An early end to British impressment?

I'm reading a little about James Oglethorpe, and in this biography I've discovered that he made a rather impassioned plea to end impressment on the seas in 1728. Setting aside how exactly this occurs, say that his argument wins over the Commons and the British end impressment by 1730. What are the consequences, if any, on British military history?
 
It's very hard to do. The anti slavery act in the 1830s specifically reaffirmed the right to impressment - 100 years after you are talking. The British during this time period lived in a paranoid frenzy of French and Spanish invasion, with the Royal Navy their main - and at times only - line of defence. They will not risk that defence by ending impressment.

The only exception I can think of is if the Brits achieve earlier naval supremacy versus the French. One POD here could be Pitt achieving his primary aim in the Peace of Paris to take all the Atlantic Fisheries after the 7YW. I believe something like three quarters of French naval sailors came from the fishermen in these fisheries. Several historians of this era have stated it would have ended France as a naval power for Pitt to have got this. Maybe then the Brits would have felt secure enough to lose impressment.
 
I would think a more realistic aim would've to restrict the use of impressment to port cities / towns in Britain and British merchant ships while on the high seas. In OTL, it was the provision allowing Royal Navy captains to apply impressment to ships from neutral nations during wartime that caused a majority of the problems with the U.S. during the Napoleonic Wars.
 
I would think a more realistic aim would've to restrict the use of impressment to port cities / towns in Britain and British merchant ships while on the high seas. In OTL, it was the provision allowing Royal Navy captains to apply impressment to ships from neutral nations during wartime that caused a majority of the problems with the U.S. during the Napoleonic Wars.
Plus, their attitude of "Well, they say they're Yanks, obviously they're lying bastards", didn't help matters.
 
Plus, their attitude of "Well, they say they're Yanks, obviously they're lying bastards", didn't help matters.
I am not defending their actions which were, in modern terms, kidnapping. However at the time the British RN Captain was faced with a crippling shortage of trained manpower during long wars. Boarding an American ship to find it full of valuable English sailors who claimed US citizenship from the day they joined the crew must have been annoying!

The only way to remove impressment is to institute a formal conscription of seamen. In the 18thC. Not going to happen.
 
I am not defending their actions which were, in modern terms, kidnapping. However at the time the British RN Captain was faced with a crippling shortage of trained manpower during long wars. Boarding an American ship to find it full of valuable English sailors who claimed US citizenship from the day they joined the crew must have been annoying!

The only way to remove impressment is to institute a formal conscription of seamen. In the 18thC. Not going to happen.
Or making conditions on the ships actually appealing.
 
If the British Royal Navy were to still allow ship captains to impress naval personnel from merchant ships from neutral nations on the high seas, there should've been a provision prohibiting impressment on American ships since Britain and America were only a generation removed from the Revolutionary War and only thing the Orders in Council did was to alienate the Americans (in OTL, the British eventually realized that the Orders in Council did more harm than good, however the aftermath of the assassination of Prime Minister Spencer Perceval and the onset of the Regency meant the Orders in Council wasn't repealed in time before the War of 1812).
 
And risking alienating other nations was so vital to the Navy's practices?
The RN in the 18thC could not care less about any (yes ANY) other nation. They were almost embarrassingly jingoistic and Xenophobic (in our terms). It made for very hard fighting ships but made it very hard for the British Government to stop them doing what they always had at the end of a long war. Simply it was much easier for the RN to live with an annoyed USA (And the RN did Much worse to other countries, Denmark for instance, without being criticised) than it was to rein in their captains.
 

Saphroneth

Banned
The only way to remove impressment is to institute a formal conscription of seamen. In the 18thC. Not going to happen.
It was, in fact, intended as conscription of seamen. Part of the problem that caused Impressment to become an issue was that people could not only qualify for American citizenship quite easily (and hence without renouncing British citizenship) but that it was also very easy indeed to fake American citizenship - and the Royal Navy understandably took a very dim view of both the British Royal Navy sailors who deserted in the middle of a war to sign on for an American ship, and the Americans who insisted everyone on their ships should be counted as American even without documentation (or with obviously fake documentation) even if they had Royal Navy tattoos.
If by 'formal conscription of seamen' you mean keeping track of everyone, this is already done in one sense (British citizens could obtain an immunity from impressment in the form of a document countersigned by a Lord of the Admiralry; only British citizens are eligible) and impossible in another (many sailors in this period hardly ever go onshore - the only way to do it is on ships).


The UK wasn't trying to impress US citizens: it was trying to impress British subjects improperly claiming to be US citizens, and sheltering behind the inadequacy of US citizenship documentation in order to do so. Impressment was never something used exclusively on US citizens; the Royal Navy abandoned it with the defeat of Napoleon not the actions of the US, and the decision not to revive it stemmed from wider social and political moves reflecting faith in a individualist, voluntary armed forces (see also the decline of the militia ballot and the decision not to introduce conscription throughout the period).

As to the idea that the British just took whichever Americans they wanted without respect for nationality, this is false.




If it were true, the Royal Navy wouldn't have released 2,000 incorrectly-recruited Americans in the years before 1812, and a further 1,800 after the war was over. But if you dismiss the non-existent British claim that all people who spoke English were English, then surely you must treat with equal scorn the US claim that all sailors on American vessels are Americans?

The British attitude at the time towards America over sheltering what would later be called draft-dodgers reminds me very much of the current American attitude towards countries like Switzerland, Lichtenstein and Luxembourg for their role in assisting corporate or individual tax evasion. It's not strictly parallel, of course- Napoleonic Britain is fighting for its existence and modern America is the richest country on earth- but there are some interesting areas of common ground between the two. An interesting counterfactual is what if the US had chosen to issue proper documentation to naturalised citizens, and an even more interesting speculation is why they chose not to do so. For comparison's sake, a British protection of the time listed height, age, complexion, hair colour and place of birth, and must be signed by the First Lord of the Admiralty, two or more Lords of the Admiralty and the secretary: an American protection listed height and age, and could be bought at the local public notary (or, dare I suggest it, in a bar from an American sailor who happened to be about your height and age and was short of cash).


If the best evidence we had was a haphazard comment from the US National Archives website, I'd understand. However, NAM Roger's The Command of the Ocean, summing up the scholarship, arrives at an estimate of c.6,500. Monroe claimed 6,257 between 1803 and 1812, so the numbers are obviously in the correct ball park.

We can also have a stab at estimating the proportion that were improperly impressed. Press gangs were interested in experienced sailors, not unskilled men they could easily recruit anywhere. Gallatin estimated that of the able-bodied sailors serving aboard American ships engaged in foreign trade, half (9,000) were British- by American definitions, not by British. This compares favourably with statistics from the US Navy at New York in January 1808, where 56% were British by British standards and 45% by American standards.

Taking Gallatin's figure of 50% as an approximation, if Royal Navy ships impressed able-bodied seamen completely at random that 6,500 would have represented 3,250 British and 3,250 wrongly impressed Americans. Because 3,800 men were released on grounds of nationality, there was either a slight bias towards impressing Americans (perhaps reflecting a willingness to accept ordinary seamen or landsmen as well as ABs) or a number of British sailors took advantage of the opportunity to leave Royal Navy service.



For what it's worth, contemporary documentation suggests that the Americans knew that - had they (for example) banned British subjects from working on their merchant marine, they wouldn't have been able to sustain one half the size of the OTL one. There were simply too many British subjects in the merchant marine, and since both Britain and America agreed that they were valid targets it's hardly surprising that Impressment was happening!
 
I don't know Oglethorpe but in 1728 he was probably thinking of impressing from british ships. That is he was worried about merchant ships losing seamen and hence money. I suspect that means he would not support any change that might raise taxes.
 
Even today, nationality in any merchant navy is rarely unique - that is matching the flag of the ship or the owners of the ship. Through the middle of the 19th century at least it would be rare to find a merchant ship that did not have some "foreigners" aboard. Sailors tended to have more "citizenship" with the sea than with the country where they were born. Given the conditions aboard RN ships with crap food, brutal discipline, poor pay (unless you got very lucky with prize money), and the chance of getting killed or wounded, recruiting was a "challenge". You could only have a certain percentage of your crew as "landsmen" who had to be taught all sailor skills and were only good for pulling on ropes to begin with. When you have a navy the size of the RN with huge manpower needs in the sailing era, as well as continuing losses through disease and wounding/combat death impressment is not just a solution to the problem, it is the only solution. Given the predominance of the RN, really no other maritime power can do much to prevent some of their citizens from being snapped up. It should be noted that sailors on merchant ships taken as prizes were often impressed as well.
 
crap food, brutal discipline, poor pay (unless you got very lucky with prize money), and the chance of getting killed or wounded, recruiting was a "challenge
Actually what you're describing was a typical sailor's life whether in naval or merchant service apart from the discipline element.
However, due to the larger crews required for combat, the actual workload on naval vessels tended to be lighter.
 
Part of the problem from the American prospective was that Jefferson didn't maintain a navy that was strong enough to deter the Royal Navy from performing impressment on American ships. If I was President at the time, I would've kept the Navy the Federalists had built up and instituted a convoy system in the Atlantic mainly to show the British that I meant business on the impressment / Orders in Council issue.
 
Remember people, that just because a British subject renounced British citizenship to become an American, didn't mean the British accepted that.

That's true to this day. Canadians, for instance, who are viewed as citizens be the country they travel to can be imprisoned, for instance, and the Canadian government can do nothing about it, really.

My brother's in-laws never dared go back to Latvia until Gorbachev came to power in the USSR, because they would never have been allowed to leave again.
And, more recently, there's been issues with Canadian/Iranians not being allowed to leave Iran after visiting. (Or mothers with custody can't get their kids back when Dad takes them to Iran).

So, this is still accepted international practice.

Britain was ENTIRELY within her rights to press British sailors on US merchant ships.
The problem arose when you 1) had disputed citizenship, and 2) that the US encouraged fake documents.
Given both of those, it's no wonder that British captains had to 'use their judgement', and occasionally snapped up people who really, genuinely were US and purely US citizens. Whcih did happen, but was far, far less common than you'd ever believe from US history books, or newspapers at the time.
 
Vizzer - yes and no. The discipline was tough, but not what the RN did. Merchant sailors could quit, and if they "deserted" nobody was hunting for them, and they could get a job on another ship or quit the sea. Because of this, a competition for skilled labor, merchant skippers had to make some effort to have halfway decent conditions. Desert from the RN, and people were looking for you and if you were ever caught, getting hung was the best thing that could happen. Conditions for folks who were hired help of any sort land or sea were pretty bad - only if you were a self employed artisan etc did things get better. The fact that so many RN seamen deserted to take up jobs as merchant sailors under any flag gives you an idea of the relative desirability of the jobs - not many merchant seaman moved over to the RN voluntarily.
 
Dathi: The issue of renouncing citizenship in country A to become a citizen of country B is contentious. In the US when you become a citizen you renounce all former allegiances. The problem is country A may not allow that, in fact some countries have the attitude that if your parents, or even one parent (usually a father) was a citizen of that country, even if before your birth he/they became citizens of another country, you are still counted as a citizen and if you set foot in that country are liable for the draft if they have one, exit restrictions and so forth. The USA does NOT recognize the legality of this, how much they can do for you if you get stuck someplace is another question.
 
Top