Another said threats of “British thunder” against “French and other neutral ports” that were trading with the rebels would smoke out duplicitous allies. “An open enemy is much better than a secret enemy, and we trust Britain will yet take severe vengeance on every pitiful associate of the American rebels.” The view reflected people’s growing awareness that Britain had other secret enemies besides France.
The crews of privateers bearing congressional commissions, especially those signed by William Bingham, were increasingly of mixed nationality. Indeed, the only English spoken by many West Indian privateers was the “Strike to Congress!” they yelled as they closed on their prey. Spanish and Danish islands known to deal with American blockade-runners were now said to receive, with only perfunctory stealth, British prizes for settlement. As for the Netherlands, a diplomat’s observation that “these Dutch browse in all pastures” struck a sour note in London after reports that the fort at St. Eustatius had returned the cannon salute of a visiting Continental brig, Andrew Doria, in November 1776.
The gesture, which signified respect for sovereign flags, fueled British paranoia that the Netherlands was now “so far debased” as to recognize the American nation. After France officially entered the war on America’s side in 1778 and St. Eustatius replaced Martinique as the foremost “nest of spies and rogues who carried on clandestine trade with the enemies of Great Britain,” that paranoia proved justified.
Even in the face of such two-faced behavior, merchants generally stopped short of demanding an all-out military escalation against their European neighbors and against the rebels as well. Their early hope for a quick victory had banked, in the French foreign ministry’s analysis, on “the idea that all the ports in America would be blockaded and their ships burned. They had not taken into consideration the impossibility of guarding a coast 1500 miles long.”
Reports filtering back to America indicated that many British businessmen were “petitioning for an accommodation with the colonists upon commercial principles only.” Benjamin Franklin, writing for the Committee of Secret Correspondence, had counted on just such frustration. “We expect to make their merchants sick of a contest in which so much is risked and nothing gained.”
Britain’s hawks remained steadfast. Their usual rebuttal to any defeatism was to call it subversive. Victory was assured, argued London’s Public Advertiser. “All reports to the contrary are manufactured here by interested stockjobbers or by disappointed statesmen.” Negative war news was disinformation put out by Congress to deceive its own constituents. “They have no idea of their real situation; losses are concealed, defeats made victories, and French assistance represented as at the door. By such subterfuges, three-fourths of the rebels are engaged in nominal support of a desperate cause.”
There was concern that hostilities with America had been “carried too far to retract” and that initiating peace talks with Congress would, in the eyes of European rivals, “be manifesting their real weakness if they now consented to grant what they have so constantly refused.” Too, there was a visceral element to British belligerence. People resented America’s hit-and-run combat style on land and sea, deeming it an “unmanly way of fighting.” A perception of the privateers in particular as “bragging, cowardly banditti” was reason enough to persevere.
One report of the capture of a supply ship alleged that “rebels stripped the killed and wounded, robbed every article of clothes, bedding, and provisions belonging to the sick, burned the cutter and added every insult to the distress.” And any foe that would, “against the laws of God and Man,” fire on a vessel under a flag of truce deserved, it was declared after one such incident, “all the horrors of rebellion,” by which was meant no mercy.
Disgust with the “unequal terms” on which Britain was engaging the rebels—that is, the conduct of honorable warriors versus lawless rabble—was expressed by one of the Royal Navy’s ablest captains, Andrew Snape Hamond of the forty-four-gun HMS Roebuck. Stationed in American waters since early 1776, Hamond complained of “treating them with openness and generosity while they are daily practicing every kind of art, treachery and cruelty to destroy us.”
He particularly deplored the privateer trick of rigging abandoned vessels with “combustibles” that caused powder magazines to explode after British seamen took possession, a scene “horrible to behold,” one witness wrote. “It went off like the sound of a gun, blew the boat into pieces and set her into flame.” Before long, however, Hamond and other commanders resorted to “piratical” tactics that once would have shamed them, including such ruses de guerre as flying phony colors or distress signals and painting over their gunports to imitate defenseless merchant ships.
The captain found it worrisome that so few American captives opted to switch sides. But Ambrose Serle, who as Admiral Howe’s secretary wrote out “pardons for rebels,” filed a contrary report that applicants were “coming in for them by hundreds.” Serle took this as evidence “that the hostile business will be settled in the next campaign.” Writing on the very same day, a Royal Navy officer in Newport warned that American mariners “have employed themselves with such success to the southward that they have collected the means to prosecute this diabolical war for three years.”
Britons were unready for such a long struggle. Charles Garnier, a diplomat in the French embassy in London, believed that his host’s maritime pride, which, he said, “exceeds national pride by several degrees,” would crumble over time. He assured the foreign minister in Paris that “the great superiority of the English navy consists in the confidence which reigns in it—a spirit founded on the success and experience of its officers who are accustomed to master their element.” Undermine that confidence through “a slow war devoid of glorious adventures” and the Royal Navy and ultimately the British people “would be without strength and credit.”
That was Captain Hamond’s fear when he lamented the “defensive kind of war” Britain was waging. Dutiful optimism sustained him for a while (“Englishmen always rally when things are at the worst”), but after his crew suffered dozens of fatalities during the winter of 1776–77, some in battle, most from illness, he acknowledged “the great success the rebel small privateers have met with.” Meanwhile the land war, with its “sad blot” of British defeats at Trenton and Princeton, continued to sputter due to one “favorable moment” after another failing to be exploited by army commanders.
Most dispiriting was the apparent futility of the navy’s operational success. More than 120 American vessels were captured in the West Indies between November 1776 and April 1777. Losses ran into millions of dollars. Hundreds of casualties had been inflicted, thousands of prisoners taken. Yet the devastation, Hamond noted with puzzlement, “has been of very little consequence in distressing the enemy.”
Twenty-four-year-old William Bingham excelled at what he called “the art of uniting war and commerce.” The vast network of privateers he managed in the West Indies unsettled Congress with its unruliness but decimated enemy trade in the region and won him the bitter respect of the British press, which marveled that Bingham’s international status rivaled that of Britain’s ambassador to Paris.
This paradox was integral to the American game plan. Though fewer British transports were lost in the same period, the greater wealth and breadth of British trade corresponded to a higher value of its individual cargoes—the difference between, say, an American sloop carrying barrel staves and a fat British “Indiaman” packed with sugar, textiles, or slaves. “They have much more property to lose than we have,” Robert Morris wrote with typical pragmatism. William Bingham, who knew better than anyone the state of the maritime scorecard, concurred. “Upon casting up accounts, the balance will be immensely in our favor.”
By mid-1777, the French foreign ministry, observing from the sidelines, had received confirmation of its early prediction that Britain possessed “insufficient resources in men and money to sustain a prolonged war at sea.” Most telling was the publi
c outcry—“disturbances in several places,” was how a French newspaper reported it—against the government’s impressment of seamen for the Royal Navy.
Impressment, or “the press,” was the age-old way that warships were manned whenever there were shortfalls in volunteers. Its techniques ranged from mere marketing to brute force. Sometimes it was enough to set up recruiting desks in waterfront pubs and let officers and sailors spin tales of world travel and esprit de corps; signups were taken on the spot. And sometimes, especially during war, press gangs were used. These were comprised of moonlighting navy men or hired local toughs. Paid up to 40 shillings per head, they filled quotas by snatching citizens from the private workplace and herding them to His Majesty’s ships.
The legal warrants under which the coercive “hot press” was authorized were much disputed. In his study of the Royal Navy in the eighteenth century, The Wooden World, N.A.M. Rodger notes the fundamental conflict between the navy’s manpower needs and the people’s instinctive resistance to “any extension of government’s power to control and regulate. Thus, in the midst of war, public opinion and the law still worked strongly to hamper the Navy.”
In the midst of this war particularly, with its pressures of unconventional combat on land and sea, traditional dissension against impressment turned virulent. Elaborated upon by the French ambassador to Britain, Marquis de Noailles, those earlier “disturbances” in fact were bloody riots against the press gangs. “The sailors of the India Company fought back, as well as sailors from some privately owned ships. A naval lieutenant was killed, and there were about thirty men drowned or wounded.”
To avoid such eruptions, the Royal Navy preferred to replenish its crews at sea. It was standard procedure to seek converts among enemy captives; the persuasion could be comradely or severe. In addition to pressing foreigners, the navy was allowed to grab sailors off British transports as long as it was done offshore. The remove from public scrutiny combined with the merchantmen’s sailing experience and penchant for seafaring made offshore presses the Royal Navy’s most consistently productive. Shipping firms condemned the practice, of course, even though their demand for warships to defend transatlantic convoys was a major cause of the manpower squeeze. Their hypocrisy was cited by some members of Parliament as evidence “of the unpopularity of the present barbarous war.”
Parliament’s hawks, on the other hand, defended the press as unpleasant but necessary. “Two very striking features” of the current rebellion forced the issue in their view. First, in the past the Royal Navy had included some thirteen thousand Americans in its ranks. “It is unnecessary to say where they are now. They are making reprisals upon our defenseless trade.” Second was the “mysterious conduct” of France and Spain, both of whom were expanding their navies. If they moved against Britain, “fifty, sixty, seventy frigates and sloops” would be required to repel them. And where were those ships? “Almost all in America.” More were needed, along with sailors to man them. Otherwise, lamented a former admiral to his fellow lawmakers, “things have an extreme disagreeable appearance.”
Soon it wasn’t just the maritime community that felt the sting of impressment. “It is beginning to snatch away servants from behind their master’s carriage,” the French ambassador gloated. When news of an upcoming sweep hit the dockyards of London’s Thames River, “most of the men withdrew into the city for protection.” Their flight, and the collusion of those who hid them, engendered a scofflaw culture hardly helpful to the government’s selling of the war to an increasingly dubious public.
Local officials obliged to enforce impressment procedures began to work against them. This was especially true in places unaccustomed to the coarse presence of roaming gangs. Three naval officers were arrested for running a hot press outside the London stock exchange. They had legal authority but briefly were thrown in jail anyway. Ambassador de Noailles gave Vergennes the good news. “There you have the first example of resistance by civil authority since impressment began.”
Forced to maintain the press despite rising opinion against it, British leaders enacted other controversial measures in order to keep a posture of stern resolve. George III issued a proclamation assuring punishment “to the utmost severities of the law” to any Briton found serving on a foreign vessel—a situation prevalent on American privateers, whose skippers often marveled at how readily British merchant seamen threw in with them. In addition to a money reward, the king offered a one-year amnesty from naval impressment to anyone turning in such an offender.
Prime Minister North’s infamous Pirate Act of 1777 likewise sought to harden British resolve. John Paul Jones spoke for all American mariners in protesting their designation under British law as “Traitors and Pirates and Felons! Whose necks they wish to destine to the cord!” But the act was widely criticized in Britain as well. It was called “cruel, persecuting” “ill-advised and intemperate” “unconstitutional” “shocking to humanity” and sure to bring “oppression and tyranny through every part of the realm.” For the five years it remained law, it was a rallying point for antiwar and humanitarian activists, for whom it exposed “the precarious tenure on which the liberty of England is held.” The controversy gave American leaders a useful gauge of anti-government feeling in Britain. Indeed, the first reports of the act to reach Philadelphia contained both its technical details and the encouraging news “that the city of London had ineffectually petitioned against it.”
On the heels of its passage came the admiralty’s announcement that the prisons at Forton and Mill were ready to receive captives taken at sea. “A shocking place,” wrote Jonathan Haskins, the first American to enter Mill. He was the surgeon on Charming Sally, a privateer out of Martha’s Vineyard seized in January after a brief cruise in which it took one prize. Others who’d suffered long confinements on prison ships and in their captors’ holds had a different view. One man “rejoiced greatly” at the change of scene. Another likened it to “coming out of hell and going into paradise.”
As the prisons filled, problems of sanitation, food, and the “negligence or connivance” of the guards rendered them less congenial. Illness, lice, and “the itch” (mange) were rampant. Inmates called their treatment “more cruel than Turkish enemies” with punishments that included flogging and up to six weeks’ lockup in tiny windowless cells known as “black holes.” The open-ended detention permitted by North’s Act added to the duress. By August 1777, most prisoners believed their welfare depended totally on American victory. Should Britain “conquer the country or even get the upper hand, we are positive the gallows will be our destiny.”
The admiralty tried to exploit this anxiety in order to entice them into Royal Navy service. After the war, Franklin, who despite North’s Act successfully negotiated exchanges for small groups of Forton and Mill inmates, praised their resistance to “the allurements that were made use of to draw them from their allegiance to their country.” He called it “a glorious testimony in favor of plebian virtue,” and pointedly noted that “This was not the case with the English seamen.”
The facilities drew considerable public curiosity. In coming to ogle the exotic rebel pirates (“Can they talk? Are they white?”), Britons were amazed to discover, wrote Charles Herbert of the captured privateer, Dalton, “They look like our people, and they talk English.” When prisoners were later indentured into the population as laborers and apprentices, their savage reputations were further humanized, planting seeds of sympathy that eventually led to underground networks dedicated to helping escapees elude capture and slip out of the country.
Initiatives on behalf of the prisoners sprung up at all levels of British society. Churches and charities donated food and clothing. One hundred Londoners met at a pub in December and raised £1,300, an amount quickly tripled by contributions from three members of the House of Lords. The money was distributed to inmates according to rank and went for the purchase of tobacco, tea, books, and writing supplies; a lot went for gambling and drinking as well.
The cause of prisoner relief inevitably became linked with Britain’s peace movement. In Parliament, opponents of the war supported fund drives and dispatched representatives, with pointed skepticism, on fact-finding missions to Forton and Mill. Newspaper editorials against the war added humanitarian pathos to their economic argument for reconciling with America. Reading them in prison, Charles Herbert sensed that Britain was “little short of civil war.” Though an exaggeration, the impression no doubt heartened him and his fellow prisoners, not to mention observers in America and Europe equally impatient for British resolve to crack.
To go along with North’s Act and the opening of two prisons for American seamen, Parliament took another aggressive measure by legalizing British privateers in March 1777. The resolution followed deliberations along the lines of Congress’s debates the previous year, with privateering’s potential for social chaos weighed against the damage it would inflict on the enemy.
It was out of such chaos that support for the policy had first arisen. Merchants on Antigua, center of Britain’s West Indian commerce, had been ravaged by rebel privateers. In reprisal, they began launching unauthorized warships against American trade in late 1776. Soon frantic reports of enemy privateers “cruising for northward vessels” filled American newspapers. France took note as well, fearing its trade would be ensnared in the melee.
Ambassador de Noailles, blind to the irony of decrying the same scourge he’d formerly applauded, demanded an explanation from the admiralty. The assurance he received of British merchants arming their transports strictly in self-defense echoed the indifferent replies he’d given the admiralty when the tables had been reversed. “The government being unable to attend to all the needs of merchant shipping, there is no other remedy but to encourage private shippers to protect their own interests.”
Patriot Pirates Page 16