Adams John - American Sanctuary: Mutiny, Martyrdom, And National Identity In The Age of Revolution

IT WAS THE BLOODIEST MUTINY in the annals of the Royal Navy, a horrific eruption of savagery during the most storied epoch in British seafaring history. At the height of the French Revolutionary Wars, when England stood imperiled by invasion, mutineers on a pitch-black night in September 1797 murdered the captain and nine other officers aboard a thirty-two-gun frigate, HMS Hermione, four thousand miles from home in the tropical waters of the Caribbean. Butchered by crew men brandishing axes and cutlasses, all ten officers, including a fourteen-year-old midshipman and a second lieutenant delirious with yellow fever, their skulls crushed by tomahawks, were heaved overboard ten leagues off the western coast of Puerto Rico. By morning light, except for a dozen shipmates, well over one hundred men had joined the uprising.

This book begins by following the fortunes of the Hermione, from the genesis of the mutiny and the crews flight to the Spanish Main to the transatlantic dragnet laid by the Royal Navy. Very little has been written about the ill-fated frigate since the publication of Dudley Popes popular narrative, The Black Ship, in 1963. Except for scattered historians and legal scholars, the mutiny remains largely unknown. Unlike the South Pacific saga of the Bounty eight years earlier, the carnage aboard the Hermione generated few heroics. The tale is not easily romanticized, with little to match Captain Blighs epic survival in a cramped launch or the nomadic adventures of the Bountys crew on the far side of the world. But the bloodbath in Puerto Ricos Mona Passage did have profound repercussions, especially for the young American republic, that have been widely ignored.

For the mutiny thrust upon the administration of John Adams, Americas second president, already bedeviled by partisan opposition, a set of incendiary issues involving natural rights, American citizenship, and political asyluma consequence of the purported presence of impressed American sailors aboard the Hermione and, in turn, their threatened extradition to Great Britain after seeking refuge in the United States. In sanctioning the surrender of a seaman named Jonathan Robbinsa native son, he claimed, of Danbury, ConnecticutAdams in the summer of 1799 ignited a political firestorm fanned in the following weeks by news from Jamaica of the sailors hanging as the reputed Irish ringleader Thomas Nash. No one circumstance since the establishment of our government, observed Thomas Jefferson, has affected the popular mind more.

Not only did the aftershocks of Robbinss martyrdom powerfully influence the momentous election of 1800, the first full-blown presidential campaign, but they also helped to shape the infant Republics identityhow Americans envisioned both themselves and the larger destiny of the United States. In drawing heightened importance to the principles of 1776, the Hermione crisis led directly to Americas historic decision whether to grant political asylum to refugees from foreign governments, a major step toward fulfilling the magnetic promise of American independence, famously voiced by Tom Paine, to provide an asylum for mankind.

A few studies, especially a long article by the legal scholar Ruth Wedgwood, have probed the affairs constitutional implications arising from allegations of judicial interference by Adams. Perhaps as a consequence, recent studies of the Revolution of 1800 and biographies of John Adams have either minimized or, more often, entirely overlooked the controversy. Even so, I have profited greatly from scholarship that has of late centered on the young Republic, including the contested landscape of early national politics.

Sources for this book have been wide ranging, among them documents in the British National Archives at Kew. Especially critical were Admiralty dispatches, journals, logs, and muster books. Court-martial records graphically detail events aboard the Hermione before, during, and after the mutiny. Also vital were records at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. Manuscripts of key political figures proved revealing, not least those of Robert Liston, Timothy Pickering, Oliver Wolcott, Rufus King, and Edward Livingston, along with the correspondence of Adams and Jefferson. Electronic databases such as Americas Historical Newspapers and the British Newspaper Archives offered an unparalleled opportunity to canvass innumerable papers published on opposite sides of the Atlantic. Highly influential at the turn of the eighteenth century, newspapers in the United States afford a particularly striking lens on public opinion as well as on national politics.