When Britain went to war with France in 1793, the British Navy consisted of 16,600 sailors. As the British and French waged war with economic sanctions, attacking vessels at sea, the British needed an increasing number of sailors. By 1797, the number of sailors in the British Navy had ballooned to 119,000. It remained at that level for the next ten years. The Navy lost about 12,000 sailors each year to death, disease and desertion. The Navy, with low wages and harsh discipline, competed with the British merchant marine for sailors. Demand for seamen was double the supply of available Englishmen.[1]
Desperate but dominant, the British Navy flagrantly ignored the rights of men on land and at sea. British naval thugs called “press gangs” boarded ships and hunted down victims on the streets, wharves and taverns of seaports. Armed with clubs, and ready to use their fists, they impressed men against their will to serve in the British Navy.[2] Britannia may have ruled the waves, preying on the French merchant marine, but French privateers fought back, plundering British merchant ships wreaking havoc on their insurers.
Americans quickly exploited the situation becoming the largest carriers of maritime trade. New England led the way. American shipbuilding, largely based in New England, boomed. The American merchant marine, measured in tonnage, dramatically increased from 558,000 tons in 1802 to 981,000 tons in 1811.[3]
American merchants needed an increasing number of sailors to man their ships. Their trade was highly profitable. Unlike the British Navy, they could pay handsome wages and offer better working conditions. Sailors aboard an American merchant ship received fifteen to eighteen dollars a month compared with the seven dollars a month allotted to a British naval sailor. That was a powerful incentive for British sailors to desert.[4]
The British used a broad brush to define citizenship in its empire. A man born as a British subject could not renounce that citizenship or its obligations, specifically the duty to serve the Crown during a war. The American process of naturalizing its immigrants conflicted with the British notion that a man was a British citizen for life. British and American tallies of British-born sailors aboard American ships differed significantly. In 1807, the British asserted that American shippers employed more than 20,000 Britons. An American report that same year estimated the number to be roughly 9,000. In 1809, a sea captain tabulated the nationalities of sailors based in New York. He concluded that forty-two percent were born in America, only nine percent were naturalized citizens. The majority were recent immigrants. Some came from Britain, but more than half came from Ireland.[5]
From 1803 to 1811, the British frantically impressed an estimated 10,000 naturalized or American seamen to fight the Napoleonic wars.[6]
TRANSITION TO PUBLISHER | The Jay Treaty and the American Remembrancer
[1] Alan Taylor, The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010) 103.
[2] Taylor, Civil War, 103.
[3] Taylor, Civil War, 104.
[4] Taylor, Civil War, 104.
[5] Taylor, Civil War, 102,104.
[6] Taylor, Civil War, 106.