Perilous Fight

by Stephen Budiansky

  Most Americans still reckoned money in shillings and never saw an American coin larger than a cent. The loose ties that linked the states together had changed little from colonial times. The new capital was meant to be an affirming symbol of nationhood, but as the historian Henry Adams would later wryly observe, “the contrast between the immensity of the task and the paucity of the means” seemed only to suggest that the nation itself was no more than a “magnificent scheme.” The unraised columns of the Capitol were a symbol not of national affirmation but of a people given to grandiose and loudly proclaimed plans incapable of fulfillment. Pierre L’Enfant’s grand design of broad avenues and long vistas existed only in the imagination across an ugly expanse of tree stumps. Expectations that Washington would grow like any other city and become a place of commerce and culture had been roundly disappointed; the legislators lodged together in boarding-houses, two to a room, living “like bears,” complained one senator, “brutalized and stupefied” by having nothing to do but talk politics morning and night, having to send to Baltimore for all but the most ordinary necessities. “Is national independence a dream?” asked the citizens of Mobile, part of Jefferson’s grand Louisiana Purchase of 1803, struggling as they were to eke out a miserable living on a frontier a thousand miles away.9

  The one bright spot in all this was America’s maritime trade: it was absolutely booming. By 1805 the American merchant fleet engaged in foreign trade was growing by seventy thousand tons of shipping a year, well on its way to reaching a million tons by the end of the decade, double what it was in 1800 when America already boasted the world’s largest merchant fleet of any neutral nation. From Salem, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charleston, American-built ships laden with American-grown cotton, wheat, and tobacco set sail across the Atlantic, the Caribbean, and even more distant seas. American exports passed $100 million a year, quadruple the figure of just a decade earlier. And it was not just American products they were carrying; Yankee ships were showing up wherever there were goods to be carried and money to be made. William Jones, merchant captain of Philadelphia, was already following a well-worn path for American traders when he sailed to India in 1803 and Canton in 1805, taking a share of the lucrative Chinese opium trade.

  Customs duties were the national government’s only reliable source of revenue, and the expansion of foreign trade brought millions flooding into the United States Treasury. Jefferson’s administration ran a surplus every year, making it possible to pay down the debt that the president had called a “moral canker” on the body politic of the young nation. Federal revenues grew from $10 million at the start of Jefferson’s presidency in 1801 to $16 million by the end of his second term, allowing his treasury secretary, Albert Gallatin, to announce in 1808 that $25 million of the $82 million national debt had been erased.10

  America’s growing merchant fleet created a huge demand for labor to man all the new ships: four thousand new sailors were needed each year just to keep pace with the expansion. By 1807 some fifty thousand seafarers would be employed on American merchant ships. It was a young man’s occupation, and a distinctly urban one. Nearly all American seafarers came from towns or cities along the coast; half were from the twelve largest coastal cities. Most went to sea between the ages of sixteen and twenty and stayed at it only a few years; half were between the ages of twenty and twenty-four, and only 10 percent remained at sea for more than fifteen years. For a young American of 1800 it was not a way of life but an adventure and a way to make some quick money, since the wages paid merchant seamen had risen swiftly with demand, and American seamen were soon earning $18 a month at a time when their counterparts in the British merchant marine and the Royal Navy were paid less than half that. Some American shipowners were offering as much as $30 or $35 a month when that was what it took to man their vessels.

  It was also an exceedingly dangerous occupation. The physical descriptions entered in seamen’s certificates issued by the United States in the first two decades of the nineteenth century in almost every case include a mention of scars and deformities: most sailors had smashed, split, bent, or broken fingers, missing nails, or missing fingertips; one in ten were partially disabled with missing eyes, lame legs, or ruptures.11

  Significantly, more than 15 percent of American seafarers at this time were free African Americans; that was two or three or even four times the percentage of the black population in the places they came from. Half of black seafarers worked as stewards or cooks, but the other half were regular seamen. It was an opportunity for equal pay and equal respect that simply did not exist anywhere else in American society at the time. “To drive carriage, carry a market basket after the boss, and brush his boots, or saw wood and run errands, was as high as a colored man could rise” on land, recalled William Brown, whose father, Noah, had been a sailor on merchant ships in Rhode Island in the first years of the 1800s. But at sea, noted one traveler of a slightly later period, “the Negro feels as a man.” Black seafarers responded to the opportunity by sticking with the life at sea much longer than their white counterparts: they were on average older, more likely to be married, more likely to be tied to one home port. That meant they were also more experienced. On many Yankee ships African American sailors ranked higher, and earned more, than white hands.

  African Americans were almost never officers—there were limits—but many observers commented on the equality and lack of racial animosity that existed among American sailors in the first decades of the nineteenth century. They messed together and worked together. Racial boundaries retreated in the face of the far more salient boundaries that the rules and regimentation of shipboard ritual imposed; ironically, the very depersonalization and dehumanization that all sailors suffered made race recede in significance along with every other claim to individual, human consideration that a ship’s captain made perfectly clear he didn’t give a damn about. A visitor to New Orleans around 1800 noted with wonder that black seamen might “give twenty lashes with the end of a rope to white sailors, but ashore they dare not even look them in the face.”

  It would not last: by 1840 segregation was already becoming the norm on American ships, and more and more the only jobs open to African Americans at sea were the familiar and degradingly menial ones of servant, messman, and cook. But in the formative years of the young republic, African Americans would carry a hugely disproportionate burden in the emergence of the nation as a force to be reckoned with on the high seas.12

  BRITISH OPINION divided on whether the swelling tide of American merchant vessels was a good thing or a bad thing. A few radical members of Parliament regularly rose from the Whig party’s opposition benches to praise all things American. Samuel Whitbread, whose successful brewing business had made him a fortune—and an emblem of the self-made man who was beginning to challenge the landed aristocracy’s traditional hold on power—declared that he viewed America’s successful Revolution with “reverence and admiration,” and made clear he welcomed American progress on any and all fronts as a boon to humankind.13

  Others saw perfectly practical reasons to welcome America’s growing commercial prosperity. America was the market for half of Britain’s textile exports in 1806, a third of all her exported goods—worth some $50 million a year. America, for her part, supplied Britain with the wheat she needed to feed herself, shipping twice as much as the rest of the world combined, along with some fifty million tons of cotton a year to keep her mills running. Anticipating free-trade arguments that would take nearly two centuries to become commonplace, the Scottish Whig politician Henry Brougham argued that trying to protect traditional British monopolies on the oceangoing trade only hurt Britain’s prosperity in the long run; the American shipping trade provided an outlet for British manufactures and put money in the pockets of Britain’s best customers. “Can any but the veriest driveller in political science, doubt for a moment that her gains are our gains,” Brougham wrote of America in 1808, “… that the less she traded with other nations, the le
ss she will trade with ourselves; and that to confine her foreign commerce to her trade with England, would be to diminish, if not to destroy this trade also.”

  That was a compelling argument for many of Britain’s emerging industrial class. But it was the “drivellers” who spoke far louder, clinging to a traditional view that equated the strength of Great Britain with her hegemony of the seas, pure and simple: British merchantmen no less than the Royal Navy were why Britannia ruled the waves. Shipbuilders, shipowners, and the trades that supplied them formed a powerful bloc that violently opposed any concessions to rival trading nations, and in particular any weakening of the Navigation Acts, which barred non-English ships from carrying goods to or from English colonies. They noted with alarm that America had already elbowed aside Britain in the trade between the two countries; British tonnage engaged in that transatlantic commerce had plummeted from 72,000 to 14,000, and there was no end to America’s appetite for more. “Our liberality was but that of the prodigal who gives without return,” declared Lord Sheffield, a venerable proponent of the Navigation Acts. America’s gains, insisted the traditionalists, inescapably were Britain’s losses.14

  Calls to crack down on the encroaching American trade sharply intensified with the resumption of Britain’s war with France in May 1803. As the Royal Navy swept French and Spanish merchantmen from the sea, neutral American shippers swept in. “Their own fair Trade has increased immensely & yet they would have the carrying all the French & Spanish,” fumed Augustus Foster. “There is not, thanks to our Tars, a single French or Spanish merchantman that now navigates these Seas—& these Jews want to navigate for them.”15 It was sometimes hard to tell which the British resented more, the money the Americans were making or the aid they were giving their enemy, but there were clear signs that a harsh reaction was coming.

  In summer 1804 the British frigate Leander appeared off Sandy Hook at the entrance to New York harbor. Along with two other British warships, the frigate Cambrian and the sloop of war Driver, the Leander had been in and out of New York since the spring, ostensibly to keep watch on two French frigates that had taken refuge in the harbor. On one occasion Cambrian and Driver had sailed into port and anchored directly abreast of the French ships in an attempt to rattle their foes.16

  On her return in August 1804, the Leander began to make clear that the British navy now had an additional mission on the American coast, and that was the systematic harassment of American shipping. “With the outward-bound vessels we had little or nothing to do,” recalled Basil Hall, then a young midshipman aboard the Leander. But every American ship returning from Europe was halted and boarded, just outside of the United States’ three-mile territorial limit:

  Every morning, at daybreak, during our stay off New York, 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 aboard, “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 the whole day, before our search was completed.… When any circumstance in the ship’s papers looked suspicious, the boarding officer brought the master and his documents to the Leander, where they were further examined by the captain; and if anything more important was then elicited, by an examination of the parties or their papers, to justify the idea that the cargo was French, and not American … the ship was forthwith detained. She was then manned with an English crew from the ships of war, and ordered off to Halifax.17

  Neutral trade was governed by what was, in effect, a body of international common law, a set of precedents and rulings that had been accumulating for centuries, enforced by the admiralty courts of each nation. The basic principles were widely recognized and accepted as part of the “law of nations” that governed the rules of civilized warfare. A belligerent could legally make a prize of any of his enemy’s merchant vessels encountered on the high seas. He could not, however, interfere with neutral vessels trading with the enemy so long as they did not carry contraband—material such as weapons or ammunition that directly aided the enemy’s military forces. The more traditional rules that British courts enforced held that noncontraband goods owned by a belligerent could also be seized on the high seas, even when transported by a neutral vessel. American policy favored a more encompassing definition of neutrality: “free vessels make free goods.” This difference would often be cited as one of the key points of dispute in the war to come between Britain and America, but the truth was it was largely moot by 1804; American shippers by then had access to enough credit that the goods they transported were almost always purchased on their own account, so American ships carried American goods. By either the British or the American definition, the ships and their cargo were neutral and not subject to seizure.

  The British rule may have provided slightly more convenient legal window dressing for the pretexts British captains began to use as they stepped up the campaign against American shipping, but it was manifest they were going to find pretexts no matter what. Hundreds of American ships were halted and seized on the flimsiest evidence—a ship’s paper not drawn up in correct form, a bill of lading that the British captain declared might have been forged, a piece of private correspondence referring to business transactions in France—and sent in to Halifax or Bermuda or the West Indies for adjudication by the British vice admiralty courts that operated at these colonial outposts. The ships’ owners faced months of lost time while their ships were held and their cargoes frozen, and contesting the legality of the seizure incurred thousands of dollars in legal fees and court charges for the ship’s owner, win or lose. And then the captor could threaten to carry the case to the Lords Commissioners of Appeal in London, which guaranteed to tie up the matter for a minimum of another year, virtually forcing the owner to compromise in order to have the appeal dropped. And after all that, upon the release of his ship, he faced the good chance that his vessel would be seized yet again by another British ship on his way home, starting the process all over again. There were never any official repercussions for a British navy captain who was overly zealous in stopping and seizing American ships; none was ever disciplined. Although in egregious cases the vice admiralty courts could find the capturing ship’s captain liable and award the owner costs and damages, the sanction was never applied with the frequency or certainty required to offset the much greater rewards that captors regularly reaped even in dubious seizures.

  Knowing this allowed the even less scrupulous British privateers, who eagerly began to join in the game, to extort ransoms of $500 or $1,000 apiece from the owners of merchant ships they stopped on scarcely any pretext at all. It was a small price to pay for staying out of the clutches of the British legal system.18

  IN 1805 the tensions that would finally erupt seven years later into full-blown war took a sharp jump as a result of a British legal ruling that vastly widened the scope of the for-now-undeclared British war on American neutral commerce. In May 1805 the British vice admiralty court in Nassau, Bahamas, ruled that any American ship carrying goods between France and her colonies could legally be seized, regardless of who owned the goods or where the voyage began. As a direct consequence, British cruisers everywhere began snapping up every American merchant ship they encountered crossing the Atlantic.

  The legal reasoning in the case, which involved the merchant brig Essex, revolved around a British precedent known as the Rule of 1756, established during the Seven Years’ War of 1756–63 between Britain and France. The rule held that a neutral could not carry on in wartime a trade that was closed to him in peacetime. France, like most European powers, restricted trade to her colonies to French vessels. For a neutral to come in and take up that trade in wartime was, from the British viewpoint, not a neutral act at all, but rather was using the cover of neutrality to reconstitute the com
merce of an enemy that had been legitimately destroyed by the not inconsiderable exertions of the Royal Navy.

  The 1803 revival of hostilities between Britain and France had produced a bonanza for American merchants carrying sugar and coffee from the French West Indies to France, precisely the sort of trade barred by the Rule of 1756. To skirt the rule, American ships would break their voyage by touching at an American port, sometimes even unloading their cargo onto the wharves and paying import duties before reloading the goods and “re-exporting” them. An earlier British admiralty court decision had seemed to sanction this practice, and American shippers immediately started to run away with this trade; American re-exports doubled in just two years, reaching $60 million in 1805. The Essex decision slammed the door on this legal charade. “I cannot hesitate in denying to a fraudulently circuitous voyage, those immunities which are withheld from a direct one,” the judge of the British vice admiralty court ruled in affirming the validity of the Essex’s seizure.19

  The decision caused an uproar in the United States when news of it finally arrived in late 1805, not least because it had come without warning and scores of American ships were taken before American shippers could learn of the change in policy. Hard on its heels there arrived from England a furious attack on American motives that literally added insult to the injury. War in Disguise: or, The Frauds of the Neutral Flags was published anonymously but was almost immediately known to be the work of James Stephen, a British lawyer with close ties to the government. James Monroe, the American minister in London, sent a copy back to Washington along with the report that everyone in London knew it was “a ministerial work, or rather under its auspices.” Those suspicions were amply confirmed when Stephen was shortly afterward rewarded with a safe seat in Parliament.