"We are not objects of pity": New York City Sailors and the Embargo of 1807

After President Thomas Jefferson signed the Embargo Act of 1807 on December 22, 1807, the maritime community was devastated, and a newly resurgent Federalist Party hoped to wrest unemployed sailors, traditional constituents of the Democratic-Republicans, to the Federalist ranks. While their efforts were successful in Philadelphia and throughout New England, Federalists had only limited success swaying the loyalties of mariners in New York City. In part, this was due to Republicans skillfully tying the Embargo to the rights of impressed sailors while portraying Federalists as Anglophiles more concerned with maintaining a profitable trade with Great Britain than championing the welfare of seamen, an accusation which seems to be partly borne out by private correspondence between key Federalist leaders. In the process of competing for sailor's votes, both parties revealed a tendency to underestimate the individual political agency of sailors, assuming their political support could be won through the use of alarmist political rhetoric and pandering nautical jargon. This essay uses newspapers and other sources to investigate the political rhetoric both the Federalists and the Republicans employed to appeal to sailors, especially through the use of perceived sailor language and sailor metaphors. While there is a body of scholarship discussing the political use of language in relation to sailors during the early national period, none has looked in depth at how this language was utilized during the Embargo of 1807.¹

In the 1960s, Jesse Lemisch conducted groundbreaking research into the history of "the inarticulate," examining the politicization of sailors. Using the impressment riots in North American ports before the Revolution as examples, he described a maritime populace unwilling to play the subordinate role on land that they were forced to assume at sea. In more recent interpretations marxist scholars like Lemisch, Marcus Rediker, and Peter Linebaugh, have portrayed seamen as internationalist proletarians purposefully resisting capitalist exploitation. Paul A. Gilje has published several works arguing that sailors fully embraced their American identities but utilized patriotism in a calculated way when it suited their needs, fully aware that they represented American independence in the public eye both during the Revolutionary period and later in the politically tumultuous years before the War of 1812. Daniel Vickers has written of sailor's identity, revealing how sailors in several Massachusetts ports were tied to their community. According to Vickers, these young men only took to the sea in their youth; as a result, they were not a marginalized proletariat segregated in "sailor towns" as they would have been in Europe nor did they end their lives as "Jack Tars." More recent scholarship explores the ways the United States government came to define citizenship in its effort to address the impressment of American sailors in need of documentation. To that effect Simon P. Newman has explored the important role nationalistic sailors played in elections of the Jeffersonian era, noting that "from the mid-1790s onward the Democratic-Republican leadership was under constant pressure to represent the concerns of seafarers."²

Elaborating on current scholarly trends I argue that during the Embargo of 1807 such pressure stemmed from two primary fears: a fear of violence and disruption caused by idle sailors in American ports coupled with a fear that these same sailors might leave America for opportunities in foreign lands, specifically in Canada. While the latter fear was justified and ultimately realized, the former was not: sailors did protest the Embargo, but they did so in an orderly way, making it clear that they were fully engaged citizens holding the same democratic principles as their contemporaries and capable of expressing these principals without recourse to violence. Unfortunately, even when protesting the Embargo in a lawful way, both parties dismissed such group actions as political stunts staged by the opposing party. Such actions perpetuated the stereotype of the guileless "Tar" whose support and vote could be bought by political opponents who offered them free alcohol and free rent or enticed them with broadsides replete with sailor terms, rather than ideas that transcended immediate self-interest. That many of these sailors chose...