Jesse added 11 papers
Papers
Introduction to session on “From the Bottom Up: Sailors and Democracy”
Organization of American Historians annual meeting, Washington DC, April 9, 2010
We have three exciting papers, by Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, Chirstine Sears and Hester Blum – I’ve read them, and I know they’re exciting. By way of introduction to this session, here’s two minutes of context for understanding today’s papers:
When I started out working on Jack Tar, the colonial seaman (see Lemisch, “Jack Tar in the Streets: Merchant Seamen in the Politics of Revolutionary America,’ William & Mary Quarterly, July 1968), the reigning notion among historians was that sailors were muscular, generally drunk, foul-mouthed types who were utterly incapable of having political ideas. Riots in colonial cities were seen as irrational, or hired mobs. Think Bernard Bailyn, Daniel Boorstin, Edmund Morgan and most other people then in early American history. Bailyn described impressment resistance and other seamen’s protests as “ideologically inert,” expressing only “a diffuse and indeliberate antiauthoritarianism.” So politically poisoned was the field by this kind of stuff, with haughty LeBonian judgments, that, to find something better, you had to look across the Atlantic to people like Edward Thompson, who found among the lower classes alternative ideas and an “ethos of mutuality.” And George Rude helped to teach us to see riot as political expression, purposeful and discriminating. So some of us in the US, listening to the voices of those in the past who had been deemed “inarticulate,” found instead the articulation of ideas, politics, social and economic views. In the Revolutionary mob, resisting impressment on ship and ashore, and in the prisons of the Revolution, .I found Jack with a mind of his own, rational and purposeful, thinking about liberty, politics and self-government, often with radical ideas and expression, at odds with liberal leadership, as in the Stamp Act riots, which led fruitfully to nullification of the Act from the bottom up. Jack was concerned with liberty and right, even in the prisons of the Revolution (see Lemisch, “Listening to the “Inarticulate’: William Widger’s Dream and the Loyalties of American Revolutionary Seamen in British Prisons,” Journal of Social History, Fall 1969) where captured seamen drew up constitutions and laws – “no giant-like man shall tyrannize over another, not his equal.” As Nathan Perl-Rosenthal points out in his fine paper, Marcus Rediker went beyond seamen ashore to look at Jack on shipboard and found ideas and behaviors that resembled those of Christopher Hill’s “masterless men.” Other important and relevant work has been done by Al Young, Peter Linebaugh, Staughton Lynd, and others. And, bringing this up to the present, today’s papers continue and nicely enlarge this work, showing among other things how sailors used the principles of the Revolution to advance their liberty, relating shipboard grievances to larger principles, and expressing what Edward Thompson called a “moral economy” “and a “legitimizing notion of right.”
We begin with Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, a precocious graduate student in history at Columbia, where he is working with Eric Foner and Isser Woloch on a dissertation about “Private Letters and Patriot Societies in the American, Dutch and French Revolutions, ca 1765-92.”. You may have seen his article in last July’s William and Mary Quarterly “The “Divine Right of Republics”: Hebraic Republicanism and the Debate over Kingless Government in Revolutionary America.” I picked up someplace that his tastes in music run from Bach and Dylan to Aretha, and the same source says that he` has three hundred and forty-two friends. His paper is called “A Democratic Navy for a Democratic (?) Revolution?: Liberty and Discipline in the Continental Navy, ca 1776-1783”…
For video excerpts by History News Network from the presentations by Lemisch and by Perl-Rosenthal, see: for Lemisch, http://hnn.us/roundup/63.html#125388; for Perl-Rosenthal http://hnn.us/roundup/63.html#125389