by Ian W. Toll
It was no secret that many British seamen—including both deserters and seamen who, though not deserters themselves, were liable to be pressed by virtue of their British birth—found their way onto American ships. They were lured by better pay, better working conditions, and the certainty they would be released from service at the end of a voyage. Once employed on an American vessel, they could pass themselves off as native-born Americans, often with the active collaboration of their officers and shipmates. Treasury Secretary Gallatin, with typical candor, told Jefferson that the number of British seamen employed in American ships exceeded the number of American seamen impressed into British warships. Total American merchant tonnage, he said, had grown at the rate of about 70,000 tons per year between 1803 and 1807; of the 4,200 seamen needed to man this annual increase, between one half and one third were probably British. Moreover, the British sailors tended to be highly trained and experienced “able seamen.” Gallatin estimated that of the 18,000 able seamen employed in American merchant vessels in the two years before 1807, half were British. Admiral Sir George Cranfield Berkeley, commander in chief of the British North America station, said that “high wages given both in their [American] Men of War and trading Ships cannot be withstood by the Men,” and estimated “according to the best intelligence I can procure above 10,000 English Seamen under these protections are at present employed in the Service of the Americans.” Other estimates ranged as high as 20,000.
To feed its voracious appetite for men, the Royal Navy was determined to reclaim as many of these British-born seamen as possible. Admiralty orders directed commanders to stop and search American merchant vessels and to seize all British sailors they could identify. How to identify which men were British was left to the discretion of the commanders on the scene. Americans carried official citizenship certificates, known as “protections,” but British seamen could obtain these documents fraudulently without much difficulty. Regarding the protections as a sham, the English tended to ignore them: “[T]he flagrant and undeniable abuses of the official documents of American Citizenship have obliged their Lordships [the British Admiralty] to look at all such documents with the utmost distrust.”
A majority of impressments occurred just off the North American coast, often within the three-mile limits of U.S. territorial waters, in the major sea-lanes off the Virginia Capes, the Delaware Capes, Sandy Hook (New York), Rhode Island, and Boston. In some cases, American ships were stripped of so many men that they were left precariously short-handed, and forced to make their way as best they could to the nearest safe harbor. British commanders, operating at a great distance from London, were allowed broad latitude in carrying out their orders. A common ruse was to impress any man whose name began with the Scottish prefix “Mc” or “Mac.” It was useless to point out that Scotsmen had been immigrating to America for nearly two hundred years. Some ignored the niceties of national identity altogether, and openly avowed an intention to press Americans into their ships. As one English captain said, with admirable candor, in 1797: “It is my duty to keep my ship manned, & I will do so wherever I find men that speak the same language with me, & not a small part of them British subjects, & that too producing Certificates of being American Citizens.”
Once pressed into the Royal Navy, an American seaman was immediately confronted with a Hobson’s choice. He could “enter the books”—that is, enlist formally—in which case he would be eligible to receive wages. In doing so, however, he renounced any right to appeal for his release though official channels. If he refused to enter the books, he would still be forced to serve as any other member of the crew, while receiving no pay. If he refused to obey orders, he would be flogged half to death. If injured or disabled in the line of duty, he would simply be landed on the nearest shore, ineligible to receive a pension or medical care at a naval hospital. His officers might confiscate and destroy his protection certificate and take measures to prevent him from contacting American government officials to petition for his release. Even when a protest was lodged through diplomatic channels, it could be rejected at the Admiralty on any number of flimsy pretexts. If the appeal led to a discharge order, the commanding officer might shelve it indefinitely, on grounds of necessity. In either case, the appeals process could be expected to drag out for years.
By the system’s perverse logic, a pressed American seaman was transformed into a subject of the British crown. He could be compelled to fight and die in England’s wars. After the outbreak of war between America and Britain in 1812, he could be compelled to fight and kill his own countrymen. If he managed to escape, he was forever labeled a deserter, and would be hunted for the rest of his life on land and sea. If he subsequently served in the U.S. Navy during the War of 1812 and was taken prisoner, he could be condemned as a traitor and executed.
Why was such a travesty permitted to continue for so long, and on such a large scale? The attitudes that countenanced impressment were a product of the extreme pressures on Britain during the middle and later stages of the Napoleonic Wars. Desperate times, it seemed, called for desperate measures. The English people believed they were fighting a just and necessary war on behalf of all civilized nations. The Royal Navy was the last barricade standing between Napoleon and his ambition to conquer the world. A vocal segment of British public opinion despised Americans as unprincipled scavengers, eager to enrich themselves in the wartime carrying trade while England held back the Corsican Tyrant. If Americans were complicit in draining away manpower from the Royal Navy, and if there was no practicable way to stanch the flow, why not dragoon a few Yankee seamen into joining the great campaign?
JEFFERSON AND MADISON WOULD HAVE LIKED to persuade England and the other warring powers of Europe to recognize an expansive version of American maritime rights, summed up in the slogan: “Free ships make free goods.” Jefferson chose a metaphor to justify the American position. In a civilized society, “the place occupied by an individual in a highway, a church, a theater, or other public assembly, cannot be intruded on, while its occupant holds it…. No nation ever pretended a right to govern by their laws the ship of another nation navigating the ocean. By what law then can it enter that ship while in peaceable and orderly use of the common element?”
The question of neutral maritime rights during wartime was hardly a new one. It was governed by an intricate set of historical and legal precedents. The navy of a belligerent power had the right to stop and search neutral merchant vessels, and to interdict shipments of “contraband”—arms, ammunition, and war materiel—to an enemy port. Belligerent powers, however, tended to favor a broader definition of contraband than neutrals were willing to concede. For example, Britain had provoked the indignation of several neutral maritime powers in 1778–83 by interdicting shipments of naval stores and timber from the Baltic seaports to France. The neutral powers had joined in an “Armed Neutrality,” and resolved to declare war on Britain if their rights were not respected. (The threat had influenced the British government’s decision to recognize American independence.) Jefferson and Madison did not dispute Britain’s right to stop American merchantmen and search them for contraband, nor its right to blockade an enemy port. But they insisted upon a narrow definition of contraband, and objected to “paper” blockades, which gave the Royal Navy a pretext to seize and condemn American vessels even when not laden with contraband.
With the return of the Pitt ministry to power in May 1804, the British government took a less fastidious view of neutral maritime rights. British naval power had virtually swept the French merchant marine from the sea, cutting the ties between France and its remaining overseas colonies. The English were determined not to allow the French economy to continue to prosper by shifting its traditional colonial mercantile trade into neutral ships. By a controversial doctrine known as the “Rule of 1756”—so called because it dated back to Seven Years’ War of 1756–63—England denied any nation the right to carry cargo on a route that would be denied to that nation’s vessels in a time of
peace. For example, if France’s peacetime mercantile restrictions barred foreign ships from carrying goods between Guadaloupe and Le Havre (as they generally did), then England would not recognize a third nation’s right to trade on the same route during wartime (when the sea was no longer safe for French merchantmen). During the Napoleonic Wars, as in the earlier conflict, the rule had a very specific purpose: to sever all commercial tendons between France and the French West Indies.
American merchants circumvented the Rule of 1756 by purchasing cargoes of sugar and coffee for their own accounts, transporting them back to the United States as if they were to be imported directly into the American domestic market, and then “re-exporting” them to Europe. In order to decontaminate the paper trail, the goods were actually unloaded from the ships and stacked on the wharves in the American seaports. Import duties were paid to the U.S. Treasury Department (and later reimbursed). New bills of lading were drawn up. The “Americanized” goods were subsequently reloaded, often into the same ships that had brought them. This “re-export” trade was a major engine of the American maritime economy, growing from $26 million in 1796 to $53 million in 1805.
For years, England had acquiesced in the re-export trade on the principle that a neutral had the right to carry non-contraband goods on its own account. The party was brought to an end on July 22, 1805, when a Vice Admiralty Court in Nassau, New Providence (the present-day Bahamas), rendered a decision that outlawed the practice in a single stroke. The case concerned an American merchant brig, the Essex, which had unloaded a cargo of Spanish-bought goods onto the wharves at Salem, Massachusetts, paid import duties, reloaded the cargo, and sailed for Havana. She was captured by a British privateer, the Favourite. The court ruled that the cargo aboard the Essex had been brought from Spain and landed in Salem “solely to colour the true purpose…that the voyage was in fact to the Havanna, touching at Salem.” Because the detour to Salem was solely for the purpose of evading the Rule of 1756, the Essex and her cargo were declared rightful prize. The judge, Sir William Scott, justified the ruling by adding: “I cannot hesitate in denying to a fraudulently circuitous voyage those immunities which are withheld from a direct one.” The decision was subsequently upheld at Whitehall.
Whatever the legal merits of the Essex ruling, it prompted seizures of hundreds of American merchant ships all throughout the Atlantic. The policy served many different British interests at once, not least of all the officers and seamen of the Royal Navy, who enjoyed a unexpected windfall of prize money. Many of the captures occurred before news of the court’s decision had reached American seaports. Maritime insurance rates spiked by as much as 400 percent. The Americans protested that the sudden attacks were not much different from piracy, and compared the British to the Barbary corsairs. The Norfolk Gazette and Ledger carried an account of the Virginian vessel Ann Elizabeth, boarded by the crew of a British 16-gun brig on October 1, 1805, while en route to Norfolk from Malaga. The American captain reported that a heavily armed boarding party, numbering ten or twelve men, “broke open my trunks, took away my wearing apparel, $200 in cash, my watch, hat, shoes, hammock, and sheets, did not leave me one shirt…all my navigation books; also my mate’s clothes and $20, also…destroyed my papers and accounts. They beat the mate and people most dreadfully.”
In Britain, where anti-American sentiment ran high, the press generally applauded the Essex ruling, or else complained that it did not go far enough. Many wondered why England did not simply seize all American commerce, using the entire weight of its naval power. A vocal minority demanded an outright declaration of war, even an invasion of North America and a campaign to reconquer the ex-colonies. A contemporary English pamphlet described the sources of the animosity:
Hatred of America seems a prevailing sentiment in this country. Whether it be that they have no crown and nobility, and are on this account not quite a genteel Power; or that their manners are less polished than our own; or that we grudge their independence, and hanker after our monopoly of their trade; or that they closely resemble us in language, character, and laws…the fact is undeniable that the bulk of the people would fain be at war with them.
In October 1805, a lawyer named James Stephen published a book entitled War in Disguise; Or the Frauds of Neutral Flags. It argued that Americans had conspired to circumvent trade restrictions to undermine the British war effort, and should be regarded as Napoleon’s collaborators. Widely circulated and hugely influential, War in Disguise served to rally public support for the Pitt ministry’s aggressive policies. In the same month, Nelson wiped out the combined French and Spanish fleet at the Battle of Trafalgar. If there was any question that England possessed the will to quash American shipping, there was no longer any doubt that it possessed the means. As the Naval Register proudly declared: “The winds and seas are Britain’s wide domain / And not a sail, but by permission, spreads!”
AMERICANS GREETED THE NEWS of the Essex decision with an upwelling of popular anger. Ambassador Merry wrote of the “sensation and clamour excited by this news from England.” Memorials and petitions from merchant and seaport communities poured into Washington. Jefferson forwarded these to Congress, adding his opinion that the British policy was “producing the most ruinous effects on our lawful commerce and navigation.” In the two-year period between 1805 and 1807, some 469 American ships were forced into British ports for adjudication. Jefferson’s 1805 annual message, prepared for the first session of the Ninth Congress in December, alluded to the Royal Navy’s “system of hovering on our coasts and harbors…to the great annoyance and oppression of our commerce.”
Privately, Jefferson worried that the Republicans’ well-known hostility to standing armies and navies had invited European aggression. “The love of peace, which we sincerely feel and profess,” he wrote Judge Cooper, “has begun to produce an opinion in Europe that our government is entirely in Quaker principles, and will turn the left cheek when the right has been smitten. This opinion must be corrected when just occasion arises, or we shall become the plunder of all nations.”
Madison retired to the solitude of his office and composed a 200-page treatise attacking the legality of the Essex decision, entitled simply An Examination of British Doctrine. Copies were delivered to each member of the House and Senate. Drawing upon centuries of precedent, the Examination left no doubt that England had acted in flagrant contravention of settled principles of international maritime law. It was exhaustively researched, tightly reasoned, masterfully argued—and otherwise irrelevant. The most cogent retort was offered by Virginia congressman John Randolph, who acknowledged Madison’s lawyerly erudition but dismissed the effort as “a shilling pamphlet against eight hundred ships of war.”
Randolph was a distant cousin of Jefferson’s, a former friend and ally of Madison, and the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. He was a skilled debater and leader of the congressional faction known as the “Old Republicans.” Randolph and his followers professed to stand for the party’s traditional core principles, and opposed what they regarded as the Jefferson administration’s drift away from those principles. The neutral carrying trade, he said, served no vital national interest and was not worth fighting for. American lives, American treasure, and American independence should never be placed at risk to support “this mushroom, this fungus of war.” The notion that the United States could or would ever dare to dispute England’s command of the sea was preposterous. Randolph asked: “Shall this great mammoth of the American Forest leave his native element and plunge into the water in a mad contest with the shark? Let him stay on shore, and not be excited by the mussels and periwinkles on the strand!” The Virginian had no doubt that American patriots would turn back any invasion of American soil, but as for the sea, “I will never consent to go to war for that which I cannot protect. I deem it no sacrifice of dignity to say to the Leviathan of the deep: ‘We are unable to contend with you in your own element; but if you come within our actual limits, we will shed our last drop
of blood in their defense.’”
Randolph and his allies pressed for an embargo, forbidding all American ships to leave American seaports. By withdrawing from the sea altogether, they reasoned, America could no longer come into hostile contact with the warring powers. “In six months,” Randolph said, “all your mercantile megrims would vanish.” As for the economic pain an embargo would cause at home, Randolph allowed that “it would cut deep,” but insisted: “we can stand it.”
After debating the subject for several weeks, Congress voted instead to impose trade sanctions, a policy with historical roots in the American Revolutionary era. The Non-Importation Act of 1806, passed on March 25 and scheduled to take effect, at the president’s discretion, on November 15, generally barred the importation of all “luxuries” and manufactured goods from Great Britain.
IN APRIL 1806, two Royal Navy frigates, Cambrian and Leander, lay to in the waters just off Sandy Hook, in the sea corridor leading to and from New York Harbor. So long as the weather was fair, these two warships managed to stop and search virtually every merchantman sailing in or out of New York. One of the Leander’s midshipmen, Basil Hall, described how it was done:
Every morning at daybreak, we set about arresting the progress of all the vessels we saw, firing off guns to the right and left to make every ship that was running in heave-to, or wait until we had leisure to send a boat on board “to see,” in our lingo, “what she was made of.” I have frequently known a dozen, and sometimes a couple of dozen, ships lying a league or two off the port, losing their fair wind, their tide, and worse than all their market, for many hours, sometimes all day, before our search was completed.
Few vessels were tempted to make a run for the safety of the harbor. A direct hit by a single 18-pounder ball could sink a small merchant vessel in minutes. When Cambrian or Leander fired a warning shot, an interdicted vessel was quick to “let fly the sheets,” heave to, and wait for the boarding party to come over the side. An English officer would demand and examine the ship’s documents. Any deficiency, real or perceived, was enough to trigger the order that the vessel be detained, navigated to Halifax, and the case adjudicated by a British Admiralty judge. Any one of many different pretexts could then be employed to condemn her—missing documents, a reference to a French port in a private letter found in a crew member’s possession, a stamp on a barrel in the hold. Even if the case was decided in the American owner’s favor, the long delay often resulted in the decay and spoilage of the cargo, and no claims for delay-related losses were allowed. The boarding parties also made a practice, in Midshipman Hall’s words, of pressing any sailor “whom they had reason, or supposed or said they had reason” to believe was a subject of the king of England.
