Rough Waters: Sovereignty and the American Merchant Flag

TITLES IN THE SERIES

With Commodore Perry to Japan: The Journal of William Speiden Jr., 1852–1855

Whips to Walls: Naval Discipline from Flogging to Progressive-Era Reform at Portsmouth Prison

Crisis in the Mediterranean: Naval Competition and Great Power Politics, 1904–1914

Home Squadron: The U.S. Navy on the North Atlantic Station

The Sailor’s Homer: The Life and Times of Richard McKenna, Author of The Sand Pebbles

New Perspectives on Maritime History and Nautical Archaeology

James C. Bradford and Gene A. Smith, editors

Rivers, seas, oceans, and lakes have provided food and transportation for man since the beginning of time. As avenues of communication they link the peoples of the world, continuing to the present to transport more commodities and trade goods than all other methods of conveyance combined. The New Perspectives on Maritime History and Nautical Archaeology series is devoted to exploring the significance of the earth’s waterways while providing lively and important books that cover the spectrum of maritime history and nautical archaeology broadly defined. The series includes works that focus on the role of canals, rivers, lakes, and oceans in history; on the economic, military, and political use of those waters; on the exploration of waters and their secrets by seafarers, archeologists, oceanographers, and other scientists; and upon the people, communities, and industries that support maritime endeavors. Limited by neither geography nor time, volumes in the series contribute to the overall understanding of maritime history and can be read with profit by both general readers and specialists alike.

This book has been brought to publication with the generous assistance of Marguerite and Gerry Lenfest.

NAVAL INSTITUTE PRESS

291 Wood Road

Annapolis, MD 21402

© 2017 by Rodney Carlisle

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Carlisle, Rodney P., author.

Title: Rough waters: sovereignty and the American merchant flag / Rodney P. Carlisle with Bradford Smith.

Description: Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press, [2017] | Series: New perspectives on maritime history and nautical archaeology | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016030922 (print) | LCCN 2016045418 (ebook) | ISBN 9781682470879 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Ships—Registration and transfer—United States—History. | Flags of convenience—United States—History. | Ship transfers to foreign registry—United States—History. | Merchant marine—United States—History. | BISAC: HISTORY / Military / Naval.

Classification: LCC HE589.U5 C37 2017 (print) | LCC HE589.U5 (ebook) | DDC 387.50973—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016030922

Print editions meet the requirements of ANSI/NISO z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

252423222120191817987654321

First printing

Book design and composition: Alcorn Publication Design

Contents

List of Tables

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Introduction: The Flight from Flag to Flag

1. The Maritime Code Duello

2. Right of Search, 1812–58

3. Flagging-Out in the U.S. Civil War

4. The Flag Insulted, 1865–95

5. The New American Empire and the Muscat Dhows Decision

6. Attacks on the American Merchant Flag as Casus Belli in World War I

7. Danzig, the Missing Link in Flags of Convenience

8. Panama, 1919–39

9. Neutrality and War

10. Sovereignty for Sale

11. Challenges Ashore and at Sea, 1955–80

12. The Marshall Islands Register

13. Second Registers and Port-State Control

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Tables

1. Rise and Decline of the American Merchant Fleet in Foreign Trade, 1830–90

2. American Ship Incidents, 1886–95

3. U.S. Shipping Lines, 1899–1914

4. Major Tanker Oil Spills, 1967–79

5. Foreign Registry of Ships over 1,000 Gross Registered Tons in Eight Major Ship-Owning Countries

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank the following people for specific and general suggestions: Paul Adamthwaite, George Billy, Jim Bradford, Elizabeth De Sombre, Paul Fontenoy, John Hattendorf, Jamie Rife, Gene Allen Smith, and Josh Smith. Bruce Dennis provided professional help in locating documents in the British National Archives. Joseph Gibbs tracked Omani records in the library of the American University of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. Thanks are also due to the anonymous peer reviewers at the journal of the North American Society of Oceanic History, Northern Mariner, for their many helpful suggestions and to the editor of the journal, Roger Sarty, for permission to reproduce the elements of chapters 2–8, 13, and 14 that previously appeared in the journal. Sarty’s encouragement and fine critiques were invaluable. Discussions with participants at North American Society of Oceanic History conferences led to refinement of my thinking and many helpful leads. I am particularly grateful to my wife, Loretta Carlisle, for her patience and support.

Abbreviations

INTRODUCTION

The Flight from Flag to Flag

The flag of a nation is a powerful symbol, and protection of the flag is no mere ritual. When the flag is physically attacked, the people and the government naturally respond. Thus, the story of the merchant fleet’s flag is a crucial and central part of the history of a nation’s engagement abroad, in peace and war.

The United States has a rich history of engagement with the sea. The thirteen British colonies in North America that declared their independence in 1776 all had seaports on the Atlantic coast or on waterways that led to the Atlantic Ocean. Some of the grievances that led to the Declaration of Independence were maritime in nature—particularly the Sugar Act of 1764 and the Tea Act of 1773. With the exception of some of the Indian wars, all of America’s wars engaged the American Navy, and indeed, many of the wars that the United States fought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were caused by incidents involving attacks on U.S. naval or merchant shipping or bombardment of a fortification in a harbor. In the twenty-first century, the U.S. Navy remains the strongest in the world, but its flagged merchant fleet is small, ranking at twenty-second in the world in registered tonnage.¹

The United States’ sensitivity to the reception of its merchant flag in foreign ports and on the high seas is deeply related to the nation’s sense of its identity. In the eighteenth-century world in which the United States declared its sovereignty, acceptance of and respect for U.S.-flagged ships were both essential to national identity. If the flag were not respected, foreign trade by American merchants in U.S. ships would have been nearly impossible. Recognition of the merchant flag was a matter not only of practical business or legal national status but also—and perhaps most important—of national honor. The principle of freedom of the seas, which held that ships of all nations had equal rights to travel on the high seas (out of the territorial waters of any nation), had been articulated in 1609 by Hugo Grotius in Mare Liberum. U.S. statesmen and journalists were well aware of this principle in the early years of the republic and understood that failure to recognize the right of ships under the U.S. flag to sail the open seas would be a failure to recognize the United States as a nation.²

Flags, of course, are highly emotional symbols, not only in the United States but around the world. Often the presence of a national flag on board a merchant ship is a source of pride, but if a ship is attacked, disrespected, or discriminated against, its flag can be a source of dismay.

When the United States entered into treaties of commerce and navigation and exchanged consuls, ministers, and ambassadors with other nations, recognition of the nation took legal, economic, and diplomatic form. But the symbol of that recognition was respect and honor shown to the flag itself, both on ships and at the diplomatic outposts of the nation abroad. Later in the nineteenth century, Americans developed their version of the cult of the flag, a phenomenon found in Europe and Asia in the same period. As the cult flourished in the United States, it was replete with ceremonial practices and a pledge of allegiance to the flag; the symbolism of the stars and stripes became even more deeply embedded in the American psyche.

From the earliest days of the American republic, the treatment of U.S.-flagged merchant ships abroad was considered a matter of honor. The code of honor among ships was similar to the code of honor among gentlemen that led to hundreds of duels in that era. Throughout the nineteenth century, ships flying the U.S. flag frequently, in the course of legitimate (and sometimes illegitimate) business, drew the nation into conflict with other nations—sometimes into war and more often into maritime incidents that only threatened to lead to larger armed conflict. While the honor code among gentlemen declined in the United States in the nineteenth century and nearly vanished after the Civil War, the rhetoric of national honor still shaped public discussion of the treatment of the national flag, whether it was flying on a naval ship, on a merchant ship, or at an embassy or consulate in a foreign city. The issue took on far greater significance in 1917, when German U-boats sank U.S. merchant ships that prominently displayed the flag, dragging the United States into World War I. Following that war, the public and Congress, disillusioned with Woodrow Wilson’s lofty and largely unrealized war goals, were content to see the transfer of some U.S.-owned shipping to foreign flags, under which the ships could be operated at lower cost and without drawing the nation into another military conflict in defense of the flag’s honor.

When war broke out in Europe again in September 1939, the United States was able to remain neutral for twenty-seven months precisely because much U.S.-owned shipping had rapidly shifted to foreign flags; when some of those foreign-flagged ships carrying petroleum and other cargo to the Allies were sunk, the American flag was not endangered, and national honor did not require U.S. involvement in the war. The handful of episodes directly involving U.S.-flagged merchant ships did not generate the crisis that had arisen in 1917. The nation entered the war only after Japan’s direct attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, an attack characterized by President Franklin Roosevelt as dastardly and perceived by the public as a stab in the back. The flag and the nation had been struck, not on merchant ships but on Navy ships, a naval base, and U.S. airfields without warning, even as peace talks supposedly proceeded in Washington. During U.S. participation in World War II, official U.S. policy further endorsed the use of the Panamanian and other flags for some U.S.-owned or -controlled ships.

Aside from diplomatic and military considerations, the straightforward business and profit lessons U.S. ship-owning corporations learned in the period of neutrality (1939–1941) and during World War II led them in the 1950s and 1960s to greatly expand their flight from the flag, primarily to the flags of Panama and then Liberia. Operating a ship with a foreign crew under a foreign flag was simply cheaper. Despite the protests of American merchant mariners and their unions, the courts ruled that U.S. law did not apply to labor conditions on board American-owned, foreign-flagged ships; instead, the laws of the flag state applied. In these decisions, the courts reflected an obscure 1905 ruling of the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague regarding the grant of the French flag to slave-trading dhows in the Indian Ocean operating out of the sultanate of Muscat. The flight from the flag and the flight from U.S. labor law have become firmly and legally established.

In the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century, the decline in the number of ships flying the U.S. flag remained a concern to American mariners who found employment opportunities greatly reduced; cruise ships, tankers, and freighters, owned by American corporations or American investors in foreign corporations, fly foreign flags and hire very few, if any, Americans. The dismay at the decline of the U.S.-flagged merchant fleet is shared by many Americans who take pride in the national maritime heritage, not from any personal economic motive but as part of their sense of national identity.

The attraction of operation under foreign flags in the late twentieth century produced a new generation of flags of convenience that drew shipowners from the major maritime nations of Europe as well as from the United States. Consequently, in the early twenty-first century, the face of the world’s merchant shipping is entirely altered, with a large percentage of ships now registered under flags of microstates around the world.

From time to time in recent decades, one of the few merchant ships flying the U.S. flag has set off an international incident, requiring a short display of U.S. military force that echoes the honor code of the earliest days of the republic. However, since 1939 the United States has avoided becoming involved in war to defend freedom of the seas and the honor of the American flag because of the flight of American-owned shipping from flag to flag. This work unfolds that tale.

1

The Maritime Code Duello

Naval officers in the United States in the first two decades of the nation’s independence were drawn from the self-defined gentleman class. Speaking of gentlemen in southern folkways, David Hackett Fischer noted that status could be shattered by loss of honor. An honorable gentleman never lied, cheated, stole, or betrayed his family or friends. However, when a gentleman was accused of such behavior, he was obliged to defend his honor. The honor code was a widespread phenomenon, influencing public discourse not only in the South but also in the North. Among historians, Bertram Wyatt-Brown, in A Warring Nation , described the honor code’s national power in the early republic. The language, rhetoric, and values of honor shaped national discourse on matters of international relations and the personal conduct of prominent figures. ¹

Among several recent studies of the honor code’s influence is Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic by Joanne Freeman. As Freeman points out, Far more than directives for negotiating a duel, the code of honor was a way of life. She continues, The code of honor did more than channel and monitor political conflict; it formed the very infrastructure of national politics, providing a governing logic and weapons of war.²

Paul A. Gilje, in Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights in the War of 1812, sees the British challenge to national honor and the way it evoked the principles of the code duello as forming the basis for the rhetoric of political leaders in the era. He argues further that the fundamental causes of the War of 1812 were British challenges to national honor, especially affronts against American shipping and merchant sailors. Hence, Gilje shows, the motto of the war, Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights, perfectly captured the central importance of defending national honor.³

In the early days of the republic, most naval and political leaders lived by the underlying values of honor. Few New Englanders participated in duels, although one, Congressman Jonathan Cilley of Maine, felt obliged to respond to a personal challenge in 1838. His death in that duel led to widespread efforts (largely unsuccessful) to suppress the practice of dueling in the years before the Civil War.⁴ As Joanne Freeman points out, Northerners were as well versed in the code as southerners; it was in their utilization of violence that they differed most noticeably. . . . In a sense northerners and southerners spoke different dialects of the language of honor, balancing the conflicting value systems of honor, religion, and the law in regionally distinct ways.⁵

Naval officers, southern or northern, were conscious of a gentleman’s code that applied both in private life and in naval warfare.⁶ Among naval officers, honorable behavior on board a ship or ashore was so well understood that its principles did not need to be articulated in a formal statement. Historians can glean the maritime application of the gentleman’s code from contemporary and historical accounts of events of naval warfare, which suggest that naval officers were expected to behave at sea in accord with many of the same principles that governed their personal lives. By twenty-first-century standards, the values of the gentleman’s code were not only redolent of class arrogance but also deeply rooted in sexist and racist attitudes. Because these values are so scorned in the modern era, it is difficult to recognize how natural and coherent they were at the time and how they shaped discourse between individuals as well as discussions of national politics, international commerce, foreign affairs, naval engagements, and military preparedness. The early status of the maritime flag for merchant ships was intimately connected to these broader systems of the honor code and the rhetoric of honor.

Honor was associated with the flag even though there was no specific design for either the national flag or the maritime flag flown from ships in the period before the 1820s. Several alternate designs of the flag were in common usage simultaneously, although all had either thirteen or fifteen red and white stripes and a blue field in the upper left corner (the canton) with varying numbers of white stars. However, even though different ships might have flown different versions of the flag in these decades, at a distance and viewed through a telescope of the era, the white-starred blue canton and the red and white stripes identified the naval or commercial ship as from the United States. Highly revered as a symbol of the nation’s honor, the flags in use on board ships continued to vary even after Congress enacted a law in 1818 specifying the official design with twenty stars.⁷

Quite broadly, the issue of national honor was frequently invoked when people discussed the treatment of the nation and its flag abroad. On an international level, the mutually understood honor code was shared by officers in Britain, France, Spain, and, to a great extent, other navies of the period.⁸

Maritime Code Duello Standards and Expectations

The honor code applied to warships in very conscious and explicit ways, in effect regulating encounters between naval ships and the way naval battles were fought in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The expectations and standards of the personal honor code extended to a wide variety of ship-handling and battle etiquette issues, not only for U.S. officers but also for the officers of naval ships of Britain, France, and Spain in the period.

The codes were not always explicitly stated. As in encounters between gentlemen, one ship might offer a challenge to another. This could result from an insult to the flag or to a ship. When at war, the master of a naval ship would sometimes directly issue a challenge to an equivalent enemy ship.⁹ A duel between warships was explicitly characterized as two equally matched ships confronting each other—frigate to frigate, for example.¹⁰ Sometimes, the British Admiralty forbade its officers from entering single ship-on-ship frigate battles on the grounds that some foreign frigates were more equivalent to a Royal Navy line-of-battle ship (in modern parlance, a battleship), and thus, to avoid a ship-on-ship duel was no reflection on honor.¹¹

Not only were one-on-one ship engagements rhetorically dealt with as duels, but they were sometimes specifically set up in much the same fashion as gentleman-to-gentleman duels, with a location specified and rules of engagement agreed between combatants, often ensuring no third ship become involved that would make the battle unequal. At sea and on shore, it was understood that the weapons should be equivalent. Thus, there was great emphasis at the time and in later literature on the issue of equivalency of ship size, speed, manning, and weight of guns. Frequently, at-sea engagements were noted as occurring within pistol shot distance.

The victory of a lesser-armed ship against a better-equipped ship represented an unequal contest; such a victory demonstrated manly qualities: seamanship, bravery, and superior fortitude at the guns. Skills, character, bravery, and honor were expected. These qualities of the individual were also attributed racially to the seamen, and the vocabulary of honor was often employed when discussing military engagements. A reverse victory (of a stronger ship against a weaker) should not have been fought, but the weaker could simply have evaded the encounter or, if trapped, should have surrendered with honor; for a stronger ship to continue to fire on a weaker ship without providing a chance for honorable surrender was a violation of the code and was dastardly.

On the high seas, ships were due a set of ritualized courtesies, such as greetings and the showing of flags; outrages or affronts could come in the form of the inappropriate use of a naval or armed coastal patrol. Apologies could take the form of firing gun salutes. Gentlemen on board a ship (officers and midshipmen) were expected to demonstrate courage by standing up when being fired on. The lower orders (especially passengers who were nongentlemen or women and children) were expected to lie down, go below, or take cover. Someone claiming to be a gentleman would lose that status if he took cover; a midshipman (a youth) could be forgiven lying down because of his age. Officers and petty officers who took cover would be court-martialed.¹²

U.S. naval officers were particularly prone to engage in duels in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Naval historian Charles Oscar Paullin wrote, During the first fifty years of the Old Navy, 1798–1848, the mortality of naval officers resulting from duels was two-thirds that resulting from naval wars.¹³

In addition to using the same language at sea as was used to talk about honor on land, seamen followed practices in maritime engagements that very directly reflected the personal code of honor: insults were avenged, challenges were issued, to refuse a challenge was dastardly, the stuff one was made of (e.g., whether one was red-blooded and courageous) was revealed in battle or in a duel, ceasing resistance after being wounded (overwhelmingly damaged in ship battle) was expected in order to preserve life.

An unarmed ship that was fired on was being treated as of lower social standing than the ship that fired; the firing on an unarmed U.S. merchant ship by a ship crewed or controlled by people perceived as racially or politically inferior was therefore an outrage. U.S. officers often regarded Spanish Americans as inferior; Spaniards themselves were sometimes so regarded. U.S. seamen and naval personnel did not perceive British, French, and other northern Europeans as ethnically inferior, but all people of color were seen as lower caste and, therefore, any action by them against a U.S. ship was an outrage. The notorious capture and retention as forced labor of U.S. crews by the corsairs of the Barbary States were perhaps the most famous such outrages of the era. Americans perceived the North Africans as primitive, sordid, and cruel. The term outrage is often encountered in reference to episodes at sea in this and later periods.¹⁴

Historical treatments written later in the nineteenth century (and some written in the twentieth century) reflected many of the underlying values of the maritime honor code: naval officers were expected to be cool under fire, equivalence of ships was considered in evaluating the performance of officers, and officers and men desired a fair fight. Mines (known then as torpedoes) were regarded as infernal machines. Because they provided no opportunity for a fair fight, they were despised by naval officers.¹⁵

That naval officers, drawn from the gentleman class, would carry the values of the honor code to their conduct as officers on board ships is perfectly understandable. Their definitions of proper personal behavior, particularly in situations involving mortal risk, would naturally carry over to conduct in warfare or in situations in which well-armed potential adversaries met in the lawless reaches of the high seas. Exchanges of identification; careful determination of whether a strange ship was a friend, foe, or neutral; and determination of whether that ship should display deference were all regulated by the mutually understood rhetoric and rules of gentlemanly intercourse. Because these values were shared by officers of the English, French, Spanish, and other navies, most encounters between ships had a degree of predictability. Identification by flag and hailing within earshot were crucial parts of ship-on-ship behavior at sea.

For these reasons, the naval honor code had certain very practical functions, not only for the United States but for all the navies of the period. In the sailing ship era, when armed warships of different nations encountered each other at sea, the rituals and practices embodied in the honor code actually prevented unnecessary loss of life. The understanding that a lesser-armed ship (such as a frigate) could honorably surrender without an extended exchange of gunfire to a heavier and better-armed line-of-battle ship meant that the surrendering officers and men could live; later, they might be released under a prisoner exchange or cartel, or peace treaty, and live to fight another day. In strict terms of labor and warfighting capability, this aspect of the naval honor code had a humane, practical function. The practices spelled out in documents of the era were all quite suited to the demands of independently sailing naval and merchant ships in a time before rapid radio communication between ship and shore or ship and ship.

So, stripped of the emotional, symbolic, and rhetorical appeals to underlying psychological values of the era, the U.S. flag on board naval ships was recognized and respected internationally for practical economic and military reasons. Similar principles carried over to merchant shipping and the merchant flag, as did the need to prevent the violation of those standards on U.S. naval and merchant ships.

The Honor Code in Diplomacy and International Affairs

From the earliest days of the republic, the application of the honor code and its language to maritime and international affairs became embodied in treaties, public pronouncements, founding documents, political disputation, and presidential statements. When the United States obtained its independence, almost its only contact with the other nations of the world was by sea.¹⁶ If U.S. merchant ships were recognized and treated at sea with the same respect as ships from other independent nations, that respect would represent the world’s acceptance of the United States’ equal status as a sovereign state. If U.S. merchant ships and seamen were not extended the rights and status on the high seas that went with sovereignty, that disrespect would represent both a failure to treat the United States as a sovereign nation and a failure to accord the U.S. ships the freedom of the seas. In territorial waters, diplomatic recognition and respect were not the only concerns; treatment of ships engaged in mundane practices—such as entering and leaving harbors, discharging and receiving cargoes, paying port and harbor charges, and being subject to quarantine in times of plague or contagion—was also important. Recognition of and respect for the U.S. merchant flag was both a matter of honor and a matter of practical importance.

These practical matters were regulated by amity, commerce, and navigation (ACN) treaties, which defined exactly how U.S. honor was to be protected and respected. Such treaties, later called friendship, commerce, and navigation (FCN) treaties, were signed by the United States and dozens of other countries.¹⁷ One of the first of these treaties, which served at least as a partial model for later such treaties, was Jay’s Treaty with Great Britain, signed in 1794. Jay’s Treaty used vocabulary common in the honor code.

The ACN treaties of the era all reflect similar language, and all were intended to record other nations’ obligation to treat U.S. merchant ships with the proper expected courtesies and procedures, under the principle of freedom of the seas propounded by Grotius. The use of terms such as word of honor, respect, insult, and outrages, and the courtesy that small boats be used when a crew approached another ship to avoid giving offense—all suggest the degree to which the code of honor carried over to the relations between states on the high seas and in ports. The language was not merely a colorful reminder of the internationally understood honor code or a common maritime rhetoric; it created a set of practical, functioning arrangements designed to facilitate commerce and to ensure that U.S. merchant ships were treated equally with those of other recognized nations.

The honor code and the maritime side of it, with its focus on the flag as the emblem of national identity, thus applied to the merchant flag. A series of clashes between the United States and foreign powers over the treatment of U.S. merchant ships abroad characterized the diplomatic issues of the first few decades of the nation’s existence. The Quasi War with France of 1798–1799, the Barbary Wars of 1803–1808, and the War of 1812 all grew out (wholly or in part) of the failure of foreign nations to extend to U.S. merchant and naval ships the respect or deference consistent with the treatment by one gentleman of the prerogatives and status of another gentleman or the treatment of one recognized sovereign state by another.¹⁸

Notably, the rhetoric used in discussing the merchant marine and naval skirmishes that engendered these military clashes was used not only by the gentleman class of the South but also by journalists, politicians, and public assemblies found throughout the fledgling nation. In that era, gentlemen frequently made it clear that they did not regard any journalist as a gentleman; when insulted in an editorial, the proper response was to horsewhip or thrash the offender. Nevertheless, the rhetoric did not simply reflect the elite that dominated the Navy. Nor was it simply a carryover of that language from personal and naval circles to diplomacy. Rather, the rhetoric and the set of values it represented were part and parcel of all national discourse over international affairs.

Honor Code Rhetoric in International Affairs

The use of this language by people other than naval officers, including northern civilians and political leaders of various persuasions, was common throughout the period from the ratification of the Constitution to the War of 1812. Selections from the vast public literature and journalistic comment of the period concerned with maritime issues and foreign policy reflect this theme.

Guadeloupe Incident, 1786

In 1786, during the period of the Articles of Confederation, eighteen U.S. merchant ship masters signed a petition complaining of indignities suffered in Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe. The complaints indicated a rising demand for a more effective national identity embodied in a national constitution and a national government. In part, the ship masters said, The little respect that is paid to the American flag and the repeated insults which subjects of the United States meet with in foreign ports, must convince the good people of this continent, that it is absolutely necessary we should invest Congress with a power to regulate our commerce and to support our dignity as free and independent states; without which, we must soon become a reproach and bye-word among the nations.¹⁹

Ratification of the Constitution

A review of the 1787–1788 debates over ratification of the U.S. Constitution reveals numerous discussions regarding the establishment of a navy. Antinavalists argued that a navy would impose a burden on an essentially agricultural and isolated people, that it would favor New England and other coastal regions