Sailing Toward Freedom: Early American Merchant Mariners at Work and In Protest

Sailing Toward Freedom is about work and political protest in the decades leading up to the American Revolution. Specifically, I explore the work performed by merchant seamen and try to uncover why so many of them participated so often in the protests of the 1760s and 1770s. Early American merchant mariners viewed themselves as a breed apart. Of course, so did the wigged elites and the people who wrote the histories. It is just that their view of mariners as the dregs of society was in direct opposition to mariners’ view of themselves. Mariners understood liberty and freedom in unique ways that were linked to their working lives. Pride in their performance mastery at work led to a general confidence in their definitions of liberty. When the British and colonial elites challenged mariners’ complex ideas of liberty, merchant mariners responded collectively with action learned and honed at sea. My goal is to uncover the past of eighteenth-century maritime workers as men who worked with a great deal of autonomy and agency. The mariners were situated in an imperial world of conflict and competition. Mercantilism, as amorphous as it was, was the dominant economic system of the period. In the Atlantic World, merchant shipping moved people, goods, and ideas. In the American colonies this fact was nowhere more apparent than in New England. Zooming in from the scale of empire, to one region of that empire, and then, finally, to small groups of men at work and in protest allows us to see the connections. The values and norms, the meaning, men took from their work as mariners encouraged them to protest abuses of governmental power; they stood up to the Royal Navy, customs officials, and Acts of Parliament and left an impress on the world worth recovering.

David Riggs teaches history at Inver Hills Community College in Minnesota.