Liberty on the Waterfront: American Maritime Culture in the Age of Revolution

Preface

Preface Few words are more central to understanding the American past than “liberty .” But few words have been more contested and ambiguous. Nonetheless, the Founding Fathers believed that the purpose of government was to ensure each man his liberty through protection of the individual and his property. In exchange, each individual had to concede a certain amount of his own liberty to government. Liberty could be endangered in two ways. First, if government amassed too much power, the people could lose their liberty. In 1776 revolutionary leaders argued that King George III and Parliament were guilty of this type of usurpation and that their rule threatened to lead to tyranny. But liberty could also be challenged from below through excess and licentiousness. Granting too much liberty could lead to a world where everyone pursued their own interests regardless of the rights of others, a situation which was akin to savagery. The leaders of the Revolution therefore sought a middle ground between tyranny and anarchy. “Liberty” also came to epitomize the American cause. Slogans like “Sons of Liberty,”“the Liberty Tree” or “give me liberty or give me death” have come down to us as the very essence of the American Revolution. During the years of the early republic the concept of liberty became deeply embedded in American culture, associated with the concepts of equality, civil rights, and the protection of property. Americans turned to their sacred documents of nationhood—the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States—and, conflating the two, proclaimed that they guaranteed American liberty. We know a great deal about the ideology of the leaders of the American Revolution and how they sought to protect liberty. We also know that Americans have become transfixed by the word “liberty.” But what did those further down in society—such as sailors—think about liberty? How did they apply this word to their everyday lives? And, how did they react to the reifi- xii • PREFACE cation of “liberty” in the years after independence as the phrase became so central to national identity? This book examines the meaning of “liberty” to those who lived and worked in ports and aboard ships. The people of the waterfront themselves used the word “liberty” in several ways. Sometimes they referred to the higher ideals of the age, but often they referred to a more immediate and individual liberty that seemed to embrace the very “unlimited indulgence of appetite,” as one revolutionary put it, that the Founding Fathers believed threatened to lead to anarchy. If liberty ashore allowed men to misbehave and pursue sensual bliss regardless of its impact on others, liberty at sea often released sailors from shoreside attachments and provided a geographical mobility unimagined by most of their landbound cousins. My aim has been to examine liberty —and its many costs—in all of its varied meanings for those who lived on the waterfront in the Age of Revolution. I acknowledge the concept of liberty as a moment of license as a self-evident truth for the waterfront world and as a foil against which we can measure the more rarified definitions of men like Thomas Jefferson. The Age of Revolution may have created a new society that cherished the word “liberty” and the ideal of equality, but the great democratic transformation affected those who lived and worked on the waterfront to a varying and usually lesser extent. My starting point is the sailor’s own understanding of liberty both ashore and afloat in an American maritime culture that remained largely the same from 1750 to 1850. Fine distinctions can be made between decades, between regions and ports, between types of shipboard labor, between work on ship and shore, between experiences of fishermen, whalemen, merchantmen, and men-of-war. My aim, however, particularly in Part I, has been to emphasize a larger unified American maritime culture, rather than focus on differences. After all, seamen sailed from ports around the United States and all over the world, and sailors shifted their berths among vessel types with uncommon ease. The same man might work on the waterfront one day only to ship out the next. Despite the continuity of much of the maritime experience, the Age of Revolution was important to the people on the waterfront; the great revolutionary currents churning the Atlantic in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries both had a profound impact upon, and in turn were affected by, the common folk of the...