During the colonial wars, under the protection of the Royal Navy, the rebellious colonies had developed a strong maritime tradition, based on Atlantic trade. The British Empire was bound together by trade in colonial staple crops and British manufactures on the most local level. For instance, by the 1740s, the tobacco trade originating in Chesapeake Bay ensured that nearly half of British exports went to Maryland and Virginia.1 Annual tobacco convoys were organized by merchants from Chesapeake ports like Norfolk to Liverpool and Glasgow in Britain. Maritime historian Arthur Middleton has described the convoys leaving Chesapeake Bay:
Nowhere else in the British Empire could an observer see a more important demonstration of the old colonial system. Here, stretching before him, was a vast, richly laden fleet of two hundred ships bound for England with the annual produce of two of her most prosperous colonies. Here, indeed, was the embodiment of maritime intercourse between colonies and mother country upon which the economic structure of the empire rested.2
Alongside the tobacco trade, increasingly in the eighteenth century was the grain trade, which focused on wheat and corn being sent to the West Indies. This trade was not limited to the Chesapeake but also involved New York, Pennsylvania and Delaware, where wheat flourished. Increasingly, merchants in upper Chesapeake began to look toward nearby Philadelphia’s merchants to facilitate this trade. As early as 1737, Philadelphia was the usual port for Chesapeake merchants to cash bills of exchange for the hard currency needed for trading in the West Indies.3 Because Philadelphia merchants could collect grain from several areas they were able to load their vessels at once, while Chesapeake merchants were delayed in putting together a cargo. By the 1770s, Philadelphia firms had taken over the long-distance grain trade.
As the Revolution approached, an influential Philadelphia merchant was Robert Morris Jr. Born in Liverpool, England on January 20, 1734, he had been raised by his maternal grandmother until the age of 13, when he immigrated to the port of Oxford, Maryland.4 He lived with his father, Robert Sr., who provided him with a tutor, but he quickly learned everything that he could and his father sent him to Philadelphia for further experience. He stayed with Charles Greenway, a family friend, who arranged for young Robert to become an apprentice at the shipping and banking firm of British-born merchant Charles Willing. Robert inherited his father’s estate when he died and by 1757, he was a partner in the firm of Willing, Morris & Company. The firm traded in India, the Levant, and the West Indies and participated in the slave trade. Thus, the Morris merchant family became a fixture in Philadelphia’s mercantile establishment and later, Robert would play a leading role in the administration of the Continental Navy.
Merchant families with ties on both sides of the Atlantic were fundamental players in the empire of trade. New York’s Cruger merchant family had come from Bristol, England, appearing in the city in 1698. By the 1750s, the family had its own docks on the East River, but it was also still involved in Bristol’s trade, sending trawlers from there to the West Indies. Henry Cruger Sr. managed the selling of Hudson Valley flour in the West Indies. His sons, Henry Jr., John Harris, Teleman and Nicholas acted respectively as his factors in Bristol, Jamaica, Dutch ‘Curassow’, and Danish St Croix, creating a transatlantic family enterprise.5 Unaware of the future, Nicholas had hired a bright 12-year-old named Alexander Hamilton as a clerk. The family business came to depend on sending English manufactures from Bristol to New York City and from there exporting fine flour and importing mahogany from the Bay of Honduras. In old age, as the Revolution raged, Henry Sr. would join his son Henry in Bristol, where he died in 1780 and was buried in the center aisle of Bristol Cathedral.
Henry Cruger Jr. became the family’s most renowned member because he eventually became Mayor of Bristol and was elected as the port’s representative to the Parliament. Born in New York in 1739, he attended King’s College and at the age of 20 went permanently to the family counting house in Bristol. He was known as New York’s largest exporter of flax seed and oil to Bristol, his ships returning with linen, candles, manufactures and bills of exchange. He made the rounds of the coffee houses and found friends he had made earlier in New York, who were now in semi-retirement, notably General Robert Monckton and his former aid, Captain Horatio Gates. How much influence disillusioned Gates had on Cruger is seen in that later political rivals called Cruger a ‘hot Wilkite’, a title which his moderate views did not match.6 He did, as with his entire family and most Bristol merchants, oppose the Stamp Act of 1765. As a member of a Bristol merchant delegation, he spent three weeks in London, advocating the repeal of the act and his effort was rewarded by Bristol’s citizens with a silver hot water urn. Later, he opposed the non-importation movement by the colonial legislatures because it stifled trade in general, remarking that one of his vessels from Boston had returned in ballast, ‘unable to procure a freight for Love or money’. Cruger embodied the sentiments of both New York’s and Bristol’s merchants in the era leading to the Revolution, opposing measures that would restrict trade but stopping short of supporting the colonies’ independence.
In the eighteenth century, Newport, Rhode Island had the distinction of being more heavily involved in the slave trade than any other colonial port.7 The trade required rum, either distilled in Newport from molasses or imported from the Caribbean. This liquid currency was used to purchase slaves on the West African coast, which then were sold in the Caribbean or southern American colonies. Rum was in great demand in Africa, giving Newport an advantage over English competition from Bristol or Liverpool, whose merchants traded for slaves in fabrics or East India goods. Vessels constructed for the slave trade were swift and small because a number of slaves had to be collected at several ports and then exported quickly to reach market without the impediments of slave sickness, injury or rebellion. The trade also meant that Newport’s population in 1774 was one-ninth black, a high percentage for a New England community. Additionally, the number of adult males involved in the trade or lost at the sea was high, so the Newport’s sex ratio was heavily in favor of women. While women were brought up to be dependent on their men, this maritime circumstance forced them to be independent in making day-to-day decisions while their menfolk were at sea. Many future Continental Navy captains began their maritime career navigating a slave ship.
Beyond merchant trade connections, timber resources allowed for the development of the colonies maritime sector.8 While lumber was abundant, it was not inexhaustible, so American communities and the Royal Navy attempted to restrict use of it. New Hampshire guarded its timber resources so as to protect its shipbuilding enterprises. In 1724, the New Hampshire General Assembly supplemented existing laws by fixing fines for cutting trees on another person’s land or common land.9 Even the making of barrel staves for sale outside of Portsmouth, New Hampshire was prohibited.
From the late seventeenth century, the trade between Britain and its colonies was jeopardized by pirates as well as French, Spanish and Dutch privateers. Armed escorts for the convoys were needed. Building warships, however, did not come easily to New England shipbuilders. This was because
American shipwrights knew a good deal about building vessels for the merchant and fishing fleets but much less about building warships … Not only were they of greater size, but they also had to be more sturdily built to accommodate the weight of their armament and more heavily sparred to move their great bulk through the water.10
Unseasoned timber and slightly built frames could be built quickly, but such ships were by no means suited to the needs of the protecting Royal Navy.
Portsmouth, New Hampshire was one the few places with facilities considered sophisticated enough to build warships for the Navy Board. The colony’s largest city, with a population of about 5,000, was located on the south side of the Piscataqua River before it entered the Atlantic Ocean. Fishing and West Indies trade had been the community’s early sources of wealth.11 A merchant oligarchy dominated Portsmouth, erecting substantial mansions and holding household slaves, reflecting a cosmopolitism born of trade. The lower orders consisted chiefly of mariners, who lacked property, in some cases probating none at all.
Proximity to waterways and standing timber made the Portsmouth area a center of shipbuilding. It built three of the four warships constructed in the colonies before the Revolution: the Falkland and Bedford in 1695 and 1701, and the America constructed as compensation for the successful Louisbourg expedition in 1745.12 The Navy Board considered these three contracts to be experiments as to the quality of ships produced in New England in comparison to those produced in private British yards. On the whole, the Board came to believe that New England timber was untreated and thus rotted quickly and therefore lacked the longevity the navy expected. This certainly was the case of the America and it would continue to be a drawback for ships built in the Revolution. The only way that New England timber became acceptable to the Board was in masts, and it appointed mast agents to mark selected trees with broad arrows and collect and finish them for use of the Royal Navy. They were exported to naval dockyards in large vessels with stern ports, although they had to compete with masts exported from Nova Scotia and the Baltic.
Maine’s Falmouth region was also popular for shipbuilding, attracting shipwrights from the mother country. One example is Daniel Brocklebank from Whitehaven on the Irish Sea. He was born, son of the curate of nearby Torpenhow, Cumberland County in 1741 and apprenticed, aged 14, as a carpenter to a Whitehaven shipbuilder.13 He became involved in shipbuilding by providing ships for the coal trade and purchased the Isaac Little & Co. Ropeworks. He married Whitehaven’s Anne Cupperage at Holy Trinity Church. At the age of 28, Daniel decided to immigrate from Whitehaven to New England with his wife, baby daughter Sarah and his own carpenters and seamen.
Settling at Sheepscot, northeast of Falmouth, he had enough capital and resources to set up his own shipyard.14 Two sons were born there, Daniel Jr. in 1773 and Thomas a year later. Between 1770 and 1775 he built five ships, including the Castor. When the American War began, he chose to be loyal to the crown, deciding to return to Whitehaven with his family. He sailed in his Castor, which had not completed its fitting and was forced to leave cargo behind. With insufficient supplies to complete an Atlantic voyage, he first headed for Newfoundland’s fisheries. With the fish he caught and preserved in salt, extracted from between his ship’s timbers, he arrived back in Whitehaven on June 11, 1775. Here he would begin his life anew by leasing the Brantsy Ropeworks.
Just behind New England for shipbuilding was Chesapeake Bay. There, carpenters and shipwrights could prosper if involved in several projects, from erecting houses, to the fashioning of plows, carts and barrels, as well as the building of ships. Like New England, timber was abundant, but other necessities like nails were lacking. As early as 1641, on the Eastern Shore of Virginia, William Stevens claimed he had furnished a shipbuilder with ‘nails of various size, six gallons of tar, and four days’ work upon a shallop’.15 Often, however, these items were not available, so that after construction, the fitting of ships was much delayed.
In the seventeenth century, few whites claimed to be mariners in the Chesapeake because of a lack of trade, competition from the northern colonies for sailors, and the conviction that tobacco planting was a surer way to prosperity. The crews of small sloops employed on the rivers were largely made up of slaves or a few free blacks.16 After 1730, the number of native mariners increased because of expanding West Indies’ trade. Three years later, in Maryland they numbered 106, rising to 480 by 1756, but declining after that as result of the Seven Years’ War. With the war over, trade revived and Chesapeake mariners rose to 1,200, while British-owned vessels in the Chesapeake employed almost 4,000 British mariners.17 These increases were brought about by diversification away from tobacco and toward grain.
British sailors found the Chesapeake to be ‘a very plentiful country’ after their arduous voyage.18 In the first half of the eighteenth century, however, the tobacco trade forced sailors to be stevedores, fetching and rolling the cumbersome nearly half-ton hogsheads to landings where they could be placed on ships. Furthermore, in the summer, as the sailors rolled the hogsheads, they drank spring water and cider to excess and were soon ill with fluxes and fevers. Mariners faced this strenuous work because ports were small and had no free labor force.
In 1747, Maryland passed the act establishing its tobacco warehouse system, relieving ship masters of the liability of sending crews to fetch tobacco from inland plantations, making it the responsibility of the plantation owner to get it to the warehouse for shipment.19 The lack of free workers in the Chesapeake made it possible for mariners to demand higher wages, and the dispersed work places made it easier for them to desert, following the highest wages. Colonial governments did protect seamen’s rights in the courts, where it was common for them to successfully sue for back wages.
Desertion of sailors on merchant ships became a problem for colonial governments and great planters because if crews were depleted, tobacco could not get to European markets in a timely fashion.20 To prevent the threat of desertion in Chesapeake waters, mariners were prohibited from going ashore without leave. Also, they were only allowed limited credit at taverns and they could not cross a ferry or travel overland without permission from their captain. These local restrictions sounded almost like a slave code. To tide themselves over, some seamen took work on plantations. They could always be found congregating at the nearest tavern, where brawling was common as sailors took on each other, soldiers and locals.
The condition of Chesapeake mariners was different from the larger port cities of Boston, New York and Philadelphia, where their grievances led them to participate in riots. Eastern Shore mariners resided in a few small places like Chestertown, Oxford and Cambridge, which were too small for an urban crowd.21 True, in Chestertown in 1757 a brawl developed which included sailors, British soldiers and town boys of good family. Casualties were limited to a single sailor and those charged were pardoned at the request of the ships’ captains. Thus, while the possibility of mariner discontent existed, such incidents were rare because urban conditions were lacking.
In addition to sailors, trade offered employment to maritime support services. Crucial for seaborne commerce were the cooper’s skills. Larger Royal Navy ships actually employed one, for on board food and water were stored in casks. The copper used staves, supported by wooden rims, to make the hogsheads in which tobacco was packed.22 Levers, weights and screws were used to pressure as much tobacco as possible into the cask. The size of the Maryland hogshead grew in the eighteenth century to meet competition from Virginia and reached a point where it weighed between 950 and 1,400 pounds. The casks were stored tightly in the hold of a ship and accounts were registered in the number of casks rather than their weight. Many of these casks were made on plantations by slaves, who, because they were not experienced coopers, sometimes produced an inferior product. In rolling casks over rough trails, poorly made ones could fall apart. Planters, therefore, sought the best coopers to ensure the protection of their exported tobacco or grain.
The need for pilots was essential for Chesapeake Bay and the Delaware River, which abounded with treacherous shoals. Those captains who tried to navigate without a pilot often found themselves grounded on a sand bar. In Virginia, pilots were regarded as professionals and were licensed by the government, while in Maryland and Delaware, pilots were left unregulated.23 Maryland’s Calvert proprietors’ efforts to license them were unsuccessful because they failed to prosecute unauthorized pilots; anyone with a knowledge of local soundings and a compass could claim to be pilot. When the Revolution began, the rebel authorities in Philadelphia feared that pilots in Sussex County, Delaware would guide the Royal Navy through its Delaware River defenses to the very gates of their city.
Some American historians make it seem that shore-based impressment was the only way the Royal Navy recruited and thus a key cause of colonial rebellion. To them impressment was an abuse that Atlantic sailors struggled against. These historians claim that this hostility ‘first took shape among the buccaneers of America’.24 Thus pirates and sailors are linked in protest in the early eighteenth century, to the violence against taxation of the 1760s and 1770s, which caused the American Revolution.
Most Chesapeake trade with Britain was not carried in colonial vessels, the tobacco convoys being made up of British merchant ships, whose seamen did not remain in the Chesapeake but were lured to New England’s ports by lucrative privateering. Colonial merchants found their crews depleted by desertion and thus were unable to sail. They petitioned Maryland or Virginia governors for relief and in response the governor ordered Royal Navy warships to supply the petitioner with seamen.25 To make up for its loss, the navy ship was then empowered by the governor to conduct an impressment. Governors granted requests to carry out presses to refill the navy’s crews, so long as they met prohibitions like not appropriating men from crews with fewer than a dozen members. Unfortunately, some Royal Navy commanders were too desperate for sailors to wait for credentials to carry out impressment.
Impressment by colonials became a regulated and well-established practice by the Seven Years’ War. When in 1767, Captain Jeremiah Morgan of the sloop Hornet attempted a nighttime impress in Norfolk to obtain sailors, town authorities, including the mayor, calmly confronted him and forced him to leave empty handed.26 In this case, the rioters were the Royal Navy pressmen, not sailors. In New York, the local magistrates organized New York militia to serve as press gangs in recruiting sailors for the hired transports that plied between the city and the British Isles. The press was an accepted necessity of maritime trade.
Narratives of impressment of sailors as a cause of the Revolution stop cold as the war commences because both sides were forced to use the impress more extensively than before. In Massachusetts in 1779, not only sailors but ships’ cargos of pork, beef, flour and bread would be impressed to feed a growing fleet. These historians now admit that sailors ‘were read out of the settlement at the revolution’s end’.27 While dissident mariners may have helped to cause the Revolution, their early motives do not continue into the war. Mariners were not predisposed by the impress to support the rebel cause. In fact, as late as October 1783, Philadelphia seamen, blacks and ‘loyalist leather-aprons’ tore down the Stars and Stripes from Captain Stewart’s vessel and triumphantly carried them through the streets.