The Promises and Perils of National Identity for American Seafarers of the Early Republican Era

The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School College of the Liberal Arts TRUE BORN COLUMBIANS: THE PROMISES AND PERILS OF NATIONAL IDENTITY FOR AMERICAN SEAFARERS OF THE EARLY REPUBLICAN PERIOD A Thesis in History by Dan Hicks © 2007 Dan Hicks Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 2007 The thesis of Dan Hicks was reviewed and approved* by the following: William Pencak Professor of American History Thesis Advisor Chair of Committee Daniel C. Beaver Associate Professor of History Amy S. Greenberg Professor of American History and Women’s Studies Carla J. Mulford Associate Professor of English Sally A. McMurry Professor of American History Head of the Department of History and Religious Studies *Signatures are on file in the Graduate School. ii Abstract This work investigates national identity and masculinity among American sailors during the era of the War of 1812, drawing from a number of published and unpublished materials. It begins with a description of pertinent aspects of maritime culture: specifically, the ubiquitous adoption of false identities by common seamen, officers, and merchants, both in public and in private services. After establishing this context, the project investigates the ways in which individual men had their professed identities, be they true or false, accepted or rejected by other men; and it explains the hierarchies of status which added weight to the claims of some men over others (such as that of officers over that of men from the forecastle). This dissertation also examines American sailors’ relationship with landed society. Although sailors consciously differentiated themselves from “landlubbers” they also shared many of the same concerns, beliefs, and assumptions—such as a conviction that a healthy community was founded on the well ordered sentiments of its members. These shared understandings allowed sailors, despite their idiosyncrasies, to serve as symbols of the American national community. Seamen did not accept this role passively; instead, they used it to articulate their own understanding of American nationality. Through their songs and their writings, they argued that the genius of the American nation lay in the interrelationships of its male members. Unlike men of other nations, sailors contended, American men joined together voluntarily in pursuit of the commonweal and the protection of individual members. The last chapter of the dissertation shows how sailors strove to embody the ideals of American national identity to which they subscribed, and depicts the self-destructive consequences that sometimes resulted from that attempt. iii Table of Contents Preface……………………………………………………………………………………vi Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………..x Chapter 1. INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………….1 Chapter 2. THE CONFIDENCE AND THE SURPRISE: THE DECEITFUL PRACTICES OF MERCHANTS, NAVAL OFFICERS, AND SEAMEN, AND THEIR SHARED CHARACTERISTICS…………………………35 Chapter 3. “WHO ARE HER SUBJECTS, AND WHO ARE OUR CITIZENS”: THE ROLES OF CONSENSUS AND STATUS IN THE DETERMINATION OF NATIONAL IDENTITY…………………………………………….79 Chapter 4. “PIRATES AND SHARKS ARE FOUND ASHORE AS OFTEN AS AT SEA”: SAILORS AND SENTIMENTAL CRITIQUES OF DOMESTIC AMERICAN SOCIETY………………………………………………..111 Chapter 5. BROADSIDES ON SEA AND ON LAND: NAVAL BATTLES AS CONTESTED SYMBOLS OF AMERICAN NATIONAL IDENTITY……………………………………………………………...145 Chapter 6. “THEIR FOES WERE IN THE MASCULINE GENDER”: FRATERNAL INTERDEPENDENCE AND NATIONAL IDENTITY DURING THE WAR OF 1812………………………………………………………….175 Chapter 7. “THEY MUSTN’T THINK THEY HAVE FRENCHMEN TO DEAL WITH”: NATIONAL IDENTITY AND RESISTANCE AMONG AMERICAN PRISONERS OF WAR………………………………….207 iv Chapter 8. CONCLUSION.……………………………………………………………255 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………260 v Preface Why should we care about the War of 1812? Though we are certain to be deluged with ever more works on the subject as its bicentennial nears, it will likely remain a subject about which most historians care little and most Americans care less. A war that ended with a restoration of the status quo antebellum seems on its face a triviality, especially when the war itself is regarded, as it so often is, as a series of humiliating blunders. When Theodore Roosevelt set down to wrote a history of the war, he decided that only the naval battles and the Battle of New Orleans deserved scrutiny; the other affairs on land were too ignominious to teach valuable lessons. Shortly thereafter, Alfred Thayer Mahan concluded that most of the naval battles, victories or not, were strategic mistakes. Since then the narrative of the war has been largely a tale of Andrew Jackson’s rise to fame through his crushing defeat of a British army which had bested Napoleon. Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, and Daniel Webster and other lesser figures who will share the stage with Jackson also make their premiere appearances as figures of importance in the build-up to or during the war. The War of 1812 in this familiar telling represents a changing of the guard, from the cohort of the Age of Revolution to that of the Age of Jackson. Rather than a momentous event, it becomes merely a generational turnover. Historians have interested themselves the causes of the war, but have shown relatively little concern for the motives of the common soldiers and sailors who enlisted to fight it. This dissertation will broach the subject by describing how American sailors understood both the war itself and their own participation in the war. It will do so in part by analyzing a little-known “battle”—a confrontation between armed British guards and vi stone-wielding American prisoners of war at England’s Dartmoor Depot of Prisons on April 6, 1815. Throughout the duration of their confinement the American prisoners of war at Dartmoor Prison needled the authorities placed over them. The captives refused to recognize the legitimacy of their detention—all they had done, they claimed, was to fight for their homeland. While inmates of other nationalities who shared the prison with the Americans placidly accepted their lot, the American prisoners of war made their displeasure known. They raised American flags over the prison yard on patriotic holidays, shoved guards into the cold mud, and plotted their escape. Their discontent only grew after the war concluded and the men remained imprisoned, victims of the failure of the British and American governments to agree on who would foot the bill for their return. April, 1815, came with hundreds of prisoners unreleased. They rioted on April 4 when British authorities deprived them of fresh bread and attempted to unload stores of hardtack on them. A moment of confusion two days later brought a large crowd of inmates into the courtyard of the depot, face-to-face with a line of British militiamen with their weapons at the ready. When commanded to disperse the Americans refused. They assaulted the riflemen before them with insults and whatever the ground at their feet offered to hand. After repeated warnings, the Britons let loose a volley over the prisoners’ heads. Instead of cowing them, this act only angered the inmates further. The next volley went straight into the ranks of men. More would follow as the prisoners broke for the safety of their barracks. The altercation left at least six American prisoners dead and some sixty wounded, half that number gravely so. vii The “Dartmoor Massacre,” as the event came to be known, remained in the American consciousness for several generations to follow. In its immediate aftermath several survivors recorded their memories of the event for publication. A new spate of narratives emerged in the 1840s and 1850s, as aging men told tales of their brief forays upon the ocean, using the Massacre to climax their story. Even in the 1870s, autobiographers for whom the Massacre was one event among many in a long life mentioned it on their title pages—presumably its notoriety remained a selling point. Around that time, newspaper obituaries began to carry a curious feature: when memorializing elderly men who had spent part of their youth at sea, eulogists would wonder, “Have we seen the passing of the last of the survivors of the Dartmoor Prison Massacre?” As late as 1926 a publishing company advertising its new edition of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Yarn of the Yankee Privateer referenced the “famous Dartmoor massacre of American prisoners.” Clearly, what happened at Dartmoor that early spring day more than three months after the war had officially ended struck a resounding chord with the American nation. I would argue that we can understand something about the importance of the War of 1812 by analyzing the events that led to the Dartmoor Massacre. At the beginning of the war, the United States held a low position in the ranks of nations. Stronger states like Britain and France, and even weaker ones like those of North Africa, abused it with seeming impunity. Americans boasted of their liberty yet they could not protect their sailors on the high seas or secure the rights of neutral trade which they believed they deserved. They declared war against Britain in the summer of 1812 partly to earn respect from the rest of the world, and to have their rights as an independent nation recognized. viii Similarly, the American prisoners who provoked the Dartmoor Massacre seem to have felt compelled to defy their armed captors even at the risk of death. In defense of their actions, they explained that they were Americans; as Americans they were freemen; as freemen they could not bow to the will of an arbitrary tyrant. Their countrymen used much the same rhetoric in explaining the nation’s recourse to war. The prisoners’ patriotic truculence won them the admiration of their compatriots. For the historian, it offers an entrée into their understanding of their nation, themselves, and the war they waged. ix Acknowledgements I would like to thank everyone who made this project possible including the many professors in seminar, colleagues at conferences, and fellow students in less formal surroundings whose advice has helped me shape different aspects of this dissertation.

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