” Greene wrote Wadsworth in 1779, “the world will have suspicions to our disadvantage. By keeping the affair a secret I am confident we shall have it more in our power to serve the commercial connection than by publishing it.”
Privateers figured big in Barnabas Deane & Company’s operations. Records of August 1779 show an interest in nine of them worth £25,000, and at times its roster of ships at sea numbered in the dozens. Similarly invested through his other partnerships, Greene’s involvement deepened just as privateering reached new levels of risk. The Royal Navy began putting copper sheathing on the hulls of its ships in 1778. The copper repelled wood-boring worms and reduced the accumulation of seaweed and barnacles that hindered performance. As a result, enemy vessels patrolled the seas for longer periods and were faster and more nimble in battle.
And there were more of them, thanks to Britain’s 1777 authorization of anti-American privateers. Parliament had been reluctant to take this step since it seemed implicitly to recognize America as a legitimate state. But once legalized, one hundred loyalist warships launched from New York and more than a thousand from Britain and the West Indies, another species in a crowded sea of predators.
American privateering remained a growth industry. Applications quadrupled between 1778 and 1781, by which time there were almost five-hundred private warships at sea and less than ten Continental ones. General Washington praised the Boston community for “the valuable prizes that have been lately brought into your port. We stand in need of all your activity to increase our supplies by these means.”
To promote sea raiding, he’d directed that “ammunition from the Continental magazine” be made more available to the public. “They should not be suffered to want so essential an article.” But businessmen who were paying close attention realized that privateering’s easy pickings were a thing of the past. “The case is very different now,” was the word around Boston in 1778. “More than half the vessels that have been fitted out this winter have been taken.”
Greene remained largely oblivious. Distracted by military “cares and applications of every kind” and insulated from the shock of failed voyages by his quartermaster cash flow, he was almost flippant in his commitments. “I should have no objection to sporting with five or six thousand dollars in that business, providing there was a good vessel with a lucky captain.”
His main motive for dabbling in privateers continued to be their connection to “the business of my present profession,” meaning warfare. “I don’t wish to become an adventurer. Indeed, I should have little or no inclination to be concerned in privateering but for its being calculated to annoy the enemy and consequently to favor our cause.”
In other words, privateering was serious to Greene in strategic terms. But as a financial endeavor it was “sport,” a cavalier view he could well afford in this time of plenty of money.
Back in Providence, the economic fallout of the British occupation of Newport was felt by everyone. John Brown complained that it “ruined the place, that shipping was rotting, that wealth was being invested elsewhere.” He was exaggerating. While trade indeed was hurt, industries such as paper mills and saddleries flourished, as did ironworks owned by the Browns and others.
But his point that “privateering successes were few” was accurate. A series of letters from John R. Livingston, a young fortune-seeker from New York, chronicle the downturn. Livingston shared Greene’s poor business timing. He arrived at Providence at the peak of its boom in October 1776, two months before Newport fell. He wrote his family excitedly, “The many captures that are daily made convince me that it is best to lay out our money in privateers.” True, local merchants were a crafty lot, “But I shall endeavor to play them like a trick.” His confidence swelled when his first bet struck gold—“I have made £800 by the Beaver”—though in hindsight it seems a classic instance of the early blind luck that keeps a gambler too long at the table.
Three months later he was in Boston, whose rebound from enemy occupation got a boost from Rhode Island’s maritime shutdown. “This harbor really looks brilliant and grand, as full of ships as in the most flourishing state of commerce.” Unapologetic in his quest to profit by war, he worried that peace, “if it takes place without a proper warning, may ruin us.”
Before long, however, a closer look at his privateer investments persuaded him to cut back. “I am rather too deep. I wish I could take all my property from the vessels I am concerned in.” With a stake in four ships totalling £4,882, he unloaded one at “25 percent on what I gave, and the other at 30 percent.” This was the business advantage of “persons on the spot” that Morris had described, an advantage General Greene, preoccupied with military concerns, didn’t enjoy.
Meanwhile the Browns flourished. Having long resisted doing business outside Rhode Island, they now funded privateers in Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. They also expanded their arms clientele up and down the coast, ultimately selling three thousand cannon at roughly £2,000 apiece, bringing in revenues approaching $1 billion in today’s terms.
And how did Rhode Island fare overall? Soon after the British pulled out of Newport in late 1779, a French visitor was amazed by the “large tracts of country cleared and many houses recently built” outside Providence. Even the most conservative citizens were “money crazy,” he reported.
The colony’s nervy temerity likewise never lagged. In 1782, a French military force passed through Providence on the way to joining the Continental Army. Town leaders subsequently billed the French government 4,600 silver dollars for property damage caused by its soldiers. The foreign ministry denounced it as an “exorbitant sum” and paid it under protest.
1778
BARBADOS, WEST INDIES
A sad maxim of war suggests that it’s often the best officers who get killed in combat, that bravado under fire and fierce commitment to duty aren’t conducive to long life. No one exemplified this better than Nicholas Biddle of the Continental Navy. “I fear nothing but what I ought to fear,” he wrote his family in 1775. “I am much more afraid of doing a foolish action than of losing my life.”
In 1777 Biddle was given command, at twenty-eight, of the thirty-two-gun Randolph. The Marine Committ
ee, fearing the loss of yet another new frigate, cautioned him “to avoid two-deckers or engaging when there is more than one in sight.” Aspiring to “character of conduct as well as courage,” he vowed “never to throw away the vessel and crew merely to convince the world I have courage.”
Biddle’s conscientiousness wasn’t matched by his luck. On its first cruise, Randolph’s main mast snapped in two and its crew was ravaged by fever from which many died. While under repair in Charleston, the vessel twice was struck by lightning, splintering two replacement masts. Biddle dealt with more illness among his men and had to put down a mutiny before finally relaunching in August. Over the next eight months he captured several prizes and small warships in West Indian and European waters.
Praise from the Marine Committee contained a revision of its original order. He was now “to strike a stroke” against Britain’s “Jamaica Fleet.” Though still obligated to dodge enemy frigates sailing in pairs, “if you meet either single we hope you can and will take them.” Near Barbados in March 1778, Biddle tried to do that. The vessel he took on, perhaps mistaking it for something smaller in the 8 p.m. dusk, turned out to be HMS Yarmouth, a sixty-four-gun ship-of-the-line.
He fought brilliantly, outsailing his opponent and getting off three volleys to each one of Yarmouth’s, leaving it “greatly shattered.” Misfortune superseded bravery and seamanship, however. A South Carolina privateer, General Moultrie, swept in to support the Continentals, a blessing that turned negative when its first volley struck Randolph, severely wounding Biddle and forcing him to direct his vessel while slumped in a chair on the quarterdeck.
Then Randolph exploded—probably from a spark in the powder magazine. Yarmouth’s captain wrote later that “our ship was in a manner covered with parts of her.” The debris included burning spars and, eerily to witnesses, “an American ensign, rolled up, blown in upon the forecastle, not so much as singed.”
In an event the British captain called “very remarkable,” he picked up four survivors clinging to some wreckage five days later. The rest of Randolph’s crew—301 men—were gone. It was America’s costliest naval battle of the war, with almost twice as many sailors killed as in John Paul Jones’s victory over Serapis.
In total, 832 Continental seamen died in Revolutionary combat. Harder to measure is the number killed among what the U.S. Navy’s official compilation of war documents terms that “peculiar comrade-in-arms, the privateers.” But statistics out of the coastal towns of Essex County, thirty miles north of Boston, offer a clue. Newburyport listed twenty-two vessels destroyed and a thousand men dead. Salem lost almost one-third of its fifty-four registered privateers; Gloucester lost all twenty-four. Their postwar populations of adult males were roughly half what they’d been before the war. Two-thirds of Beverly men between eighteen and sixty were captured at sea at one time or another, some of them more than once. One-third of the women in Marblehead were widowed, and more than one-fourth of the children were fatherless. Hundreds of tax abatements were granted to families whose breadwinners were listed as “missing at sea,” “taken and sick,” “died abroad,” “in the hands of the enemy,” “long absent, supposed to be lost.”
Roughly 10 percent of all privateers seized by the British hailed from Essex County; warships under American flags eventually poured out of Boston and other New England ports, Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas, the West Indies, and, in time, Europe. But if wider consequences can be inferred from one county’s experience, it’s clear that untold thousands died in the enterprise.
The government editors of Naval Documents of the American Revolution acknowledge, “Hundreds of sea fights occurred between our privateers and British merchantmen, between United States and British privateers, and between our privateers and British naval vessels, but all such actions we have omitted. Privateers were not part of our navy.”
Six
Thousands of schemes for privateering are afloat in American imaginations. Out of these speculations many fruitless and some profitable projects will grow.
—John Adams, August 1776
After seizing Newport and blockading Providence in December 1776, Admiral Richard Howe advised his captains that the rebels would now “assemble their chief maritime strength at Boston.”
John Adams would have liked nothing better. An avid supporter of privateering, he’d predicted that Massachusetts would lead the way in launching a citizen armada once Boston was free of enemy occupation. So fervent was his cheerleading for his home colony, he disliked hearing, weeks after the British pullout, that “Continental cruisers have taken so many and the provincial cruisers and privateers so few prizes. Our people may as well fight for themselves as the Continent.”
Adams considered Massachusetts mariners tops in courage and skill. He blamed Congress’s “languor, censure, and complaint” for administrative delays in translating those qualities into hordes of marauding warships. A year later, reflecting on Rhode Island’s early success in mounting voyages, he revised his view. “At Providence, I fear, there has been a system of selfishness, and at Boston of incapacity.”
He was right to narrow his disappointment down from Massachusetts as a whole to Boston in particular. Though the town was beginning to reclaim its eminence as the center of New England commerce, recovery from occupation was slow. Despite the reopening of its harbor and the return of many merchants, business remained at “low ebb” into 1778. The colony’s true strength lay in its Essex County ports of Beverly, Salem, Marblehead, and Newburyport, which got a head start in expanding their maritime industries thanks to the capital’s sluggish revival.
Until recently, Boston-based enemy frigates had suppressed the county’s fishing and sea trade to such an extent that almshouses swelled with record numbers of needy and coastal communities had to seek relief from the annual province tax and to accept grain from Quaker charities in Pennsylvania. Prizes taken by Washington’s Continental schooners over the winter of 1776–77 had nudged the stalled economy forward. The momentum built to a torrent after the Royal Navy abandoned its Boston station in March.
Before the year was out more than forty privateer commissions were granted and more than eighty prizes captured. The first of the 350 armed vessels that ultimately sailed from Essex County were former fishing sloops and schooners, small and lightly armed. Through new construction or refitting old vessels, larger brigs and brigantines with upward of twenty cannon and one hundred crewmen became the preference.
Finding armaments remained a challenge, “but with what they dig up on wharfs and at the corners of streets,” one visitor marveled, “they have made out heretofore very well.” One source of metal was the many local statues of British royalty, which could be melted down and recast as musketballs “to assimilate with the brains of our infatuated adversaries.”
The county was “privateering mad.” Ports swarmed with seamen attired in “Dutch cap, check shirt, canvas trousers, with coarse shoes and brass shoe-buckles…rolling and rollicking along with their pockets full of hard money, singing songs, chewing tobacco, smoking cigars, drinking at all the public houses.” Recruiters worked the waterfronts like carnival barkers. Taverns were pasted with broadsides advertising voyages to “anyone meaning to make his fortune in a short time” and offering signing bonuses of up to $100 (Congress was giving $40) to go along with a $20-monthly wage, prize shares, and ample allotments of grog, a sailor’s “liquor of life.”
The many prize captures were manifested in a glut of goods and commodities still scarce in Boston. And while ocean trade remained an important component of the region’s resurgence, men who’d pushed for the legalization of privateers and whose speculation in commerce raiding equaled or exceeded their involvement in traditional trade were making the greatest leaps in wealth and influence.
There was, however, something different about what was happening. In Providence, established business leaders, the Browns foremost, used their experience and family wealth to grab the greatest rewards of the wartim
e boom. The same was largely true in Philadelphia. (Robert Morris was an exception: he’d been successful before the war but no titan, and lacked the lofty social ties of most of his associates.) Boston likewise featured an ensconced upper class of interconnected merchant families, but since many had been loyalists forced to flee with their British protectors, a vacuum was left that the entrepreneurs of Essex County quickly filled—first as provincial elites; later, after many moved their homes and businesses to the capital, as new-minted Boston Brahmin.
Of middling prewar status for the most part, these men included Joseph Lee, Josiah Batchelder, Jr., and John and Andrew Cabot of Beverly; Richard and Elias Hasket Derby of Salem; and Nathaniel Tracy of Newburyport. Captains in their hire, notably Hugh Hill and Simon Forrester, used prize earnings to buy vessels of their own. Israel Thorndike, a cooper’s apprentice in Beverly, skippered a privateer at age nineteen before going on to amass one of New England’s largest fortunes in banking and textiles.
At least one common sailor, Joseph Peabody, made the transition from teenage deckhand to privateer investor over the course of nine voyages between 1777 and 1783, initiating his rise toward becoming Salem’s largest magnate with eighty-three ships and eight thousand employees. And the lawyer John Lowell, originally of Newburyport, outearned his privateer clients through fees collected by brokering partnerships and helping to settle more than a thousand prizes.
They were the Revolution’s nouveau riche, daring, grasping, brazen. Their future heirs would exemplify American old money at its most genteel.
John Hancock, Congress’s president through October 1777, was even more impatient than John Adams to see Boston thrive again. Adams, a lawyer, rooted for the town out of civic pride rather than financial interest. But Hancock had been Boston’s wealthiest merchant ever since inheriting his uncle’s estate in 1764. Nothing he did as an anti-British agitator before the war or as a politician during it was completely divorced from his business interests.
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