Robert H. Patton - Patriot Pirates: The Privateer War for Freedom and Fortune in the American Revolution

CONTENTS

for Vicki, of course

and for the memory of my father,
George S. Patton IV

The New Englanders are fitting out light vessels of war, by which it is hoped we shall not only clear the seas and bays here of everything below the size of a ship of war, but that they will visit the coasts of Europe and distress the British trade in every part of the world. The adventurous genius and intrepidity of those people is amazing.

Thomas Jefferson, July 1775

It is prudent not to put virtue to too serious a test. I would use American virtue as sparingly as possible lest we wear it out.

John Adams, in support of Congressional approval of independent privateers, October 1775

ILLUSTRATIONS

by Edward Malbone, 1794. (Collection of the New-York Historical Society)

lithograph by L. H. Bradford & Co. Published by Glover Broughton, 1854. (Peabody Essex Museum)

(Collection of the New-York Historical Society)

(The Royal Society)

engraving after portrait by Robert Edge Pine, c. 1785. (Collections of the University of Pennsylvania Archives)

engraving by Longmore, c. 1850 after portrait by Charles Willson Peale. (Stapleton Collection/Corbis)

by Charles Willson Peale, c. 1775. (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

etching by Albert Rosenthal, 1888, after portrait by John Trumbull. (Library of Congress)

by John Trumbull, 1793. (Smithsonian Institution, National Portrait Gallery)

(Peabody Essex Museum)

engraving after portrait by Gilbert Stuart, 1795. (Collections of the University of Pennsylvania Archives)

(Bettmann/Corbis)

by Louis Carrogis de Carmontelle, c. 17801781. (Smithsonian Institution, National Portrait Gallery)

Lord Stormont, by George Romney, 1783. (The Governing Body of Christ Church, Oxford)

by Charles Willson Peale, 1785. (Virginia Historical Society)

by V. Zveg, 1976, based on a miniature by Louis Marie Sicardi. (U.S. Navy Art Collection)

(Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis)

PROLOGUE

Beset by a sudden squall in April 1775, a small British sloop, very much torn to pieces by the gale of wind, ducked into the sheltered bay off Beverly, Massachusetts, sometime after dark. It proved a false refuge, for the next morning two fishermen armed with pistols rowed out from the town wharf and claimed the beleaguered vessel as a war prize. After its crew of five men and two women surrendered without protest, the event went down as Beverlys first capture of enemy loota single barrel each of flour, tobacco, rum, and pork.

Citizens excitedly kept watch on the bay in anticipation of more prey. Their vigilance was rewarded when His Majestys ship Nautilus ran aground while pursuing Hannah, an armed schooner recently commissioned by George Washington to hijack enemy transports supplying British troops in Boston, twenty-five miles south.

People flocked to the beach and began shooting at the stranded warship very badly many times with household muskets and a motley battery of antiquated cannon. Tis luck they fired so high, Nautiluss captain wrote afterward. Even so, one of his seamen lost a leg in the barrage and another was killed before the vessel rose off the sand on the incoming tide and fled to open water. Ashore, men had body parts blowed off by misfires of gunpowder and by accidentally shooting one another.

The mad fervor of the regions saltwater colonials was well known to British authorities. Thered been incidents of government supply crews abandoning ship down one side as marauders in converted fishing boats clambered up the other side wielding clubs and cutlasses. In response, the Royal Navys commander in Boston, Admiral Samuel Graves, had directed his captains to burn, sink, and destroy suspicious vessels and to lay waste and destroy every town or place from whence pirates are fitted out.

The spiraling violence made everyone cry foul. Americans cursed Graves and his harpies. The British retorted that a thief might with as much truth and reason complain of the cruelty of a man who should knock him down for robbing him!

British leaders told themselves those vermin would be easily crushed, especially when their loose discipline is considered. But an unsigned letter from a naval officer stationed in Boston and published that winter in a London newspaper gave a darker assessment. They are bold enough to dare and do anything, he wrote of the American sea raiders. Whatever other vices they may have, cowardice is not one of them.

INTRODUCTION

The American Revolution never impressed me. For one thing, it seemed far surpassed by the Civil War in terms of drama and palpable grit, Currier & Ives compared with Mathew Brady, powdered wigs and tricorner hats compared with the sprawled bodies and forever-young faces of the dead in that road at Antietam.

One of my colonial ancestors, General Hugh Mercer, was mortally wounded at the battle of Princeton in 1777. A famous painting by the Revolutionary War artist John Trumbull depicts Mercer sprawled on the ground parrying a British redcoats bayonet, yet the works heroic appeal pales beside the letter composed by my great-great-uncle at a Gettysburg field hospital where he lay dying after Picketts charge; or beside the chunk of Yankee cannonball that killed his brother, Colonel George S. Patton, at Winchester one year later. Retrieved by a surgeon from Pattons gut, the shrapnel is crescent-shaped and rusted red at its edges, and lies heavy in your hand when you hold it.

Ken Burnss 1990 television documentary, The Civil War, blended scholarship and artful detail to make its subject powerfully immediate to millions of viewers, creating through music, images, and lyrical voiceovers a video equivalent of the poignant artifacts passed down from my doomed Rebel forebears. A steady outpour of histories and novels keeps the Civil War current today, as do perennial pageants of battle reenactment, lucrative speculation in its memorabilia, and the wars fundamental relation to African American history and the struggle for civil rights. Small wonder the Revolution cant compete.

The great figures of American independence remain intriguing, of course. Enduring popular interest in the Founding Fathers confirms our desire to view them as human and accessibleas people like us, and yet not. But the proverbial search for an eras characteristic specimens is a tall order when prospecting among such singular men. Put another way, can George Washington possibly have been anything like anyone we know? In photographs of Abraham Lincolns gaunt face we glimpse the terrible toll of prosecuting a war that took hundreds of thousands of lives. Of Washington, however, we praise his wisdom, vigilance, and modesty, but on a personal level generally recall him as dour and toothless.

The Revolution suffers in the same way. Bunker Hill and Valley Forge seem mere milestones in the march of progress rather than fateful occasions of risk and peril. Joseph Ellis observes, No event in American history which was so improbable at the time has seemed so inevitable in retrospect as the American Revolution. Conversely, the Unions triumph over the Confederacy never comes across as a foregone conclusion; that sense of precariousness gives its memory lasting vitality. Yorktown occurred almost a century before Appomattox. The added distance dulls the suspense and thus the humanity of the Revolution, allowing us to see it as myth, which is to say, scarcely to see it at all.