1775 (27 page)

Next to the Sons of Liberty, the name Sons of Neptune is barely known, but angry seamen and sailors sometimes so identified themselves. In 1765, a letter signed by “The Sons of Neptune” threatened an attack on lower Manhattan’s Fort George if the Stamp Act was enforced locally.
¹⁸

Boston’s North End Caucus, dominated by Samuel Adams—himself the grandson of a sea captain—had strong ties to the waterfront. One supposition is that the name
caucus
derived from the prominence of attending caulkers and shipwrights.
¹⁹
Caulkers were the workers who made boats waterproof
by filling their cracks and seams with pitch or oakum. In Boston, many lived on North End streets close to the Green Dragon Tavern where Adams’s caucus met.
²⁰
John Adams also later recalled when the caucus met in “the sail loft of Tom Dawes.”
²¹

The last great pre-Revolutionary confrontation staged by smuggling-prone merchants, caulkers, ropewalkers, and their political leaders was, of course, the Boston Tea Party. It
could
have taken place in New York, Philadelphia, or Charleston—these three ports, as well as Boston, had been picked by British officials to receive the original shipments of East India Company tea. In Philadelphia, the tea ships were turned around and not permitted to land. In New York, the principal ship came late and was ordered back. Another vessel did have some tea dumped into the harbor.
²²
In Charleston, after the tea arrived, no one would receive or pay the required duty, so it was seized by Crown officials and stored in the basement of the Exchange. Anonymous radicals had threatened to torch that tea ship, and in 1774, when activists found out a just-arrived vessel, the
Britannia,
had seven chests of tea, “the General Committee [South Carolina’s extralegal Patriot authority] forced the consignees to board the ship, smash in the chests, and empty the contents into the Cooper River.”
²³

Even so, it was in Boston that the fates converged. Royal Governor Hutchinson refused to let the principal tea ship leave without unloading, so on December 16 several hundred Patriots—spurred by a don’t-fail-us letter from Philadelphia—implemented carefully laid plans to dump £18,000 worth of tea into the harbor.
²⁴
History was well served. No other city could have carried off the burdens and military challenges of the next sixteen months so well, which Samuel Adams probably understood.

Further elaboration on the salt air that stiffened the Revolutionary wind is almost unnecessary. However, the 1750s and 1760s saw frequent allusions to the famous but short-lived revolt led in Naples by a fisherman named Masaniello. Thomas Hutchinson in Boston was not the only royal official to tell Patriots, “You are so many Masaniellos.” Officials in Maryland, New York, Virginia, and London used the same calumny.
²⁵

Some Crown officials went so far as to blame the Revolution on maritime Americans. As we have seen, Joseph Galloway, a leading Loyalist, singled out two vocations: smugglers and speculators. In 1765, General Thomas Gage cast his blame for the Stamp Act protests: “This Insurrection is composed of great numbers of Sailors headed by Captains of Privateers.”
Other provincial governors also singled out the roles of seamen and former privateersmen in those riots.
²⁶

Geography and population reinforced the maritime dimension. Of the four seaports, each was substantially waterfront in a spatial and not simply commercial sense, as the four eighteenth-century maps reproduced elsewhere display. Boston was a virtual island, save for a thin neck leading to the mainland; its farthest inland point was only a half mile from water. New York was the water-encircled southernmost portion of Manhattan Island, separated from New Jersey on the west by the Hudson and from Brooklyn by the East River. Philadelphia was bounded by the Schuylkill River on the south, with its waterfront facing east along the Delaware. Charleston, in turn, was a peninsula pointing into its harbor, with the Ashley River to the west and the Cooper River to the east. Both the Boston and Charleston waterfronts were further extended by huge wharves.

Although ordinary seamen could participate in Boston town meetings, most did not meet even the minimal property requirements for voting in any city elections. For many, participating in mobs or riots must have been a political sport they could enjoy right in their own vocational backyards.

Maritime vocations—seamen, sailors, pilots, shipwrights, shippers, caulkers, dockworkers, carters, chandlers, sailmakers, and others—abounded in each seaport. Boston remained the most intensively maritime, even though rival Massachusetts ports like Marblehead, Salem, and Beverly were taking away shipbuilding, trading, and fisheries employment. Boston made some rebound during the 1765–1775 period; its population reached almost 17,000, about where it had been in the 1740s. However, by most maritime measurements, Philadelphia and New York had pulled ahead. What Boston clearly still led in producing between 1750 and 1775 was also relevant:
economic and political frustration.

Philadelphia, by the 1770s, led the other three seaports in both shipbuilding and volume of exports. The city had a large commercial hinterland, and its population had grown more than the others’ between 1765 and 1775. In a good year, some 700 to 800 ships visited the Quaker City, more than came to Boston. Between 1750 and 1775, the tonnage of ships registered in Philadelphia by merchants rose from 7,092 to 16,809.
²⁷

Maritime New York had thrived during the French and Indian War, fattening on British war expenditures, smuggling, and lucrative privateering. The city’s merchant fleet had tripled between 1749 and 1762—from 157 vessels to 477 in 1762, and from a tonnage of 6,406 to 19,514.
²⁸
Several
thousand privateer crewmen were discharged as the war with France wound down in the early 1760s, and local joblessness remained high. The mob violence of 1768–1770 came easily.

On a per capita basis, Charleston was the most prosperous of the four in 1775. Although this principally reflected rice and indigo, its maritime facade was grand enough take the wind out of even Yankee sails. Huge wharves made its Cooper River waterfront look like a floating market, and wharf construction was just beginning on the Ashley River side. Upon entering Charleston Harbor in 1773, Josiah Quincy, Jr., of Massachusetts commented that “the number of shipping far surpassed all I have seen in Boston. About three hundred and fifty sail lay off the town.”
²⁹
Local historian Robert Weir said of Charleston that to “a far greater extent than often realized, it was a seafaring town,” and at the height of the shipping season in February and March, more than 1,500 seamen were ashore.
³⁰

Precision about the numbers of seamen in each of these cities is obviously impossible. Visiting tars, of course, could also riot. According to an estimate by maritime historian Jesse Lemisch, “To those discharged by the navy at the end of the war [1762–1763] and others thrown out of war by the death of privateering were added perhaps twenty thousand more seamen and fishermen who were thought to be direct victims of post-1763 trade regulations.”
³¹
Although these frustrations maximized in New England and New York, they were a factor in dozens of seaports.

In retrospect, the ship has been called the earliest factory, and seamen the first international labor force, with unusually democratic principles. These sentiments were reinforced during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries by the “against all flags” psychologies of pirates and piracy. Blacks also represented 10 to 15 percent of the seamen from New York northward. Labor historians emphasize the uniqueness of these backdrops.
³²

Skeptics of the out-front role played by seamen, sailors, and waterfront mobs in gestating the American Revolution need only consider earlier revolutionary precedents in the Anglo-Dutch world. In Holland, the famous
watergeuzen
—in English, the sea beggars—of the 1560s and 1570s were radical Dutch Protestant corsairs who sailed under letters of marque from William of Orange. Dutch historians generally regard their capture of Brielle and Flushing in 1572 as triggering the general revolt of the Netherlands against Spain. In pre-civil-war England, according to historians Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, “the mass resistance of sailors began in the
1620s, when they mutinied and rioted over pay and conditions; it reached a new stage when they led the urban mobs of London that inaugurated the revolutionary crisis of 1640–1641.”
³³

As American seamen edged toward revolution between 1740 and 1775, worse explosions were brewing in the British Isles. Once peace in 1763 had seen 20,000 sailors discharged, the Royal Navy tightened its discipline, sought further economies, and reduced its material conditions (food and wages). In 1768, sailors and seamen in London “struck”—as in “took down”—their vessels’ sails, tying up commerce and giving labor relations a new byword:
strike.
Riots against impressment and press gangs proliferated, and an activist adopting the name Nauticus penned
The Rights of the Sailors Vindicated,
in which he compared the sailor’s life to slavery.
³⁴
When another strike in Liverpool in 1775 led to authorities firing on the crowd and killing several, sailors pulled ships’ guns to the city center and fired on the Mercantile Exchange, leaving “scarce a whole pane of glass in the neighborhood.” On both sides of the Atlantic, sailors were “a vector of revolution.” Mutinies and desertions within the Royal Navy grew after 1776, “inspired in part by the battles waged against press-gangs and the king’s authority in America.” Between 1776 and 1783, “an estimated forty-two thousand of them deserted naval ships.”
³⁵

During the years between 1760 and 1774, a half dozen issues, led by the abuses of British naval impressment, converged to rile American seamen. To describe impressment into the Royal Navy as carrying a fate of death or slavery was only a slight exaggeration. Three out of four men who were pressed died within two years, with only one in five killed in battle.
³⁶
Under the so-called Sixth of Anne statute enacted in 1708, American seamen were not to be impressed. However, British warships frequently ignored that constraint, especially in and around Boston.

The greatest provocation came in 1747, when British Commodore Charles Knowles sent a press-gang through Boston, taking up seamen, including many who had already been paid wages for imminent voyages, as well as artisans and landsmen. As Knowles proceeded, a huge Boston mob, swelling to near 4,000, took as hostage three of the naval officers running the press, obliging Governor William Shirley to intervene. Ultimately, Shirley himself decided to flee to the harbor fortress, Castle William. However, he persuaded Commodore Knowles to free most of the men impressed, and the leadership of the militia escorted the governor safely back to Boston from Castle William.
³⁷
Impressments along the Massachusetts coast surged
in 1775, because of local fighting and the needs of so many Royal Navy warships.

New York, too, had vivid experiences with naval impressment. In 1756, when a British expeditionary fleet was short of hands, 3,000 men cordoned off the city at two o’clock in the morning and pressed some 800 men, of whom half were later released. In 1760, when the frigate HMS
Winchester
stopped and sent a press party to the local privateer
Sampson,
its crew fired on the British, killing and wounding several, before escaping into the city. Then in 1764, when four fishermen were seized and taken to a nearby man-of-war, an angry crowd burned the ship’s barge in front of city hall, forcing city officials to negotiate for the fishermen’s release.
³⁸

Small vessels also found themselves harassed by punitive customs enforcement. Coasters with two- or three-man crews, under an owner without influence or money, were helpless prey when charged. They could not afford bribes or the expense of going to court over illegal seizures, and many infractions were no more than technical. Customs officers could and did charge owners with “breaking bulk before entry” if they had put any part of their cargo ashore, or shifted portions to make repairs, or even thrown overboard some spoiled fruit. Coastal vessels making only short local trips within Massachusetts or Connecticut waters could be seized for lack of clearances or bonding, even though a higher court would have to dismiss. On top of which were the clearance fees, which even for small craft could be three dollars. “The little fellows,” said Oliver Dickerson in
The Navigation Acts and the American Revolution,
“had to endure such treatment as they received. It was cheaper to submit to the illegal exactions than risk seizures and court costs.”
³⁹
Magnates like Henry Laurens and John Hancock could fight back against smuggling charges, but not Jonathan Anonymous from Annisquam.

Even individual seafarers were targeted. Despite hard times, crew members were no longer allowed what had traditionally been nonwage compensation—the “venture,” or small amounts of goods that crew members had been permitted to put in the ship’s hold at no freight charge and then to resell. After the reorganization of 1764, customs officials began to seize these, too.
⁴⁰
Several of the customs men tarred and feathered in and around Boston earned their Yankee Jacket for such activities.

Economically, fishermen often found themselves in the same boat as smugglers. The molasses trade—the ability to bring it from the French West Indies as a profitable return cargo—was part of a broader commercial
relationship in which New Englanders needed to sell low-quality dried fish, lumber, and provisions to the French islands. For Massachusetts, the profitable fish were the high-quality dried cod—those best cut and preserved—shipped for the most part to southern Europeans, especially Italians and Spaniards. Britain permitted those sales to be made directly. The lower-quality scraps, however, also had a market in the French Caribbean, where they were used to feed black slaves in the sugar islands. Without these sales, broader fishing economics became marginal.