John Adams pushed to legalize American privateering at a time when many of his congressional colleagues still recoiled from its shady reputation. But while thrilled with privateering’s success against enemy shipping, he was shocked to see his beloved Boston consumed with speculation and materialism thanks to the industry’s soaring profits.
In 1768 one of Hancock’s vessels, Liberty, had been seized for failure to file proper papers on a cargo of wine. A subsequent mob riot had forced British authorities to quarter two regiments in town as a police force whose rankling presence ignited the Boston Massacre eighteen months later. Hancock similarly was tied to the Boston Tea Party in 1773. Confronted with a $90,000 influx of duty-free East India tea, Samuel Adams had proposed dumping it into the harbor out of fear that if landed and brought to market it would prove an “invincible temptation” to the people. Hancock concurred. Though an ardent patriot, he was also, by virtue of his commercial stature, one of those “certain men who had a large financial stake in smuggled tea.”
Hancock owned one of Boston’s largest wharfs, shut down by British decree during the occupation. In naming a protégé, John Bradford, to be Congress’s prize agent in Boston less than a month after the British evacuation, he anticipated profitable returns once the town’s maritime industry got up to speed. The Marine Committee hastened that result when, in a favor typical among political colleagues, it had Bradford direct “all the Continental prizes that arrive in your port to our worthy president’s wharf and transact the whole of their business there.” The agent’s subsequent report that two British transports “now are an ornament to the finest wharf in America” shows the zeal with which he carried out the order on behalf of his benefactor.
The captains of Washington’s original Continental schooners weren’t pleased to make Boston their exclusive “port of rendezvous” to service their vessels and send prizes for settlement, transactions that would generate commissions for Bradford and business for Hancock. Agents elsewhere in Massachusetts were also peeved. Bradford was a latecomer to a process that after months of confusion was starting to run smoothly. At privateering’s Beverly–Salem epicenter, the partnered agents William Bartlett and Jonathan Glover had laid out personal funds to outfit Continental warships in expectation of reimbursement with interest. Now they’d been summarily fired in notices signed by the new “Navy Agent of Massachusetts Colony.”
Glover rode to Boston in June to confront Bradford. He left their meeting with an understanding that Bradford would “superintend over the whole” but not displace local agents. Then Bradford did the math. Hancock had appointed him on April 23, 1776. That was three weeks before the young Marblehead skipper, James Mugford, captured the British transport Hope with its rich cargo of one thousand muskets and five hundred barrels of gunpowder. Hope was scheduled for trial in Boston on June 21. Such trials were termed “libels” and provided a chance for “any persons concerned therein” to claim rights to the vessel and cargo before they were sold at auction. With thousands of dollars in commission at stake, Bradford reasserted his status as the colony’s ranking agent, dismissing his predecessors in Essex County as “the late agents.”
Glover and Bartlett protested that his appointment was unofficial. It was true. Hancock had installed Bradford through an informal communication. The technicality delayed Bradford’s taking office until after Hope’s libel trial. But still hoping for a piece of the vessel’s proceeds, he begged Congress for a written order while at the same time undertaking a letter campaign to Hancock and Robert Morris in which he trashed his rivals’ abilities and reputations.
With Hancock, he pulled no punches in accusing Glover and Bartlett of running a shabby operation. Their captains, he said, were “all at variance, each taxing the other with being a thief, a robber, a coward.” He passed along rumors that the agents were cheats, buying up sailors’ prize shares “for a fourth part of their real value.” And he noted that despite the many prizes settled in Essex County, he had “not the least probability of coming at any money from Glover and Bartlett,” the implication being that they were embezzling government funds.
He was more circumspect with Morris, burying his wish to be “vested with greater powers than the present” under large dollops of praise for the chairman of the Marine Committee, “so important a station in the Grand Council.” But four days before Hope’s scheduled auction on July 18, he penned a frantic follow-up. Glover and Bartlett “pay no regard,” he whined. “The powder ship was taken weeks after my appointment, yet they’ve advertised to sell the powder without consulting me.”
Hope and its cargo sold for more than $1.5 million. Details of the auction are unknown, but by rule, bidders would immediately have put up 5 percent of the purchase price in cash. The buyers they represented—Congress being but one of them, and with no greater right to the munitions than any private entrepreneur—increased that amount to 10 percent, with the balance due within three days or else the downpayment was forfeited.
Still not empowered at the time of the sale, Bradford went after his 2.5 percent commission retroactively. In addition to lobbying Hancock again, he laid a groundwork of innuendo against Glover and Bartlett in a pair of letters to George Washington, who’d appointed the two agents the previous year. After pouring on the flattery, Bradford wrote with aggrieved righteousness of local seaports full of “men too little impressed with the honorable service they are employed in.” He reported that “great complaints are made” about the prize process but dared not specify Glover and Bartlett by name. They were Washington’s guys, after all.
Both agents had already written their former boss to argue the case for keeping their jobs. They cast Bradford as an interloper whose abrupt promotion was an insult to the commander in chief’s expressed satisfaction with their performance. But Washington had no time for this fraught correspondence. He was preparing his army to defend New York.
With not “the smallest inclination to interfere in any degree in the matter,” he forwarded the letters to Hancock and thereby cut ties to the agents, the Continental schooners, and their privateer offshoots. After the war he would reflect that sea power was “the pivot upon which everything turned.” His forbearance in unleashing that power through the unruly and ungovernable privateers is perhaps reason enough to claim, as did one naval historian in 1932, “George Washington as our first great admiral.”
Bradford received his official designation as the sole Continental agent in Massachusetts on August 8, 1776. He promptly published it in the New England Chronicle. When he showed it to Glover in triumph, however, the Salem agent pointed out that Congress had dated it July 30, not April 23 per Bradford’s informal notice from Hancock. The technicality caused Bradford to miss out on all of Hope’s sales commission.
He embarked with a vengeance on his new duties. He demanded detailed ledgers from former agents, informed the captains of the schooners (“our little navy,” he called them to Hancock) that he was their representative now, angled to manage prize shares for the schooners’ crewmen, and set about purchasing cannon for two Continental frigates, Boston and Hancock, recently constructed in Newburyport. Finally, he contacted French merchants to let them know that, “as Continental Agent, it probably will be in my way to do business with you.” At the close of the letter he put in his first order: tea and brandy, “for my account.”
Having already alienated agents in Massachusetts, he quickly got on the wrong side of John Langdon by knocking New Hampshire (“the cruisers from this state don’t shine in taking prizes”) and by urging the Marine Committee to settle Portsmouth prizes in Boston because “it’s a notorious fact that vessels nor cargoes will sell for more than half they would sell for here.” Langdon retaliated by warning friends in Congress that Boston, like Providence, had become a place where “there are schemes on foot to keep everything in their own hands.”
More damaging to Bradford was the distrust of his sailor clients, whose grumblings turned ugly when he was caught manipulat
ing prices at the January 1777 auction of Lively, a valuable British transport. The episode highlighted an agent’s difficulty in serving the interests of captors, who wanted a maximum return on prizes, and the interests of the government, which sought to pay no more than a reasonable price for munitions and supplies culled from captured cargoes.
Lively’s cargo included thousands of suits, shoes, and blankets desperately needed by Washington. As Bradford later told Congress, “the exigency of the army being such, I was obliged to send forward large quantities of goods uninvoiced.” Men from the Continental schooners that had captured the vessel were furious that the goods, rumored to be worth as much as £25,000, had been dispersed without payment.
They got even angrier during Lively’s auction when a Baltimore merchant, William Turnbull, presented himself as a military procurement agent there to bid on the remaining cargo. Out of patriotic generosity, the public sometimes withdrew from bidding on items needed for the health and welfare of Continental soldiers; that way, government agents didn’t have to pay top dollar. This benefited the cause but not the prize’s captors, who were never pleased when bidding was artificially dampened.
When they saw other buyers refraining, men from the schooners began bidding against Turnbull in an attempt to boost prices. He prevailed easily, but then came the scandal, which Bradford described to his superiors with careful understatement. “It seems at the close of the sale a gentleman offered Mr. Turnbull 100 percent on his purchase. This got about the sailors and created great bickering and uneasiness.”
Bradford had reason to be nervous. Because it had been stored in crates unseen by the general public, only he and Turnbull had known that Lively’s leftover cargo consisted purely of civilian goods—wine, women’s clothing, and housewares. Turnbull’s military procurement ruse had been proposed by Bradford as a way to hold down competition and clean out the ship at a bargain. What Bradford gained in the deal is unknown, but word soon spread that he “could not be trusted.” Shunned by clients, he retained his position thanks only to Hancock’s clout.
Three months after the Lively travesty, the Marine Committee formed a three-man oversight commission to monitor Bradford’s books. “We find complaints are made by the officers and seamen concerned in the capture of prizes that have fallen in your hands.” Though he remained in office until the end of the war, his authority was vastly diminished. In a last laugh, the sailors’ grievances had been compiled and sent to the committee “by Mr. Glover, their agent.”
Bradford blamed his job woes on “this growing evil” of avarice, but he was ill-suited to the waterfront scene from the start. The seamen, said to “pant for the expiration of their enlistments in order to partake of the spoils of the West Indies,” shocked him with their rudeness. Even officers were “vulgar enough to quarrel on the Sabbath morning.” They behaved “like pirates,” he said.
He blackballed captains who balked at sending him their prizes, withholding government funds needed to mount new voyages; they in turn continued to divert much of their business to Essex County. After taking fifty-five prizes since its inception in 1775, the Continental squadron fell into disarray. By the end of the year its schooners had been sold and its captains commissioned in the navy, though all but one would eventually switch to privateering.
Bradford’s efforts to launch the frigates Hancock and Boston—part of Congress’s original call for the construction of thirteen Continental warships—were only marginally more successful than his stint with the schooners, but he caught so much grief in the process that it merits some sympathy. Like Langdon, he constantly contended with privateers for armaments and crew. And it didn’t help that the two men assigned to command the frigates, John Manley and Hector McNeill, despised one another.
Manley, famous for capturing the ordnance ship Nancy in November 1775, had taken several more prizes since then. A popular hero, he wasn’t without detractors. John Paul Jones passed rumors that he was illiterate and ridiculed him as “a boatswain’s mate” who fatuously flew a commodore’s pennant. Jones resented that his commission predated Manley’s but that Manley ranked higher on Congress’s officer seniority list. “That such despicable characters should have obtained commissions as commanders in a navy is truly astonishing and might pass for romance with me unless I had been convinced by my senses of the sad reality.”
Among his men, however, Manley was considered “blunt, honest, and extremely popular.” This despite a temper that, when annoyed by a junior officer’s insubordination, for instance, caused him to strike the man “with a cutlass on the cheek with such force that his teeth were to be seen from the upper part of his jaw to the lower part of his chin.”
He was also generous—and often with diminished means. The Salem court had awarded him and his crew £2,500 in April 1776, of which £30 went to the lowest-rung sailors and £250 to the captain. (A Boston family at the time could live comfortably on about £50 a year.) But of his richest prizes, the supply-starved army “had stripped ordnance from Nancy, coal from Jenny, and clothing from Concord without placing a value on the goods.” Nancy didn’t receive its official valuation of £20,500 until ten months after capture, too late to garner money for its captors.
Even so, after pestering Washington for a ship “of equal footing with the enemy” and receiving a promise to command Hancock, Manley put up his own money to outfit the frigate after months of delay. “Persons who scarcely know the difference between a ship and a wheelbarrow” had gotten the lucrative construction contracts through inside connections. “Captain Manley,” the Massachusetts General Court noted of Hancock’s progress in November 1776, “has therefore exerted himself to get her round and has been obliged at very considerable expense to execute this business.”
He’d felt secure enough to contribute toward his ship’s preparation on the basis of a judgment of £1,000 due him for Elizabeth, a transport seized during the British evacuation of Boston that had been loaded with valuables stolen from local homes. Unfortunately the cargo subsequently was ruled private property and the judgment overturned before Manley or his crew got paid—only to be restored again in October 1777, far too late for it to be itemized and sold.
His counterpart aboard the frigate Boston, Captain Hector McNeill, though admittedly inexperienced “in the way of taking prizes,” shared his friend Jones’s disgust at being ranked below Manley. McNeill considered Manley an illiterate primitive whose leadership was suited only to “such creatures as himself.” Ordered to serve as his subordinate, he agreed to “follow as the jackal does the lion, without grumbling except in my gizzard.” In fact he grumbled plenty, to John Bradford.
“Impudent” was the agent’s opinion about the many snippy missives he received from McNeill, in one of which McNeill bluntly grouped Bradford with “the set of men who can only be called drones.” The letters often griped about money, but their most common refrain was personal derision of Manley. The general opinion that McNeill’s vanity was primarily to blame for the spat did little to resolve the problem of two navy commanders sailing in tandem, who, “like the Jews and Samaritans,” a friend advised John Adams, “will have no connections or intercourse.” Yet sail together they would—and, to further complicate matters, they would do so in company with nine privateers.
The plan to deploy Continental and private vessels in a joint operation had been adopted grudgingly. It arose out of mutual acknowledgment that antagonistic competition for ships, cannon, and crewmen was hurting both sides. Privateering’s huge popularity (a “moderate computation” at the time put the number of New Englanders participating at “not less than 10,000”) had led the government to place embargoes on privateers in hopes of quelling the demand that was depleting Continental ranks.
The embargo was predicated on military manpower quotas. Until a town had fulfilled its assessment, it could dispatch neither privateers nor merchant ships without official permission. Businessmen protested the policy change. “The government has been forward in enco
uraging private adventurers,” complained one consortium of investors with £12,000 tied up in a grounded privateer, “and in consequence of that our ship was fitted at great expense.”
Cooperation soured between the public and private sectors. When asked to lease vessels to the state, Elias Hasket Derby drove such a hard bargain (“I shall be willing if the terms suit me, together with five percent commission”), it was a slap at lawmakers. One of them, James Warren of the Massachusetts General Court, came to “execrate the policy of stopping our privateers” for the rancor it caused, the corruption it promoted, and the relief it gave the British from “the amazing damage we should have done them.”
John Adams concurred. “I am sorry the embargo was ever laid. I am against all shackles upon trade. Let the spirit of the people have its own way.”
One compelling argument to remove the embargo was tactical. Royal Navy frigates, based now in Halifax, were still patrolling Massachusetts Bay to devastating effect. Aboard HMS Milford, “foremast men” who earned bonuses for sighting colonial vessels had made £140 each in recent months on their prize shares. Because the frigates usually “cruised single,” a flotilla of American warships seemed the best way to defeat them.
John Manley captured the Revolution’s first and last significant prizes. After a maritime career that won him the devotion of his men and the respect of his British adversaries, Manley, like his relentless detractor John Paul Jones, fell into postwar obscurity. Unlike Jones, he remained there.
But privateers were averse to the yoke of Continental command and in any event avoided taking on the Royal Navy except as a last resort. Such confrontations usually went badly. Daring as they were, most privateersmen were seafaring novices who “could not find a rope in the night” much less match the gunnery skills of British professionals. A 1777 engagement in the West Indies was typical. Though the warships—one private, the other Royal Navy—were of equal firepower, the battle left two British casualties versus, on the American side, “16 killed and near 40 wounded. Two have since died of their wounds and many others likely to meet the same fate.”
Patriot Pirates Page 14
