From the start privateers had been enveloped in a mist of romanticism

From the excellent Perilous Fight by Stephen Budiansky, an account of the naval aspects of the War of 1812. Page 286.

“American Privateers had been contributing no small part to the growing American strategy of trying to “make the war an evil” to the British classes that Madison believed most supported it; they had also been contributing mightily to the swelling population of American captives held in British prisons. And that was the trouble in a nutshell.

From the start privateers had been enveloped in a mist of romanticism; the Republicans lauded them as “the militia of the sea” and “our cheapest & best Navy,” and with the way they seemed to roll republican virtue, American entrepreneurialism, and authorized swashbuckling into one, they offered a story no newspaper editor could improve upon. Privateers were nominally subject to naval discipline and the laws of war and acted with the authority of the president—that was what distinguished them from pirates—but other than that were not under the orders of United States authorities and were free to make war on the enemy’s commerce whenever and wherever they saw fit. One of the first acts of Congress upon the declaration of war was to authorize the president to issue commissions to private armed vessels empowering their captains to “subdue, seize and take any armed or unarmed British vessel, public or private,” and hundreds were issued in the first months of the war. (Although the term “privateer” was often used to refer to any private armed vessel, a distinction was usually drawn between privateers in the strict sense, whose only purpose was raiding enemy shipping, and letters of marque, whose major purpose was to carry a cargo, employing their arms to fight their way through or capture any prizes they fortuitously happened upon along the way.) Any shipowner who was prepared to swear that he was an American citizen and produce two “sureties” willing to sign a bond of $5,000 as a pledge that the ship would obey the laws of war was welcome to try his fortune. From Baltimore, Salem, New York, Boston, and other ports large and small, private armed vessels set out to sea, many bearing self-consciously patriotic names or christened after American military figures of renown, past and present. The small seafaring town of Marblehead, north of Boston, supplied 120 men to the American navy but six times that number to the privateers that sailed from the port; in Baltimore some 6,000 seamen made their way onto the 122 privateers and letters of marque that set out from that city in the course of the war. Some were the usual Fell’s Point rough customers, some were seamen from other ports up and down the Chesapeake, but a good many were farm boys with visions of glory and easy money or other romantics or naïfs drawn to the short stints and adventure the job offered. The rapacious recruiting agents who scoured the portside for men to make up the crews were never very particular.