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

Gilje's new book is part of a growing series devoted to the interdisciplinary exploration of neglected aspects of the early American experience. Since the book follows a long line of maritime studies, including those of Rediker, Bolster, and Linebaugh—to name a few—one might wonder what remained to be examined?¹ The answer is a cultural history of the waterfront that treats the experience of sailors ashore as well as at sea. Gilje's enterprise embraces all those who interacted with seamen, including their wives and prostitutes, their boarding houses, the shipwrights and dockworkers—whose ranks many sailors joined as they grew older—the religious missionaries and reformers attempting to "improve" their lot, and such nineteenth-century novelists as James Fenimore Cooper, Richard Henry Dana, and Herman Melville, who wrote about them.

Liberty on the Waterfront is an ambitious synthesis that draws on an unusually wide range of sources in exploring how this maritime culture influenced, and was influenced by, larger cultural currents. Though the book has no formal bibliography, Gilje's notes refer to much of the published material bearing on the maritime world between 1750 and 1850, both factual and imaginative. He also draws heavily on seamen's journals and the artifacts that they produced like scrimshaw. Poems and illustrations from unpublished sources supplement the many reproductions of nautical prints and paintings, as well as quotations from published collections of sea chanteys and ballads, permeating the text.

Though the beauty and physical mobility the sea afforded promised release from constraints experienced on land, the realities of shipboard life resembled slavery more than liberty. Nonetheless, seamen went from being a marginal proletariat granted minimal rights by the hierarchies that prevailed on land and at sea to a constituency that, as a consequence of commanding privileged symbolic stature in the larger culture, was accorded new rights by it. The transformation occurred despite the sailors' view of liberty as release from shipboard constraints precluding effective collective action. Their participation in protests against British measures like the Stamp Act began an association between seamen and patriots that, Gilje argues, gave patriots' ideas of liberty a more egalitarian dimension than it otherwise would have possessed. The importance of overseas commerce in the subsequent struggle for economic independence made seamen emblematic of the nation's liberty. This development was ratified by the advent of democracy and celebration of the common man after the War of 1812. Reform impulses emanating from the Second Great Awakening then helped to extend revolutionary values to the forecastle. By the early 1850s, flogging had ceased on naval and merchant vessels, and the best writers of the age celebrated the sailor as a symbol of American freedom.

There is a lot to like in this volume, including Gilje's own research into the role of boarding houses in maritime culture. Their keepers provided other services to sailors besides lodging that included extending credit, taking care of sailors' families when they were absent, and providing leadership for a nascent seamen's labor movement in the 1830s. The only excuse to quibble is the occasional exaggerated claim. A Philadelphia riot by sailors against a dramatic depreciation of the continental currency in 1781 is construed as the seed of a labor movement even though it had little to do with a conflict of interests between capital and labor. Nevertheless, Liberty on the Waterfront is the most broad gauged and carefully nuanced of the recent maritime studies.