Patriot Pirates (13 page)

Langdon would seem to have been the sort of staunch patriot the prickly Jones could respect (“he does not improve on acquaintance,” an associate once wrote of the captain). But it wasn’t long before Jones was insulting him as someone “who was bred in a shop and hath been about a voyage or two at sea under a nurse,” which was to say, as someone incompetent to build a warship. Jones’s scorn aimed at more than the agent’s inexperience. He hated privateers for the competition they posed for ships and men, and Langdon, himself long critical of the enterprise, had become an avid investor.

Still stymied in obtaining cannon for his frigate
Raleigh
(“the most humiliating circumstance of my life”), Langdon had collected an assortment of smaller guns for
Ranger
, personally laying out $40,000 at a time when two-thirds of “my little fortune” was frozen overseas in prewar deals with British merchants. Five months earlier he’d turned down an offer from Robert Morris to invest together in a New Hampshire privateer, “not that I’ve the least doubt but much might be made in this way.” But with Congress leaving him stranded with outstanding expenses, he’d been forced to change his tune. He bankrolled several privateers and asked Bingham to receive their prizes in Martinique and “dispose of them and their cargoes to the greatest advantage.”

Jones was furious that his civilian superior in Portsmouth had succumbed to privateering’s lure. Fighting fire with fire, he composed a recruiting poster for
Ranger
’s crew that emphasized “the possibility to make their fortunes” alongside the chance “to distinguish themselves in the
GLORIOUS CAUSE
of their country.”

The selective capitalization showed where his sentiments tilted, but even he wasn’t immune to self-interest. At least one contemporary deemed Jones outright hypocritical in that regard. “Under the guise of despising money he is aiming and grasping all he can.” This was too harsh. But still, having made $3,000 from prizes seized last fall, he used the period of delay in outfitting
Ranger
to research how best to invest it.

Jones and Robert Morris had corresponded frequently in the past about Marine Committee matters. But in a letter written that summer, Jones buried within his usual litany of suggestions and complaints a nervous request for advice. After first reminding the financier of an earlier “kind offer of interesting yourself in my favor when any private enterprise should be adopted,” he proposed that “we get a small squadron together.” He didn’t mean a squadron of government ships. “It would give me pleasure to bear a second or a third part in any private enterprise under the conduct of gentlemen of superior abilities from whom I could receive instruction and improvement.”

Since privateering was notoriously disreputable, Jones went on, “I must rely on you to guard me from future connections with illiterate men of incapacity.” No sooner had he floated the idea, however, than his rectitude kicked in and he hedged, “But I have already gone too far. I leave my present and future destination to the gentlemen at whose disposal I am and whose orders shall govern my actions as servant of the public.”

Jones’s “future destination” was Europe. He vowed “to draw off the enemy’s attention by attacking their defenseless places,” a plan fulfilled the following spring in his daring hit-and-run raid on the port of Whitehaven, which panicked the British people by bringing the war to English soil. However, as to his prediction that he “would do infinite damage to their shipping,” that goal was nearer approached by the swarms of privateers he despised and in whose enterprise he never wound up investing. It was glory over gold for Jones. He would have liked to get both, of course. When he died at age forty-five in France nine years after the war, he pretty much had neither.

As for Langdon, he finally got his beloved frigate
Raleigh
armed and launched in late 1777. A year later the vessel surrendered under enemy fire, was rechristened HMS
Raleigh
by its captors, and subsequently participated in the British capture of Charleston, South Carolina, in the summer of 1780.

1776

B
ROOKLYN,
N
EW
Y
ORK

Whitby
, a decrepit transport that once carried livestock for the British Army, dropped anchor in Wallabout Bay on the Brooklyn side of the East River in October 1776. Its hull was dismasted and stripped of its fittings, portholes were barred, and a ten-foot barrier, notched for the muskets of British guardsmen, was erected between the main deck and the elevated quarterdeck at the stern.

Six weeks later the governor of Connecticut received a letter from Timothy Parker, a navy lieutenant imprisoned aboard
Whitby
along with 250 other Americans. It detailed their “miserable circumstances” with a desperate decorum that, to read it today, gives an impression that things weren’t really so bad. Two-thirds rations, being “crowded promiscuously together without distinction or respect to person, office, or color,” and the necessity of “tubs and buckets” to do “what nature requires” seem unequal to the “lingering inevitable death” the lieutenant foretold for himself and his companions.

The matter alarmed George Washington, however. Having long believed that the enemy’s treatment of American prisoners “ought to be exactly observed upon our part to those we take prisoners from them,” he now warned his British counterpart, General Howe, that unless conditions on
Whitby
improved, the Continentals “will, if forced to it, most assuredly retaliate.” But conditions didn’t improve. Overcrowding led to illness and malnutrition. British bitterness over the prolonged war led to willful cruelty toward prisoners and indifference to their suffering; that most were civilian “pirates” contributed to the vindictiveness of their treatment. Even Lieutenant Parker distanced himself from those pariahs, stressing that he’d been taken “in the service of our country and cannot be deemed a common privateer.”

British captives taken at sea generally complained of the Americans’ rude behavior rather than of any systematic abuse. Vastly outnumbering Continental and state warships, privateers did most of the capturing. Applications for commission required them to pledge a bond as high as $10,000 to guarantee “the greatest humanity and tenderness” toward captives. This didn’t prevent occasional “cruel usage” (a phrase connoting anything from being cursed to being flogged), but there are few recorded claims of mortal mistreatment at the hands of privateers, and prosecutions of violations that might have resulted in bond forfeitures were rare.

Theft of captives’ personal property was common. Some skippers offered reimbursement in Continental dollars, itself a potential scam since captives usually spent it; whereupon, faced with no job prospects in an alien port, “they must starve unless they enter on board privateers which are always ready to receive them.”

Constantly short of experienced crew, privateers no less than the Royal Navy cajoled prisoners to switch sides and join the ship’s company. Americans by and large resisted this pressure (“a man had better curse mother and father and be killed at once than live such a life,” said one). British seamen, especially those off the merchant ships, flipped more easily, though there were many instances when they banded together to take control of a privateer once the dispatch of prize crews thinned the number of colonials on board down to a vulnerable few.

Detaining a prize’s officers served a legal purpose; at settlement trials their testimony helped establish the legality of certain captures. Yet in most cases privateers considered captives mere baggage and freed them at the first opportunity. This blasé disregard, critics argued, reduced America’s leverage to force exchanges for prisoners held in British jails.

William Bingham shared that opinion. As his Martinique privateers grew increasingly successful, the island’s prison filled with enemy seamen. A British emissary alleged they “were starving and dying each meal there,” but Bingham (“styling himself the agent of the American Congress,” clucked the emissary) declared that none would be released “until the Americans should be discharged by the English from their prisons.” The same objective later motivated Franklin’s involvement with privateers in Europe. Though other officials were in it for the money, “The prisoners to exchange for Americans are all the advantage I have for my trouble,” he wrote

In Britain, Forton and Mill prisons received more than four hundred seamen in the first months after opening in April 1777. Eventually that number reached three thousand, with inmates, almost all New England privateersmen, ranging in age from nine to sixty. Getting there in the holds of warships was often the worst part of the ordeal. British humanitarians called conditions below deck “barbarous” and described disembarking colonials as resembling “persons in a hot bath, panting, sweating, and fainting for want of air.” Once the prisoners arrived at Forton or Mill, the Commission for Sick and Hurt Seamen, which administered the facilities, strove to provide decent food, clothing, and medical care. In five years only a hundred men died.

To be consigned to the hulks of Wallabout Bay, however, posed a different fate entirely. In one “obstinate engagement” between a Salem privateer,
Jack
, and an enemy brigantine late in the war, the privateer’s first officer (his captain and many mates had died in a point-blank volley after the two ships tangled in one another’s rigging) took a boarder’s bayonet through his thigh, which then “entered the carriage of a bow gun, where I was fastened.” Even so, by exhorting his men to remember “the sufferings of the prison ship,” he got them to fight for two more hours before capitulating.

Whitby
was gone by then, set afire in 1777 by prisoners who preferred immolation to imprisonment. But seven other vessels took its place, including
Jersey
, a converted three-deck battleship that housed one thousand prisoners. If
Jack
’s survivors wound up there, odds were three in four that they never left. Fewer than a thousand were exchanged off the prison ships during the war. Some twelve thousand died, bearing out Timothy Parker’s dark prediction to his governor.

Most of the dead were privateersmen. Their bodies were thrown overboard or buried by fellow inmates in the sand banks edging the bay. In the decades since, bones unearthed during construction of the Brooklyn Navy Yard were interred in a large crypt at nearby Fort Greene. A 148-foot Martyrs Monument was erected above it in 1908. Designed by famed architect Stanford White, its tower featured a lighted beacon and an elevator to carry visitors up for a sweeping view of New York. After the 1930s it fell into disrepair due to lack of funds and community interest.

Five

I flatter myself I am not dependant upon the state of Rhode Island for either my character or consequence in life.

—Nathanael Greene to John Brown, September
1778

T
he esteem that developed between George Washington and Nathanael Greene derived mostly from shared defeat. Resiliency and perseverance were their only solace after repeated setbacks in the summer and fall of 1776. In advising the commander in chief that September, “’Tis our business to study to avoid any considerable misfortune,” Greene was telling Washington nothing he didn’t know. Washington always had sought to injure the enemy without being drawn into conventional battle against a vastly superior force. The only question was whether to launch selective tactical strikes, dig in and make a stand, or pull back lest his army be overrun and the rebellion lost at a stroke.

Anticipating that the enemy, having quit Boston in March for temporary refuge in Halifax, would strike New York next, Washington had moved his army to Long Island in expectation of an attack from the east. Instead, a British task force landed on Staten Island in July, then crossed New York Bay and flanked the American positions in Brooklyn.

Washington was slow to recognize the threat of his army’s entrapment on the far side of the East River away from retreat routes into the mainland. His last-minute evacuation on August 29, brilliantly executed in small boats at night, followed a stinging defeat in the Battle of Long Island in which his conduct had been “inept and indecisive,” according to the historian David McCullough.

Washington then vacillated on the matter of abandoning New York altogether. Greene, incapacitated by illness during the recent fighting, argued for withdrawal in order to spare the army for future battle, a course Washington chose only after needlessly losing more men and equipment in inconclusive skirmishes that fall.

But their roles reversed in November when Greene persuaded Washington to leave behind a heavily armed garrison at Fort Washington overlooking the Hudson River across from New Jersey. Despite Greene’s assurance of its impregnability, the fort fell to an overwhelming assault at a loss of 146 cannon and 54 men killed, 100 wounded, and more than 2,800 captured, two-thirds of whom died in the next eighteen months aboard prison ships anchored in Brooklyn’s Wallabout Bay.

Both commanders were roundly criticized. Members of Congress and some fellow officers hinted that they should be fired. But Washington retained Greene despite the Fort Washington debacle, and Greene reciprocated with an admiring loyalty whose fundamental view ultimately mirrored history’s. “His Excellency George Washington never appeared to so much advantage as in the hour of distress.”

Soon they would taste success against the Hessians at Trenton and Cornwallis’s redcoats at Princeton. Countering the British advance into Pennsylvania later in 1777, Greene, under Washington’s direction, would lead troops in battles at Brandywine and Germantown in which the Continentals were driven from the field only after inflicting casualties in such numbers the British leadership was rattled, French confidence in the American rebellion encouraged, and the patriots’ spirit renewed.

But when the army settled at Valley Forge in the winter of 1777–78, logistical problems exacerbated by what Greene called “neglect of some and the designs of others” turned a relatively mild winter into a crucible of cold and hunger. “Our troops are naked. We have been upon the eve of starving and the army of mutinying. Our horses are dying by dozens every day for the want of forage, and men getting sickly in the huts.”

Greene had excelled at managing logistics during the siege of Boston, and his placement of storage depots in advance of the army’s retreat through New Jersey had indicated a talent for contingency planning. So while still at Valley Forge, where almost a quarter of his men would die, Washington tapped him to revamp the army’s supply system as quartermaster general.

Though Greene’s brothers and his cousin Griffin were “very anxious I should accept,” he consented only because “His Excellency presses it upon me exceedingly.” He was unhappy to be removed from battle’s “line of splendor” and wrote a colleague, “All of you will be immortalizing yourselves in the golden pages of history while I am confined to a series of drudgery to pave the way for it.” As a concession, Congress allowed him periodically to couple his quartermaster duties with field command.

The preceding quartermaster general and his staff had shared a 5 percent commission on all transactions. Greene, fearing to appear greedy, asked in letters to Washington and Congress to serve only at his current salary as a major general. But to entice into public service the two businessmen he wanted as aides—John Cox, a Philadelphia merchant with extensive area connections, and Charles Pettit, who would keep accounts and manage the cash—Congress allotted the three men a 1 percent commission to be divided among them.

Greene’s two year tenure in the department saw a dramatic improvement in the army’s supply situation. Though subsequent winters were harsher, the agonies of Valley Forge weren’t repeated on anywhere near the same scale, and his system of field depots contributed to the tenacity of Washington’s pursuit of British forces evacuating Philadelphia for New York in the summer of 1778. Yet he detested the job and asked several times to resign. Like every procurement official, he was constantly harassed for payment of government bills. At one point, more than three months passed before his pleas to Congress for money were answered—and these were in letters sent from Pennsylvania and New Jersey rather than, as from William Bingham and Silas Deane, across the Atlantic Ocean.

His dislike of his duties (“humiliating to my military pride”) made him defensive of his accomplishments. “It is confessed by everybody that the army could not have got from Valley Forge at the time they did had it not been for the extraordinary exertions we made.” One aspect of his work worried him, however. It was making him rich.

In a replay of the solicitations that came to him as he’d risen in rank earlier in the war, Greene’s appointment as quartermaster general brought a rain of business offers. His relatives were first in line. To dodge “impositions” for trading across state lines, Griffin Greene asked to move his merchandise on military wagons, whose loads weren’t subject to such fees. He asked also for a right of first refusal on military contracts provided it was “consistent with your honor.”

Merchants from throughout the colonies sought similar deals, each of which promised commissions for the general. “Nothing shall ever induce me to depart from the line of honor and truth in any business committed to my care,” he wrote his brother Jacob—but lest others not interpret matters in the same light, “You must not let people see my letters as they contain sentiments that I would not wish made public.”

Questioned by Washington about the wisdom of doing business with family, Greene explained that the army’s desperate need for supplies forced him to cast a wide net. “I have given extensive orders almost without limitation for the purchase of these articles.” Persuaded that pragmatism and expediency “save the public millions of dollars,” Washington’s concern was assuaged—another instance, Greene wrote, of the “partiality that His Excellency General Washington has always shown to my advice.”

The young general was less sanguine in private. He nervously asked Jacob to “write me the public sentiments respecting transactions in the quartermaster’s department and how the public views me.” And Griffin’s pushiness in exploiting their connection forced Nathanael to temper, “for fear you should mistake my intentions,” a letter of hearty recommendation to the deputy quartermaster in Baltimore. Do not engage Griffin in any way “which will interfere in the least degree with the duties of your office or effect its reputation,” he wrote. More specifically, “Neither must you lend Mr. Greene any public monies.”

He had cause for worry. In purchasing the army’s food, clothing, ammunition, arms, and medical supplies, building its camps, and securing horses and wagons to transport its gear, quartermaster officials could profit through commissions or through embezzlement for which “a thousand opportunities would daily present themselves without the possibility of detection.” All Congress could do to limit “peculation” from “piddling, pilfering plunderers in the characters of deputies and deputies’ assistants” was to hold the quartermaster general “responsible for their conduct.” Responsible, that is, personally.

There’s no evidence that Greene inflated purchases in order to increase his commissions. He didn’t have to. Just prior to his appointment he’d implored his brothers to dissolve their father’s estate and to buy out his stake in Jacob Greene & Company. “Let it be valued, and I will either give or take.” He’d needed immediate cash to support his family and maintain his staff, and saw no way to raise it short of liquidation. But the quartermaster job was “flattering to my fortune” from the start, a fact corroborated by the almost instant disappearance of money worries from his personal letters.

Those worries had centered on Jacob Greene & Company’s heavy involvement in privateering. Caught up in fighting the war, he’d taken little notice of their vessels’ poor performance. Besides, as important as turning a profit was the damage they did to British morale. “Remember, while it rains upon us, the sun does not shine upon them. We must balance accounts in national suffering.” But as the realization sank in “that fortune is no friend of ours in the privateering business,” his offhand inquiries into the family’s “navigation matters” took an urgent tone.

By mid-1777, after learning of the capture of two family-owned vessels,
Florida
and
General Greene
, he was ready to support his brothers’ call to quit the enterprise. “They have met with so many losses, they had better stop before all is gone.” But the family was still involved a year later due to his insistence, “I am not for quitting yet.” If the reason he gave his brothers to stay the privateering course seems fatalistic—“It is a long lane that has no turn”—his prediction to Griffin was much bolder. “Great things may yet be done by speculation.”

He was in position to know. Expenditures out of the quartermaster department approached an annual rate of $32 million soon after Greene’s appointment. This brought him commissions worth more than half a million dollars in today’s terms, far above his general’s salary and one of the highest assured incomes of any man in America at the time.

Though he downplayed his improved situation to his wife (“My fortune will be small but I trust by good economy we may live respectably”), they were doing better than ever before. When visiting Greene in the field, the twenty-five-year-old Caty socialized with the loftiest couples in the army, including Martha and George Washington, who joked of stealing Caty from her “Quaker preacher” while they danced for hours at a time. When in Rhode Island, she and their children lived in a large farmhouse in Westerly. There, she wrote, “I have been visited by the finest circle of ladies I have seen for a long time.”

Because he was paid in Continental dollars, which could lose half their value in a month, Greene was compelled to spend his money as soon as he got it. Without banks or stocks available as investment vehicles, and with government loan certificates paying a negligible return in those same plummeting dollars, his best options were real estate, ships, and commercial ventures. With no time to manage his affairs, he depended on his brothers and cousin to arrange deals. In addition, he formed partnerships with his aides, Pettit and Cox; with Samuel A. Otis, an emerging leader in Massachusetts privateering; and with the army’s commissary general, Jeremiah Wadsworth, a merchant and former seaman one year younger than Greene.

In 1779 Wadsworth and Greene put up the capital behind Barnabas Deane & Company. Barnabas Deane was Silas’s brother, and like his sibling had more ambition than cash. He and Wadsworth were longtime associates whose careers, typically of the era, combined self-interest with significant contributions to the Revolutionary cause, including shipbuilding, powder voyages, and iron production.

Placing the company in Deane’s name was an acknowledgment that even honest officials often found their public service rewarded with criminal investigation. “However just and upright our conduct may be,” Greene wrote Wadsworth in 1779, “the world will have suspicions to our disadvantage. By keeping the affair a secret I am confident we shall have it more in our power to serve the commercial connection than by publishing it.”

Privateers figured big in Barnabas Deane & Company’s operations. Records of August 1779 show an interest in nine of them worth £25,000, and at times its roster of ships at sea numbered in the dozens. Similarly invested through his other partnerships, Greene’s involvement deepened just as privateering reached new levels of risk. The Royal Navy began putting copper sheathing on the hulls of its ships in 1778. The copper repelled wood-boring worms and reduced the accumulation of seaweed and barnacles that hindered performance. As a result, enemy vessels patrolled the seas for longer periods and were faster and more nimble in battle.

And there were more of them, thanks to Britain’s 1777 authorization of anti-American privateers. Parliament had been reluctant to take this step since it seemed implicitly to recognize America as a legitimate state. But once legalized, one hundred loyalist warships launched from New York and more than a thousand from Britain and the West Indies, another species in a crowded sea of predators.

American privateering remained a growth industry. Applications quadrupled between 1778 and 1781, by which time there were almost five-hundred private warships at sea and less than ten Continental ones. General Washington praised the Boston community for “the valuable prizes that have been lately brought into your port. We stand in need of all your activity to increase our supplies by these means.”

To promote sea raiding, he’d directed that “ammunition from the Continental magazine” be made more available to the public. “They should not be suffered to want so essential an article.” But businessmen who were paying close attention realized that privateering’s easy pickings were a thing of the past. “The case is very different now,” was the word around Boston in 1778. “More than half the vessels that have been fitted out this winter have been taken.”