U.S. Navy Defense of the Merchant Ship Flag, 1831–60
The association between flag and national identity still extended clearly to the flag on board merchant ships at sea. When Sumatran pirates attacked the U.S. merchant ship Friendship at Kuala Batu in 1831, seizing the cargo and killing the crew, President Andrew Jackson ordered retaliation.13 The Potomac, disguised as a merchant ship, conducted a raid on the pirate haven in 1832, destroying five forts and slaughtering more than a hundred villagers.14 However, the chastisement seemed to have little effect. In August 1838 the U.S. merchant ship Eclipse was attacked in the same area, its master murdered, and the ship plundered of opium and some $18,000. Hearing of this second outrage, the commander of U.S. frigate Columbia sailed from Ceylon, bombarded Kuala Batu again, and destroyed another nearby town, Muka, in retaliation.15 The Kuala Batu raids of 1832 and 1838 illustrated that the merchant flag, like the flags of railroad entrepreneurs, explorers, ambassadors, and U.S. troops abroad, represented the United States and that the underlying honor code would continue to determine the appropriate response to affronts to the flag. Considering that the Sumatran pirates had no commerce that the United States could effectively interdict, no diplomatic channels through which protests could be made, and no regime from which restitution or reparations could be obtained, a direct reprisal with force was the only alternative.
U.S. merchant ships were often subject to blockades, harassment, and sometimes outright confiscation during the many rebellions, conflicting claims of jurisdiction, and civil conflicts in Latin America from 1831 to 1859, and the U.S. Navy responded to affronts to the merchant flag on just a few occasions in these years. Historian John H. Schroeder has detailed several such episodes. Among them was one that followed after Argentine officials seized the U.S. sealer Harriet in 1831 in the Falkland Islands for killing seals on the island shores. In retaliation, Capt. Silas Duncan, in command of the Navy’s Lexington, ordered his ship to the islands, where he spiked the guns of the fort and posted a notice that interference with U.S. sealers was an act of piracy. The episode led to a break in diplomatic relations between the United States and Argentina that lasted until 1844.16
In 1841, in an episode in what is now the Ivory Coast (Côte d’Ivoire), the U.S. merchant schooner Mary Carver was captured and its crew murdered. Finally, more than a year later, Commo. Matthew C. Perry took his antislavery squadron of four naval ships and anchored off the offending village of Berebee on December 13, 1843. When an attempt to negotiate turned into a brawl, Perry’s sailors killed the local king and burned the village.17
As noted by historian Brian Rouleau, as “representatives” of U.S. culture, early nineteenth-century merchant crew members far outnumbered officials and more polite citizens, like missionaries and government representatives such as consuls, ministerial staff, and naval officers. While Yankee tars perceived their trips to foreign ports as carrying the flag abroad, often their antics had adverse effects. Sometimes U.S. merchant seamen, sealers, and whalers in ports abroad created local incidents that had the making for international incidents. Minstrel shows by seamen, disputes over theft, fistfights and barroom or brothel brawls in many ports, and a full-scale riot by merchant sailors ashore in Hawaii in 1852 all led to objections or protests by local authorities. In some of the more violent cases, U.S. merchant sailors were tried before U.S. consular courts and condemned to local prison or work gangs. The cultural contacts were often insulting to the local peoples, sometimes very contentious, and now and then bloody.18
When episodes of conflict between U.S. seamen (naval or merchant) and peoples abroad reached the U.S. press, ethnic and racist preconceptions created a natural tendency to place blame on the “natives.” Even so, in terms of potential for armed conflict, the treatment of the U.S. flag on board merchant ships while at sea or in ports was far more crucial than the encounters of American tars with sailors from other nations or with local residents, whether primitive or modern. Journalists and statesmen were more likely to become engaged when the flag was challenged than when one or more American tars got in trouble ashore.
The Right of Search as Insult to the Flag
In a series of episodes involving the American merchant flag at sea in the 1840s and 1850s, Britain challenged U.S. national honor to the extent that it became a national concern. The protection the U.S. flag offered to merchant ships was tested when the British sought to interdict the continuing African slave trade from West Africa to Cuba, Santo Domingo, Puerto Rico, and Brazil in the 1840s. U.S.-owned and U.S.-flagged ships were active in this trade, and even Spanish slave traders, operating ships not regularly registered in any port, flew the U.S. flag in hopes of preventing British search and seizure of their vessels. The American response to the British challenge illustrated exactly how far the United States would go to protect its merchant flag at sea.
Howard Jones wrote, “Southerners protested British search tactics as an infringement of America’s freedom of the seas—a reminder of impressment—and called on the Washington government to defend national honor. Their sincerity is impossible to determine, but some Southern papers argued for maritime rights and national integrity.”19 The southerners’ outrage was also shared by politicians and journalists in the North, whose anti-British sentiment was aroused over both British treatment of the merchant ship flag on board suspected slave ships and the issue of the U.S. border with the British colony of New Brunswick.
At its height in 1841, the “right of search” controversy became one of several possible casus belli for a third war between Great Britain and the United States. After the issue had apparently been resolved with the signing of the Webster-Ashburton Treaty in 1842, it lay dormant for more than a decade, until it resurfaced in 1857 and 1858. Although the maritime issue was only one of several problems generating tensions between the United States and Britain, the controversy revealed that affronts to the flag and the honor due to the flag at sea continued to excite public, journalistic, and political outcry in the United States.
As noted earlier, the British exercise (and, in American eyes, misuse) of the right of search had been one of the reasons for the War of 1812. The British did not officially claim a right of search on a warship of a nation with which they were at peace, but even so, they did not officially apologize or make restitution for the violation of the principle in seizing deserters from the Chesapeake in 1807. The treaty that resolved the War of 1812 did not include a clause prohibiting the searching of ships in peacetime in the future. The British regarded such an explicit prohibition as unnecessary or redundant. Searching a foreign merchant ship in international waters during peacetime was a practice not even countenanced in British law unless the ship flew the flag of a nation that had entered a treaty allowing such a search. Therefore, the Royal Navy’s detention and examination of merchant ships that flew the U.S. flag on the high seas in the 1840s and 1850s was indeed an extraordinary departure from commonly accepted international practice and Britain’s own regular procedures.
Off the coast of West Africa and later in the West Indies, British warships did in fact stop and detain many merchant ships flying the U.S. flag; British officers then boarded the ships to inspect documentation to verify whether or not the ships were entitled to fly the flag. The British claimed that the detention, visitation, and searches of suspected slave ships were all done to determine proper documentation of the ships’ right to fly the U.S. flag.20
During the Napoleonic Wars, seamen from U.S. merchant ships were impressed under the wartime right of search, but in 1839–1840 the United States and Britain were at peace. Americans believed