Liberty on the Waterfront. Paul A. Gilje

as one revolutionary put it, that the Founding Fathers believed threatened to lead to anarchy. If liberty ashore allowed men to misbehave and pursue sensual bliss regardless of its impact on others, liberty at sea often released sailors from shoreside attachments and provided a geographical mobility unimagined by most of their landbound cousins. My aim has been to examine liberty—and its many costs—in all of its varied meanings for those who lived on the waterfront in the Age of Revolution. I acknowledge the concept of liberty as a moment of license as a self-evident truth for the waterfront world and as a foil against which we can measure the more rarified definitions of men like Thomas Jefferson. The Age of Revolution may have created a new society that cherished the word “liberty” and the ideal of equality, but the great democratic transformation affected those who lived and worked on the waterfront to a varying and usually lesser extent.

      My starting point is the sailor's own understanding of liberty both ashore and afloat in an American maritime culture that remained largely the same from 1750 to 1850. Fine distinctions can be made between decades, between regions and ports, between types of shipboard labor, between work on ship and shore, between experiences of fishermen, whalemen, merchantmen, and men-of-war. My aim, however, particularly in Part I, has been to emphasize a larger unified American maritime culture, rather than focus on differences. After all, seamen sailed from ports around the United States and all over the world, and sailors shifted their berths among vessel types with uncommon ease. The same man might work on the waterfront one day only to ship out the next.

      Despite the continuity of much of the maritime experience, the Age of Revolution was important to the people on the waterfront; the great revolutionary currents churning the Atlantic in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries both had a profound impact upon, and in turn were affected by, the common folk of the maritime community. The people of the waterfront played a central role in the revolutionary conflict, first as the shock troops in the mobs of the resistance movement from 1765 to 1775, and then as combatants at sea. This participation infused the revolution with an egalitarianism it might otherwise not have had. Sailors could seize upon the rhetoric of the revolution to argue for their own rights. But they were also survivors in an age of great upheaval. Jack Tar's commitment to the American cause, in typical ambiguous sailor fashion, often owed less to ideological motivations than pragmatic personal interests.

      The various meanings of liberty on the waterfront persisted into the years of the early republic. Throughout the 1790s and early 1800s, American trade expanded, creatiing increased opportunity for the people on the waterfront and placing many sailors in jeopardy from Barbary pirates, and the warring French and British. This development helped to identify the sailor's liberty with American liberty and Jack Tar became emblematic of our nationhood during this period. The War of 1812 was the consummation of this trend, as the maritime community thought that the war was fought to protect its rights.

      After the war the waterfront still could not be fully incorporated into the American republic. Christian missionaries inspired by the Second Great Awakening sought to remake the waterfront in their own middle-class image, with limited success. In literature, Herman Melville, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., James Fenimore Cooper, and others portrayed the sailor as an embodiment of the democratic man. At the same time the efforts of living and breathing sailors to bring the benefits of the Age of Revolution home to the water-front—in the form of organized labor—were largely frustrated.

      Liberty on the waterfront appealed to me for many reasons. Rather than writing on brief dramatic episodes in the lives of the participants-as I did in my previous study of rioting, upon which this book builds-I wanted to focus on one group of laborers who had played a central role in popular disorder. Beyond the explosive moment of tumult, I wanted to follow real people into the workplace and into their everyday experience. Although the record contains mainly partial stories and anonymous characters, gradually I have pieced together enough material to portray maritime culture and tell stories about people who might otherwise be overlooked and almost invisible in our histories.

      In contrast to the scenarios presented by other historians, maritime society as I see it during this period was not a proletariat ready to assert class consciousness. Nor could I identify a group of would-be embattled patriots responsible for founding a nation. Many sailors I encountered in diaries, letters, and memoirs often fit the stereotype of drinking, misbehaving, and living for the moment. Many others did not, and their perspectives are equally valid and valuable. Throughout I have tried to provide a balanced portrait of life at sea and ashore, and to recount the stories of men and women who survived events they could not fully understand.

      Regardless of the attempted reform and the books on the common seamen, and even regardless of the articulation of revolutionary ideals coming from the waterfront itself, much of the maritime world continued relatively unchanged and seamen remained an exploited work force with little political voice. From the period before the first hail of the Sons of Neptune to the age of Melville, “liberty” retained many of its ambiguous and contested meanings on the waterfront.

      PART I

      ASHORE AND AFLOAT

      1

      The Sweets of Liberty

      Horace Lane first went to sea when he was ten years old. By the time he was sixteen he had been pressed into the British Navy, escaped, traveled to the West Indies several times, and witnessed savage racial warfare on the island of Hispaniola. Although he experienced many of the perils of a sailor in the Age of Revolution, he avoided the wild debauchery of the stereotypical sailor ashore. In 1804, after a particularly dangerous voyage smuggling arms and ammunition to blacks in Haiti, his rough-and-tumble shipmates from the Sampson cruised the bars, taverns, and grog shops of the New York waterfront. One night a shipmate took him to the scene of the revelry. Lane remembered that “after turning a few corners, I found myself within the sound of cheerful music.” As they approached the door, Lane hesitated. His companion shamed him into entering by declaring “What…You going to be a sailor, and afraid to go into a dance-house! Oh, you cowardly puke! Come along! What are you standing there for, grinning like a sick monkey on a lee backstay!” Lane could not handle the rebuke. Gathering himself, he mustered enough spunk to enter. No sooner had he crossed the threshold than he was met with “a thick fog of putrified gas, that had been thoroughly through the process of respiration, and seemed glad to make its escape.” The room was packed with the humanity of both sexes and several races. In one corner loomed a huge black man “sweating and sawing away on a violin; his head, feet, and whole body, were in all sorts of motions at the same time.” Next to him was a “tall swarthy female, who was rattling and flourishing a tamboarine with uncommon skill and dexterity.” A half dozen other blacks occupied the middle of the floor, “jumping about, twisting and screwing their joints and ankles as if to scour the floor with their feet.” Everywhere people shouted, “Hurrah for the Sampson!” Among the crowd some were swearing, “some fighting, some singing; some of the soft-hearted females were crying, and others reeling and staggering about the room, with their shoulders naked, and their hair flying in all directions.” Lane was horrified and beat a hasty retreat, proclaiming “Ah!…Is this the recreation of sailors? Let me rather tie a stone to my neck, and jump from the end of the wharf, than associate with such company as this!”¹

      1. While on liberty in a port, sailors spent money freely on liquor. Notice the woman in the window, probably a prostitute, and the black man in the background walking in front of the oyster and clam shop. “Sailors Ashore.” From Hawser Martingdale, Tales of the Ocean… (Boston, 1840). New Bedford Whaling Museum.

      A few more years, and many more adventures at sea, led to a change of heart. Lane recounts his conversion to hard living. He had agreed to deliver a letter to a young woman who worked at “French Johnny's,” a notorious dance hall on George Street in New York. As he worked his way through the crowd outside, he approached the door blocked by a chain and a guard. After paying the cover charge, Lane stepped into “a spacious room, illuminated with glittering chandeliers hanging in the