Patriot Pirates (28 page)

One day in October 1781 the sound of cannon echoed over the East River’s opposite shore from where the dead of the prison ships lay buried. News of Cornwallis’s surrender at York-town had reached the patriots in New Jersey; they were shooting off volleys in celebration. Vail’s anxious hope that things now might change for the better was fulfilled when, “in a few days after this, a cartel arrived from New London and I was exchanged.”

He caught a fever on his way home and “lost my senses for 27 days.” When he revived, someone asked whether, after so much hard luck, he would venture to sea again. “I told the person that I never would if I begged my bread from door to door.” Yet with the fighting dragging on, and with loyalist transports still plying to and from New York, he couldn’t stay away. “I shipped myself out on board the sloop
Randolph
of 16 guns and 70 men.”

He cruised unsuccessfully on several more vessels until late in the summer of 1782. While serving aboard
John
, “with but one gun and 24 men,” he hailed a transport whose papers indicated a nondescript cargo of flour and flax bound for Providence. Suspicious, Vail cracked opened a barrel and was amazed to find that “by some means or other the flour had turned into inkstands.” Its cargo was a trove of loyalist “conveniences” worth £4,000 sterling.

Of the tens of thousands of patriot privateersmen, a huge proportion died; of the survivors, only a fraction wound up with money in hand. Vail was one of the lucky ones, and after collecting his earnings he retired from sea roving and looked ahead to life in a new America. He also did what young men throughout history have done upon gaining their fortunes. “I got married,” he wrote, “and remained at home until the next spring, when peace took place.”

A
t the time Vail was making his score on
John
, a contemporary he never knew, Andrew Sherburne of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, was cruising the West Indies on an American letter of marque called
Scorpion
.

Having found in 1781 that prize money he’d earned earlier in the war had been spent by his mother while he was in prison in Britain, Sherburne had been forced to sign up for another sea venture despite his lingering ill health. “Some ambition” figured in the decision, he admitted, “and probably no small share of pride.”

Off the island of Montserrat,
Scorpion
had just welcomed aboard a French pilot crew to steer it into the harbor when the British warship
Bee
closed to within one hundred yards. There was a strange moment of calm as the heavily armed brig, “ports up and guns out,” held its fire.
Scorpion
’s French sailors “jumped below,” Sherburne later wrote, “and others fell upon their faces, crying out ‘
foutre d’Anglais
’.”

The broadside didn’t come.
Bee
wheeled seaward “under all the sail she could set” as the Montserrat fort opened fire. Cannonballs splashed behind the fleeing brig. For the rest of his life Sherburne would marvel, “She had opportunity to do us considerable injury by raking us, but her commander had the humanity and generosity to refrain.”

Ashore on the island, Sherburne got drunk for the first time. “I was not a little mortified at the thought of having been intoxicated, and resolved to guard against this destructive practice.” He also got his first glimpse of slavery. “I was appalled to see the hungry and almost naked slaves suffering the cruel scourges of their drivers, some of them having iron collars about their necks with a chain suspended from it; others with a heavy chain fastened to the leg, and in other instances two chained together.”

Scorpion
exchanged its cargo of Virginia tobacco for limes, sugar, and rum. Though the homeward journey featured several narrow escapes from British pursuers, “within two days’ sail of our port we fancied ourselves almost safe.” Suddenly they were run down by the frigate
Amphion
. After surrendering,
Scorpion
’s 13 crewmembers were brought aboard the warship and placed “under two decks, where we found near a hundred of our countrymen who had fallen into their hands.”

The prisoners knew where they were bound. “Our hopes of a prosperous voyage were now blasted; our property gone, and no other prospect than that of taking up quarters on board the old
Jersey
prison ship in New York harbor.”

It was November 1782, more than a year after Yorktown and more than four years after France and America had signed their treaty of alliance—milestones that meant little now. “I had just entered the eighteenth year of my age and had now to commence a scene of suffering almost without parallel.”

Aboard
Jersey
, anchored 120 miles from where Christopher Vail was settling down with his bride in Connecticut, the worst of Sherburne’s war was about to begin.

Twelve

There were many persons in Salem dejected on the return of peace, but a greater spirit of industry arises among the inhabitants than I had expected to see after the idleness and dissipation introduced by the business and success of privateering.

—Timothy Pickering, December 1783

W
artime entrepreneurialism, privateering especially, was a testament to individual initiative. Yet in his comprehensive study,
Business Enterprise in the American Revolutionary Era
, Robert A. East downplays the significance of those “giants of enterprise who molded the opinions of their fellows.” The greater legacy of the era’s business boom was that “social forces of the generation had taught many persons to think alike.” The common thought they’d learned was of making money.

Before the war, this would have been viewed as undermining the virtues of a proper republic. “Like Puritanism,” writes Gordon S. Wood, “of which it was a more relaxed, secularized version, republicanism was essentially anti-capitalistic, a final attempt to come to terms with the emergent individualistic society that threatened to destroy once and for all the communion and benevolence that civilized men had always considered to be the ideal of human behavior.”

The question of whether rampant capitalism benefited America or endangered it was at the heart of the Deane–Lee division in Congress, with the Virginia Lees, along with Henry Laurens of South Carolina, uniting with the Adamses of Massachusetts to condemn “the joint combination of political and commercial men” exemplified by Deane, Robert Morris, and their ilk.

The Lees, though infected with jealousy and personal feuds, based their position on “the principles and manners of New England, wise, attentive, sober, diligent, and frugal.” But during the 1780s they realized that the Puritan egalitarianism they idealized ran counter to their preference for a permanent aristocracy founded on bloodlines and landed wealth. As a result, their belief that New England most fully embodied “that spirit which finally has established the Independence of America” devolved into one more point of resentment.

John and Samuel Adams were more genuine in praising their fellow New Englanders’ “generous feeling for the public and for each other.” Consequently they were shocked when their home state succumbed to “a spirit of avarice” as the war progressed. John in particular—he’d been one of the first to call for unleashing privateers, after all—lamented that his vision of Boston as a “Christian Sparta” had been overwhelmed by a tide of speculation, materialism, and self-interest.

“Rich and numerous prizes,” wrote one Bostonian of his town’s roaring economy late in the war, “are the grand engines.” Sea captains, waterfront agents and lawyers, and the “new race of merchants” from Essex County (the so-called “meaner people” in 1775), were now Boston’s financial elite, dwelling in mansions unaffordable to “those who are not in business.”

Samuel Warren was dismayed by the change. “Fellows who would have cleaned my shoes five years ago have amassed fortunes and are riding in chariots.” And Samuel Adams decried “the expensive living of too many, the pride and vanity of dress which pervades through every class.” These newly rich seemed “almost the only men of power, riches, and influence.” Their migration to Boston would ultimately hurt the commercial status of Essex County, though for now it seemed a logical move of upward mobility.

Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where John Langdon had done so well bankrolling privateers he’d built a bridge for the town, also flourished, as did coastal communities in Connecticut and Delaware. Philadelphia and Providence were thriving, though Newport, Savannah, and Charleston still struggled after their lengthy British occupations.

All in all, East summarizes, “the country was not left in the deplorable economic state frequently attributed to it.” The demographics had shifted, however. In addition to established merchants who’d successfully exploited the war’s freewheeling commercial environment, America’s wealthy now included the entrepreneurs of Revolutionary trade and privateering, “a small but vigorous set of newcomers, invariably young in years but national in viewpoint, who were prepared to take the business bit in their teeth and set a faster pace for the future.”

F
ranklin, returning to America in 1785, noted the new construction and abundance of goods seemingly indicative of a healthy economy. But shipping tonnage was in decline. While exports continued to sell, imports plummeted after a brief, postwar inundation from European merchants backlogged with surplus from the long conflict. Euphoric in the first months after victory, Americans welcomed the glut with a consuming spree; the resulting debt showed up in increased bankruptcies two years later. The military was no longer the insatiable customer for equipment and food it had been. When European economies faltered under the weight of their war debt, demand fell for American lumber, flour, and tobacco, further hurting farmers and merchants.

American privateer commissions were revoked by a Marine Committee decree signed by Robert Morris in March 1783. Yet in Boston, even with privateers no longer delivering prizes laden with desirable cargoes, there was enough supply to last for seven years sitting in local warehouses. Inventory was sold at a loss. Ships sat empty, crews idle.

The scene was repeated all along the coast. But lacking the agricultural hinterlands of New York, Philadelphia, and the south, ports in Massachusetts and Rhode Island felt the slowdown more acutely. Their situation worsened after Britain, through its navigation act of 1783, vindictively tried to restrict American trade with its West Indian colonies. The same businessmen who’d leaped into privateering again took innovative steps in response. They undercut European prices by as much as 20 percent to tempt island merchants to defy the law and accept American bargains. And with traditional markets in Britain, France, and Spain drying up, they used expertise gained in running privateers to promote commerce with Russia and Scandinavia and, most importantly, to open trade with China.

In the last years of Revolutionary privateering, the trend had been for larger vessels that could stay at sea longer, carry extensive armaments and prize crews, and yet still sail fast. Refitting these for transport was only part of the immense cost of sending them on distant trade expeditions, which could run as high as $100,000. But the war’s many privateer partnerships, formed to share expenses and distribute risk, found a perfect application in these global ventures. Legal firms and insurance consortiums were on hand to facilitate arrangements as they’d done with countless privateer ventures just a few years earlier. Most of these were based in Boston, so Boston soon became the center of America’s Far East trade.

Some of the wealthiest privateer investors launched expeditions on their own. Elias Hasket Derby refitted his large warship
Grand Turk
and dispatched it, with one of his privateer skippers at the helm, to Canton, China, in 1785. The venture must have done well, for five years later he laid out half his fortune to mount another that returned profits four times the original cost. His Salem neighbors, the Cabots, similarly had the means, the vessels, and the captains, to mount expeditions themselves. So did the Browns in Providence.

But the Revolution’s greatest effect on business practices had been to accustom individualist Americans to financial partnerships and institutions. Thus national, state, and eventually private banks proliferated as the new century progressed, and speculation and trade became driven as much by syndicates as by separate merchants. These syndicates sprang up in towns throughout America and became the preferred business mechanism not only for aggressive newcomers but for the “conservative element” that in the past had operated either alone or strictly with family members.

Privateering—daunting in its risks, irresistible in its potential rewards—had stimulated this collective capitalism. The postwar depression fixed it in the American landscape as a way to share the pain of slowdown and the fruits of recovery. As for other consequences, East puts it plainly. “The tendency of hard times was to weed out the smaller businessmen to the eventual benefit of the larger; and to evolve more highly organized business communities, all of which cleared the way for greater business activity in the later years.”

S
lavers, by contrast, rarely worked in partnerships. How many there were—that is, how many New England maritime magnates kept their slave ship investments separate from other ventures in their portfolios—will never fully be known. Various penalties and proscriptions relating to the African slave trade were adopted around New England between 1780 and 1788. Aside from its illicitness, slavery’s disrepute induced most men to hush up their involvement. “After the ban of 1788,” the historian James A. Rawley observes, “Bostonians concealed their clandestine activities.” He adds, “Their heirs have not been disposed to place the family records in public repositories.”

The south had slavery’s buyers and brokers; Virginia and South Carolina were the main receiving points. New England had the expertise to outfit and insure the transport ships. The main towns from which voyages launched had been leaders in privateering: Boston and Salem; Newport, Providence, and Bristol in Rhode Island; and to a much lesser extent, Portsmouth, New York, and Philadelphia. But to call it a similar social phenomenon misses the point that privateering’s preference for cooperative ventures was almost entirely absent from New England slaving.

Instead of partnerships, businessmen and families usually put up the money alone. That their names are few in number is deceptive, since most, “working through middlemen and correspondents,” hid their participation from public scrutiny. The major known participants in the postwar slave trade—the Graftons of Salem, the Perkinses of Boston, the Champlins of Newport, and the D’Wolfs of Bristol—had been active in privateering but not on the level of the Cabots, Derbys, and Tracys. Only rarely does one of those top-tier names appear in the records as an owner of a ship bound for Africa. With more money in hand and more reputation to lose, they were perhaps less tempted by the profits of slaving; perhaps they concealed their activities better; or perhaps they were repulsed by the business.

A database of vessels launched between 1783 and 1810 compiled by James A. McMillin in
The Final Victims
shows that many were former privateers or converted prizes. Privateering’s larger vessels presented obvious advantages for slave transport. And since slave ships, even large ones, required as few as nine crewmen, there was plenty of room for human cargo. Skippers were often former privateer masters. Some were young members of the same few clans that funded the ventures, apprenticing in the family trade.

Roughly a hundred slave voyages, with a capacity of ten thousand Africans, are known to have sailed from North America in the 1780s. The actual number is certainly greater; there are many examples of ships registering as whalers and cargo ships to disguise their purpose. The majority originated in New England. In 1783 a news item from Africa reported that many, “mostly from Boston,” were bringing in rum to exchange for slaves. Two years later a British visitor counted six ships, “from Boston and its vicinity,” waiting offshore “to take slaves only, and more are daily expected.”

Three-fifths of all North American slave ships came from Rhode Island, a statistic in keeping with its obdurate iconoclasm. In 1781, calling it “a yoke of tyranny,” Rhode Island had rejected a national impost tax proposed by Robert Morris to help settle Congress’s debts; suspicions of centralized government likewise made it the last of the original colonies to ratify the Constitution, and only then after asserting that federal taxes be levied “in such way and manner as the legislature of this state shall judge best.” Similarly, antislavery laws that were unassailable in most northern states were subject to hot debate and frequent violation in Rhode Island. Moses Brown led the push for anti-slave trade legislation. His brother John led the resistance, often diluting the fines and restrictions down to a point of inconsequence.

John funded several slave voyages but not nearly as many as others in the state, especially James and Henry D’Wolf, who funded dozens. Rather, his main contribution to the trade was as an unabashed advocate for its perpetuation on competitive grounds. He argued that businessmen had a right “to enjoy the benefits of a trade permitted by all the European nations.” It supported rum distillers and put revenues in the treasury, and as for its alleged inhumanity, the slave trade benefited Africans since it “much bettered their condition,” he said.

Harassed and shamed by his brother, (and in fact sued several times by Moses’s abolitionist group), John was privately uneasy about slaving and claimed to be forced into it “from necessity, seeing no other way to pay the revenue of the United State to whom I owed near 100,000 dollars.” Though he indeed had sunk much of his manufacturing and privateer wealth into postwar investments that the economy’s downturn sharply reduced, his whining drew no sympathy from Moses.

On the contrary, Moses pointed out that John had “found means” to influence jurors to lower fines levied against him for trafficking in slaves, and he charged that John’s complaint of persecution by Rhode Island leaders was disingenuous, since in truth he would have been “prosecuted more severely had it not been for the influence of those he calls his enemies.”

Yet even while condemning his brother, Moses seemed to understand that John was helplessly addicted to slaving’s high profits. John promised him several times, “I shall not be any more concerned in the guinea trade,” only to relapse. In 1787 he vowed that henceforth Moses could “do what you think right respecting the proposed prohibition.” A year later, needing funds to support the expansion of his fishing fleet and the construction of a gin distillery, he mounted two quick expeditions to Africa.

As late as 1800, the addiction still held. Moses wrote a friend that John “has now a ship he has been refitting which if he does not sell I fear he would, again, be tempted to send on a slave voyage.” The only reason that voyage never materialized was that John found a more profitable venture, dispatching his refitted privateer,
General Washington
, on a two-year expedition to China.