As part of our celebration of America at 250, we’ve started a weekly newsletter by historian Jonathan Horn. Learn what happened this week in American history, why it matters, and what else you should see and read in The Free Press and beyond. This week Jonathan looks at the history of privateering during the American Revolution. To get this newsletter in your inbox every week, sign up here. —The Editors
In 1859, Mary Custis Lee, the owner of the famed Arlington House in Virginia, published some letters by her late step-great-grandfather, George Washington. Not everyone approved of her editorial choices. Her husband, Colonel Robert E. Lee, believed she had erred by including correspondence showing that Washington had taken an ownership stake in a privateer vessel during the Revolutionary War. “I would prefer it had been omitted,” Lee wrote to Mary. “It may suit the mercantile taste of the East more than it does mine.”
Although it was too late for Mary to remove the offending letters, many chroniclers of the American Revolution have taken her husband’s advice and obscured the contributions of privateers. Perhaps the hesitancy to mention them is due to their being lumped in (usually unfairly) with pirates or perhaps to a discomfort with how these privately owned ships mixed patriotism with profits. With this week marking the 250th anniversary of the Continental Congress setting rules for privateering, it’s long past time to see these ships for what they were: the embodiment of the entrepreneurial spirit that would shape the new country.
In early 1776, the colonists learned that Parliament had passed a law forbidding trade with them and unleashing the world’s most powerful navy against their ships. Although the law would go into the history books as the Prohibitory Act, Continental Congress delegate John Adams favored calling it “an Act of Independency” because it broke any last ties that remained to the Mother Country. “It throws 13 colonies out of the royal protection . . . and makes us independent in spite of all our supplications and entreaties,” he wrote. “It may be fortunate that the Act of Independency should come from the British Parliament, rather than the American Congress.”
