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

Nathan Perl-Rosenthal’s Citizen Sailors is a timely book, and not just for what it reveals about America’s early republic era. At a time when we bear reluctant witness to the plight of stateless persons, confront difficult images of refugees seeking haven in Europe from the Syrian civil war, and see a line of refugees as the dominant image of the United Kingdom’s Brexit campaign, the significance of citizenship in a world at war is more urgent than ever.

Citizen Sailors brings us back to a time when American mariners were caught in the dilemma of stateless persons, or, rather, men whose bodies were claimed by competing states (they were uniformly male; at stake was the labour that their bodies could perform). One result was the practical exigency of creating the first citizenship documents. Between 1796 and 1803, US customhouses issued 100,000 certificates, accounting for some two percent of the American population in the 1800 US census. How this came about is the subject of Nathan Perl-Rosenthal’s study.

Perl-Rosenthal asserts that prior to the American War of Independence, European powers were largely successful in ensuring that their merchant marines was crewed by their own nationals. However, the appearance of American mariners on the high seas complicated a “common sense of nationality,” identified by “manners” such as language, clothing, religion, and customs, and especially obscuring the markers that distinguished American from British mariners. Forty years of global maritime war — the American War, the Wars of the French Revolution, the War of 1812 — further “mixed up the human geography of empires” and introduced a “fog of uncertainty” that challenged a commander’s ability to identify nationality (82).

Consequently, American mariners needed documents that would prove their citizenship and so prevent their impressment into the Royal Navy or capture in European ports. The confusion worsened in the late 1790s, when assaults from British and French navies and privateers captured hundreds of US-flagged vessels. Ships’ officers and colonial authorities dismissed the conventional protection papers and consular affidavits as insufficient or fraudulent, asserting that only they had the authority to make a determination.

Perl-Rosenberg posits that a “quantitative and qualitative shift in impressment took place in 1796.” The uncertainty precipitated a debate within Congress over developing some way to prove American citizenship. The result, enacted in the Act for the Protection and Relief of American Seamen of 28 May 1796, was a “new form of identity document, the Custom House protection, that was virtually without parallel in its time” (174). Under this and a similar 1803 law, thousands of sailors received certificates and a “momentous change was getting underway, the seizure by the state of the right to be the arbiter of personal identity” (197). This was not enough to prevent conflicts with England and France, but it set a precedent for eventual nationality documentation.

Citizen Sailors offers an introductory rather than a comprehensive examination of the problem of citizenship at sea, and there are questions that this reviewer would like to have seen further investigated. For one, Perl-Rosenthal asserts that European empires were successful in determining the nationality of their crews, and the historiography he cites seems to support this contention, but there is no discussion of how navies dealt with foreign crewmembers during war. Furthermore, he might have explored the relationship between sailors’ protection certificates and the forging of an American national identity. Did the citizen certificates transform American mariners’ consciousness? Was the 1796 debate part of a larger problem of national legitimacy and identity?

For instance, in using the story of Nathaniel Fanning, a Connecticut privateersman, to frame the narrative, Perl Rosenthal tells us that Fanning’s “story, his very existence even, called into question the boundaries of the Revolution: what did it mean to call it ‘American,’ after all, if many of its protagonists were in fact French...