9

 

Jonathan’s Ghost

GREAT BRITAIN GREETED THOMAS JEFFERSON’S pending election with understandable dismay. “The result is certainly unpleasant towards this Country,” the London Times remarked in January in anticipation of his victory. Already relations had begun to cool once John Adams, in the final year of his presidency, had made peace with France and war with the “British faction” within his own party. Jefferson’s rhetoric, dating to his opposition to the British Treaty (a “millstone round our necks”), gave London few grounds for hope, especially in light of the ever-vexing issue of impressment. On November 28, the envoy Robert Liston wrote Lord Grenville that only one danger immediately threatened harmonious relations between the two nations: “The perpetual and numerous complaints of the impressment of American seamen, and of the unjust sentences of the British Colonial Courts of Admiralty.” Regrettably, he added, “The nature of this republican government compels the members of the Administration to pay more attention than the matter in justice deserves.”¹

All the same, relations between Britain and the United States temporarily improved upon news that the Admiralty had recalled Sir Hyde Parker as commander in chief of the Jamaica station for a post in the Baltic, where he briefly served as Horatio Nelson’s superior at the Battle of Copenhagen. Parker’s indifference in the West Indies to American protests had long been a source of contention. Even London had grown exasperated with the Admiral’s rapaciousness. In just four years, he had reportedly reaped £200,000 in prize money. Equally pleasing to U.S. officials was word, in early 1801, that Captain Israel Pellew of the Cleopatra also had been recalled, following a stern complaint in January from Rufus King that Pellew had “vexed our trade upon our own Coast.” His brazen appearance off Manhattan the preceding spring was but the most egregious incident. Jefferson’s newly appointed secretary of state, James Madison, wrote King in July 1801, “The removal of Admiral Parker and Captain Pellew from the America station, and on the grounds assigned for it, is another indication of a juster policy toward the United States.” Robert Liston, reviled by Republicans, had departed as well, pleading ill health owing to the “intemperance of the seasons” in America.²

Anonymous, James Madison, ca. nineteenth century Credit 40

But Secretary Madison yet fretted that Britain, in addition to disrupting American commerce, had over the years impressed nearly two thousand U.S. citizens, more than four-fifths of whom were reputedly native-born. If anything, the number was escalating. From his quarters in the new capital on the Potomac, he informed King, “The complaints daily arriving at this office, show that our mariners are impressed without the least respect for their legal protections, certified in the most authentic forms; that after impressment they are often menaced or maltreated into enlistments.” “These wrongs,” he emphasized, “have made a deep impression on the American mind,” suggesting that continued depredations would cause the United States to retaliate. In October, Madison again expressed frustration to King over the boarding of American vessels, ostensibly to capture fugitives from the Hermione still at large:

It is now a long while since the vengeance

of that country has steadily pursued the

actors in the tragedy of the Hermione, and

many dreadful examples of their punishment

have been given. It therefore appears high

time that the scene should be closed, at

least as far as the tranquility and security

of foreingers [sic] and their vessels are

concerned.³

It was ill news to the Jefferson administration that one of the British ships again active in the Caribbean was the forty-two-gun frigate HMS Retribution, none other than the Hermione herself, a notorious scourge to American commerce prior to the mutiny. Within days of her triumphant return to Jamaica from Puerto Cabello in November 1799, officers of the yard at Kingston had pronounced the frigate “in every respect a fit ship for His Majesty’s Service,” to the delight of Sir Hyde Parker. First named the Retaliation, she had been ordered to sea as early as December 22 under the command of Captain Samuel Forster. Newly commissioned the Retribution the following September, she spent the next two years harassing commercial vessels, including American shipping. Thus the fate of the Sea Horse, bound from Puerto Cabello for New York, which was captured as a prize in February 1801 and brought to Jamaica. Soon afterward, as the Retribution bore down on a foreign schooner off Santo Domingo, a gun burst, resulting in heavy damage to the larboard deck and upward of forty deaths. Well covered in the United States, the story prompted the Carolina Gazette, in recalling Jonathan Robbins’s fate, to observe that the British “cannot escape the vengeance of Heaven.”⁴

Summoned from Port Royal, the Retribution arrived in Portsmouth, England, in January 1802. The following month at Spithead, the execution of William Bower, a member of the Hermione’s crew, took place on her main deck. Not long afterward, she was deployed to help defend the Thames from a possible French invasion. In June 1805, having changed hands many times in the course of twenty-two years, the Retribution was finally broken up at the Deptford dockyard in southeast London.⁵

Less easily laid to rest for the Admiralty was the haunting knowledge that numerous mutineers yet remained at large, their ranks thinned but scarcely eradicated since the uprising. The “fate of the Hermione” an Exeter paper attested in September 1801, remained “fresh in the memory of the public.” Along with Bower and Robbins, another fourteen men were tried in the years after 1798, on top of the seventeen apprehended within the first fifteen months of the mutiny. Of the sixteen court-martialed after 1798, thirteen were executed. “The hand of Providence,” exulted a London newspaper in late 1800, “has evidently shown itself in the punishment of these atrocious wretches, the shame of England and of humanity.”⁶

Only a few fugitives were taken at sea, having long scattered across the Caribbean and North Atlantic. James Duncan, a foretopman, on reaching Denmark from the island of Saint Thomas, was imprisoned for mutiny in Helsingør’s Kronborg Castle (the setting for Shakespeare’s Hamlet) before being transferred to a British sloop. Two men, William Johnson and Hadrian Poulson, were found on Curaçao after the Dutch surrendered the island to the British in September 1800. Poulson, a Dane, was convicted of having pushed Pigot overboard. Johnson, who gave himself up, had been employed on the island as a clerk at the American consulate, notwithstanding the consul’s knowledge of his checkered past. Conveyed to Portsmouth, Johnson received a pardon from the Admiralty upon the recommendation of a court-martial board. Less fortunate was a shipmate who arrived in Bristol aboard HMS Hannibal. Having aroused the captain’s suspicion by frequently speaking of the Hermione in his sleep, he hurriedly disembarked, later to be seized by crew mates.⁷

Aside from Robbins, authorities netted their most infamous catch in Portsmouth. On March 10, 1802, a sixteen-gun sloop commanded by Captain Edward Kittoe arrived after three years plying the Caribbean. In the ensuing days, a bargeman by the name of Thomas Williams, a favorite of the captain, frequently slipped ashore at the Point, a tongue of land teeming with grog shops on the eastern edge of the harbor. But on the twenty-second, while passing through King James’s Gate, Williams was abruptly tapped on the shoulder. “Isn’t your name David Forrester?” asked John Jones, Captain Pigot’s steward aboard the Hermione. Told no, Jones persisted. “Yes, but it was in the Hermione!,” he exclaimed upon grabbing the seaman. Dragged to a guardhouse following the chance encounter, Forrester confessed. The following week, Jones and Master Southcott were among the witnesses at a court-martial aboard the Gladiator. The testimony of either man would have produced a conviction, but Jones’s recollection was particularly devastating: “David Forester came out of the cabin with a cutlass or tomahawk in his hand….He tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘I have just launched your bloody master overboard.’ ” Justice for Forrester was swift. Three days later, minutes after describing Pigot’s murder and those of two other officers in gruesome detail, he was hanged from a yardarm. “We do not recollect ever seeing so great a number of spectators assembled on such an occasion,” reported the Hampshire Telegraph & Portsmouth Gazette.⁸

Thomas Rowlandson, Portsmouth Point, 1811 Credit 41

Not for four years did the final execution take place. Just twenty-five years old, Thomas Woods confessed at a Plymouth court-martial to having served aboard the Hermione during the mutiny, a statement that Southcott confirmed. Yet as authorities later discovered, Woods had been in Portsmouth on board the Marlborough at the time. On being forewarned of Southcott’s testimony, rather than assert his innocence, Woods had chosen to incriminate himself, hoping the court would show mercy. In fact, as he pleaded the day before his hanging, Woods had never seen “the outside of the ship,” much less served aboard it.⁹

In the annals of the Royal Navy, the mutiny on board the Hermione was not only the most violent but also one of the most successful. Despite the Admiralty’s dogged pursuit, at least a hundred seamen eluded apprehension. Still at large were such notorious figures as John Farrel, William Turner, Patrick Foster, William Crawley, and Lawrence Cronin. Some crew members never left Venezuela, but others, addicted to the sea, continued to serve under British as well as foreign flags. As many as nine Hermiones were said to have enlisted aboard the French warship La Brave. Two others played a key role in the Danae mutiny in 1800, in which a British post ship was carried into the French port of Brest. And almost certainly a sizable, if indeterminate, number of Hermiones took up new lives in America.¹⁰

A spate of false confessions akin to that of Thomas Woods rendered the navy’s hunt more difficult. At one time or another, as many as six sailors boasted of striking the first blow against Pigot. All were interrogated and in some cases transported home from overseas, but not one, it turned out, had served on the Hermione. In 1801, William Oates found himself confined aboard the Pompee after bragging about cutting off Pigot’s head. Coming to his senses upon the ship’s arrival at Spithead, he escaped ashore disguised in women’s clothing. Every bit as vivid was the tale recounted by Benjamin Brewster, well known aboard the American ship Hero for claiming to have thrown the boatswain overboard during the uprising. Notwithstanding “being a very violent man,” Brewster had, in fact, been freed from the Hermione in April 1797 as an impressed American citizen from Preston, Connecticut—a former shipmate whom Thomas Nash, perhaps, later chose to emulate.¹¹

Apart from exacting retribution, the Royal Navy undertook modest reforms following the unrest of 1797. Once immediate fears of further violence had subsided, the mutinies, both at home and abroad, prompted a subtle shift in attitudes toward shipboard discipline. By the time of the Peace of Amiens in 1802, the rough paternalism of commanders had begun to give way, with the Admiralty’s encouragement, to a more enlightened style of leadership designed to afford sailors greater dignity and respect. “Seamen are nowadays a thinking set of people,” opined a commander, “and a large proportion of them possess no inconsiderable share of common sense.” Still low by the standards of merchant seamen, wages rose; and while flogging continued to be employed, restraint and discrimination were expected of ship captains. In 1806, the punishment of “running the gauntlet” was abolished, and by 1811, captains were required to justify instances of corporal punishment in writing. Then, too, as N. A. M. Rodger has written, “Officers of all shades of opinion united in insisting that men were not to be worked unnecessarily, especially not for drill or show.”¹²

In this new mental climate, no less a figure than Sir Edward Hamilton ran afoul of naval regulations. Profusely honored for cutting out the Hermione from Puerto Cabello as captain of the Surprise, he was summoned before a court-martial at Spithead in January 1802 for having ordered an elderly gunner and his crew strapped to the main rigging—“seized up in the shrouds”—for three hours on a bitterly cold day for having failed to clean the guns on the ship’s quarterdeck. (By an odd happenstance, the Retribution arrived in port just as the tribunal got under way—“as if,” reported a newspaper, “she had come at that particular instant to plead his cause.”) Though Hamilton contended that the head injury received at Puerto Cabello had affected his judgment, the board dismissed him from the service. “Such is the close of the career of the gallant officer who cut out the Hermione, and who has, from the age of eight years, devoted his life to the service of his king and country,” bemoaned a London magazine. “But deeds of heroism,” it added, “are no longer in request.”¹³

To be sure, most of these changes were a matter of degree, nor were all directly attributable to the Hermione or less violent uprisings. They were also the product of a broader shift in cultural attitudes during an age of reform that saw sweeping innovations in law enforcement, including the growing prominence of prisons in lieu of corporal punishment. Yet the 1797 risings, not least the shocking bloodbath aboard the Hermione, long weighed on reformers’ minds. Even stern disciplinarians did not excuse Hugh Pigot’s indiscriminate reliance on the lash—which for reformers, who shared a strong distaste for physical suffering, illustrated the catastrophic consequences of excessive punishment. Others blamed neither Pigot nor flogging but impressment as the root cause of unrest. Conscription, they contended, naturally made seamen more rebellious. Thus in London’s Morning Chronicle, “Nauticus” reflected in 1815, “The power to inflict severe punishments may be traced to the necessity there is to repress the ill temper occasioned by impressment, on which therefore these evils may be justly charged.”¹⁴

—

IT WAS IN THE UNITED STATES, not Britain, that the ramifications of the Hermione mutiny and more particularly the full force of Robbins’s surrender continued to be felt most deeply. Following the election of 1800, their influence was profound and lasting. “While Americans retain any portion of sympathy or sensibility,” declared a Trenton newspaper in July 1801, “they will never forget the order of Mr. Adams to surrender Jonathan Robbins to a British officer for execution on a gibbet.”¹⁵

In the wake of his death, Robbins had become an indelible symbol of British oppression. Again and again Republicans invoked his personal sacrifice—in poems, sermons, essays, and orations. Not since the Boston Massacre or Lexington and Concord had an act of martyrdom so transfixed the public. A “raw head and bloody bones story,” Federalists decried, owing to the narrative’s powerful impact. At a July Fourth gathering in Wallingford, Vermont, in 1801, a squire proposed in a toast that the yard arm from which Robbins was hung might “never rot until every democrat in the United States is hung upon it.” In Pennsylvania, Germantown Republicans, by contrast, celebrated by singing the tune “Robbins’ Ghost.” Another favorite, set to the melody of the “Galley Slave,” was “Robbins’ Lament”:

By Executive influence, ROBBINS the brave,

Was a sacrifice, borne away,

In the hands of his foes, a sad victim

of state as a martyr he yielded his breath;

Ye sons of Columbia, O! I think on his fate.

He resolv’d to have freedom or death.¹⁶

Following Jefferson’s inauguration, a scathing sermon, “The Reign of Terror,” invoked satanic metaphors from the Book of Revelation to castigate Robbins’s oppressors. “Ah Jonathan!” it bemoaned, “thou little knowest the gloomy fate that awaited thee! The great Beast, full of power, who sat at the Helm of Government, favoured not thy pious intensions; and the British Bloodhounds demanded thee back.” A refrain oft voiced in Republican papers was “Who gave up Jonathan Robbins?”¹⁷

In Jefferson and Liberty, a five-act play composed in honor of Jefferson’s inaugural by the satirist J. Horatio Nichols, Robbins and his ghost both played prominent roles. Other dramatis personae included Judge B., Liston, Timothy Vigilant, and the Duke of Braintree. Says Braintree to Vigilant in the second act, “Altho one murder makes a villain, / ’Tis pard’nable in a case like this, / When a nation’s policy is thus involv’d, / We chuse the smaller evil; sacrifice / One vulgar man, sooner than the friendship / Of the well born few whose right is to rule, / Should be dissolved.” Depicted, in turn, are Robbins’s trial (“O Liberty how art thou perverted!”); Adams’s dismissal of Pickering (“Who can tell but he may betray me in the affair of Robbins?”); and Jefferson’s triumph at the polls. Afterward, Braintree is awakened one night by Robbins’s spirit. “Be ready at a thunders call, / To know thy doom from awful heaven’s tongue,” Braintree is admonished before his death. “How much a traitor to all human right / Thou wast.”¹⁸

And the issue continued to arise in Congress. In the midst of a House debate in April 1802 surrounding the return of a captured corvette to the French government, John Randolph seized on Federalist calls for an investigation of the Jefferson administration. Never allowed, he declared, was a proper review of Robbins’s extradition, which the previous incumbent had blocked with allies in the House. With James Bayard of Delaware rising to protest, only the Speaker’s gavel ended a testy debate, though Randolph’s eruption would not be his last on the subject. “The case of Jonathan Robbins,” a fellow Republican representative later observed, “excited a fermentation in this country almost beyond example.”¹⁹

It was at election time that Robbins’s memory roused the greatest ardor. The martyred sailor became a persistent fixture of Republican campaigns. Since the Revolution, there had been no more famous victim of British tyranny; and largely as a consequence, recollections of his death continued to draw droves of voters to the polls, including plenty of Irish Americans. Federalist allegations that Robbins had been a native of Waterford only magnified support among the “sons of Hibernia,” first in 1800 and again in 1804. It made no difference that Jefferson’s opponent during his reelection contest, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, bore no responsibility for the Robbins debacle. Noting that “many a doleful ditty will yet be sung by the demos,” a Charleston newspaper remonstrated in September 1804, “The democrats at the Northward have once more conjured up the ghost of THOMAS NASH (alias Jonathan Robbins) to bear witness against federalism.” For Nash, “a pirate and murderer,” the paper moaned, “has so long excited the sympathies of the democrats in the middle and Northern States of the Union.”²⁰

There was little for Federalists to do. Exasperated by the controversy, a loyalist asked, “How long shall we see men, so zealously espousing the cause of foreign outcasts, murderers, pirates, insurgents, house-breakers, and letter-stealers, whilst they persecute with unrelenting rigour, native Americans of honour and integrity who have grown grey in the service of their country?” During the War of 1812, lest the “political depravity of federalism” be forgotten, “Resuscitator,” writing in upstate New York, recalled the “Reign of Terror” during the Adams administration. “First in magnitude” was “the case of the poor unfortunate Jonathan Robbins,” which he revisited at length. “What American,” he demanded, “can read the above account without horror and detestation! Modern federalism is a ‘chip of the old block.’ ” A favorite target remained Timothy Pickering, who, following his tenure as secretary of state, represented Massachusetts in both the Senate (1803–11) and the House (1813–17). As late as 1814, fifteen years after Robbins’s extradition, Pickering deplored that the “ghost of Jonathan Robbins has since been repeatedly conjured up; particularly when at any time it was convenient to bring a railing accusation against me.”²¹

And John Adams? No one had suffered greater torment at Republican hands, returning to Quincy embittered by his rejection by American voters and the opposition press’s unrelenting barbs. Fiercely proud of his accomplishments, at home and abroad, in war and in peace, he struggled to make sense of the political turmoil in 1800 that Jefferson later labeled a revolution. Before American independence, as a Boston lawyer he had famously defended victims of British oppression, among them four Irish seamen charged with the murder of a British naval officer in resisting impressment. Indeed, Adams regarded the case as more important than his storied defense one year later of British redcoats in the aftermath of the Boston Massacre. Not only did his role in Rex v. Corbet remain a singular source of pride, but he continued to condemn Britain’s reliance on conscription. “A daring act of despotism,” he wrote his son John Quincy, in 1808. But if he regretted his decision to sanction Robbins’s extradition, having—a New Hampshire paper reflected in 1804—“signed the death warrant of his own dignity,” he never acknowledged a twinge of remorse. Instead, both in private and in public the former president gave no quarter in defending his conduct. In the Boston Patriot in 1809, Adams wrote of the “hideous clamor” occasioned by the Alien and Sedition Acts and the “surrender according to the British Treaty, of the Irish murderer Nash, imposed upon the public for Jonathan Robbins.” Twice in his twilight correspondence with Jefferson, he turned to the “fictitious fabricated case of a Jonathan Robbins who never existed.” The unkindest cut? Adams reserved his greatest enmity for the former congressman, Edward Livingston, whose “lying Villainy,” he assured Jefferson in 1812, “I have not forgotten.” “Neddy is a naughty lad as well as a saucy one,” he fumed. Barely a year later, Adams recalled having been threatened by Livingston with “impeachment.” Only in a letter of May 13, 1812, to his close friend Benjamin Rush did his tone betray the faintest hint of resignation. Robbins he condemned as “a scandal that ought to have been killed before it died of old age”—“a more infernal, wicked, malicious, unprincipled, deliberate, and cruel scandal never stalked this earth,” one that he still failed to comprehend. “Indeed,” he confessed to Rush, “I know not whether it be dead yet.”²²

—

HAD MEMORIES OF ROBBINS BEEN confined to electioneering, they would not have had such sweeping repercussions during Jefferson’s presidency. But with majorities in both the House and the Senate, Republicans paid more than lip service to the martyred seaman. In his first address to Congress, hand delivered on December 8, 1801, to be read aloud by a clerk, Jefferson, nearing fifty-eight years of age, concluded his appraisal of the Union’s state by pointedly invoking America’s messianic pledge to afford a haven for persecuted refugees. In stark contrast to the nativism of the Adams administration, he declared, “Shall we refuse to the unhappy fugitives from distress, that hospitality which the savages of the wilderness extended to our fathers arriving in this land? Shall oppressed humanity find no asylum on this globe?”²³

Among other priorities, the new administration targeted the Naturalization Act, one of the three Alien laws of 1798. Although Congress retained the Alien Enemies Act, authorizing the president in time of war to deport suspicious males from hostile nations, Jefferson pardoned individuals who had been prosecuted during the conflict with France, as he did persons convicted under the Sedition Act. In the meantime, the Alien Friends Act, threatening to exile other foreign nationals from the United States, had expired on June 25, 1800, two years after its passage. But the Naturalization Act, which for prospective citizens had extended the minimum period of residence in the country from five to fourteen years, remained on the books to the dismay of Republican lawmakers and a handful of Federalists, not to mention large numbers of immigrants.²⁴

Central to all three acts was the contentious issue of alien rights. While aspiring citizens awaited naturalization, their legal status under the Constitution remained at best uncertain. Many Federalists were prepared to deny aliens, even in peacetime, any safeguards at all, as was the case with European governments, where foreigners could be deported at will. In the view of Congressman Bayard, “Aliens cannot be considered as members of the society of the United States….Whatever is granted to aliens is a mere matter of favor; and if it is taken away, they have no right to complain.” In Boston, “Hume” affirmed in 1802, “All well governed states have placed aliens under disabilities as inhabitants, and entirely excluded them from their public councils.” Meanwhile, a New Hampshire newspaper lampooned the limits of Jefferson’s compassion. Conspicuous by their absence from the ranks of “unhappy fugitives” were slaves.²⁵

Since its inception, the Robbins affair had drawn unprecedented notoriety to the rights of foreign nationals (if not yet to those of African Americans). Whatever the seaman’s origins, Republicans relentlessly insisted that Judge Bee had not afforded him basic rights of due process, including a trial by jury as well as the opportunity to acquire evidence and confront his accusers. The Aurora declared, “In the view of national independence—as it relates to our character as a nation—as it relates to the character and independence of our judiciary, it is a matter of utter insignificance whether Jonathan Robbins was a native of the Irish bog, or of the rough declivities of Connecticut.” Against the backdrop of rising numbers of Irish immigrants trumpeting the cause of alien rights, the alarming specter of Robbins’s surrender contributed powerfully to the mounting debate. During the election of 1800, it is likely that few publications achieved wider currency than the address printed in March for the citizens of states due to elect legislators for the purpose of selecting presidential electors. Widely reprinted that spring in Republican newspapers at the behest of “a number of Republican citizens,” the four-page address, signed by a “Republican Farmer,” portrayed Robbins’s extradition as the horrific consequence of the Alien Friends Act executed to its logical extreme:

Every oppressed man was taught to believe

that here he would find an asylum from tyranny

and confusion—that the sacred right of jury

should be preserved to him—that it should not

depend on the will of any individual however

important and elevated, and in whose breast

was impenetrably locked the reason of [t]his

procedure, to force him from this asylum, and

banish him without the intervention of a jury.

You did not then believe that any man found in

your country, and claiming, whether this claim

was true or not, to be a citizen, could be

delivered to a foreign tribunal and military

execution, at the request of any individual to

a judge, without the trial or opinion of a jury.²⁶

Less than a year into Jefferson’s first term, the cause of alien rights acquired growing momentum. Even sundry Federalists grudgingly embraced shifting attitudes.²⁷ In time, shrewd members eager to right the party openly courted immigrant votes, including those of Irish Americans, who overwhelmingly voted Republican. Any doubts about their burgeoning power were laid to rest when the nativist congressman Bayard was defeated in Delaware in 1802, reputedly by swelling numbers of Irish American voters. A delighted President Jefferson wrote the victorious Republican candidate, “Our success in defeating Bayard has mortified our Feds beyond expression.” Six years later, however, a “Naturalized Irishman” in a Pennsylvania paper felt the necessity to remind immigrants that their interests lay not with the “enemies to the common rights of man.” After citing, among other incidents, “Jonathan Robbins, delivered up by an infamous Pickering,” he affirmed, “Behold the same junto, the firm supporters of these men and measures, coming forward, like crawling sycophants, to ask for your suffrages.”²⁸

Numbers of Americans, in grappling with Robbins’s identity, more readily comprehended the meaning of their own. Assuming an unprecedented dynamic, the concept of nationality took on a richer significance. For Republicans, the possibility that Robbins had been Irish, not an American citizen, became steadily less consequential. The question of his identity, which had initially transfixed the public, in the end became more important for its irrelevance. Simon Slim averred, tongue in cheek, that he could not recall whether Robbins or Nash was his real name. Federalists understandably became irate at such indifference. Of Robbins’s discredited claims, a South Carolinian complained, “The Jacobins were not to be staggered by facts; they still harped upon the old key to a new tune.” If not an American by birth, Robbins was adopted posthumously. At the height of the campaign in 1800, the “Republican Farmer” proclaimed, “May the government of America never forget that the persecuted patriots of Europe have as good a right to an asylum in the woods as their forefathers had.” More important than his birthplace were Robbins’s republican convictions, thereby encouraging, with unparalleled power, a broader definition of citizenship and national identity, based on belief and volition, not just the vagaries of nativity. Indeed, as a young and increasingly diverse nation of immigrants or the descendants of immigrants, what bound most Americans together as a distinctive people was their common commitment to liberty. This recognition of national self-consciousness, this rebirth of the libertarian spirit of ’76—recently ignited by the Alien and Sedition Acts—acquired heightened importance in Robbins’s martyrdom.²⁹

Drawing on John Locke, the attorney Michael Barrett argued vigorously for the right of any individual—“at liberty to pursue his own happiness”—to flee domestic oppression. In The Reply of a Friend to Justice to a Friend to Propriety on the Fate of the Unfortunate Robbins, Barrett continued, “If the persecutions exercised against our ancestors, and their prejudices against European governments, justified them in expelling the aborigines of America from their native soil, a slight recurrence to this fact ought to create, in an American sympathizing bosom, some degree of compassion towards those unfortunate men, fleeing to our shores for protection, from the most accursed tyranny that ever disgraced an unfortunate country [that is, Great Britain].” Robbins, he wrote, was “an immolated martyr at the shrine of American independence.” No less emphatic, the moderate Federalist John Steele, Adams’s comptroller of the Treasury, proclaimed in his anonymous “Letter from a Federalist”: “It is of little moment whether his name was Robins, or Nash; whether he was a Citizen, or an Alien; it is enough that he was a man who sought asylum in an INDEPENDENT COUNTRY, whose peace he had not disturbed.”³⁰

Doctrinaire Federalists at first derided such fugitives as “imported” patriots. Noting Robbins’s claim to citizenship, a South Carolinian lamented, “We expect soon to hear every unhung rogue of Europe, who finds an asylum on our shores, dubbing himself a whig of ’76.” Republicans, by contrast, continued to welcome immigrants as fellow freedom fighters. A Rhode Island paper attributed Federalist abuse of “foreigners” to “their being sworn foes to Regal Oppression and warm friends of Republican Liberty.” Rumors persisted that Republicans had long known of Robbins’s Irish roots. In 1809, Stephen Cullen Carpenter, author of the spurious Memoirs of the Hon. Thomas Jefferson, still raged, “The pirate, mutineer, and murderer was dear to them, and the more dear because the outrages he committed were against the great enemy of Jacobinism and France, and because the lives he helped to destroy of British officers. The case of Nash, had every thing in it that could recommend him to their guardian care.”³¹

Apart from the acquisition of constitutional rights, which the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Marshall periodically affirmed in subsequent decades, aliens, by virtue of a new Naturalization Act on April 14, 1802, stood to become citizens in five rather than fourteen years, the same period prescribed by the Naturalization Act of 1795. A declaration of intent three years prior to naturalization was also required. The staunchest advocates urged a quicker path to citizenship of no more than two years, the original period during the Washington administration. But most Republican leaders insisted that five years would permit foreign nationals to fully adopt American values, however deep-seated their commitment to liberty. “A residence shall be required sufficient to develop character and design,” as Jefferson put it. The foundation of immigration law for the remainder of the nineteenth century, the Naturalization Act of 1802, as with that of 1795, required applicants to affirm their republican convictions by swearing allegiance to the Constitution, providing written testament to their good character, and by renouncing foreign titles and former loyalties. Now more than ever, these prerequisites acquired enlarged importance. Europe, by contrast, yet embodied degradation and destitution, lords and peasants, subjects rather than citizens.³²

Republican zealots demonized natives as well as newcomers who exhibited dubious loyalties and questionable convictions. Federalists, scolded a Boston writer, “owed their origin to the agents of the corrupt government of Great Britain.” Another partisan urged that “native citizens, as well as foreigners, who abuse the blessings with which Providence has pre-eminently favored this country, ought to be divested of all public confidence and private esteem.” Of fugitives from abroad, contended a New York newspaper, “They are the more ardent in asserting the principles of liberty than those who having never lived under oppression feel not the impulse of experience to make them equally active in supporting freedom”; whereas a “Citizen of the World” went further by proposing that unpatriotic citizens be stripped of the right to vote. “I would exclude,” he asserted in the Vermont Centinel of July 16, 1801, “every foreigner, but by foreigner I include every person who is alien and foreign to the true interest of America, wherever born.” One Edward Sharman, writing in the Centinel of Freedom, yet urged the expulsion of aliens “who are not decidedly in favor of republicanism.”³³

But most were. And lured by the prospect of Republican reforms, freedom, and prosperity, thousands of immigrants, predominantly Irish, flooded into American ports, beginning shortly after Jefferson’s inauguration. New York City, Philadelphia, and the nearby port of Newcastle, Delaware, were favorite destinations. New York reported in July 1801 the arrival of nine hundred immigrants over the past month. By late 1804, twenty-seven thousand, just from Ireland alone, were said to have arrived in America during the previous year. “Emigrants from Europe,” announced a Virginian, “are pouring into the United States.”³⁴

—

IN THE EARLY YEARS of the Jeffersonian ascendancy, Robbins’s martyrdom continued to advance the rights of rising numbers of immigrants, including the right to citizenship by virtue of possessing republican convictions. Democratic reforms, themselves associated with the Revolution of 1800, from the “rise of universal white male suffrage” to the “switch to popular voting in presidential elections,” could only have benefited from this influx of aspiring American citizens. As the nation’s culture became progressively pluralistic, it also grew more democratic, however distant the achievement of a genuine democracy inclusive of women and nonwhites.³⁵

Of parallel importance, the uproar over Robbins dramatically diminished the future likelihood that the United States would surrender an American citizen or, for that matter, a resident alien to a foreign power. Such had been the resistance to his extradition that Article 27 of the British Treaty fell by the wayside well before its expiration in 1806. “The fate of Jonathan Robbins,” wrote a Pennsylvanian in 1807, “has at least established this principle in the feelings of the people.”³⁶

As a consequence, an unknown number of Hermiones who had fled to the United States no longer faced the dangers of extradition and execution. Leaving no tracks, they vanished into the vast expanses of the American backcountry or into heavily populated seaports where neither their manners, appearance, nor language set them apart—not that government authorities ever took an interest in their prosecution. The consequence was that sundry seamen, including the most culpable, owed their lives in large part to their ill-fated shipmate.

In Virginia, fueling the storm over Robbins was the growing certainty that at least one other crew member had been delivered surreptitiously to the British in 1798, much as early reports had suggested. On December 1, 1800, in a letter to the General Assembly, the Republican governor James Monroe condemned the incident, adding that he had referred all available evidence to the state attorney general. Two days later, after first casting the state’s electoral votes for Jefferson, the legislature appointed a committee to investigate what a Republican paper labeled an “unparalleled act of treachery”; and by the third week of January, legislators enacted a bill criminalizing the surrender of any individual to a foreign power. Notably, the act prohibited the extradition of aliens as well as citizens on penalty of capital punishment should the subject himself be executed. “Every person concerned in such delivery shall be adjudged a felon and suffer death.” In the end, the Norfolk magistrate Dr. John K. Read was absolved of having wittingly committed a crime, but he was found guilty of misusing his office. In July 1801, when Meriwether Jones, a prominent Richmond printer, sought a presidential appointment for his friend, Jefferson angrily snapped that there was not “a man in the United States who deserves countenance less than Dr. Read.”³⁷

Not for eight years after Robbins’s surrender did Great Britain make a subsequent extradition request—notwithstanding the British Treaty’s expiration. On January 4, 1807, the British minister to the United States, David Erskine, informed Secretary of State Madison that HMS Bermuda had commandeered an American brig months earlier with the intention of bringing her to Halifax. The American captain, however, successfully retook control of the ship with the aid of British seamen and sailed the brig to Portland, Maine. “Under the circumstances of atrocity and violence,” Erskine wrote, “I can not suppose that the protection of the United States will be extended to the British seamen,” who by then had reportedly fled to Boston. Three days later, Madison tersely responded that “no prerogative for the purpose in question is vested in the Executive of the United States.” Moreover, “neither the law nor the practices of [our] nation imposes on them an obligation to provide for the surrender of fugitives from the jurisdiction of other powers.” Of greater concern to the secretary was news that a Captain Douglas had recently detained American citizens aboard HMS Bellona in Norfolk harbor to force the surrender of the British seamen—an act of “illegal violence within the very harbours” of the United States, condemned Madison.³⁸

Irwin John Bevan, Chesapeake vs. Leopard, n.d. Credit 42

In the meantime, Erskine had boldly made a second request on learning that a notorious mutineer from the Hermione, the Belfast surgeon’s mate, Lawrence Cronin, “the principal adviser of the mutiny,” now worked for a druggist in Providence, Rhode Island. This fact had been deposed by Thomas Woods before his execution in Portsmouth, though at the time no one had sufficient reason to doubt his veracity. Waiting on Madison in person, Erskine asked “whether it was the determination of the American government not to interfere in any case however flagrant.” Despite the government’s wish to help, the secretary replied that he had no power to interfere. As for the Bellona, he expressed “exasperation,” threatening to cut off all supplies to the ship and to resort to “some ulterior force” unless the Americans were set on land. “Of what nature,” the perplexed Erskine reported to London on February 1, “he did not say.”³⁹

Less than five months later, on the morning of June 22, the Chesapeake Affair erupted. Intercepted off the coast of Norfolk just beyond Cape Henry by the British frigate Leopard, the captain of the frigate USS Chesapeake, James Barron, refused to heave to, lest a boarding party attempt to seize members of his crew, none of whom, he assured the British, were deserters. In response, the Leopard fired repeated broadsides, killing three seamen on the spot and wounding eighteen others. Forced to surrender after managing a single blast, the Chesapeake, on being boarded, gave up four deserters, three of whom were Americans formerly impressed into the Royal Navy. The fourth deserter, a native of London, who on reaching Norfolk had declared America “the land of Liberty,” was hanged from a British yardarm. British apologists in the United States intimated that Secretary Madison’s earlier refusal to extradite deserters had led to the confrontation. A Portland paper reported that Minister Erskine, in having tried to retrieve four British seamen, had been “informed that it could not be done.” Thomas Truxton, revered by Federalists for his exploits as captain of the USS Constitution during hostilities with France, suggested as much in a letter to Timothy Pickering. Indeed, Truxton claimed, the British had been rebuffed in their attempt to reclaim four seamen, convicted of mutinous words, who had absconded from a British sloop to sign on to the Chesapeake. Noting the severity of the crime of desertion, he stated that the “commander of the Chesapeake ought to have delivered those mutineers and deserters upon a proper application,” adding, however, that the captain of the Leopard should have reported the incident rather than resort to force.⁴⁰

If Britain’s belligerence in the Chesapeake Affair resulted in part from its inability to extradite naval deserters from the United States, memories of Jonathan Robbins, in turn, exacerbated American anger, already white-hot over ongoing British depredations at sea. “Witness the three thousand of our seamen forced aboard her fleet, as if slaves, to fight her iniquitous battles,” the Centinel of Freedom had protested the preceding year. “If the least murmur or complaint against unlawful detention is heard, the fate of the never to be forgotten, poor Jonathan Robbins is speedily executed.” Republican loyalists once again cited Robbins’s extradition to condemn Federalist partisans as well as the British—all the more because both had strenuously argued in 1799 that naval vessels at sea fell within their nations’ territorial jurisdiction. As the Virginia Argus and other Republican papers delighted in reminding readers, it was precisely these grounds on which “the present chief justice of the U.S. when a member of Congress advocated the surrender of Jonathan Robbins to be tried by a British tribunal.” For the “Happy Farmer,” writing in October 1807 in the True American, the only solution short of war lay in a presidential proclamation pledging the United States to protect not just American sailors but “all British deserters.” In light of their low morale—stemming from the brutality of shipboard discipline—impressed “British seamen,” he declared, “are ready whenever we give the signal to do the work of an American fleet. Which is our best policy, to give them [deserters] up as Robbins was given up?” “If men must be killed,” the “Happy Farmer” insisted, “is it not as right that the oppressed on board of the British navy to kill their oppressors?” Impressment, John Adams lamented soon afterward, “will keep alive an eternal hatred between the two countries, and end in a war at last.”⁴¹

In just a few years deteriorating relations between the United States and Great Britain climaxed in the War of 1812, caused in large measure by their inability to resolve the vexing problem of impressment. The harassment of American ships and their crews had persisted. “Friends of the country,” consoled “The Ploughboy” a day after the United States declared war on June 18, “think nought of the little expences which our country will be put to in defence of blood and the rights of man. But think—alas poor Jonathan Robbins, and thousands of our brethren at present, groaning under bondage and oppression, crying out for help, to relieve them from the enemies of both God and man!”⁴²