From a print in the possession of the Lenox Library
On the whole, a bird's-eye view of the United States showed a wilderness, 820,680 square miles in extent, that had a line of settlements along the coast. The political condition of the country was not unlike its physical—chaotic. The thirteen colonies, having thrown off allegiance to the mother-country, had essayed the formation of a ship of state, but had created only a raft of thirteen logs, if such a simile may be permitted, which chafed each other with growing friction. Congress was nominally the executive, the legislative, and the judicial head of a nation, but the money it issued ceased to circulate, and the bonds, representing borrowed coin and war material, were little better. As a body, the Congress consisted of a score or so of respectable gentlemen who met in a hall hired for the purpose, where they expressed their opinions on matters of international as well as local concern, and then begged the sovereign states to take action. They had no power to do anything—not even to raise the money with which to pay the rent of the hall in which they met.
An examination of the American merchant marine at this time shows that it had fallen far below that of the colonies. In a communication to Congress, 19 ship-builders of Philadelphia said (1789) that while they had launched 4500 tons of shipping per year before the war, "it appears from an average of three years past that we have built only to the amount of 1500 tons annually." Similar complaints were made by the shipwrights of Charleston, Baltimore, and Boston. The Charleston communication was especial interesting. It said:—
"From the diminished state of ship building in America, and the ruinous restrictions to which our vessels are subject in foreign ports; from the distressed condition of our commerce, languishing under the most disgraceful inequalities, its benefits transferred to strangers ... who neither have treaties with us ... nor are friendly to our commerce," it therefore seemed necessary to ask Congress to consider what ought to be done in the matter (Am. State Papers, VII, 9; X, 5-6).
It will help to a comprehension of the condition of our merchant marine if we recall once more the feeling of the English public towards the colonists before the war. While statesmen like Robert Peel fostered the growth of American shipping and commerce by encouraging them in evading the navigation laws, the growth thus fostered roused a strong feeling of ill-will on the part of many patriotic Englishmen. This feeling was entirely natural and unavoidable. It was not alone that the Americans were well able to compete with the mother-country for the carrying trade of the world. Under the influence of environment the Americans were developing into a distinct people. The successful colonial was often and perhaps usually self-assertive and boastful; he was necessarily aggressive. Then, too, he showed a lack of deference in the presence of rank that seemed shocking to the nobility. Men who were doing the world's work in the American wilderness made no efforts to conceal their contempt for royal governors, and the influential part of the people of England accepted the complaining letters of these baffled governors as accurate characterizations of the American people. Because of a sort of race prejudice thus produced, the measures of the king, when coercion was attempted, were heartily approved by the majority of the English people.
Then, during the war, the expelled American loyalists had ex parte stories to tell that added indignation to animosity. The successful American cruisers added to the ill feeling. At the same time the British authorities observed a tendency among the foremost hands in the British navy that was not a little alarming. While their navy lost, in the years from 1776 to 1780, 19,788 men through disease and battle, no less than 42,069 deserted. Some of these deserters were, of course, Americans who had been impressed, but many a good British tar learned about the opportunities in the new land and made haste to go to meet them.
In short, it was through natural and unavoidable causes that the influential Britons came to regard their "American cousins" with a feeling of, say, intense animosity not wholly unmingled with apprehension.
Keeping in mind this mental attitude, recall the fact that a command of the sea was then absolutely essential to the well-being of the British people, and further, that the supremacy which the British then boasted had been obtained, and maintained for a century, by good hard fighting; and further still, that many British thinkers had been alarmed at such American progress as had been manifested even a hundred years before the Declaration of Independence. Bluntly stated, while the British people had learned to hate the American, they suddenly saw that he alone had shown an ability to dispute that supremacy upon the sea which seemed absolutely necessary for the preservation of their national existence. And as an independent citizen of the world he was in a position to force the issue. It follows, therefore, that the British were naturally led to do all they could to oppose all progress in the United States. The "ruinous restrictions" of which the Charleston ship-builders made mention were a natural sequence of the success of the Revolution.