Press gang, British caricature of 1780.
Throughout the 18th and into the early 19th century, impressment, the practice of seizing men to serve in the Royal Navy, was a major American grievance, contributing to the origin of both the American Revolution (1775–83) and the War of 1812 (1812–15). The violation of seamen’s rights and the concurrent damage done to American trade helped to unite many of the colonists and, later, the citizens of the young United States in taking up arms against Britain.
When the Royal Navy began its rapid and vast wartime expansion at the end of the 17th century, the ravages caused by impressment resulted in an immediate uproar in England’s American colonies. Seamen fought hard to avoid service in naval vessels. Wages were lower than on merchant ships and privateers, discipline was often harsher, the risk of death in battle or from disease higher, and enlistment terms substantially longer. The only way of getting seamen into such a service was through the employment of press gangs— groups of men authorized and willing to use all necessary violence to physically secure seamen. At the first sight of these gangs, sailors fled; if caught, they resisted strenuously. Once impressed, resistance frequently took the form of mass desertions. To the government these difficulties only confirmed the necessity of using force when recruiting manpower for its naval vessels. Seamen were not the only ones complaining about impressment—merchants claimed that it caused severe harm to their trade, as merchantmen bypassed English colonial ports for fear of having their crews pressed. This was an argument well-designed for maximum political impact in the mercantile era. As the whole point of the empire, and therefore of the Navy, was to encourage English trade, any impediment to that purpose had to be removed. Sustained petitioning by colonial merchants against impressment prompted Parliament to pass An Act for the Encouragement of Trade to America, also known as the Sixth of Anne, in 1708.
Throughout its long history, impressment never had clear legal sanction. Proponents argued that it rested on time-honored custom, on the necessity of defending the realm, and was at least implicitly sanctioned by statuary law. Some, however, claimed that it violated the rights of Englishmen as such rights had been enshrined in the Magna Carta, while others pointed out that King John, less than a year after promulgating the Great Charter in 1215, issued warrants for a major press, thus expressly, if again implicitly, excluding seafaring labor from its protections. The Sixth of Anne continued this tradition of legal ambiguity. It clearly prohibited the Navy from pressing in the colonies, but whether governors could continue to do so was left unstated. Equally unclear was whether the act was perpetual or designed to last only until the conclusion of peace. After the end of the War of Spanish Succession in 1714, naval commanders were told the act had lapsed, but colonial governors continued to receive instructions referring to it.
With the renewed outbreak of war in 1739, desertion rates shot up, the Navy impressed, and colonial merchants once again complained. In response, Parliament passed another act, but it forbade impressment only in the West Indian sugar islands. North Americans reacted with fury, rioting against press gangs, legally harassing them, and, in a few cases, burning their boats. The conflict grew particularly intense in Boston. In 1746, a press gang killed two men and, in 1747, a hot press (that is, one ignoring all protective certificates against impressment) ordered by Comm. Charles Knowles of HMS Lark touched off an urban insurrection that was only put down several days later with the aid of the militia. After watching the multiethnic working class of Boston’s waterfront riot against British impressment, Samuel Adams was one of the first to recognize the beginning of a revolutionary movement that had moved from laying claim to the rights of Englishmen to securing the rights of all people.
The conflict abated when the War of Austrian Succession drew to a close in 1748, but returned with full force at the beginning of the Seven Years’ War in 1756. Violent clashes between press gangs and seamen erupted throughout the British Empire—nowhere more so than in the port cities of North America. Although peace returned in 1763, the Navy was now charged with the renewed enforcement of the Navigation Acts and therefore continued pressing. Many of those Americans who had considered the practice a necessary evil during wartime now came to see it as one more instance of British tyranny. In 1768, Bostonians reacted to a press by a gang from HMS Romney by burning a customs boat. A year later a court in the same city quickly ruled the killing of a press ganger to be justifiable homicide before John Adams had the chance to argue the illegality of impressment in North America. The imposition of the Stamp Act in 1765 had fused the seamen’s struggle with the growing American resistance to imperial administration, injecting the latter with a decades-long experience of violently resisting attempts by the British state to infringe on their rights, as men, to life and liberty. Up to and throughout the years of the Revolution, seamen remained at the forefront of the battle against Britain.
When Britain mobilized its Navy in 1793 for the final showdown with France, impressment once again led to tensions between the now-independent United States and its former mother country. If American resistance had formerly revolved around the rights of Englishmen and then around those of man, now the rights of citizens of a sovereign nation were at stake. Britain, short of manpower, refused to accept that anyone born before independence was anything but a British subject and claimed, with some justification, that her sailors were deserting by the thousands to join the booming American merchant marine. Hence the Royal Navy proceeded to stop and search American merchant vessels, pressing anyone who could plausibly be considered British. Already in 1792, Thomas Jefferson had adamantly maintained that “the simplest rule will be, that the vessel being American, shall be evidence that the seamen on board her are such” (Selement, 409). Lacking sufficient firepower to back up such a simple rule, Americans spent much futile diplomatic energy over the next 15 years trying to reach a compromise with Britain, during which time the Royal Navy continued to press thousands of men with impunity.
After the British frigate Leopard attacked the American frigate Chesapeake in 1807 to retake four deserters, killing three Americans and wounding 18 in the process, relations between the two countries broke down. A period of economic warfare began as Britain issued its Orders in Council, restricting neutral trade with France. Napoleon, with his Berlin and Milan decrees, tried to stop trade with Britain, and the United States first passed the Embargo Act of 1807 and then the Non-Intercourse Act of 1809, trying to put pressure on the European belligerents, but mostly hurting her own economy. Eventually, the United States declared war on Britain in 1812, citing impressment as a major cause. When the United States concluded a peace treaty in 1815, however, no mention was made of the practice. In reality, British meddling on the frontier and interference with maritime trade had played a larger role than impressment in driving the United States into its first declared war.
With the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, impressment was slowly phased out by the Royal Navy, never again to return. For well over a century it had made a decisive contribution to defining the relationship between England and North America. Its role in fomenting revolutionary anger along North America’s Atlantic seaboard has been well established by historians, as has its importance in souring relations between the young United States and Britain. One key question that remains to be systematically studied is the place of efforts to end impressment in the context of Atlantic-wide struggles against all forms of forced labor, the most important, of course, American slavery.
Bibliography Clark, Dora Mae. “The Impressment of Seamen in the American Colonies.” In Essays in Colonial History Presented to Charles McLean Andrews by His Students. Edited by J. Franklin Jameson. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1966. Hutchinson, J. R. The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1914. Linebaugh, Peter, and Marcus Rediker. The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000. Selement, George. “Impressment & the American Merchant Marine, 1782–1812.” Mariner’s Mirror 59, no. 4 (1973): 409–18.
Further Reading Bromley, J. S. The Manning of the Royal Navy: Selected Public Pamphlets, 1693–1873. Greenwich: Navy Records Society, 1976. Lemisch, Jesse. Jack Tar v. John Bull: The Role of New York’s Seamen in Precipitating the Revolution. New York: Garland, 1997. Usher, Roland G., Jr. “Royal Navy Impressment During the American Revolution.” The Mississippi Historical Review 37, no. 4 (1951): 673–88. Zimmermann, James Fulton. Impressment of American Seamen. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat, 1925.
