Citizen Sailors: Becoming American in the Age of Revolution by Nathan Perl-Rosenthal (review)

The origins and evolution of U.S. citizenship have long been objects of scholarly inquiry, but until now no one has recognized the importance of sailors, and the issues raised by maritime activity, in these processes. In his fine book, Citizen Sailors, Nathan Perl-Rosenthal demonstrates that sailors operated not on the margins of new conceptions of citizenship in the early American Republic but at their cutting edge. In the wake of the American Revolution, U.S. citizenship was easy to acquire but hard to prove. Easy to acquire because it was largely volitional: to become a U.S. citizen often meant only to choose to do so. But precisely because it was so easy, that choice was often contested at sea. In wartime, ships’ crews frequently pretended to be something they were not, and the captains of privateers and warships had to evaluate sailors’ claims accordingly. Gradually, the United States came to recognize the need to certify the citizenship of its sailors. By the early nineteenth century, citizenship was no longer merely a matter of choice; to be considered valid, U.S. citizenship had to be “conferred by the state and provable only with government documents” (12). In this sea change, which anticipated by as much as a hundred years the importance of national documentation for land-borne citizens, sailors led the way.

Until the American Revolution, Perl-Rosenthal argues, these issues had little salience. Though early modern crews routinely tried to hide their identities from enemies at sea, once a vessel was boarded its identification was usually straightforward, ascertainable by a common-sense assessment. The ship’s construction style, the manners and dress of its crew, and above all the language spoken on board told the story. A large majority of Atlantic merchant crewmen in the mid-eighteenth century came from the same country their ship did, making such identifications uncomplicated. Though privateers, pirate ships, and Mediterranean fleets had much more diverse crews, “Atlantic merchant ships, through a combination of regulation and happenstance, were different: the skilled men who sailed them, by and large, shared a sovereign and a culture with one another” (33). The American Revolution fractured this “Common Sense of Nationality” (16) by dividing Anglophones into two warring camps. It was no longer so simple to say where a ship and its crew came from or where their loyalties lay. In the earliest years of the war, both captains at sea and admiralty courts in Britain and the American states were inclined to accept the word of sailors at face value. Becoming American was understood to be voluntary, and the thing that separated American from British seamen was the choice made by the former to abandon their natal tie to the crown and opt instead for U.S. citizenship.

The war created ample opportunities to question sailors’ loyalties. American privateers captured more than two thousand British ships, while as many as four hundred rebel vessels fell into British hands. The allegiance of tens of thousands of captured seamen had to be ascertained, in a process that might mean the difference between life and death for the prisoners. Identification was anything but straightforward, since “disguise and deception were part of the ordinary rules of the game” (54). Privateers and merchant vessels often flew false flags to deceive their enemies, and ships’ crews regularly disavowed their actual loyalties. Privateer captains, naval officers, and admiralty courts on both sides made countless judgments about the allegiances of captive sailors—judgments that were much more difficult when enemy combatants shared a language and loyalty was a matter of choice.

By the end of the American Revolution, the difference between European and American conceptions of nationality was clear. Britain and France regarded nationality as natal and indelible, while the United States viewed it as volitional and contractual. And because U.S. citizenship was conferred by the states, not the federal government, there was no uniform national system...