Impressment

Throughout the 18th and into the early 19th century, impressment, the practice of seizing men to serve in the Royal Navy, was a major American grievance, contributing to the origin of both the American Revolution (1775–83) and the War of 1812 (1812–15). The violation of seamen's rights and the concurrent damage done to American trade helped to unite many of the colonists and, later, the citizens of the young United States in taking up arms against Britain.

When the Royal Navy began its rapid and vast wartime expansion at the end of the 17th century, the ravages caused by impressment resulted in an immediate uproar in England's American colonies. Seamen fought hard to avoid service in naval vessels. Wages were lower than on merchant ships and privateers, discipline was often harsher, the risk of death in battle or from disease higher, and enlistment terms substantially longer. The only way of getting seamen into such a service was through the employment of press gangs—groups of men authorized and willing to use all necessary violence to physically secure seamen. At the first sight of these gangs, sailors fled; if caught, they resisted strenuously. Once impressed, resistance frequently took the form of mass desertions. To the government these difficulties only confirmed the necessity of using force when recruiting manpower for its naval vessels. Seamen were not the only ones complaining about impressment—merchants claimed that it caused severe harm to their trade, as merchantmen bypassed English colonial ports for fear of having their crews pressed. This was an argument well-designed for maximum political impact in the mercantile era. As the whole point of the empire, and therefore of the Navy, was to encourage English trade, any impediment to that purpose had to be removed. Sustained petitioning by colonial merchants against impressment prompted Parliament to pass An Act for the Encouragement of Trade to America, also known as the Sixth of Anne, in 1708.

Throughout its long history, impressment never had clear legal sanction. Proponents argued that it rested on time-honored custom, on the necessity of defending the realm, and was at least implicitly sanctioned by statuary law. Some, however, claimed that it violated the rights of Englishmen as such rights had been enshrined in the Magna Carta, while others pointed out that King John, less than a year after promulgating the Great Charter in 1215, issued warrants for a major press, thus expressly, if again implicitly, excluding seafaring labor from its protections. The Sixth of Anne continued this tradition of legal ambiguity. It clearly prohibited the Navy from pressing in the colonies, but whether governors could continue to do so was left unstated. Equally unclear was whether the act was perpetual or designed to last only until the conclusion of peace. After the end of the War of Spanish Succession in 1714, naval commanders were told the act had lapsed, but colonial governors continued to receive instructions referring to it.

With the renewed outbreak of war in 1739, desertion rates shot up, the Navy impressed, and colonial merchants once again complained. In response, Parliament passed another act, but it forbade impressment only in the West Indian sugar islands. North Americans reacted with fury, rioting against press gangs, legally harassing them, and, in a few cases, burning their boats. The conflict grew particularly intense in Boston. In 1746, a press gang killed two men and, in 1747, a hot press (that is, one ignoring all protective certificates against impressment) ordered by Comm. Charles Knowles of HMS Lark touched off an urban [Page 358]insurrection that was only put down several days later with the aid of the militia. After watching the multiethnic working class of Boston's waterfront riot against British impressment, Samuel Adams was one of the first to recognize the beginning of a revolutionary movement that had moved from laying claim to the rights of Englishmen to securing the rights of all people.

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