Seamen and other lewd and profligate persons

From the excellent Perilous Fight by Stephen Budiansky, an account of the naval aspects of the War of 1812. Page 50.

The Growing British harassment of American trade from 1804 on stirred American resentment, but what turned resentment into fury was a sudden increase in the longstanding and long-detested Royal Navy practice of seizing sailors from merchant ships and forcibly impressing them into British naval service. As the war with France created a surging demand for sailors to man the fleet, it became a daily occurrence for British warships to stop and board any passing American merchant vessels and pull off a few experienced seamen. That the British claimed the men it took were all British subjects did little to assuage American anger, especially since Britain arrogantly insisted that anyone born in Britain remained a British subject, forever owing allegiance to the British crown even if he had since become a naturalized American.

Yet even during the colonial years Americans had loathed and at times violently resisted impressment. In November 1747 a press gang from a British man-of-war had come ashore in Boston and rounded up sailors, shipbuilders’ apprentices, and laboring land men, triggering three days of rioting. An angry mob of “seamen and other lewd and profligate persons … arm’d with cutlasses and other weapons,” as Massachusetts’s colonial governor indignantly put it, chased British naval officers through the streets and forced its way into the first floor of the town hall when the officers holed up there to try to escape. The rioters broke into the council chambers and hurled brickbats at the governor and his council, dragged off an undersheriff guarding the governor’s house and beat him and threw him in the town’s stocks, and hauled up a navy barge and threatened to set it on fire in the governor’s courtyard. The governor tried to call out the militia to quell the disturbance, but the militiamen refused to obey the order to muster.

Declaring that he “did not think it consistent with the Honour of His Majesty’s Government to remain longer in the Midst of it,” the governor then ran for his life, taking shelter in Castle William, a stone fort manned by British army troops on one of the islands in the harbor. Eventually some of the impressed men were released in exchange for naval officers held hostage by the mob. Two decades later, in 1769, John Adams successfully defended an American sailor who killed the lieutenant of a British frigate when he tried to press him and other crewmen as their merchant ship was returning to Massachusetts after a voyage to Europe; the judge ruled it justifiable homicide.

Americans have always had a hard time being governed through coercion.