Patriot Pirates: The Privateer War for Freedom and Fortune in the American Revolution

by Robert H. Patton Narrated by Alan Sklar

Overview

They were legalized pirates empowered by the Continental Congress to raid and plunder, at their own considerable risk, as much enemy trade as they could successfully haul back to America's shores. They played a decisive role in America's struggle for independence and later turned their seafaring talents to the slave trade, revealing the conflict between enterprise and morality central to American history.



In Patriot Pirates, Robert H. Patton, the grandson of the battlefield genius of World War II, writes how privateering engaged all levels of Revolutionary life, from the dockyards to the assembly halls; how it gave rise to wild speculation in purchased shares in privateer ventures, enabling sailors to make more money in a month than they might earn in a year; and how privateering created fortunes that survive to this day.



As one naval historian wrote, "The great battles of the American Revolution were fought on land, but independence was won at sea."



Patton writes how, in addition to its strategic and economic importance, privateering played a large political role in the Revolution. For example, Benjamin Franklin, from his diplomatic post in Paris, secretly encouraged skippers to sell their captured goods in French ports-a calculated effort on Franklin's part to break the neutrality agreements between France and Britain, bring the two countries to blows, and take the pressure off American fighters.



This is a sweeping tale of maritime rebel-entrepreneurs bent on personal profit and national freedom.

Editorial Reviews

Evan Thomas

…to a degree conveniently overlooked today, profit was an animating motive of the early patriots, or so argues Robert Patton in his entertaining and enlightening new book…Patton, the grandson of the legendary World War II general, has dug deep into Revolutionary War-era records and writes with verve. His organization in Patriot Pirates is, like that of the privateer fleet, a little scattershot, but he has a great eye for ironic detail.
—The Washington Post

Publishers Weekly

Patton (The Pattons: A Personal History of an American Family) turns his attention to an often overlooked aspect of the Revolutionary War: maritime privateering, or legalized piracy. Patton is careful to distinguish the mixed motives of these "patriot pirates," for often there was less patriotism than simple greed. Nevertheless, their work fulfilled George Washington's strategic aim to win the war by exhausting Britain into giving up the struggle. In what Patton terms "a massive seaborne insurgency" that dwarfed the efforts of the colonists' small navy, thousands of privateers nettled British shipping, sometimes gaining vast fortunes. Privateering also turned into a handy political issue when Benjamin Franklin, the American representative in France, succeeded in persuading his hosts to allow Yankee skippers to sell their booty in French ports-a breach of the country's neutrality that aggravated diplomatic tensions, as Franklin knew it would, and helped cement Paris's commitment to American independence. Patton gives an absorbing exhumation of an undersung subject that will be of particular interest to Revolution buffs. (May 20)

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Kirkus Reviews

An illuminating look at an underappreciated chapter of the Revolutionary War: the daring, faintly disreputable, privateer war on British maritime interests. As Robert Morris, financier to the American Revolution, remarked of the British, "They have much more property to lose than we have." Accordingly, and following wartime conventions of the era, the Continental Congress commissioned citizen sailors to attack British shipping. For their towering self-interest and for the drain they took on scarce resources necessary to the Continental Navy, John Paul Jones detested them. For carrying the war to the British, Washington, Franklin and John Adams, from a polite remove, cheered them on. For the staggering potential profit, the nation's leading financiers, Philadelphia's Morris, the notorious Browns of Providence and an entirely new generation of entrepreneurs and speculators rushed to fund them. Patton (Life Between Wars, 1997, etc.) tells marvelous sea stories about privateers Jeremiah O'Brien, John Manley, James Mugford, Gustavus Conyngham and about the Royal Navy, charged with the impossible task of patrolling a 1,000 miles of coastline with only 50 warships to protect against the depredations of these "legal" pirates. Though the privateers had much to gain, if captured they were denied all rights typically accorded prisoners of war and held under the terms of Parliament's controversial "Pirate Act of 1777," untried and without the possibility of exchange in wretched prison ships. Patton also subtly examines the curious interplay between patriotic purpose and economic gain, and the always uneasy marriage between public service and private speculation. Through his sensitive treatment ofMorris and the Browns-and especially of Silas Deane, the colonies' agent in France-and of Nathanael Greene, Washington's favorite general, the author demonstrates how, from the beginning, rampant capitalism compromised the virtue of the infant republic and how privateering specifically accustomed the country to a variety of enduring, sometimes dubious, financial practices. A pleasing mixture of high-seas adventure and shrewd analysis.

From the Publisher

Entertaining and enlightening. . . . [Patton] has dug deep into Revolutionary War-era records and writes with verve.”–The Washington Post Book World“The British had always accused us of being pirates and thieves. Robert Patton’s fascinating account of privateering during the American Revolution nicely proves their point.”–Winston Groom“Wonderfully told.” –The Hartford Courant“Intriguing. . . . Lively and instructive. . . . Patriot Pirates is not ‘revisionist’ or ‘alternative’ history. What it offers is neglected history, the study of a crucial theater of the Revolution that has been overlooked, perhaps because it lacks the mythic cutouts we like to champion on the Fourth of July.”–The Washington Times“Having, as an Englishman, been brought up on Hornblower and Nelson, I was fascinated to read Robert Patton’s Patriot Pirates and to discover what I never knew about the American Hornblowers–the privateers of the Revolutionary War and their extraordinary adventures. For all those who love history and the sea, this is soul-stirring stuff, as good as reading a Patrick O’Brian novel, except that every word is true.”–Michael Korda, author of Ulysses S. Grant and Ike“A fascinating account that would make an exciting television series. . . . [Patton] has done great work to bring this story to life.”–Proceedings Magazine (U.S. Naval Institute)“Patton gives an absorbing exhumation of an undersung subject that will be of particular interest to Revolution buffs.”–Publishers Weekly“In this deeply considered book, based on overlooked primary sources, Robert H. Patton illuminates the raucous, illicit origins of our American democracy. The privateers of the Revolution operated in a twilit world of idealism and greed, launching the new nation on the double edge that would thereafter define it. Many familiar names–the Browns of Providence, the Cabots and Derbys of Salem, the Binghams and Franklins of Philadelphia–appear here in unfamiliar, less admirable ways. With neither rancor nor illusions, Patriot Pirates reminds us again of the mystery and unpredictability of true history.”–Stephen Fox, author of Wolf of the Deep: Raphael Semmes and the Notorious Confederate Raider CSS Alabama“A fascinating case study in free enterprise. . . . Patton’s book is an eye-opener”–The Georgetown Record (Massachusetts)“A well-written examination of an obscure aspect of American military history.”–Booklist“Illuminating. . . . A pleasing mixture of high-seas adventure and shrewd analysis.”–Kirkus Reviews

OCT/NOV 08 - AudioFile

The privateers were "an instant navy" for the Americans, but the British saw the crews that attacked their ships for both profit and patriotism as pirates. For both sides, they turned out to be an important part of the Colonies' fight against England. Alan Sklar narrates with spirit and enthusiasm, bringing alive both the historic conflicts and the political atmosphere of the Revolution. Sklar and author Robert H. Patton solidly convey the atmosphere in which privateering developed and flourished, gradually winning over the support of the English public and skeptics at home. The story of these businesslike patriots is intriguing as it casts light on a little-told part of American history. J.A.S. © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170688937
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	06/03/2008
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

PROLOGUE

Beset by a sudden squall in April 1775, a small British sloop, “very much torn to pieces by the gale of wind,” ducked into the sheltered bay off Beverly, Massachusetts, sometime after dark. It proved a false refuge, for the next morning two fishermen armed with pistols rowed out from the town wharf and claimed the beleaguered vessel as a war prize. After its crew of five men and two women surrendered without protest, the event went down as Beverly’s first capture of enemy loot–a single barrel each of flour, tobacco, rum, and pork.

Citizens excitedly kept watch on the bay in anticipation of more prey. Their vigilance was rewarded when His Majesty’s ship Nautilus ran aground while pursuing Hannah, an armed schooner recently commissioned by George Washington to hijack enemy transports supplying British troops in Boston, twenty-five miles south.

People flocked to the beach and began shooting at the stranded warship “very badly many times” with household muskets and a motley battery of antiquated cannon. “’Tis luck they fired so high,” Nautilus’s captain wrote afterward. Even so, one of his seamen lost a leg in the barrage and another was killed before the vessel rose off the sand on the incoming tide and fled to open water. Ashore, men had body parts “blowed off” by misfires of gunpowder and by accidentally shooting one another.

The mad fervor of the region’s saltwater colonials was well known to British authorities. There’d been incidents of government supply crews abandoning ship down one side as marauders in converted fishing boats clambered up the other side wielding clubs and cutlasses. In response, the Royal Navy’s commander in Boston, Admiral Samuel Graves, had directed his captains to “burn, sink, and destroy” suspicious vessels and to “lay waste and destroy every town or place from whence pirates are fitted out.”

The spiraling violence made everyone cry foul. Americans cursed “Graves and his harpies.” The British retorted that “a thief might with as much truth and reason complain of the cruelty of a man who should knock him down for robbing him!”

British leaders told themselves “those vermin” would be easily crushed, “especially when their loose discipline is considered.” But an unsigned letter from a naval officer stationed in Boston and published that winter in a London newspaper gave a darker assessment. “They are bold enough to dare and do anything,” he wrote of the American sea raiders. “Whatever other vices they may have, cowardice is not one of them.”

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