From subject to citizen, or, At once everyone seemed to come alive : Hessian mercenaries gain autonomy and self define during the American Revolution, 1776-1783

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College

“The Socio-Cultural Impact of the War of American Independence on Liverpool, 1775-83.”

Much has been written about how the American Revolutionary War affected the British Isles. However, Liverpool (arguably the second city of empire) rarely features within such literature. This article redresses this oversight, and considers the socio-cultural impact of the war on the town. Liverpool will illustrate three key themes: first, that, contrary to some suggestions, eighteenth-century warfare did impact on British society; second, that both the localities and the central fiscal-military state influenced the agenda; third, that warfare generated division and unity. This third point has important implications for our understanding of British opinion, imperial ideology and national identity c.1775-83

Coercion, Cooperation, and Conflict along the Charleston Waterfront, 1739-1785: Navigating the Social Waters of an Atlantic Port City

This dissertation argues that the economic demands of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world made Charleston, South Carolina, a center of significant sailor, slave, and servant resistance, allowing the working people of the city's waterfront to permanently alter both the plantation slave system and the export economy of South Carolina. It explores the meanings and effects of resistance within the context of the waterfront, the South Carolina plantation economy, and the wider Atlantic World. Focusing on the period that began with the major slave rebellion along the Stono River in 1739 and culminated with the 1785 incorporation of Charleston, this dissertation relies on newspapers, legislative journals, court records, and the private correspondence and business papers of merchants and planters to reveal the daily activities of waterfront workers as they interacted with each other, and with their employers and masters. During these decades, while masters and employers dominated the plantation fields and urban households of South Carolina, the waterfront of Charleston and the waterways of South Carolina were the reserve of maritime workers. These environs muted the power of the white elite and greatly expanded the autonomy of workers. Due to their near-constant mobility and daily interactions with others who were mobile, maritime workers created an environment that allowed them to challenge and reset the boundaries of acceptable behavior in and out of the work environment.While the story of planter and merchant domination in South Carolina is well documented and understood, any story of slave, servant and free worker subversion of the plantation regime from within is incomplete without a consideration of the important role that maritime laborers played in this process. By highlighting the central role that maritime laborers played in challenging and reshaping local and regional social and economic systems in the eighteenth century, this work expands our understanding of Southern, African American, Atlantic, and maritime history

For Country, Liberty, and Money: Privateering and the Ideologies of the American Revolution

Along with service in the Continental Army and Navy and the various state militias, American patriots during the Revolutionary War had the option of sailing aboard privateers, private ships authorized to attack British commerce during the war. Where studies analyzing other military forces during the Revolution have been more nuanced, scholars that have looked at privateering have either focused on its strategic effectiveness during the conflict or merely written it off as a profit-driven phenomenon of maritime plunder. Privateering played a role in the course of the Revolution to a degree, but more importantly the practice was influenced by the ideological considerations that framed the Revolution itself—considerations that are ignored when privateering is seen through the eyes of the profit-narrative. While in part motivated by profit, privateering during the American War for Independence can only be fully understood when placed in the context of contemporary debates over liberty, republicanism, and identity. These debates stretched across the range of actors involved in privateering, from the sailors crewing privateer vessels to the merchants investing in privateer expeditions. This thesis will draw upon existing literature on privateering, Revolutionary ideology, and original analysis of primary source information including correspondence, government documents, and individual narratives to place privateering within the broader framework of the Revolutionary period. In doing so, it will add a more complex and multilayered approach to privateering to place that scholarship alongside other studies of military phenomena during the American Revolution

For Country, Liberty, and Money: Privateering and the Ideologies of the American Revolution

Along with service in the Continental Army and Navy and the various state militias, American patriots during the Revolutionary War had the option of sailing aboard privateers, private ships authorized to attack British commerce during the war. Where studies analyzing other military forces during the Revolution have been more nuanced, scholars that have looked at privateering have either focused on its strategic effectiveness during the conflict or merely written it off as a profit-driven phenomenon of maritime plunder. Privateering played a role in the course of the Revolution to a degree, but more importantly the practice was influenced by the ideological considerations that framed the Revolution itself—considerations that are ignored when privateering is seen through the eyes of the profit-narrative. While in part motivated by profit, privateering during the American War for Independence can only be fully understood when placed in the context of contemporary debates over liberty, republicanism, and identity. These debates stretched across the range of actors involved in privateering, from the sailors crewing privateer vessels to the merchants investing in privateer expeditions. This thesis will draw upon existing literature on privateering, Revolutionary ideology, and original analysis of primary source information including correspondence, government documents, and individual narratives to place privateering within the broader framework of the Revolutionary period. In doing so, it will add a more complex and multilayered approach to privateering to place that scholarship alongside other studies of military phenomena during the American Revolution

Mobility for the Cause: The Massachusetts State Navy and Inter-Service Mobility in the Revolutionary War

Master of ArtsDepartment of HistoryLouise A BreenServicemen during the American Revolution chose to participate in the conflict for many different reasons, and they frequently transitioned among the different types of services available to them on sea and land. This thesis, using the Massachusetts State Navy as a focal point, will examine the ways that revolutionary fighters and colonial authorities worked to balance the former’s contributions to the war effort in an environment where various official and quasi-official military organizations – privateering vessels, state navies, militias, the Continental Army and the Continental Navy – vied for recruits. The Massachusetts State Navy, dedicated to protecting Massachusetts’ coastline, securing necessary trade goods in the face of the British blockade, and raiding British shipping, provided one such option for military service, competing with other Patriot military organizations for recruits. Finding – and retaining – enough seamen was challenging for the Massachusetts State Navy because servicemen might choose to end their military service altogether at the end of an enlistment, move to a privateer or land-based military unit during their current term of service, or desert their posts. This thesis will assess the military careers of ten Patriot servicemen to illustrate the mobility between branches of service that these men and their counterparts often experienced. The thesis will examine the choices that various servicemen made when moving in or out of the Massachusetts State Navy, and the struggle Patriot military forces faced in retaining personnel. While some Patriot servicemen stayed in one military branch for their whole military career, many Patriot sailors and soldiers chose to move from one branch of service to another

Away to freedom : African American soldiers and the War of 1812

This research will address several key historical realities overlooked in reference to African Americans during the War of 1812. One, that African Americans played a significant role in the successes of United States military conflicts during the war. Two, an acknowledgement that African Americans used military service as a way to demonstrate their legitimacy as American citizens. Finally, military service proved to be a viable method of resistance to the institution of slavery during both the American Revolution and the War of 1812. I will pay particular attention to African Americans who escaped slavery to enlist in Six Companies of British Colonial Marines resettled in Trinidad upon conclusion of the war

The Border-seas of a New British Empire: Security and the British Atlantic Islands in the Age of the American Revolution

“The Border-seas of a New British Empire” explores the relationship between the rebellious thirteen colonies and the British Atlantic Islands of Bermuda and the Bahamas, and how the “on the ground” impact of the American Revolution explains not only why they did not join the rebellion—despite initial sympathy for the cause—but illustrates also the long-term political, cultural, commercial, and military transformation wrought by the war and its aftermath. To understand the British Atlantic islanders’ allegiances during the American Revolution and the impact of the islands’ loss on the United States, this dissertation employs Atlantic, borderlands and border-seas, and security interpretive methods of analysis. This work pays close attention to Bermudian and Bahamian colonial documents, trade records, newspaper reports, and correspondence to illuminate the pragmatic and fluid nature of the islanders’ loyalties during the conflict. Records from the Continental Congress, American patriot diplomats, British colonial administrators, and the Admiralty reveal how American and British officials came to understand the British Atlantic Islands as strategic assets in the post-revolutionary war Atlantic world. In 1775 and 1776, American patriots’ interactions with the neighboring British Atlantic Islands endeavored to solidify the revolutionary United States’ sovereignty and international security by pursuing plans to expand their territory beyond the North American mainland to avert future British military threats. The United States’ inability to wrest Bermuda and the Bahamas away from Britain through military force or diplomatic negotiations in 1783 constituted significant losses. Britain’s retention of both colonies enabled the Royal Navy and subversive British agents to challenge the nascent republic’s sovereignty in the western Atlantic and along its southeastern borderlands. British entrenchment at its Atlantic islands, and subsequent efforts to undermine American sovereignty, precipitated the War of 1812 and the United States military’s actions in Spanish Florida in 1819. “The Border-seas of a New British Empire” concludes that American patriots\u27 inability to annex Bermuda and the Bahamas forced the independent United States to fight a serious of skirmishes and wars between 1783 and 1819

Political, military and cultural impact of the North African muslims on the United States during the first years of the early republic : 1783-1807

The North African Barbary States (Morocco, Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli) and the United States of America maintained various relations in the Early Modern Times. After the War of Independence the relations became rather problematic between the two cultures. In the American mind, relations with the Barbary States have been generally associated with issues of commerce, piracy, captivity, tribute and war. The American merchants and sailors were captured several times by muslim corsairs after the Revolutionary War. The confederation, however, was powerless in foreign matters and there was a need to centralize the government. At the same time, in the early 1800s several sea narratives and captivity narratives were published about the Americans. This had an important impact on American literature. Furthermore, the first foreign war of the United States was against Tripoli between 1801-1805. Historians connect this war with the birth of the US Navy and Marine Corps. After the Tripolitan War, the Americans citizens met an illustrious muslim diplomata as well. Sidi Soliman Mellimelli, the Tunisian envoy was the first Muslim ambassador in the USA between 1805 and 1806