Citizen Sailors: Becoming American in the Age of Revolution

by Nathan Perl-Rosenthal

In the decades after the United States formally declared its independence in 1776, Americans struggled to gain recognition of their new republic and their rights as citizens. None had to fight harder than the nation’s seamen, whose labor took them far from home and deep into the Atlantic world. Citizen Sailors tells the story of how their efforts to become American at sea in the midst of war and revolution created the first national, racially inclusive model of United States citizenship.Nathan Perl-Rosenthal immerses us in sailors’ pursuit of safe passage through the ocean world during the turbulent age of revolution. Challenged by British press-gangs and French privateersmen, who considered them Britons and rejected their citizenship claims, American seamen demanded that the U.S. government take action to protect them. In response, federal leaders created a system of national identification documents for sailors and issued them to tens of thousands of mariners of all races—nearly a century before such credentials came into wider use.Citizenship for American sailors was strikingly ahead of its it marked the federal government’s most extensive foray into defining the boundaries of national belonging until the Civil War era, and the government’s most explicit recognition of black Americans’ equal membership as well. This remarkable system succeeded in safeguarding seafarers, but it fell victim to rising racism and nativism after 1815. Not until the twentieth century would the United States again embrace such an inclusive vision of American nationhood.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

408 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 12, 2015

Reviews

[Cindy Vallar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nowadays, we take nationality for granted. But nationality was a relatively new concept in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Before the American Revolution, if you were born in England or France, then you remained an English or French subject for your entire life regardless of where you lived. In fact, your financial status, religion, ethnicity, and family lineage mattered more so than your allegiance to a particular country did. Then the upstart colonials upended this definition when they rebelled and became the United States of America. Perl-Rosenthal’s study focuses on sailors and their role in shaping and helping to define what it meant to be a citizen of the United States, because seamen were in the forefront of establishing one’s identity and citizenship long before most people had to do so. In the process he shows how the documents from this time period eventually evolved into passports and identity cards we use today.

This question of nationality might seem straightforward, but at the time it was not. Americans and Britons spoke English, and there wasn’t as significant a difference in our accents as there is today. Language no longer allowed seamen to differentiate between friend and foe. Complicating this issue was that some people, like Nathaniel Fanning, could claim to be either American or French. Also, since war was frequent during this time period, ships and sailors of one nation sometimes claimed to be those of another nation. So how could authorities, such as the British and French governments, distinguish who truly was an American and who was not? Perl-Rosenthal answers this question through historical documents and by looking at some of the sailors and government officials, such as Edward Livingston and David Lennox, involved in defining nationality. Burgess demonstrates that seamen of all races participated in this, for the prejudices and restrictions of later decades hadn’t yet invaded the maritime world. He also discusses in detail how American seamen could prove their citizenship, and who had the right to determine who was a citizen of a particular country.

Maps, illustrations, end notes, and an index accompany the information presented in this book. Citizen Sailors is of particular interest to students of privateering, for the men who served on these ships were at the forefront of defining nationality due to the prize law in force during the Age of Revolution. Anyone interested in how early sailors thought of themselves as Americans and how other countries viewed mariners as citizens of the United States will also want to read this book. Perl-Rosenthal clearly shows the difficulties in proving one’s citizenship and the precarious methods and legislation other nations implemented to do so. Citizen Sailors is a fascinating look into a topic often overlooked or glossed over in history classes, and yet it has now become such an important part of our everyday lives.

[Anne Morddel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an excellent study of how the Seaman's Protection Certificates issued to American merchant seamen came to be used as the first citizenship document of the modern era. From my own research, it certainly is clear that the seamen themselves viewed their SPCs as proof of citizenship but that, because of the many forgeries, others did not. Perl-Rosenthal makes his case superbly but, unfortunately, limits his sources to American and British material. To be sure, the SPCs were intended to prevent the British from impressing American seamen, so the material from those two nations is the most plentiful, but to follow the argument that the SPCs became proof of citizenship, a look at how other countries accepted the document or not would have been useful.