Liberty on the Waterfront. Paul A. Gilje
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century the British navy paid twenty-four shillings per month for an able seaman. The Continental navy did not offer much more during the Revolutionary War. By the nineteenth century, the American navy paid about two dollars a month less than the merchant service. The prize money, however, could add up to hundreds of additional dollars. During the Quasi War with France, Elijah Shaw, who served as a ship carpenter on the frigate Constellation, earned $320 in prize money in addition to $300 in wages.103
Shaw's earnings, at a time when a common laborer received a dollar a day, might seem like a small fortune. Somehow, few seamen ever seemed to get much ahead. A sailor had to work a month before he caught up with the advance paid on his signing the articles, and that money was usually quickly placed in the hands of a boardinghouse keeper. Expenses frequently ate away at earnings. After almost fourteen months at sea, Amos Towne was worse off than when he started the voyage. Between advances he received after he first signed on, and at various ports in Europe and the East Indies, as well as charges for clothes, tobacco, and board while ashore, Towne had to sign unto another vessel owned by John Carrington shortly after he returned to Providence in 1824 to erase the debt that he had accumulated while working on the ship Franklin.104 Whalers and privateers too had previous commitments for the lays and shares. The typical earnings of the crew of the whaler Gratitude was $269.37 for a two-and-a-half-year voyage. Almost every man who earned this amount, however, was actually paid less than $100 because of advances and debts incurred before departure.105 On some voyages the deductions stripped the sailor of almost all his earnings. Three years after exclaiming that he liked “whaling very well” and “the best of anything I have ever tried,” James Webb reported to his mother that “I made nothing by the voyage—the owners claimed all when I got home.”106 Privateers might sell their shares, or a portion thereof, before they even left port.107 Men in the navy also spent advances, incurred debts, or, like Shaw with his earnings, invested their small wealth poorly. On the positive side, payment of the sailor's wage had first priority if a shipowner went bankrupt and a few men managed to use their money to start life anew on shore.108
Not every sailor conformed to the stereotype by drinking, cursing, carousing, fighting, misbehaving, and spending to excess while on leave. Sailors with strong shoreside attachment were often more careful with their money. Some went to sea only to build up a bankroll that could be used to establish themselves in an occupation on shore. During wartime, men expected and sometimes achieved quick rewards through privateering. In peacetime the process took longer. Whaling offered an opportunity to accumulate capital. A successful whaling cruise in the nineteenth century might last two or three years, while the sailor's lay—his share in the profits—could amount to a small fortune of several hundred dollars. Even aboard regular merchant vessels, wages could add up if properly managed and saved. Amos Towne may have ended a fourteen-month cruise in debt to the shipowner, but others on the same voyage were paid seventy or eighty dollars in cash as they signed off.109 Many men also hoped to make their careers at sea. Captains and other officers aboard ship came largely from the ranks of common sailors; at sea, knowledge and ability counted above all else.110
Who were the men who served as sailors and labored on the waterfront? Answering the questions is no easy task. During the period covered by this study there were many changes in English-speaking North America. A set of British colonies confined to trade with the West Indies and Europe, became an independent nation whose ships plied every ocean and whose seaman visited countless foreign ports. The dimensions of this huge workforce are staggering. Estimates of the number of colonial Americans working as seamen are hard to derive; English and American trade were so intertwined as to make distinctions almost impossible to detail. Thousands of seamen came in and out of colonial ports before the Revolutionary War. Naval warfare and privateers brought many more men to seek their fortunes at sea. Tens of thousands of men fought on the ocean waves from 1775 to 1783. In 1791 Thomas Jefferson estimated that there were also 20,000 men employed as merchant sailors or as fishermen.111 That number increased dramatically in the expansion of trade that began in the 1790s. By 1818, a group of merchants and captains seeking to establish a mariners' church estimated that 15,000 to 16,000 seamen sailed through the port of New York each year.112 The Board of Directors of the Boston Seamen's Friend Society reported 103,000 seamen in the United States in 1835.113 By 1850 there may have been well over 100,000 American seamen and countless others laboring along the docks.
The first and perhaps the most important characteristic of this workforce was its diversity. Men of many nationalities could be found on the waterfront. Perhaps there was less variety before 1776 because of legal limitations on crew nationality dictated by the Navigation Acts. The seamen who offered depositions before His Majesty's Vice Admiralty Court in New York were born in England, Ireland, Scotland, the Channel Islands, Germany, and Scandinavia.114 After independence, and as the American merchant marine expanded, the international mix became more pronounced. Many of the privateers and vessels commissioned during the War for Independence contained large numbers of men not born in America.115 In a sampling of crew lists from 1803 to 1806 in Providence, Rhode Island, about 10 to 15 percent of crews were foreign born. These men came from many locations, including India, the West Indies, Italy, Portugal, as well as northern Europe.116 Billy G. Smith found the same proportion of foreign seamen in Philadelphia in 1803. In 1807, as much as half of the men serving in the United States Navy in New York were foreigners.117 Melville's New Bedford contained a hodgepodge of denizens from Mediterranean mariners jostling ladies to lascars (natives of India and Southeast Asia) and Malays, to “cannibals” and South Sea islanders like Ishmael's soulmate, Queequeg.118 The New-Bedford Port Society, offering substance to Melville's literary portrait, reported in 1836 that one-third of all the sailors in the busy whaling port were foreigners.119
Blacks were an important component of the waterfront workforce. Horace Lane was struck, and perhaps intimidated, by the African American men and women at the dance hall he visited when he was sixteen. He should not have been surprised. Throughout the Age of Revolution blacks could be found in the dockside neighborhoods of almost every American port. During the colonial period most of these blacks would have been slaves; after 1776 more and more were free. These people worked in and sometimes owned grog shops, oyster stands, and other service-oriented businesses. Many were day laborers and stevedores. Blacks also worked as artisans in maritime trades like ship building, caulking, and sailmaking. A few, such as sailmaker James Forten of Philadelphia, managed to earn a modicum of wealth and respectability.120 Most, including Frederick Douglass, a slave caulker in Baltimore before his escape from bondage and his career as an abolitionist, sought to carve out a niche for themselves through their skill and hard work along the waterfront.121
Douglass, disguised in sailor's garb, was able to travel undetected to the North and his freedom because so many black men signed on as seamen in the merchant marine. The extent and character of the African American component of crews, however, varied over time. During the colonial period it was not unusual to find slaves serving aboard vessels. In some cases an entire crew might be made up of men in bondage. Free blacks also worked aboard ships. After the American Revolution, which created a large pool of free African Americans in both the North and the South, blacks became a significant element of almost every crew. At least one-fourth of Philadelphia's young black males shipped as sailors in the early nineteenth century.122 In crew lists for several cities for the same period, the percentage of berths held by blacks usually hovered around 15 percent, while in some cities, like Providence, the total reached 30 percent. By the 1830s and 1840s, however, the number of African American seamen began to decline as several southern states passed laws discriminating against black seamen, and as racial prejudice intensified in both the North and the South. By the 1840s and 1850s many of the blacks still in the merchant marine were driven from the forecastle and worked as ship's cooks.123
Even among the American-born white seamen there were many differences in background and birthplace. The image of the chiseled New Englander as the embodiment of the American tar does not hold. True enough, many sailors hailed from New England, and in some areas of maritime industry, like the banks fishery that sailed from small ports like Marblehead and Gloucester, Massachusetts, many of the half dozen men crammed into the small schooners came from the same towns and knew