American Sailors, American Freedom: Jack Tar and the Meaning of Liberty

Paul A. Gilje. Liberty on the Waterfront: American Maritime Culture in the Age of Revolution. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. xiv + 344 pp. Illustrations, glossary, notes, bibliography, and index. $29.95.

What could better embody the paradox of liberty and slavery than ships at sail? In Maryland, young Frederick Douglass called them "Freedom's swift-winged angels that fly around the world," but across the ocean a young African trapped inside an American-bound ship saw "a multitude of black people of every description chained together, every one of their countenances expressing dejection and sorrow." Suddenly, "overpowered with horror and anguish, [he] fell motionless on the deck and fainted."¹ White America, too, experienced a similarly paradoxical reaction to these great vessels. Patriots burned the Gaspé and stripped the Dartmouth of its cargo to protest tyranny, but in 1788 they marched with the Hamilton and other "ships of state" specially crafted to symbolize the blessings of liberty afforded by the new Constitution.

As Liberty on the Waterfront demonstrates, this American paradox extended into the lives of the common sailors, or "Jack Tars," who manned these vessels. Paul Gilje uses this insight, often brilliantly, to construct the hull of this fine book. In doing so he sails with giants who have previously framed Jack Tar as romantic, revolutionary, proletarian, and multiculturalist.² Although Gilje offers some criticism of these earlier interpretations, what he does best is to add detail—finely researched, nicely nuanced, and often wonderfully narrated detail. Consequently, while it will not necessarily supersede its predecessors' interpretive vision, this well-written, well-illustrated volume should become the standard, most accessible single source on seamen in antebellum America for many years to come.

The book is organized chronologically and thematically into three sections. The first provides three chapters detailing the general contours of Jack Tar's world, a maritime culture that Gilje contends "remained largely the same from 1750 to 1850" (p. xii). He begins by chronicling Jack's experience on land, where a sailor's liberty might have been described by contemporaries as pure licentiousness. Gilje vividly recreates the sights, sounds, and smells of dockside taverns and houses of ill repute where tars "flouted mainstream values and asserted their liberty by spending their money . . . as quickly as they could" (p. 11). Ironically, such profligacy led to economic bondage as sailors fell under the control of boardinghouse keepers and even less scrupulous masters more than willing to cheat Jack out of most of his earnings and then to scoop in and take what little was left after he had finished his spree. No wonder Jack was in such a hurry to spend his money!

Despite Jack's anti-bourgeois behavior, Gilje insists that sailors "were not a proletariat in the making," an assertion that puts him at odds, most notably, with the work of Marcus Rediker (p. 6). Gilje's assertion is based partly on the mentality of the sailors and, presumably, partly on their social position. While Rediker asserted that by 1750 "seafaring had become a lifelong occupation for increasing numbers of waged workers," Gilje tends to emphasize economic mobility. Sailors were usually young men, he points out, citing evidence from crew lists and prisoner of war records. As they aged, seamen increasingly found their way to shore, becoming common laborers, master craftsmen, shopkeepers, and even boarding house owners. In the end, "The men who populated the waterfront and labored before the mast defy any grand characterization," according to Gilje (p. 32). In so arguing, he stakes out a position somewhere between Samuel Eliot Morison's romantic Jack—a farmer temporarily turned seaman—and Rediker's proletarian Jack. This is an issue that one would hope might prompt some further empirical research, despite the currently unfashionable status of cliometrics. The disagreement no doubt also partly stems from Gilje's narrower focus on the United States. As Rediker noted in...