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In the years preceding the War of 1812, the British practice of impressment-forcibly taking seamen from American merchant vessels for service in the British navyaroused public opinion in the United States more than any other subject since the Revolution and became one of the major irritations leading to the war. So intense were the emotions provoked by the issue that even today the word impressment needs little explanation to most Americans. Aside from these political consequences, moreover, one of the administrative effects of impressment was the accumulation of a vast amount of detailed information about individual American seamen. The records now at the National Archives, together with a series at the Public Record Office in London about American prisoners of the War of 1812, apparently constitute the only surviving real source of knowledge of the appearance of our seafaring forebears.1 No com

Research for this article was conducted with the support of a grant from the American Philosophical Society.

1 Seamen's protection certificate applications are a series of the records of the Bureau of Customs, Record Group 36, National Archives Building. The quarterly abstracts and the crew lists mentioned later are also series of the same record group. Series ADM103 at the Public Record Office pertains to American prisoners of war.

parable base of data exists for any other sector of the early American population. Except for small, scattered amounts of information about particular persons, the seamen's records represent our only reasonably accurate picture of these early nineteenth-century Americans-who they were, how tall they were, how old, how tattooed, how literate.

The records were created as an indirect result of a flagrant case of impressment in 1796. Officers of H.M.S. Regulus boarded the American merchantman Lydia and took five men on the pretext that they were British citizens. The incident vividly illustrated the problem: Americans were unable to sail the seas in their own ships unless they carried proofs of their U.S. citizenship acceptable to British boarding officers. The papers seamen normally carried during this period were often less than convincing; the British, who in any event were looking for seamen rather than proofs, usually brushed them aside.

Congress, reacting to public outrage at the Lydia affair, passed the "Act for the Relief and Protection of American Seamen" on May 28, 1796. The law required each district collector of customs to keep a book registering the names of seamen who produced to him authenticated proof of

their American citizenship. To these seamen he was to furnish a certificate of their American citizenship-a "protection certificate." The collector was also required to file and preserve the proofs of citizenship the seamen brought him and to send a quarterly list of the seamen he registered to the secretary of state.

The act was a congressional compromise, and thus the requirement for authenticated proof of citizenship was not stringent. The oath of one witness before a notary as to the U.S. birth of the seaman established the proof needed for a protection certificate. It probably would have been difficult or impossible in many cases for seamen to produce real proofs, given their own mobility and the poor communications of that day. Therefore the law did not prevent impressment. The British normally refused to honor protection certificates issued by collectors of customs, asserting that any sailor could easily find a witness willing to swear to his American birth.

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It was the operation over the years of the 1796 law that created the records about protection from impressment available today in the National Archives. Quarterly abstracts or lists of seamen sent by district collectors of customs to the secretary of state have survived from forty-eight ports, usually in small quantities and usually from the period after 1815. These abstracts give the name of each seaman and very brief descrip

tive material.

For the port of New Haven, individual printed application forms survive. Apparently prepared by the collector of customs, they summarize the information each seaman provided as proof of citizenship. The forms give the same information as the abstracts, as well as the signature of the witness in many cases.

For New York a few actual protection certificates survive. The wording follows precisely the form of the 1796 act, even for certificates issued as late as 1860. The certificates are worn and frayed, as if long

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Thomas Grady's application for a seaman's protection certificate. Next page: Grady's certificate.

carried in a seaman's pocket. The file probably resulted from the seaman's oath when he was issued a duplicate certificate that he would return the lost one to the collector should it be found.

Also for New York some signed "oaths" or affidavits survive. These do not contain personal data about the seaman, just his name and place of birth and the oath of a witness as to his belief in the truth of those facts.

Finally, for Philadelphia a great many individual oaths or "proofs of citizenship" survive. Some are as early as 1797, and the series is fairly complete from about 1800 until 1861. The Philadelphia records are the most useful of the surviving records for insights into the seamen, their social framework, and the impressment protection process. Fortunately, the sample is a good one. Philadelphia City and County was the larg est metropolitan area in the United States in the early nineteenth century. In 1810 its population was 111,210, compared to 96,373

in New York City and County. Furthermore, over the years the collectors of customs in Philadelphia were sticklers for following the dictates of the law to "file and preserve the proofs of citizenship produced by the seamen." Relative to collectors in other ports, they were more demanding in the detail of proof they required. A number of officials-notaries, justices of the peace, aldermen, and occasionally mayorsadministered the oaths, and each used a different printed form. But each records nearly the same information. Probably the general format was specified by the collector of customs, so that all the forms show -the name and age of the seaman -his height, hair color, complexion, and usually eye color

-scars, other distinguishing marks, and usually tattoos

-his stated place of birth, or place and date of naturalization

-his signature (or mark) swearing to the truth of the information

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-the name and signature (or mark) of a witness swearing that the facts about the seaman were true "to the best of his knowledge and belief”

-the name and title of the official giving the oath.

Each "proof of citizenship" presented to the collector represents a seaman entering or reentering the seafaring labor force, or possibly one fraudulently applying for an extra certificate. Once a sailor received a protection certificate, he might use it for years if he remained in the labor force. Thus, for any given year the affidavits in the file do not indicate the number of active seamen (which can be inferred to some extent from surviving crew lists) but rather new entries and reentries. We can, however, draw many conclusions from these records because they cover thousands of seamen over a considerable number of years in a reasonably typical Middle Atlantic port. Examine now some of the questions we can ask.

-At what age did boys go to sea?
-Did the young ones run away to sea or
go with their parents' approval?
-What were the age ranges of seafarers?

What was the most prevalent age?

-Did new seafarers have urban or rural origins?

-What were the prevalent national stocks in the American seafaring force, judging from the seamen's names?

-How many were naturalized?

-What proportion of new seamen were Negroes and "men of color"? How does this compare to the proportion in the seafaring force as indicated by crew lists?

-How literate were these seafarers, judging from their signatures? 2 How many "made their mark"? Were younger sailors more literate than older ones? -How tall were they? Roughly, how do height and age correlate?

-How many had had smallpox? How many were vaccinated for it? -How prevalent was tattooing? What picture subjects were used? -How prevalent were such handicaps as missing eyes, legs, and fingers? -How did the onset of the War of 1812 affect the number of seamen wanting impressment protection?

2 The correlation between signature and literacy is indirect; undoubtedly many persons of the early nineteenth century who could not read or write could nevertheless sign their names acceptably. However, the seamen's protection records are the only source of information about the literacy of seafarers large enough to allow statistical comparisons. To make inferences, therefore, a seaman who made his mark was assigned literacy level 1; a barely legible signature, level 2; a better but uneducated hand, level 3; a clear, educated hand, level 4; an excellent penman was considered literate at level 5.

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-What evidence is there to support or deny the credibility of the oaths? In other words, were the British right or wrong to contend that the protections were likely to be fraudulent, requiring as they did only one witness?

For this article, applications for protection certificates were examined for most of the year 1812, all of 1813 and 1814, and the second quarter of 1815-a total of about eight hundred men. This period was chosen primarily because of the author's curiosity about the operation of the impressment protection process during the war. Secondly, the British data about American prisoners of war to some extent provide checks on height-age correlations and racial mix figures. Finally, the main value of the protection certificate applications is in the early years. For later periods, other sources of information about age and height are available. For the early nineteenth century, the applications, the crew lists, and the British data seem to be unique sources.

Choosing the war years, however, probably introduces distortions into the data. While parents might allow twelve-year-old sons to go to sea in peacetime, for example, they might well have been more reluctant during the war. The data also have limitations as a truly valid representative statistical sample in the modern sense. Applying for protection certificates was voluntary, so the number of records and the seamen they cover are a function of who felt they needed them-or whose skippers required them.

Considering the information potentially available in the records, the need to orga

3 The Philadelphia applications are not precise enough about height to be really useful to anthropologists. The notary probably did not always take the measurements; more likely he usually asked the seaman his height-which the man gave as exactly as possible if his impressment protection depended on the accuracy of the description. The British prisoners of war information is a much better data base for height. The measurements were apparently taken under specified conditions with the prisoners standing against a height marker.

nize the raw data to compare and correlate individual items and, in some cases, to analyze data items statistically was obvious. To make correlations with other data bases was also desirable. To treat in this manner even so small a sample as eight hundred records, each with more than twenty items of information, was for all practical purposes beyond pencil and paper. Furthermore, one purpose of the study was to demonstrate the use of data-processing techniques in dealing with historical information. Therefore, codes, card formats, and computer programs were developed to extract, correlate, and display the information.

Three principles were followed in developing the coding of the data. First, where possible, information items were given numerical codes to allow easy sorting and ranking and to pack more data on one card. Second, names of individuals were included and carried in alphabetical form because names are the links between the Philadelphia applications, crew lists, and the British P.O.W. data. Third, enough space was left on each data card to carry the unexpected and uncodable, but relevant or interesting, information that always appears in early records. One John Peters, for example, had "gold rings in his ears"; Amer Augustus, seventeen years old, was "an indentured mulatto boy."

Once the computer programs were written, the information sorted and ranked, the statistical operations performed, and the codes translated back into alphabetical print-outs, the insights began to emerge. The typical white American seaman in the 1812 period was twenty-one or twenty-two years old and surprisingly tall-5'8". He had a name of British or Irish origin; occasionally his name was German or Slavic, but this may have been regionally specific to Pennsylvania. He had brown hair and a fair complexion. He had some scars, most often on his hands. He was often tattooed. Only rarely was he missing an eye or finger. The one-legged sailor, a favorite in fiction,

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