The Republic Afloat: Law, Honor, and Citizenship in Maritime America
Ships, seafaring trade, and seamen were central to the American national project between the ratification of the Constitution and the beginning of the American Civil War. Seamen sat at the heart of the early process of national self-definition. For most folk ashore, the federal government was, beyond the post office, distant and abstract. For seafarers, the federal code was emblazoned across their work agreement. Moreover, as the laws governing actions on board ships were fleshed out through the decisions of federal judges, seafarers and officers both were bound more tightly to the nation, literally. Now the federal government (through its courts) was one’s champion, and one’s site of possible redress when things had gone bad.
Regulating international waterborne trade was the first significant task taken up by the new federal government, and, due to impressment into the Royal Navy, seamen’s citizenship was among the first of the major crises faced by the constitutional Republic. The process of using the federal consuls and courts as arbiters of their working conditions bound seamen to the nation. Even if seafarers shared, as some historians argue, an aquatic brotherhood that transcended nation and race, by using the connection to the national government, seafarers on American-flagged vessels became intricately linked to, invested in, and an important symbolic part of the national project.
Matters at sea forced the nation to define the parameters of citizenship. Some jurists saw explicitly that the maritime setting would afford an opportunity to enhance the power of the new federal government and move the United States toward becoming a single, coherently governed nation. Outside this cabal of federal judges, the Jacksonian era was marked by suspicion of and hostility toward expansion of the national authority, yet, in the hands of hundreds of undertrained consular appointees, the United States’ power was being defined by ad hoc decisions in distant ports, not just in their adjudication of the matters that came before them but also as an image of the nation abroad. Finally, this mixture of participants— seafarers fighting with officers on ships, judges seeking an expansion of federal power, consuls trying to make sense of the matters that came before them while attempting to ward off financial ruin in distant ports—all served to define the nation not only in nuts-and-bolts, day-to-day ways but in grander theoretical terms as well. The worlds of the sea, the law, and the self-conscious literary attempts to define the young nation’s character all intersect in dramatic and defining ways.
Both of the previous parts discuss the ways in which national identity and American ideology impacted seafarers and shaped how they became seen as a part of the rising Republic. “Law” explores how the regulation of the maritime environment was central to the building of an increasingly powerful legal apparatus for the new nation-state. “Honor” examines how personal definitions of worth and conformative conventions of the trade fused with growing social and political imperatives in the Jacksonian age to imbue seamen’s sense of honor with a sense of themselves as citizens of a proud nation. “Citizen” focuses on the relationship between seafarers and the nation, and the nation and seafarers. In literal and symbolic ways, seamen became embodiments of the American project around the world.
Chapter 7, “Our Man in Liverpool,” argues that the system of consuls and commercial agents that was haphazardly developed to address the needs of American vessels and citizens abroad marks an important site for the defining of the national identity. These men, political appointees often with limited maritime experience or legal training, found themselves the arbiters of who “counted” as an American. Armed with no clear definition of their duties and powers, consuls had to make sense of a complex web of complaints from men; demands from officers; pleas from destitute, abandoned, or ill seafarers; and all sorts of requests for protection, favors, and the support of the national government. Like a more confused, less coherent version of the judges who sought to bring order to the waters and power to the government discussed in Chapter 2, American consuls, prompted by the seamen who came to their offices for help, had to forge, on their own, important aspects of national self-definition, including who is a citizen, who may make claim to the rights of American identity, and what rights that appellation confers.
Chapter 8, “The Very Laws That Preserved Their Liberty,” explores how seafarers came to see themselves, and make use of their identity as, Americans. Not only by invoking the claims of national citizenship in an age of radical republicanism, but also by asserting their importance to the economic growth and military defense of the nation, US merchant seamen helped guide the developments in law and the rhetoric of the Revolution to their own ends. Just as the federal government grew more coherent in meaningful ways through the process of federal courts attempting to structure seaborne labor and commerce, seamen sought to force the new nation to define, meaningfully and concretely, the powerful inchoate promises of citizenship. In particular, the chapter looks at two eras in which seamen’s visibility on the national stage offered an opportunity to press their claims of rights and inclusion. First, the impressment crisis of the 1790s–1810s gave seamen an importance, both literally and symbolically, to the nation that afforded opportunities to press their case for protection and inclusion by the nation. In the later antebellum years, from the passage of the 1835 Crimes Act through the beginning of the Civil War, a combination of (a) Jacksonian democracy’s assertion of white, male equality; (b) northeastern reform movements working to remove the demeaning, dehumanizing aspects of punishment at sea, in slavery, and in prisons; and (c) a growing nativist panic about the dangers of an increasingly “foreign” labor force at sea with implications for national commerce, safety, and character came together to give seamen another opportunity to press their advantage. Seamen turned the interest in their affairs and conditions to their own use. Rather than simply accepting the depictions of themselves as infantilized drunkards in need of “uplift” promulgated by reformers, seamen used this attention to assert their rights in increasingly national and legal terms, and demanded that the nation afford them not pitying charity and paternalistic protection but the rights of free men of honor, and the respect owed craftsmen engaged in the work of the nation.
Finally, Chapter 9, “We Are Eminently a Maritime People,” examines the sweep of the discourse that moved from ships to courts and out to the wider world of American ideas and letters, but is rooted in the later antebellum era. By the 1850s, the rise of a self-consciously American world of arts and letters sought to define the nation and capture its citizens’ spirit. Symbolically, the sea and the law were cornerstones of that project of national self-definition. That so many explicitly “American” writers and thinkers not only drew metaphorical inspiration from but also had firsthand experiences with seafarers and their claims indicates the connectedness and significance of these discourses.
