Product Code Database
Impressment, colloquially " the press" or the " press gang", is a type of conscription of people into a military force, especially a naval force, via intimidation and physical coercion, conducted by an organized group (hence "gang"). The navies of several European nations used various means of impressment starting in the late 16th century and continuing into the 19th century. The large size of the British Royal Navy in the Age of Sail meant that impressment was most commonly associated with Great Britain and Ireland. It was used by the Royal Navy in wartime, beginning in 1664 and during the 18th and early 19th centuries, as a means of crewing , although legal sanction for the practice can be traced back to the time of Edward I of England.
The Royal Navy impressed many merchant sailors, as well as some sailors from other, mostly European, nations. People liable to impressment were "eligible men of seafaring habits between the ages of 18 and 55 years". Non-Sailor were sometimes impressed as well, though rarely. In addition to the Royal Navy's use of impressment, the British Army also experimented with impressment from 1778 to 1780.
Impressment was strongly criticised by those who believed it to be contrary to the British constitution. Though the public opposed conscription in general, impressment was repeatedly upheld by the courts, as it was deemed vital to the strength of the navy and, by extension, to the survival of the British realm and influence.
Impressment was essentially a Royal Navy practice, reflecting the sheer size of the British fleet and its substantial manpower demands. While other European navies utilized forms of forced recruitment in times of war, it was generally an extension of their formal conscription practices applied during the Napoleonic Wars and onwards.
The impressment of seamen from American ships caused serious tensions between Britain and the Thirteen Colonies in the years leading up to the Revolutionary War. One of the 27 colonial grievances enumerated in the Declaration of Independence directly highlights the practice: "He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands." It was again a cause of tension leading up to the War of 1812.
Army recruitment in England from that point, relied entirely upon volunteers, who received a bounty. Certain criminals were also permitted to join, in return for a pardon.Curtis p. 73 A limited form of impressment in the British Army was briefly reintroduced in 1778 but only for men who were not in lawful employment and who had no substance sufficient for their support and maintenance. Additionally, they had to be fit and able-bodied, between the ages of 17 and 45, and over 5’4” in height.Curtis p. 57 The act was amended the following year to include men who had abandoned their families and left them to the mercy of the parish.Curtis p. 60 The age and height restrictions were also changed to between 16 and 50, and over 5’3”.Curtis pp. 59-60 However, the acts were repealed in May 1780. The acts also improved pay and conditions for volunteers but these positive advancements were retained.Curtis p.60
As Britain grew into a world power, her navy became more important. The demands placed on it to protect trade and the colonies led to a massive increase in the number of ships, which had to be manned. Alternatives to impressment were tried but none were as effective and so it continued despite the prevalent conception of liberty among the British people. The press, as it was often shortened to, was therefore universally disliked.Rodgers p. 64. Even the authorities were hostile; local councillors would often refuse to ratify press warrants,Rodgers pp. 168-169 Judges and juries repeatedly acquitted men under trial for murder, because they had justifiably resisted the invasion of their personal liberties by press-gangs,Rodgers p. 170 and the Admiralty thought the whole process inefficient.Lavery p. 117
Before 1778, Royal Navy captains were responsible for recruiting, including impressment when required, their own crews. This burden was lessened somewhat, shortly before the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War, when the Comptroller of the Navy, Sir Charles Middleton introduced the Impress Service.
Until 19th-century reforms improved conditions, the Royal Navy was additionally known to pay wages up to two years in arrears. The Navy always withheld six months' pay as a standard policy, in order to discourage desertion. Naval wages had been set in 1653, and were not increased until April 1797 after sailors on 80 ships of the Channel Fleet based at Spithead mutinied.
Despite this, there were still many volunteers for naval service. The work for individual sailors was less than on merchant ships, since the naval crew size was determined by the number needed to man guns – around four times more than the number of crew needed to simply sail the ship. Furthermore, the food supplied by the Navy was plentiful, regular, and of good quality by the standards of the day. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, it was not at all unusual for impressed men to view life in the navy, hard though it was, as still preferable to their previous lives on shore, and to volunteer for further service when the opportunity came to leave the ship.
The main problem with naval recruitment was a shortage of qualified and experienced seamen during wartime; for example, when the Navy had to quickly recruit an extra 20,000 men in the early 18th century, and 40,000 men in the late 18th century. , the Royal Navy, and the Merchant Navy all competed for a small pool of ordinary and able seamen in wartime, and all three groups were usually short-handed. The recruitment figures presented to Parliament for the years 1755–1757 list 70,566 men, which included both pressed men and volunteers. The impressment service was responsible for raising 36,963 of those, of which 16,953 were pressed men and 20,370 were listed as volunteers.
Although there are no records that explain why volunteers were separated into two groups, it is likely these were pressed men who became "volunteers" to get the sign-up bonus, two months' wages in advance and a higher wage. It is known that large numbers did this. Volunteering also protected the sailor from creditors, as the law forbade collecting debts accrued before enlistment. A disadvantage was that volunteers who deserted were liable to execution if captured, although this threat was rarely carried out, whereas pressed men were simply returned to service. There was however, very little difference in the percentage of desertions from the two groups and some pressed men, who had initially petitioned for release had elected to remain in the service by the time their case was heard. Other records confirm similar percentages throughout the 18th century.
Average annual recruitment 1736–1783Fischer, Lewis R.; Nordvik, Helge W. Shipping and Trade, 1750–1950: Essays in International Maritime Economic History 1990, p. 25.
| 1736–1738 | Peacetime | 14,845 | 35,239 | 50,084 | |
| 1739–1748 | War of Jenkins' Ear | 43,303 | 2,602 | 30,392 | 76,297 |
| 1753–1755 | Peacetime | 17,369 | 40,862 | 58,231 | |
| 1756–1763 | Seven Years' War | 74,771 | 3,286 | 37,584 | 115,641 |
| 1773–1775 | Peacetime | 18,540 | 50,903 | 69,443 | |
| 1775–1783 | American Revolutionary War | 67,747 | 3,749 | 44,947 | 116,443 |
All three groups also suffered high levels of desertion. In the 18th century, British desertion rates on naval ships averaged 25% annually, with slight difference between volunteers and pressed men.
For example, the frigate HMS Hermione, with a regular complement of 180 men had 129 desertions between 1793 and 1797. Desertion rates for Dutch and French warships was even higher with annual rates of up to 90% not uncommon. In 1795, the Dutch vessel Staaten Generaal, with a complement of 550 lost 428 to desertion, the Delft, with 350 men lost 340. The rate of desertion started high, then fell heavily after a few months on board a ship, and generally became negligible after a year—because Navy pay ran months or years in arrears, desertion might mean not only abandoning companions in the ship's company, but also the loss of a large amount of money already earned. If a naval ship had taken a prize, a deserting seaman would forfeit his share of the prize money. In a report on proposed changes to the Royal Navy written by Admiral Nelson in 1803, he noted that since 1793 more than 42,000 sailors had deserted.
In Elizabethan times a statute regulated impressment as a form of recruitment, and with the introduction of the Vagabonds Act 1597 (39 Eliz. 1. c. 4), men of disrepute (vagrants) found themselves drafted into service. The Navigation Act 1703 (2 & 3 Ann. c. 6) limited the impressment of boys under 18 years of age to those who were not apprenticed. The Exemption from Impressment Act 1739 (13 Geo. 2. c. 17) raised the maximum age to 55. Although no foreigner could normally be pressed, they lost their protection if they married a British woman or had worked on a British merchant ship for two years. Some governments, including Britain, issued "protections" against impressment that protected men had to carry on their person at all times, but in times of crisis the Admiralty would order a "hot press", which meant that no-one remained exempt.
The Royal Navy also impressed seamen from inbound British merchant ships at sea, though this was done by individual warships, rather than by the Impress Service. Impressment, particularly press gangs, became consistently unpopular with the British public (as well as in the American colonies) and ran the risk of physical assault. One press gang leader, working in the fishing ports of Mousehole and Newlyn in Cornwall, wrote that he was severely beaten by three or four men who also attempted to hang him. After escaping, he sent his servant to fetch a local constable for assistance, whereupon the townsfolk of Newlyn "fell on my man, knocked him off his, broke his head and threw him over a cliff so that he was taken up dead."Lavery 2010, p.96
However, convicted petty criminals were often given the option of volunteering for naval service as unskilled "quota men" by parish constables and inland courts (see below).John Keegan, Battle at Sea, p. 39.
There were occasions when the local populace would band together to oppose the activities of the press where these exceeded legal bounds. One such incident, the Easton Massacre in 1803 (see caption at right), resulted in a press gang firing on a crowd, killing four people in the village of Easton on the Isle of Portland, where they were trying to impress the quarrymen.
In 1808, Thomas Urquhart was saved from a press gang of three or four men when one or more London passersby intervened. Urquhart complained to local officials, identified at least one of the men involved and successfully sued for damages in the Court of King's Bench. He went on to lobby for changes in law and practice, publishing Letters on the evils of impressment: with the outline of a plan for doing them away, on which depend the wealth, prosperity, and consequence of Great Britain in 1816.
Patrolling in or near sea ports, the press gang would try to find men aged between 15 and 55 with seafaring or river-boat experience, but this was not essential. Potential crewmen with no experience were called "landsmen". From 1740, landsmen were legally exempt from impressment; however, this exemption was occasionally ignored during wartime unless the person seized was an apprentice or a "gentleman".BBC History Magazine, Vol.9 no. 8, August 2008. Ship captains generally considered two landsmen equivalent to one able seaman. If a landsman was able to prove his status to the Admiralty, he was usually released. Court records do, however, show fights breaking out as people attempted to avoid what was perceived as wrongful impressment. The London The Times reported occasions when press gangs instituted a "hot press" (ignoring protections against impressment) in order to man the navy.The Times (London), 8 May 1805
Merchant seamen ashore from their ships (and usually conspicuous by their clothing, rolling stride, tattoos and generally weathered appearance) were another matter. Anyone with seafaring experience encountered in the street would first be asked to volunteer for naval service. If the potential recruit refused he was often plied with alcohol or simply seized and taken. A commonly held belief is that a trick was used in , surreptitiously dropping a King's shilling ("prest money") into a man's drink, as by "finding" the shilling in his possession he was deemed to have volunteered. This practice led some tavern owners to put glass bottoms in their tankards. However, this is a legend; press officers were subject to fines for using trickery and a volunteer had a "cooling-off" period in which to change his mind.
The great majority of men pressed were taken from merchant ships at sea, especially those homeward bound for Britain. This was legal as long as the Navy replaced the man they took, and many naval captains would take the best seamen, replacing them with malcontents and landsmen from their own ship. It was also common for "trusted" volunteers to act as substitutes; they would then desert as soon as the merchant ship docked, and return to their Navy ship.
Outbound merchant ships, officers and apprentices were exempt from impressment. When war broke out, the Navy would deploy frigates and vessels off the coast to intercept inbound merchantmen. Reportedly some merchant captains redirected their ships to Irish ports to offload favoured crewmen, before making final landfall in England. In 1740, a merchantman fired on a cruiser that was attempting to impress its crew; threats of similar violence to avoid sailors being pressed were supposedly not uncommon, especially with the East India ships whose crews had been away from their families and England for a considerable time. In times of an extreme shortage of men, the Navy would "embargo" the coast for a short time; merchantmen had to supply a portion of their crew in exchange for permission to sail. Many merchant ships had hiding places constructed where their best crew could hide when approached by a Naval vessel.
The owners of British , because of the Press, often appointed a master to them whilst the vessels were in port in order to protect the whalers' crews. Otherwise the Press could take the men for naval service. The owners would then appoint an actual master to replace the placeholder masters.
In addition to impressment, Britain also used the Quota System (or The Quod) from 1795 to 1815, whereby each county was required to supply a certain number of volunteers, based on its population and the number of its seaports. Unlike impressment, the Quota System often resulted in criminals serving on board ships as counties who failed to meet their quota offered prisoners the option of completing their sentence or volunteering. Apart from the probably lower quality of recruits taken by this means, another downside of the Quota System was the frequent introduction of disease, especially typhus, to healthy ships.
The Royal Navy extended the reach of its press gangs into coastal areas of British North America by the early 19th century. In response, sailors and residents fought back with a range of tactics. They sometimes reacted violently. The riots in St John's in 1794 and Halifax in 1805 led to a prohibition on impressment on shore for much of the Napoleonic Wars. The protest came from a wide swath of the urban community, including elites, rather than just sailors, and had a lasting negative impact on civil–military relations in what became Canada. The local communities did not encourage their young men to volunteer for Royal Navy service.Keith Mercer, "Northern Exposure: Resistance to Naval Impressment in British North America, 1775–1815", Canadian Historical Review, June 2010, Vol. 91 Issue 2, pp. 199–232.
France also operated a corps of regulars comprising long serving seamen trained in gunnery. The Corps d'Artllerie de la Marine would also guard dockyards and naval bases when the country was at peace. It was disbanded in 1793 by the revolutionary government, who considered it elitist.
The French method of manning the navy was ineffective, partly due to the lack of growth in the French marine population. The French navy was prevented from fully mobilising because of this throughout the Seven Years' War and the problem was exacerbated by sailors being taken prisoner or being killed in action. In 1756 alone, the British took approximately 7,000 French seamen captive. In 1808, the Inscription Maritime was extended to include caulkers and carpenters.
The individual states did not deny the concept of impressment for their own navies, but were reluctant to grant the right to the Continental Congress. The concept of drafting men into armed service remained contentious, even after adoption of the federal constitution.Fowler, William M., Jr. "The Non-Volunteer Navy". United States Naval Institute Proceedings August 1974 pp. 75–78.
There are several documented cases of a British seamen being impressed by the US Navy.John P. Deeben, "The War of 1812 Stoking the Fires: The Impressment of Seaman Charles Davis by the U.S. Navy", Prologue Magazine, U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Summer 2012, Vol. 44, No. 2
During the wars with France (1793 to 1815), the Royal Navy aggressively reclaimed British deserters on board ships of other nations, both by halting and searching merchant ships, and, in many cases, by searching American port cities. Although these impressments violated American law, Jefferson ignored them so as to remain on good terms with Britain as he was negotiating to obtain Florida from the Spanish. This changed in 1805 when the Royal Navy began seizing American merchantmen violating British law by trading with the West Indies, condemning the ships and their cargoes as prizes and impressing their crews.Anthony Steel, "Anthony Merry and the Anglo-American Dispute about Impressment, 1803-6." Cambridge Historical Journal 9#3 (1949): 331-51 online. Under the Rule of 1756, in times of war direct trade between a neutral state and a British colony was forbidden if such trade had not existed in time of peace.
As a cause of the War of 1812, the impressment and ship seizures caused serious diplomatic tension, and helped to turn American public opinion against Britain. Impressment was widely perceived as humiliating and dishonoring the U.S. because it was unable to protect its ships and sailors.Paul A. Gilje, Free Trade and Sailors' Rights': The Rhetoric of the War of 1812", Journal of the Early Republic, Spring 2010, Vol. 30 Issue 1, pp. 1–23.Spencer Tucker, Injured Honor: The Chesapeake-Leopard Affair (2006).
With wars raging in Europe and in America the Navigation Act 1703 (2 & 3 Ann. c. 6) was passed "for the of Seamen and better Encouragement of Navigation, and the Protection of the Coal Trade". 2 & 3 Ann. c. 6, in The Statutes of the Realm, Vol. 8 (1821), p. 258 This act gave parish authorities the power to indenture and apprentice boys to the sea, from as young as 10, until age 21; it also reaffirmed that rogues and vagabonds were subject to be pressed into the navy. The act establishes administration and regulations for the act, including youth who volunteer for the indenture and certain seamen engaged in the coal trade supplying cities, are exempt from impressment for three years. This act was followed by the Recruiting Act 1703 (2 & 3 Ann. c. 13), which allows impressing able-bodied men into the army and navy who did not have visible means of subsistence; also as a wartime measure the act relaxes English crewing requirements under the Navigation Acts, to make experienced English seamen more available to serve on ships of war. 2 & 3 Ann. c. 13, in The Statutes of the Realm, Vol. 8 (1821), p. 275 In 1740, impressment was limited to men between 18 and 45, and it also exempted foreigners.
As part of a wider effort to build colonial capability and harass its enemies, Parliament passed the Trade to America Act 1707 (6 Ann. c. 64). Section 9 mandated that mariners serving on board privateers and trading ships in any part of America, and those on shore, are not liable for impressment. 6 Ann. c. 64, in The Statutes of the Realm, Vol. 8 (1821), p. 806 Lingering questions remained whether the law applied only to the navy, or to civil authorities as well, and whether it applied only to the current war or to all future wars. Two attorneys-general of Great Britain, one in 1716, and another in 1740, issued opinions that the 1707 act was no longer in effect,Smith, p. 291. but many American colonists disagreed.
Despite doubts over the continuing legality of impressment in continental waters, but for similar reasons, Parliament passed the Sugar Trade Act 1746 (19 Geo. 2. c. 30) stating that impressment was forbidden in the West Indies, but it added certain exceptions and made no specific mention of America. 19 Geo. 2 c. 30, in Danny Pickering (ed.), The Statutes at Large, from the 15th to the 20th Year of King George II (1765), Gray's Inn, p. 472 This would lead to the Knowles Riot in Boston the following year, and continuing colonial questions, particularly in heavily maritime New England.
The last law was passed in 1835, in which the power to impress was reaffirmed. This limited the length of service of a pressed man to five years, and added the provision that a man could not be pressed twice. Although Britain abandoned the practice of impressment in 1815, impressment remained legal until the early 1900s, and the various laws authorising impressment have never been repealed.
During the American Revolutionary War, after the losses at the Battle of Saratoga and the impending hostilities with France, the existing voluntary enlistment measures were judged to be insufficient. Between 1775 and 1781, the regular army increased from 48,000 to 110,000. Two acts were passed, the Recruiting Act 1778 and the Recruiting Act 1779, for the impression of individuals into the British Army.Curtis, p. 57–60. The chief advantages of these acts was in the number of volunteers brought in under the apprehension of impressment. To avoid impressment, some recruits incapacitated themselves by cutting off the thumb and forefinger of the right hand, making it impossible to use a musket or sword.Curtis, p. 64. The Recruiting Act of 1779 was repealed on 26 May 1780, and army impressment was permanently discontinued.
During the experiment, the British government allowed army impressment under severely restricted circumstances — both acts emphasized volunteering over impressment, and offered strong incentives to volunteers as a "carrot and stick" tactic, to encourage the men to volunteer lest they be pressed instead. The impressment portion of the 1778 Act applied only to Scotland and the area around London, excluding Wales and the rest of England, to avoid interfering with harvesting. The 1779 Act applied to all of Great Britain, but was initially suspended everywhere except the area around London, and actually applied to all of Great Britain for only six months, until the 1779 act was repealed in May 1780, and army impressment ceased in Britain.
Unlike naval impressment, army impressment applied only to "able-bodied idle, and disorderly Persons, who could not, upon Examination, prove themselves to exercise and industriously follow some lawful Trade or Employment, or to have some Substance sufficient for their Support and Maintenance", as well as smugglers, according to the 1778 law, but excluding from that any men who were voters, or harvest workers. The 1779 law extended impressment also to "incorrigible rogues" who had abandoned their families, and left them as expenses on the parish.Curtis, chapter 3. Impressed apprentices were released under appeal from their masters, and impressed foreigners were released when requested by their countries' embassies.
Poetry
Caricature
Music
Cinema
Informational notes
Citations
|
|
