scholarly journals ‘True, Publick and Notorious’: The Privateering War of 1812

2021 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Faye M. Kert
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
United States Navy ◽  
West Indies ◽  
The United States ◽  
War Of 1812 ◽  
Royal Navy ◽  
The West ◽  
The Government ◽  
British North American

During the War of 1812, hundreds of private armed vessels, or privateers, carrying letters of marque and reprisal from their respective governments, served as counterweights to the navies of Great Britain and the United States. By 1812, privateering was acknowledged as an ideal way to annoy the enemy at little or no cost to the government. Local citizens provided the ships, crews and prizes while the court and customs systems took in the appropriate fees. The entire process was legal, licensed and often extremely lucrative. Unlike the navy, privateers were essentially volunteer commerce raiders, determined to weaken the enemy economically rather than militarily. So successful were they, that from July 1812 to February 1815, privateers from the United States, Britain, and the British provinces of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia (as well as those sailing under French and Spanish flags) turned the shipping lanes from Newfoundland to the West Indies, Norway to West Africa, and even the South Pacific into their hunting grounds. In the early months of the war, privateers were often the only seaborne force patrolling their own coasts. With the Royal Navy pre-occupied with defending Britain and its Caribbean colonies from French incursions, there were relatively few warships available to protect British North American shipping from their new American foes. Meanwhile, the United States Navy had only a handful of frigates and smaller warships to protect their trade, supported by 174 generally despised gunboats. The solution was the traditional response of a lesser maritime power lacking a strong navy—private armed warfare, or privateering.

4. A Constabulary Navy

2018 ◽  
pp. 34-44
Author(s):  
Craig L. Symonds
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Great Lakes ◽  
United States Navy ◽  
West Indies ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Manifest Destiny ◽  
The United States ◽  
The West ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Southern Border

After 1820, the day-to-day duties of the United States Navy involved dealing with smugglers, pirates, and the illegal slave trade and so deploying the large ships of the line was deemed unnecessary. Also, the successful completion of treaties with both England and Spain demilitarized the Great Lakes and stabilized the country’s southern border, easing concerns about a future foreign war. ‘A constabulary navy: pirates, slavers, and manifest destiny (1820–1850)’ describes the peacetime navy activities carried out by small squadrons of sloops and schooners acting as a constabulary force on distant stations abroad, mainly in the Mediterranean, but also in the West Indies, off Africa, in the Pacific, off Brazil, and in the East.

British Reaction to American Civil War Ironclads

Vulcan ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-69
Author(s):  
Jesse A. Heitz
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
United States Navy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Arms Race ◽  
Royal Navy ◽  
Naval Power ◽  
Government Documents ◽  
Great Ease

By the 1840’s the era of the wooden ship of the line was coming to a close. As early as the 1820’s and 1830’s, ships of war were outfitted with increasingly heavy guns. Naval guns such as the increasingly popular 68 pounder could quickly damage the best wooden hulled ships of the line. Yet, by the 1840’s, explosive shells were in use by the British, French, and Imperial Russian navies. It was the explosive shell that could with great ease, cripple a standard wooden hulled warship, this truth was exposed at the Battle of Sinope in 1853. For this reason, warships had to be armored. By 1856, Great Britain drafted a design for an armored corvette. In 1857, France began construction on the first ocean going ironclad, La Gloire, which was launched in 1859. This development quickly caused Great Britain to begin construction on HMS Warrior and HMS Black Prince. By the time HMS Warrior was commissioned in 1861, the Royal Navy had decided that its entire battle fleet needed to be armored. While the British and the French naval arms race was intensifying, the United States was entering into its greatest crisis, the United States Civil War. After the outbreak of the Civil War, the majority of the United States Navy remained loyal to the Union. The Confederacy, therefore, gained inspiration from the ironclads across the Atlantic, quickly obtaining its own ironclads. CSS Manassas was the first to enter service, but was eventually brought down by a hail of Union broadside fire. The CSS Virginia, however, made an impact. Meanwhile, the Union began stockpiling City Class ironclads and in 1862, the USS Monitor was completed. After the veritable stalemate between the CSS Virginia and USS Monitor, the Union utilized its superior production capabilities to mass produce ironclads and enter them into service in the Union Navy. As the Union began armoring its increasingly large navy, the world’s foremost naval power certainly took notice. Therefore, this paper will utilize British newspapers, government documents, Royal Naval Reviews, and various personal documents from the 1860’s in order to examine the British public and naval reaction to the Union buildup of ironclad warships.

Presidential Address: Council and Cabinet in the Mainland Colonies

1955 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 161-176
Author(s):  
H. Hale Bellot
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Executive Functions ◽  
West Indies ◽  
Presidential Address ◽  
The United States ◽  
Privy Council ◽  
The West ◽  
Presidential System

The cabinet in Great Britain is an emanation of the privy council. The councils in the royal colonies upon the American mainland, like those in the West Indies, were, in the language of the royal instructions to colonial Governors, ‘our’ councils, and at the beginning of the eighteenth century there was a prospect of a like development overseas. Yet it did not occur. The offspring of the colonial council in America is the senate of the United States. That body, like the colonial councils, has both legislative and executive functions. At the start it numbered a mere twenty-six members; and it was expected that the president, following the practice of colonial governors, would seek its advice in the discharge of his office. His cabinet had a quite different pedigree. It was envisaged in 1787 as something ‘[our Government] has always wanted, but never yet had.’ But it was, and still is, a meeting, not of ministers having seats in one or other of the houses of the legislature and collectively responsible to it, but of heads of departments individually responsible to the president. And it was historically, not a cabinet after the English model in a state of arrested development, but paradoxically a device of the legislature adapted to a presidential system. Why, it may be of interest to enquire, did this happen?

Caribbean Commission

1947 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 368-368
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
West Indies ◽  
West Indian ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The United States ◽  
Virgin Islands ◽  
The West ◽  
Rules Of Procedure ◽  
The Caribbean

The Caribbean Commission, formally established on October 20, 1946, by the United States, Great Britain, the Netherlands and France, held a third meeting of its four national sections consisting of representatives of the above mentioned countries at Curacao, Netherlands West Indies, in December, 1946. Particular items on the agenda included 1) discussion of the activities of the Commission's Secretariat, 2) rules of procedure for the Commission and the West Indian Conference, and 3) appointment of the budget. Attention was directed to the implementation of the recommendations of the second session of the West Indian Conference, which was held in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands of the United States, in February, 1946. Such recommendations reflected the effort of the member powers to coordinate their activities with a view to improving the economic and social well-being of Caribbean inhabitants.

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