Rebels at sea, p.6
Rebels at Sea, page 6
Although the privateering system was authorized by Congress, it would be implemented by the colonies. The colonies that had passed their own privateering laws—Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire—updated them to reflect the congressional terms. Even though the colonial laws remained on the books, virtually all privateering commissions in America were Continental from this point forward. Congress would supply the colonies with privateering commissions that were to be filled out by those applying for letters of marque. The commissions had blank spaces for the name and tonnage of the vessel as well as the number of cannons and officers and crew on board, among other items. The applicants would also usually indicate whether the vessel would act solely as a privateer or as a letter of marque engaging both in trade and capturing prizes. The owner or commander was required to post a bond of $5,000 for vessels under 100 tons and $10,000 for larger vessels, payable to the president of the Congress. That bond was intended to ensure that the commander and his crew would not violate the terms of the commission, which detailed what actions privateers could take and what actions were prohibited. In May 1780, the bond amount was raised to $20,000 for all privateers.
If privateersmen killed, maimed, tortured, or in any other manner treated the officers or crew of captured ships cruelly or inhumanely—or in a way that was contrary to the “practices of civilized nations in war”—the offenders would be severely punished. Also, one-third of the crew had to be landsmen, or non-mariners. The goal was to limit the number of sailors who decided to become privateers, given that it potentially paid better than serving on Continental navy ships. That way, the thinking went, the chances of navy ships filling out their crews with seasoned mariners improved.
In his letter to the colonies announcing the law and the regulations, John Hancock, president of the Continental Congress, said: “It is necessary in conducting the warlike operations on the part of America, to meet our enemy on every ground, and to defend ourselves in the best manner we can against all attempts, in whatever shape, to deprive us of either liberty or property.” Privateers were now to be a major part of the colonial war effort.
John Adams had been yearning for the colonies to formally break free of Britain since the middle of 1775, but he knew that the privateering law, no matter how revolutionary it was, did not go that far. “This is not Independency,” he said in his letter to Gates, “you know nothing like it.” Nevertheless, the privateering law did push the colonies more in that direction. It was yet another tear in the gossamer fabric holding the colonies and Britain together.
The slow lurch toward independence was sped along by the thunderclap of a pamphlet written by Thomas Paine, titled Common Sense, first published on January 10, 1776. Born in England, Paine had failed his way through a number of professions, including corset maker and tobacconist, before emigrating to Philadelphia in late 1774 with a letter of recommendation in his pocket from Benjamin Franklin. That entrée helped him obtain citizenship in Pennsylvania and win a job as editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine, where he honed his writing skills and became swept up in the political currents roiling the colonies.
Privateering might have ended Paine’s writing career well before it started. In 1756, at the beginning the Seven Years’ War, he had joined the crew of the Terrible, a British privateer captained by William Death. Paine’s father, a Quaker committed to pacifism, protested his son’s decision and convinced him to leave the ship. That was a providential turn of events. Not long after the Terrible sailed, typhus fever raced through the ranks, incapacitating and killing many. Shorthanded, the Terrible managed to take a prize, sustaining casualties in the process, before tangling with a much more powerful French privateer, the Vengeance. In the ensuing battle, Captain Death lived up to his name. He was hit with two lead musket balls, and after he had surrendered, a Frenchman shot him in the back of his head. Most of the Terrible’s crew were also killed during the fight. The survivors were placed in the overcrowded hold of the French ship, where another twenty-seven of them “were smothered to death.” The few who were still alive at that point were then thrown into prison at Saint-Malo.
Paine soon discounted his father’s concerns and, knowing nothing about the bloodbath on the Terrible, signed on to another privateer. Fortunately, for him, the King of Prussia’s relatively short cruise was much less eventful, and it returned to London with a few prizes in tow. How much Paine earned from this adventure is unknown, but he did return with his life, and he soon continued his winding path toward becoming one of the most influential proponents of the revolutionary cause.
Engraving from 1797 showing the deadly battle between the British privateer Terrible and the French privateer Vengeance.
In Common Sense, Paine argued that, given all the blood that had been spilled already, “reconciliation is . . . a fallacious dream,” and that the time for independence from Britain was now. “Everything short of that is mere patchwork, that it can afford no lasting felicity,—that it is leaving the sword to our children, and shrinking back at a time, when, a little more, a little farther, would have rendered this continent the glory of the earth.” Paine derided the unwritten British constitution as the “base remains of two ancient tyrannies”—monarchy and aristocracy. “Government by kings” fared no better: he called it “the most prosperous invention the Devil ever set on foot for the promotion of idolatry,” and he labeled King George “the Royal Brute.” As Paine proclaimed of the rebellion: “The sun never shined on a cause of greater worth. ’Tis not the affair of a city, a county, a province, or a kingdom; but of a continent. . . . We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand.”
Paine’s timing couldn’t have been better. January 10 was the same day that the text of King George’s speech opening Parliament on October 26, 1775, arrived in America. In his oration the king made clear that he was going to pursue war against the colonies, which “now openly avow their revolt, hostility, and rebellion,” with renewed vigor, including by sending more naval and land forces to America. The king’s goal was “to put a speedy end to these disorders by the most decisive exertions.” “The Royal Brute” could hardly have done more to corroborate Paine’s argument that independence was an idea whose time had come.
Many of the arguments in Common Sense had been bandied about in the colonies for months, if not years, but Paine’s synthesis, written for common people and leavened with his own powerful insights, caused a sensation. In 1776 alone, twenty-five editions of Common Sense were published, and within a few months of its first appearance it had sold roughly 100,000 copies, an astonishing number considering that the entire population of the colonies was only 2.5 million, and more than 500,000 of those were enslaved persons. (During the course of the Revolution, roughly half a million copies of Common Sense were sold, including unauthorized editions.) Common Sense became the intellectual and emotional backdrop to all subsequent debates about the future of the colonies.
After the privateering law passed, those debates took on even greater urgency. On April 6, in another reaction to the Prohibitory Act, Congress opened colonial ports to trade with all nations’ ships except those from Britain and its other colonies. By early June, the majority of the thirteen colonies had instructed their delegates to support independence. On June 7, Virginia’s Richard Henry Lee presented a resolution in Congress declaring “that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.”
Such actions and words were like a tonic to Adams. On June 9, he told William Cushing, a fellow lawyer and later one of the original justices of the United States Supreme Court, that “objects of the most stupendous magnitude, measures in which the lives and liberties of millions, born and unborn are most essentially interested, are now before us. We are in the very midst of a revolution, the most complete, unexpected, and remarkable of any in the history of nations.”
A few days later, Congress appointed a committee of five to draft a document justifying independence from Britain in the event that Lee’s resolution was approved. Among the committee members were Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson, the last of whom wrote most of the document, which was presented to Congress on June 28.
Still hesitant to make a clean break, Congress waited until July 2 to adopt Lee’s resolution. Adams was thrilled, writing to his wife, Abigail, that “the second day of July 1776, will be the most memorable epocha [sic], in the history of America.—I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding generations, as the great anniversary festival.” In this instance, Adams proved to be a poor prophet. It wasn’t until July 4 that the delegates, after making a number of revisions to the committee of five’s document, formally approved what thereafter became known as the Declaration of Independence.†
The declaration described the many oppressive, punitive, and harmful actions that compelled the colonies to break free. Among these were taxation without representation, cutting off colonial trade with the world, impressing sailors, restricting fishing in colonial seas, burning towns, and destroying “the lives of our people.” There would be no more giving the monarchy the benefit of the doubt. “The history of the present King of Great Britain,” the declaration claimed, “is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states.” As a nation of “free and independent states,” the colonies asserted their right to “levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do.”
Engraving titled The manner in which the American colonies declared themselves independent of the King of England, throughout the different provinces, on July 4, 1776, circa 1783.
By this point, the pace of privateering activity had picked up. On April 11, the first vessels obtained Continental commissions. Philadelphia’s Chance and Congress had formerly earned their keep as pilot boats in New York. They were diminutive sloops, with four and six cannons, respectively, and around forty to fifty crewmen each. While preparing to head out on their first privateering cruise, the sloops received assistance from Congress. With gunpowder in short supply in Pennsylvania, a representative of the shipowners asked Congress for permission to buy four hundred pounds of it, and Congress agreed. Armed and ready, the two sloops slipped down the Delaware River and into the Atlantic in mid-April.
They sailed in tandem to the West Indies, hunting for prizes. It was a good choice. As the influential Caribbean historian and politician Eric Williams noted, “The West Indian islands became the hub of the British Empire . . . [and] the most precious colonies ever recorded in the whole annals of imperialism.” Their great wealth was based on sugarcane cultivation and a brutal slave regime. With this came a corresponding flood of maritime traffic between the islands and Britain, which the sloops began picking off.
In less than a month, the Chance and Congress captured four British merchant ships that were transiting from Jamaica to London. It was a spectacular haul. The ships’ cargoes included more than 1,000 hogsheads of sugar, 25 tons of cocoa, nearly 22,000 gallons of rum, and, of greatest value, 22,420 Spanish silver dollars as well as 200 gold Spanish “half joes,” each of which was worth around 8 Spanish silver dollars.
The four prizes, with skeleton prize crews on board, were sent into various colonial ports to be libeled. But before setting out, the merchantmen were stripped of their silver and gold, which was placed on the Chance and Congress. Concerned about a British warship that had been lurking at the mouth of the Delaware and the potential loss of their treasure, the sloops’ captains sailed to the more secluded Little Egg Harbor in New Jersey rather than their home port. They arrived in early June and offloaded the silver and gold, placing it on wagons to be transported overland to Philadelphia. Then the Chance and Congress made a mad dash up the Delaware, evading the HMS Liverpool and reaching Philadelphia on June 5.
The same day that the Chance and Congress arrived in Philadelphia, Robert Morris, a wealthy merchant and congressional delegate, wrote to Silas Deane, then the colonies’ secret envoy to France, recounting the privateers’ great success and predicting that it was only a beginning. “I fancy many more West Indiamen will be taken this summer and probably Great Britain may have cause to repent the Prohibitory Act, especially as they have much more property to lose than we have.”
As someone who cared deeply about the colonies’ fiscal health, and who would in 1781 become the superintendent of finance, Morris was particularly excited, as were his fellow delegates, about the Spanish silver dollars. Such coins were the “first truly global currency,” welcomed everywhere. In contrast, the paper currency issued by Congress, known as Continental bills, or more commonly continentals, was of dubious worth and depreciated quickly. As a result, it was difficult to use it in both colonial and international transactions, the latter of which were critical to America’s hope of purchasing military supplies from overseas. As John Hancock put it, Congress had “great occasion for the hard money,” and the legislature asked the privateers’ owners to hand over their 22,420 silver dollars. The owners “very generously furnished it, which Congress looked upon as of essential service.” In exchange for the “hard money,” Congress gave the owners an equivalent amount in continentals.
When the value of the silver and gold was added to the money generated by the sale of four British prizes and their cargo, the two owners and a few other main investors in the Chance and Congress walked away with the princely sum of at least £5,000 each. The crew of the two privateers had quite a payday as well, with the common seaman earning as much as £500. To put such numbers in perspective, at this time a prosperous merchant might have a net worth of around £6,000, while a typical carpenter in Rhode Island earned about £82 per year, and common laborers pulled in a little more than half of that. As for mariners, the captain of a merchantman earned around £10 per month, whereas a common sailor earned £3. By one calculation, £5,000 in 1776 would be worth around £650,000, or roughly $900,000, today.
News of the Chance’s and the Congress’s success raced through the colonies, spurring other privateering ventures. By the end of June, Adams was predicting that “privateers will swarm in great numbers.” A little more than a month later, after the colonies had declared their independence, he wrote to Abigail, “Thousands of schemes for privateering are afloat in American imaginations. . . . Out of these speculations many fruitless and some profitable projects will grow.” Abigail’s response was equally optimistic. “The rage for privateering is as great here as anywhere and I believe the success has been as great.” Around the same time, James Warren, president of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, wrote to Samuel Adams: “The spirit of privateering prevails here greatly. The success of those that have before engaged in that business has been sufficient to the make the whole country privateering mad.”
That madness persisted for most of the Revolution, and many shared Warren’s astonishment. At the end of 1776, Robert Morris observed, “In the eastern states, they are so intent on privateering that they mind little else.” Two years later, an unidentified author from Boston noted that “privateering was never more in vogue than at the present—two or three privateers sail every week from this port, and men seem as plenty as grasshoppers in the field; no vessel being detained an hour for want of them.” That same year, merchant William Pickman of Salem wrote to Timothy Pickering, adjutant general of the Continental army: “Privateering still flourishes, and although some individuals are losers yet the bulk are great gainers and may make amazing fortunes.” The demand for privateering commissions was so great that many colonies repeatedly ran out of the pre-printed letters of marque, and colonial officials begged Congress to send more. In the summer of 1779, Virginia’s second governor, Thomas Jefferson, claimed that “for want of [such letters] our people have long and exceedingly suffered” because they had not been able to send forth privateers.
Before continuing with the narrative and telling the tale of how the explosion of American privateering shaped the war, let’s consider what type of men launched privateering cruises, what type of men signed on to crew privateers, why they did so given the risks involved, and how privateers and their crews went about their thrilling, lucrative, and dangerous business.
* Unfortunately, the actual petition itself has been lost, and what we know about it comes from those who made reference to it in their letters.
† While July 4, 1776, is the date that the colonies declared their independence from Great Britain, Rhode Island had made a similar declaration two months earlier. Greatly angered by both the mother country’s restrictions on the colony’s commerce and its harassment of colonists and colonial vessels (including the Gaspee affair), the Rhode Island General Assembly voted on May 4, 1776, to renounce its allegiance to King George III and sever ties with Great Britain.
CHAPTER
4
A Privateersman’s Life
Model of the sixteen-gun American privateer Rattlesnake, 1781, by Raymond W. Stone.
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While in Philadelphia attending the Continental Congress, John Adams frequently wrote to Abigail, who was living in their family home in Braintree, Massachusetts. In these letters he expressed his love for her and shared observations on life and politics. On the morning of April 23, 1777, he chose to tell her about a conversation he’d had with his barber, John Byrne, “during the gay moments of shaving.” Adams inquired, “Well, Byrne, what is the lye of the day?” The “sprightly” barber replied that he had just been told “that a privateer from Baltimore has taken two valuable prizes, with sixteen cannons each. I can scarcely believe it.” Adams did him one better. “Have you heard of the success of the Rattlesnake of Philadelphia, and the Sturdy Beggar of Maryland, Mr. Byrne? These two privateers have taken eleven prizes, and sent them into the West India Islands, nine transports and two Guinea men” (common slang for slave ships from Africa). Clearly annoyed at hearing this, Byrne proceeded to tell a tale of misfortune.
