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Nine “We Are Eminently a Maritime People”: Seafarers and the American Character
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Published:March 2013
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Abstract
Both the impressment crisis of the early nineteenth century and the rapid growth of cargo trade, fishing, whaling, and shipbuilding that followed the return of peace after 1815 inspired authors such as William Sampson, James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, and Richard Henry Dana Jr. to use maritime subjects and themes in their work. The impressments of American seamen into the British navy became a national scandal used by reformers and diarists to make their readers empathize with their subjects. They also sought to distinguish the newly distinct trait of the brave and patriotic American tar from the hideous, wanton, and dangerous characters in merchant vessels that were common in popular pirate literature and deathbed confessionals. This chapter examines the discourse that moved from merchant vessels to courts and out to the wider world of American literature in which the sea and the law were symbolic cornerstones of national self-definition. It shows how the literature of the early Republic imagined the spirit of the new nation and the American character.
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