Seafarers William Conner, Michael Corbet, Pierce Fenning, and John Ryan were Irish Americans living and working in Marblehead, Massachusetts, the foremost fishing port in British North America. On 22 April 1769, they were homeward bound from Cadiz, Spain on board the Pitt Packet, a brig that belonged to Robert “King” Hooper, a wealthy fish merchant in Marblehead, with a load of salt to be used in the colonial fisheries. Benjamin Caldwell, captain of HMS Rose, was stationed outside Marblehead's harbor. Caldwell ordered the Pitt Packet to strike sail and await inspection. He then sent Lieutenant Henry Gibson Panton with several armed seamen to board the Pitt Packet to force men into naval service, a practice known as impressment. The Irish-American workers locked themselves in the brig's hold. Panton ordered the door to the hold to be broken down, and the press gang rushed in. Conner, Corbet, Fenning, and Ryan stood amidst piles of salt armed with fishing implements, ready to defend themselves. A tense standoff ensued. Corbet grabbed a harpoon and a handful of salt. He threw a line of salt before the press gang and swore that any man that crossed it would die. Panton stepped over the line. Corbet launched his harpoon at the Lieutenant, hit him in the neck, and severed his jugular. While some of the press gang attacked the Marblehead mariners, others carried Panton up to the main deck, where he bled to death. After a short fight, the gang overwhelmed and arrested the Irish Americans, who were arrested and tried for murder in a specially convened Vice Admiralty court in Boston, Massachusetts.Footnote ¹

On the other side of the Atlantic, impressed sailors were organizing a mutiny on their way to the Nore in March 1771. The Royal Navy was mobilizing for what was presumed to be another war with France. A press gang at Newcastle had captured 160 maritime laborers. These pressed men were being transported by sea to HMS Conquestador at the Nore. John Falkingham, captain of the Conquestador, reported that he only “received 85 men”. The remaining 75 pressed men, along with 2 volunteers, had “risen against the crew” of the transport vessel, “the Active tender”, en route to the Nore. The savvy mutineers “destroyed the lists which were sent by Captain Bover [the regulating captain in charge of the Newcastle press gang]”. These lists recorded names and places of residence. After seizing control of the vessel, the mutineers “obliged the [Active's] pilot to carry her into the Port of Whitby; by which means, seventy seven Impressed men and Volunteers made their Escape”.Footnote ² Separated by an ocean, workers whose lives revolved around the sea resisted the Royal Navy and thereby helped to usher in the age of revolution.

Historians have now studied the radical dimensions of the age of revolution for over fifty years, but the maritime nature of radical ideas and actions has for the most part been neglected.Footnote ³ When anti-impressment collective actions are discussed in relation to the American Revolution that opened the age of revolution, they are commonly portrayed as apolitical affairs in which angry workers on the margins of mainstream society simply wanted to avoid unwholesome military service and familial separation.Footnote ⁴ Only a few historians have maintained that maritime laborers had a political consciousness and acted on it. This consciousness has been described as “liberal”, in the modern sense of the term, as workers were willing to wait for change to occur.Footnote ⁵ Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker stand apart in their insistence that the workers engaged in eighteenth-century anti-impressment riots were motivated by radical ideas.

Their work highlights the ways in which ideas about egalitarianism and freedom circulated around the Atlantic world during the long and uneven transition to capitalism. Such ideas, combined with a shared experience with capitalist expropriation and exploitation, linked merchant mariners, pirates, slaves, and even those involved in anti-impressment collective actions into one transatlantic, many-headed proletariat that resisted Herculean efforts on the part of a ruling class to keep workers in check.Footnote ⁶

This essay presents a sea-centered portrait of the radical ideology and behavior associated with anti-impressment collective actions in colonial America on the eve of the American Revolution. These actions were public, and therefore relatively well-recorded, illuminating the ways in which maritime radicalism (radical ideas and behavior directly related to life at sea) influenced the revolutionary movement that brought about an independent United States of America and ushered in the age of revolution.Footnote ⁷ Life and work at sea was central to radical actions and beliefs from below that helped push colonial elites, the so-called Founding Fathers, into armed rebellion against the British Empire. Maritime laborers’ radicalism inspired both fear and conviction in elites that the world might be turned upside down.

Sea power provided the means for the expansion of the British Empire across the Atlantic world. In waters teeming with pirates, privateers, and enemy warships, a strong navy made it possible for commerce, communication, and conquest to extend out from Albion's island shores over the course of the 1600s and 1700s. In the words of John Evelyn, an English writer and a commissioner in charge of tending to wounded seamen during the Second Anglo-Dutch War,

British naval expansion could not have occurred without the coercion of maritime labor. There has long been a consensus among historians of the early modern British navy that impressment was integral to manning efforts.Footnote ⁹ Nicholas Rogers has made the most concerted effort to quantify impressment. He concludes that of the 450,000 men who served in the British navy between 1740 and 1815, 40 per cent were pressed.Footnote ¹⁰ In other words, nearly half of Britain's combat strength was coerced into military service over this 75-year period.

Eighteenth-century eyewitnesses also saw impressment as vital to manning the British fleet. John Nicol, a common Scottish tar who served in the Royal Navy in 1776, observed “I was surprised to see so few who, like myself, had chosen [naval service] for the love of that line of life. Some had been forced into it by their own irregular conduct but the greater number were impressed men”.Footnote ¹¹ In 1775, at the start of the American Revolution, Vice Admiral Samuel Graves, commander of the British North American squadron stationed off Massachusetts, reported in a letter to Philip Stephens, Secretary of the Admiralty Board, that “Necessity obliges me, contrary to my inclination, to use this method to man the King's Ships”.Footnote ¹² Judge Serjeant Foster adjudicated a very important legal case in 1743 in which a mariner killed a naval officer while resisting impressment. Foster famously ruled against the mariner and defended the institution of impressment. In his ruling, Foster stated:

The British navy could not have safeguarded shipping lanes and maintained key Atlantic stations over the course of the eighteenth century without impressment. Without the ability to regularly patrol key strategic points in the Atlantic world, transatlantic shipping would have been put at greater risk. Increased risk meant higher maritime insurance rates for shippers, and it meant a reduction in the degree of predictability that was a key component of the free flow of goods. In short, without a sufficiently manned navy, Britain's maritime empire would have been vulnerable.

Like mutiny, resisting impressment was highly subversive in the context of the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world. A 1759 Act of Parliament erased any distinction between evading impressment and desertion.Footnote ¹⁴ The same act stipulated financial punishments, incarceration, transportation, and forced military service for those found to be aiding and abetting this “desertion”.Footnote ¹⁵ For those who actually “deserted”, the removal of the distinction between impressment and desertion meant death. George II's 1757 royal proclamation made desertion a capital crime.Footnote ¹⁶ Why, then, were maritime laborers willing to use violence to resist British naval impressment? Why would British subjects even consider murdering a British naval officer? Answers to these questions made for a revolutionary era.

Figure 1 Atlantic coastal communities, c.1775.

In North American coastal communities, workers were engaged in a variety of radical actions during the 1760s and 1770s that helped bring about the American Revolution. Maritime laborers joined Sons of Liberty organizations; they threatened Stamp Tax collectors and customs agents with physical violence, and they destroyed private property.Footnote ¹⁷ Tar, a nautical weatherproofing agent, became a subversive weapon in the hands of maritime mobs that tarred and feathered British officials.Footnote ¹⁸ Maritime laborers in colonial ports converted ship masts into liberty poles to celebrate the repeal of offensive British legislation. The same workers then rioted whenever British soldiers stationed in North American cities tore down these liberty poles. In what has come to be known as the Battle of Golden Hill, thousands of mariners in New York City engaged in armed combat with British soldiers on 19 January 1770 following the removal of the local liberty pole.Footnote ¹⁹ And, to be sure, there was resistance to naval impressment such as the Pitt Packet affair. Collectively, workers’ resistance in the streets generated a public discussion about the nature of British imperial authority. This resistance and discussion made policies such as the Stamp Act unworkable, and ultimately caused the British imperial machine to grind to a halt.

Certain preconditions made anti-impressment collective actions more likely to occur, the first of which was increased impressment itself. The British navy was most likely to press maritime laborers into military service during wartime.Footnote ²⁰ According to Rogers, impressment was statistically most likely to occur over the course of the first year of a war, when demand for labor was exceptionally high, naval wages were notoriously low, and volunteerism was pitifully insufficient.Footnote ²¹ At the start of the Seven Years’ War, for example, the number of men mustered into the British navy jumped more than threefold, from 9,797 in 1754 to 29,268 in 1755.Footnote ²² Military mobilization increased press-gang activities and generated unusually high levels of resistance.

The state of the economy in and around a port also bore on the frequency with which workers resisted impressment. The fact that wages in the private sector increased during periods of conflict made maritime laborers especially motivated to resist being forced into military service at this time. Left to their own devices, maritime laborers could have secured unusually high wages. As a London newspaper writer explained in 1775 “The cruelty of issuing press warrants has been long and justly complained of. The English tars, brave as they are, have no objection to be paid.”Footnote ²³ Impressment effectively cut workers’ wages at a time when labor was scarce and pay high. During the eighteenth century, the primary focus of this essay, wartime wages on merchant vessels typically stood at on average 50–60 shillings per man, per month. At the same time, an able-bodied naval seaman earned 24 shillings per month.Footnote ²⁴ Workers still resisted impressment when wages were low and jobs were scarce in the private sector. During peacetime in 1770 outside London, for example, it was reported that a mariner shot a naval officer “dead on the Spot” after the officer and a press gang came after the sailor.Footnote ²⁵ Men never wanted to be coerced into naval service, in peacetime or wartime. Yet losing the ability to earn higher than normal wages in the private sector during wartime gave workers extra incentive to resist impressment.

The nature of a ship captain's authority, on a merchant vessel and on a warship, also impacted the likelihood that anti-impressment actions would occur. The captain of a merchant vessel may have abused his crew, making them unruly, and even openly hostile. The abusive captain could then offer up such mariners to nearby naval officers, who would press the men. In 1775, at the start of the Revolutionary War, British General Thomas Gage wrote to Vice Admiral Samuel Graves to ask the naval commander to ban the impressment of seamen off the army's transport ships, which were hired merchant vessels bound for New York to get supplies for the army. The vice admiral denied this request. Graves explained that “We never impress the Transports people but in Cases of very bad behavior and at the Master's Request”.Footnote ²⁶ In 1740, “sturdy Fellows belonging to a [merchant] Ship near Southampton [England], having refused to go the Voyage without a Rise of Wages, left their Vessel. Upon which, the Master thereof gave Scent of them to a Press Gang, who, with the Assistance of some Constables, in short, seized them”.Footnote ²⁷

A vindictive naval commander could also abuse his authority and press men out of spite or personal animosity. After the Committee of Safety in Marblehead, Massachusetts, confiscated some of Graves's personal effects that had been imported into the coastal community in violation of the Continental Congress's non-importation agreement, the British vice admiral stationed a warship outside Marblehead's harbor, “pressed several Men”, and, according to a naval officer at the scene, Graves wanted “to burn their Town”.Footnote ²⁸ In either civilian or military cases, the nature of the captain's authority and the ways in which he wielded power could increase the activity of the press gang, which would provide additional opportunity and incentive for resistance.

In addition to these preconditions, a combination of deep-seated beliefs and practical experiences prompted maritime laborers to resist British naval impressment around the Atlantic world. They drew on the ideals of the Levellers, a radical political group of the mid-seventeenth-century English Revolution that originally protested enclosure and the expropriation of labor. The expansion of the Royal Navy began under Charles I, and the use of impressment to man the burgeoning fleet drew the Levellers’ ire and contributed to the outbreak of civil war. Eventually, the Levellers promoted radical ideas such as popular sovereignty, the freedom of conscience, individual liberty, religious toleration, and equality before the law.Footnote ²⁹ The demand for individual liberty was especially subversive in a deferential, hierarchical, corporatist society such as seventeenth-century England. Individual rights threatened to subvert the top-down structure of society.

Throughout the 1640s, the Levellers defended individual freedoms in their opposition to the government's use of impressment. This was a collective defense of individual rights. “The matter of impressing and constraining any of us to serve in the wars, is against our freedom”, they wrote. There was “nothing more opposite to freedom”, or no greater form of slavery, Levellers believed, than naval impressment. For this coercion violated “every man's Conscience”, and it brought “hazards [to] his life” on a daily basis.Footnote ³⁰ Following a string of anti-impressment collective actions, the “Seamen belonging to the Ships of the Commonwealth of England” were made to explain the motives behind their riotous behavior to Oliver Cromwell in 1654. The seamen, like their Leveller contemporaries, stated that they viewed the naval impressment that had continued under Cromwell's rule as a form of “thralldom and bondage”. The maritime laborers did not believe they owed deference to state institutions, including the government and the military. Rather, they viewed themselves as “freemen of England”, and they understood impressment as violating “the Principles of Freedom and Liberty” which were their natural rights. For such men, the state's abuse of these rights prompted their collective resistance.Footnote ³¹ As a group, they were willing to defend individual rights against thralldom.

Levellers such as Thomas Rainborough were outspoken in their denunciation of various forms of slavery. During the Putney Debates, Rainborough decried the impressment of soldiers and sailors as nothing less than a form of bondage. He equated the forcible appropriation and distribution of poorer English laborers to overseas colonies with African slavery. And he called for the end of the enslavement of Africans.Footnote ³² These arguments generated a language of freedom and helped build anti-slavery sentiment in England that reinforced and justified militant resistance to press gangs.

Although elites forcibly suppressed Rainborough and other Levellers, maritime conduits helped to spread Leveller logic beyond Albion's shores to the wider Atlantic world. Sailors on merchant vessels, privateers, and warships routinely carried news and information across the ocean and effectively established a systematic English Atlantic communication network.Footnote ³³ Colonists living around the Atlantic world were made aware of Leveller activities and the events of the Civil War.Footnote ³⁴ Captured Levellers were also transported to work and die on overseas plantations.Footnote ³⁵ The ideas that they shared were passed down from generation to generation.

Radical Leveller language was expressed in colonial American resistance to naval impressment as demonstrated in 1769 by the Pitt Packet affair. The court proceedings and the newspaper coverage that this sensational event generated offer an uncommon window into the radical motivations behind workers’ resistance to impressment in colonial America just prior to the Revolution.Footnote ³⁶

Like the Levellers, Corbet and his mates collectively believed impressment into British naval service was a form of state-sponsored slavery, and that they were fighting for nothing less than their liberty from oppressive authority. James McGlocklin, a cook who worked with the Irish-American mariners, testified that Corbet and his mates responded to the press gang's command to come up on deck by stating “they were Freemen born free, and would not go aboard a Man of War”.Footnote ³⁷ James Siley, a British marine, and a member of the press gang, and John Roney, the master mariner on the Pitt Packet, both testified they heard Corbet and his mates “say they wanted nothing but their Liberty”.Footnote ³⁸ Peter Bowen and William Peacock, midshipmen on the British warship, testified Corbet and his mates “said they were resolved to die, sooner than be pressed on Board a Man of War”.Footnote ³⁹ It was reported in a New York newspaper that:

Patrick Henry was not the only colonist to maintain a liberty-or-death ethos. Thomas Hutchinson, Royal Governor of Massachusetts, wrote that “The seamen had shut themselves up in the fore peak, and had furnished themselves with harpoons, and other weapons […] and swore they would die before they would be taken, and that they preferred death to slavery.”Footnote ⁴¹

Freedom and liberty were deeply ingrained in eighteenth-century American seafarers’ lexicon, no less than in Levellers’ hearts. A Massachusetts newspaper reported that at the start of 1769 mariners in Boston referred to British warships as “wooden prisons”.Footnote ⁴² Christopher Prince, a Massachusetts mariner pressed into the British navy at the start of the Revolutionary War similarly referred to life “on board of a British [naval] vessel and under the command of British subjects” as “thralldom”.Footnote ⁴³ For maritime laborers, resisting impressment was a public, radical commentary on the legitimacy of British authority that was deeply rooted in seventeenth-century English political ideas.Footnote ⁴⁴ Militant anti-impressment collective action was not simply a localized effort to fend off a press gang. Just as the Levellers viewed impressment as an infringement of natural rights and an indication of the abuse of state power during the English Revolution, colonial American maritime laborers equated impressment with state-sponsored slavery prior to the American Revolution.Footnote ⁴⁵

Popular perceptions of press gangs were directly related to the ways in which workers conceived of the nature of government authority. Benjamin Franklin, a prolific writer, one of the most democratic Founding Fathers, and a man who lived in port cities most of his life, amplified the voices of maritime laborers on this score. Echoing the Levellers, Franklin wrote that impressment took away people's natural freedom. He emphasized that impressment was especially exploitative, as it occasioned “the Loss of Liberty and Hazard of Life”. By using force against its own people, the British government had become corrupt and tyrannical. It was turning free wage laborers into slaves. In no uncertain terms, Franklin linked British naval impressment and the legitimacy of the British state: “If impressing Seamen is of Right by Common Law, in Britain, Slavery is then of Right by Common Law”. Giving voice to the concerns of many, Franklin hammered home the old Leveller saw that there was “no Slavery worse than that Sailors are subjected to”, because of the constant dangers of death. For Franklin, and for the thousands of maritime laborers whose shoulders he stood on to shout, any government that defended and utilized impressment “doth not secure Liberty but destroys it”.Footnote ⁴⁶ Repeated attempts to press colonial maritime laborers helped to convince colonists in and out of doors that their government had lost its legitimacy.

Impressment also raised workers’ political consciousness beyond the shores of North America, helping maritime laborers associate British authority with tyranny. In England, John Stradley was pressed into naval service near London at the end of the American Revolution. Of this impressment, Stradley wrote, “I was stolen away […] and locked down in the hold with a sentinel over me with a drawn sword as if I had been a thief or a Murderer”. Upon finishing his naval service, Stradley wrote, “I got Clear of that miserable situation of a seafaring life […]. I again rejoiced in my liberty and thought it a great happiness to be free from […] the Constraint of Tyrannical Officers”.Footnote ⁴⁷ John Nicol, who was pressed into the British navy during the French Revolutionary Wars, referred to impressment as “a bondage that had been imposed upon me against my will”.Footnote ⁴⁸ On both sides of the Atlantic, workers were concerned about liberty, and these concerns had a direct bearing on popular political perceptions of British authority and resistance to impressment.

Practical experience at sea informed collective resistance as well as deep-seated popular beliefs about natural rights and good government. Naval service was a life-or-death proposition that brought abstract political concepts home to poorer, uneducated laborers. Rigid forms of discipline, low pay, work-related hazards, and lengthy periods away from home all made warships into schools of hard knocks in which workers became politicized. In 1654, maritime laborers explained to Cromwell that their anti-impressment riots had been partially caused by the “great hardship” associated with naval service. This included death, wounds, and sickness: “Sea-men having sacrificed themselves [i.e. died in the line of duty]; and some of our limbs are mangled, and blood spilt […] besides great diseases and distempers, sometimes occasioned through bad Victual”.Footnote ⁴⁹ These rioters were men with prior naval experience who resisted in order not to be forced back into naval service.

Feeding naval seamen proper provisions remained habitually problematic for the British navy throughout the early modern era.Footnote ⁵⁰ Bad food continuously generated bad blood between naval seamen and the navy. The navy also gained a widespread reputation for brutal forms of discipline. Physical forms of abuse that included floggings were not uncommon. There was also psychological abuse associated with confinement.Footnote ⁵¹ Maritime laborers around the Atlantic world were also well aware that the British navy did not pay well. Massachusetts royal governor William Shirley explained this fact to Commodore Augustus Keppel in 1755. Shirley informed Keppel that it would be very difficult to man the fleet in Boston “for the King's usual Pay”.Footnote ⁵² That same year, Captain Housman Broadly informed Vice Admiral Edward Boscawen “there will be no getting Seamen at New York or Boston to come up early in the Spring upon the Wages allowed in the Navy”.Footnote ⁵³ This reputation preceded press gangs into ports, and it contributed to workers’ willingness to resist impressment. Maritime laborers’ resentment toward impressment thus represented the confluence of radical ideas and lived experiences. This resentment contributed to militant collective resistance to naval impressment.

There were, of course, peaceful, law-abiding ways of protesting naval impressment that did not pose a threat to the status quo in eighteenth-century colonial America. Even in the midst of a 1768 anti-impressment riot in Boston, local elites calmly held a town meeting and pursued formal avenues of protest. Town Selectmen, elected local officials, resolved to send a deferential letter to Massachusetts’ Royal Governor, Francis Bernard, requesting that the governor use his authority to have the naval officer in charge of the recent impressment removed from the area. Naval impressment had been illegal in North America since a 1708 parliamentary ban on the practice. The town leaders then published Bernard's negative response in the local newspaper.Footnote ⁵⁴ Elites held another town meeting and further resolved to send “instructions” to their representatives in the Massachusetts legislature.Footnote ⁵⁵ The Selectmen even resolved to forward their protests to their lobbyist in Parliament, only to wait patiently for a response. Footnote ⁵⁶ The goal of all these protests was not to upset the balance of the standing social or political order, but simply to convey dissatisfaction to the proper authorities through formal channels in the hope that superiors would be the ones to effect change.

There were also widespread, conservative sorts of crowd actions that American colonists could have employed in reaction to impressment. Humiliation by charivaris and rough music, for example, were common eighteenth-century communal methods of defending moral economies.Footnote ⁵⁷ Theoretically, colonial American communities could have publicly shamed naval officers into submission. These traditional shaming rituals seem to have worked best, however, when they targeted community members, which excluded British naval officers in colonial America. By and large, colonial American maritime laborers did not adopt elite or popular conservative means of protesting naval impressment on the eve of the American Revolution. They engaged in direct action to effect change themselves. They did not petition politely for contemplative consideration of a list of grievances, and they did not wait patiently for a response from superiors. They angrily demanded immediate change, and they were willing to use violence to bring it about.

Collective anti-impressment actions had common phases, just like shipboard rebellions. First, a core of a few individuals agreed to fight against a press gang that was known to be operating in a port. We know this because of the bounties placed on ringleaders, and the financial rewards that were offered for information leading to their arrest or capture. In the aftermath of the Knowles anti-impressment riot in Boston in 1747, William Shirley, the Massachusetts Royal Governor, wrote to the Admiralty to inform them that he had proposed “the immediate issuing of a Proclamation for dispersing the Mob, and Discovering and Apprehending the Ringleaders and others concerned in it”. Shirley's proclamation included a “Reward to be given” for information leading to the ringleaders’ arrest.Footnote ⁵⁸ Following an anti-impressment riot in Deal, England in 1755, the Admiralty publicly offered “a Reward of Two Hundred Pounds for the discovering, apprehending, and prosecuting of all, or any three or more of the Persons who were principally guilty of the several Offenses aforesaid”.Footnote ⁵⁹

The principals then formed a collective, which could range in size from a small group to several hundred maritime laborers. In June 1765 a New York City mob burned the tender of HMS Maidstone on the city commons after press gangs had swept through the colonial port.Footnote ⁶⁰ It was reported that:

By comparison, there were only four mariners involved in the Pitt Packet resistance, in which Corbet was clearly the ringleader.Footnote ⁶² All such maritime collectives prepared for self-defense.

Militant maritime laborers were willing to use violence to protect their freedom. They often destroyed the navy's property. Commodore Charles Knowles authorized press gangs to operate in Boston in 1747. Forty men were taken off the streets by force and chained below decks in tenders that made their way to warships as the well-documented Knowles Riot broke out in Boston. In this collective action, maritime laborers rioted for three days. A mob captured British naval officers, held them hostage, and generally seized control of the colonial port city. Colonial mariners even took and set fire to one of the tenders that belonged to the navy.Footnote ⁶³ Similarly, Lieutenant Thomas Laugharne of the sloop Chaleur pressed five men from various vessels outside New York City in 1764. New Yorkers formed a mob and burned the Chaleur's tender in front of the port's meeting hall.Footnote ⁶⁴ One year later, a New York City mob burned the tender belonging to HMS Maidstone on the commons after press gangs had swept through the port.Footnote ⁶⁵

Then, in the summer of 1768, American colonists in Boston, Massachusetts, rioted following three consecutive instances of impressment. Repeated impressment had “raised the resentment of the populace”, and united colonists in opposition to British imperial authority. The “people in town” were “in great agitation”. Notices were “posted up in diverse parts of the town requesting the Sons of Liberty to meet at Liberty Hall”. Sons of Liberty flags “were flying on [the] Liberty Tree” in Boston.Footnote ⁶⁶ A mob of some 2,000 angry people, many of them sailors, dragged one of the navy's tenders from the waterfront to Boston's liberty tree. The mob conducted a mock Vice Admiralty Court and condemned the navy's property, then carried the boat to the commons and set it ablaze.Footnote ⁶⁷ In each case, colonists collectively confiscated and destroyed British naval property – the hated tender. These vessels, like Charon's boat that crossed the river Styx in Greek mythology, were symbols of the separation of life and death. Burning these symbols, especially in front of a liberty tree, represented a powerful plebian celebration of life and freedom. Setting fire to a tender was akin to burning a larger naval warship in effigy, on a miniature scale.

Such militant behavior set these collective actions apart from more polite, refined forms of political protest that involved town meetings, resolutions, memorials listing grievances, formal avenues of power, and waiting. Moreover, crimes against property were especially prosecuted in Anglo-American parts of the world. As Peter Linebaugh has demonstrated, the Crown and Parliament became increasingly active in inventing capital crimes and prosecuting offenders to preserve property rights over the course of the early modern era.Footnote ⁶⁸ Riot acts were also established to preserve domestic tranquility and protect property from destruction. Burning naval property violated this sense of propriety and these laws, and it did so in a very public and overtly political manner. Destroying the navy's property on the commons, or before government-owned town halls, was highly subversive in a deferential hierarchical imperial world.

Maritime collectives also arrested press gangs. A mob of maritime laborers in Norfolk, Virginia, forcibly resisted being compelled to serve in the British navy in 1767. The armed sloop Hornet sailed into Norfolk on 5 September, and Captain Jeremiah Morgan landed with a press gang of around thirty men. Morgan had received press warrants authorized by King George III legitimizing naval impressment. After imbibing “a little Dutch courage” at a local tavern, Captain Morgan and his armed press gang “proceeded to that part of the town resorted to by seamen”. The press gang attempted to strong-arm American colonists into joining the navy. The gang had captured several men when the local watch raised an alarm, and a mob of around 100 port denizens turned out and forcefully fought off Morgan and his crew. The press gang retreated to the Hornet in the face of this resistance, but not before colonists seized 30 of the naval seamen and placed them under arrest in the port's jail for the weekend.Footnote ⁶⁹ It is likely that the maritime laborers involved in this affair were members of the Norfolk Sons of Liberty.

American maritime laborers were also willing to use intimidation to defy what was popularly perceived as a corrupt British government. On 2 February 1775, HMS Lively sat at the harbor mouth outside Marblehead, Massachusetts. Vice Admiral Samuel Graves, commander of the British fleet on the North American station, had ordered “the Lively at Marblehead, to raise men for the Squadron”, and Graves “directed Captain [Thomas] Bishop of the Lively to press thirty Seamen”. The Vice Admiral acknowledged in an official communication that Marblehead was “a place extremely violent in supporting and carrying into execution the Resolutions and Directions of the Continental Congress respecting the Non-importation Agreement”.Footnote ⁷⁰ By this, Graves meant that Marbleheaders had gone so far as to impound some of his personal effects that had been imported into the coastal community. Captain Bishop then stopped privately owned commercial vessels entering Marblehead's harbor, and he ordered his Lieutenant, William Lechmere, and several of the Lively's crew to press maritime laborers into naval service.

Lechmere faced stiff resistance. According to HMS Lively's logbook, which Captain Bishop maintained, “At 2 a.m. manned & armed the Pinnace and Cutter sent to Marblehead to Impress men at 9 ye Boats retd with 10 Men”.Footnote ⁷¹ Ashley Bowen, a Marblehead resident who had worked in the cod fisheries and on locally owned merchant vessels before becoming a sailmaker, recorded in his diary that on 2 February 1775 the British man of war Lively “pressed ten men out of the vessels in our harbor”. But, Bowen quickly noted, “Our people got 6 of them back again”.Footnote ⁷² The “people” who attempted to rescue the pressed mariners were most likely maritime laborers who worked in the port's commercial fishing industry. An observer described the activity involved in the return of one of these six detainees:

The other five Marblehead mariners were probably rescued through similar acts of intimidation.

The resistance of the Marblehead mariners made regional headlines. Newspapers in Boston, Massachusetts, and Hartford, Connecticut, reported that Graves had “arbitrarily treated” colonists in a port “mostly dependent on trade and navigation”. Two months before more famous events at Lexington and Concord, the newspapers maintained that this affair “must convince the American colonies, that had they not nobly resolved to maintain and defend their rights and liberties, the most insignificant officers of the crown would have been authorized and encouraged to insult them”. The Marblehead mariners were held up to the public as ideal patriots “determined to defend themselves against these unjustifiable proceedings”.Footnote ⁷⁴

Colonial American maritime laborers were even willing to kill to defend their individual freedoms. The crew of the American privateer Sampson fired a “volley of musketry” against a press gang from HMS Winchester in August 1760 near New York City, killing four British seamen.Footnote ⁷⁵ In the case of the 1769 Pitt Packet affair discussed above, the four Irish-American maritime laborers banded together and fought against the press gang until Corbet grabbed a harpoon, launched the weapon, and killed Panton, the naval officer. John Adams defended the mariners and got them acquitted on the basis of justifiable homicide in self-defense. Adams believed that British naval impressment raids were more powerful in raising Americans’ political consciousness regarding the tyranny of their government than the Boston Massacre, in which he defended the British soldiers. In Adams's words, “Panton and Corbet ought not to have been forgotten”. The Founding Father added, “Preston and his soldiers ought to have been forgotten sooner”.Footnote ⁷⁶

Impressment also contributed to various mid-to-late eighteenth-century mutinies. Indeed, resistance to impressment might be considered pre-emptive mutiny. Coerced military service enraged maritime laborers to the point that they were willing to violently overthrow the command of naval vessels at sea. In addition to the mutiny that took place near the Nore mentioned above, there were four separate occasions in which maritime laborers who had been captured by the British navy off the coast of Great Britain and confined below deck on tenders during transport to waiting warships rose up and violently seized control of the naval transport vessels.Footnote ⁷⁷ On two other occasions, crews of privateers near London mutinied upon learning that their captains were going to allow press gangs to board their vessels.Footnote ⁷⁸

Such militant behavior struck terror into the hearts of elites, who feared a world turned upside down. William Douglass, a Boston physician, witnessed the Knowles anti-impressment riot and expressed his concern to the public that “this Tumult might have increased to a general Insurrection”. He warned his readers that allowing the masses to overturn the social order, if only for a few days, posed the serious risk of mob rule or anarchy.Footnote ⁷⁹ In New York City, a local elite writing under the pseudonym “Anti-Licentiousness” responded to the anti-impressment activities of the Sons of Liberty in that port city in 1775 by warning the public,

The fear sailors prompted in elites makes clear the subversive nature of their actions. Just as ship captains feared mutiny and the loss of their vessels, those with social standing feared insurrections that threatened their place in the standing order of things.

Maritime radicalism also inspired revolution. In 1776, Thomas Jefferson listed naval impressment as one of the foremost grievances Americans had with the British government in the Declaration of Independence. The Founding Father wrote that the British government “has constrained our fellow Citizens”. These citizens had been “taken Captive on the high Seas”. Like the mariners at Marblehead, Massachusetts, they were forced to serve in the British navy at the start of the Revolutionary War in 1775, and they were made “to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands”.Footnote ⁸¹ Impressment had become a casus belli. Thomas Paine, the famous revolutionary firebrand, wrote in his widely read Common Sense that “the present mode of impressing men” represented a powerful, intuitive justification for revolution.Footnote ⁸²

In sum, maritime laborers were militantly willing to defend freedom against tyranny, the central struggle of what would become the age of revolution. The motivations behind this militancy involved radical ideas and practical experience directly related to life at sea. Workers were willing to kill, mutiny, intimidate, and destroy property to achieve their goals. Many of the struggles against impressment were victories. Sailors liberated their “Brother Tars”; they repelled and in some cases jailed press gangs, demonstrating for all to see that freedom could, and should, be won and defended. By this process anti-impressment collective actions had a disproportionate influence on the larger movement toward revolution in the American colonies and beyond. Workers’ militancy gave rise to the Declaration of Independence, not vice versa. Mariners thus helped to bring about the American Revolution and to inaugurate the world-shaking revolutionary era.