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

by Robert H. Patton

Overview

In this lively narrative history, Robert H. Patton, grandson of the World War II battlefield legend, tells a sweeping tale of courage, capitalism, naval warfare, and international political intrigue set on the high seas during the American Revolution. Patriot Pirates highlights the obscure but pivotal role played by colonial privateers in defeating Britain in the American Revolution. American privateering-essentially legalized piracy-began with a ragtag squadron of New England schooners in 1775. It quickly erupted into a massive seaborne insurgency involving thousands of money-mad patriots plundering Britain's maritime trade throughout Atlantic. Patton's extensive research brings to life the extraordinary adventures of privateers as they hammered the British economy, infuriated the Royal Navy, and humiliated the crown.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307390554
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/30/2009
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Robert H. Patton graduated from Brown University and Northwestern University. He is the author of The Pattons: A Personal History of an American Family. Patton lives with his wife and family in Darien, Connecticut.

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.”

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations     xi
Prologue     xiii
Introduction     xv
1     3
1775 Machias, Maine     20
2     23
1776 Boston, Massachusetts     44
3     47
1776 Providence, Rhode Island     78
4     81
1776 Brooklyn, New York     97
5     101
1778 Barbados, West Indies     110
6     113
1779 Penobscot, Maine     131
7     134
1779 New London, Connecticut     150
8     154
1780 Newfoundland, Canada     168
9     172
1782 Portsmouth, England     196
10     201
1782 Guadeloupe, West Indies     214
11     216
1782 Brooklyn, New York     229
12     233
1783 Providence, Rhode Island     241
Notes     245
Bibliography     275
Index     279

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Alan Sklar narrates with spirit and enthusiasm, bringing alive both the historic conflicts and the political atmosphere of the Revolution." —-AudioFile

Editorial Reviews

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

From the Publisher

…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

Evan Thomas

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.

Kirkus Reviews

Alan Sklar narrates with spirit and enthusiasm, bringing alive both the historic conflicts and the political atmosphere of the Revolution.

AudioFile

This is a well-written examination of an obscure aspect of American military history.”

Booklist

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

OCT/NOV 08 - AudioFile