A Private Matter

Excerpt

In October 1775, John Adams sat in Philadelphia, directing a rebellion. The British Empire commanded the most formidable fleet on the planet. The colonies possessed nothing resembling a navy, only a fleet of merchant vessels whose time at sea was limited to matters of commerce, a handful of schooners leased by George Washington, and some ships that, until then, had only been tasked with patrolling the waters off Rhode Island and Massachusetts. The colonists had not yet declared independence. And yet, Adams was already thinking like an American.

“What think you of an American Fleet,” Adams asked James Warren, paymaster of the American forces at Watertown. Adams knew the colonies would balk at bankrolling a navy, so he looked to the private sector. “A public Fleet as well as privateers,” he wrote, “might make prey enough of the Trade of our Enemies to make it worthwhile.” Adams argued that privateers — private ships manned by private citizens on behalf of the government — could sail at their own expense and take their pay from enemy prizes. He grasped the power of harnessing the private sector in service of the national interest.

Just a few months later, before the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the Continental Congress began issuing commissions for private ships of war and letters of marque and reprisal, authorizing private ship operators known as privateers to destroy enemy vessels and property. John Hancock later signed blank authorizations and dispatched them to the colonies. They came with exacting instructions: which enemy vessels could be seized, what cargo could be taken, which ports had jurisdiction to adjudicate prizes. Shipowners seeking commissions had to register their vessels and post bonds guaranteeing lawful conduct. Over the course of the Revolutionary War, Congress granted roughly 1,700 of these commissions. Nearly 800 privateer vessels went to sea, capturing or destroying some 2,300 British ships. Adjusted for inflation, the losses to British commerce were north of $300 million.

Max Meizlish is a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in the Center on Economic and Financial Power. He previously worked on sanctions licensing and enforcement at the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). He is on X @maxmeizlish.