At no time during the American Revolution were the American Colonies able to match the British Royal Navy at sea. However, with only a modest navy the Continental Congress resorted to commissioning private citizens to arm vessels and attack British shipping for profit. The results put a positive tilt on the war in the American Colonies’ favor.
Enlisting Privateers: The practice began as early as the Siege of Boston in 1775, but picked up dramatically when the Continental Congress issued a proclamation calling for ordinary citizens to arm private vessels, put to sea, and attack British shipping. Prospective privateers were required to post a bond of up to 5,000 pounds sterling as surety that non-combative captives would not be mistreated, and the privateers would not intentionally attack non-enemy vessels. In return, the privateer could keep all of the cargo found on the ship without paying any tax to the Continental Government. The practice evolved into dividing the cashed in merchandise into two equal portions: one for the ship’s owners, and the other for the ship’s crewmembers. Within a few months as many as 100 New England privateers were under way harassing British shipping, primarily in the Caribbean where the process was more lucrative. In all the Continental Congress issued about 1,700 letters of marque during the war. Several states issued a few hundred more putting as many as 2,000 privateers to sea.
Profiteering With Privateers: Investors who speculated on the success of privateers were subject to making vast fortunes from the process. One such investor was William Bingham who was sent to the French Island of Martinique to improve relations with the French, and help drive a wedge between France and Britain over North American and Caribbean trade. While he was there, he worked to acquire weapons for the Continental Army, and he also dabbled extensively in privateering. Bingham’s portion of the sale of a single ship’s coffee and sugar cargo would bring him as much as $250,000 in today’s dollars. By investing in privateers, he built up a fortune that made him the richest person in America by 1780. The Caribbean proved to be a lucrative arena for the privateers. At one point in time some eighty-two captured British merchant ships were anchored off of Saint Pierre, Martinique, waiting for their cargo to be liquidated.
Wreaking Havoc in the Caribbean: The French, Spanish, and Dutch also profited enormously with privateering as they provided a market place to sell the cargoes of the captured British vessels. They further provided weapons and war materiel to the colonies using their safe Caribbean locations as the transfer points. When the French officially joined the American Revolution against the British in 1778, they needed to first consolidate and protect their Caribbean possessions before entering the war on the North American continent. The pressure on British merchant shipping became so intense, the Royal Navy was forced to divert a large portion of its resources currently blockading other American ports to the Caribbean. This in turn enabled the fledgling Continental Navy to capture more British shipping heading for North American ports. The consortium of privateers did not restrict their efforts to Western Hemisphere’s waters exclusively. They operated close to the British Isles even capturing vessels in the English Channel. The resulting havoc caused the prices of imported goods and marine insurance rates in Britain to rise dramatically.
Pirate Act of 1777: The success of privateering was distressing to British merchants who came to view these privateers as pirates, and helped persuade Parliament to enact the Pirate Act of 1777. This made captured privateers common criminals instead of prisoners of war, despite the fact that they were authorized by a government that was becoming recognized by other countries as the legitimate government of the American Colonies. The ensuing crackdown did a lot of damage to privateering. Several hundred privateers were either sunk or captured. The fate of captured crews was particularly cruel as they were forced into prison ships where 12,000 sailors, most of them privateers, died. They were typically left with the choice of either pledging loyalty to Britain, or dying in filth and disease on a prison ship. However, this law contributed to the anti-war movement in Britain that viewed these actions as violating British moral values in the treatment of enemy combatants, along with forced conscription of citizens into the Royal Navy. The Pirate Act’s deterrence raised the risk of privateering, but did not put a stop to it. Over the next two years since the passing of the act, privateering captured more than 300 British vessels in British waters.
Conclusions: Throughout the course of the war privateering captured as many as 2,300 British merchant ships, with the Continental Navy bringing in another 200. The failure to stop privateering was a major cause in Parliament’s decision to abandon the North American colonies. Although a lot was at stake in North America, it appeared to the British that even more was at stake in the Caribbean, and the risks of losing their possessions there to the French, Spanish, or Dutch became overarching.
Sources: History.com, How a Rogue Navy of Private Ships Helped Win the American Revolution, by Christopher Klein, June 20th, 2023.
History.com, What Role Did the Caribbean Play in the Revolutionary War? by Kedon Willis, September 10, 2023.
Wikipedia, William Bingham.