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who made a living by going down to the sea, impressment was enshrined in legal precedent. A 1743 court ruling upheld subsequently by repeated courts declared the “right of impressing mariners for the public service … a prerogative inherent in the crown, founded upon common law and recognized by many acts of Parliament.” 3
    Until the first Franco-British war, in 1793, impressment had met the Royal Navy’s wartime needs. But this time it was soon clear that the mariner pool available for impressment was too small to meet the navy’s insatiable appetite while also keeping Britain’s merchant and fishing fleets at sea. In 1795 the government voted to bolster the naval ranks to 100,000 men, but where were such numbers to be found?
    Beggars, pickpockets, thieves, and other criminals, known or suspected, were dragooned, prisoners-of-war were forced into service against their homeland, and foreign mariners were rounded up. No longer was impressment limited to British ports. Press gangs rowed ashore from ships anchored in foreign ports to troll dockyards and streets for potential victims. When the frigate HMS
Macedonian
put into Lisbon it sent ashore a “press-gang … made up of [the] most loyal men armed to the teeth.” They captured several deserters who had fled other Royal Navy ships in the harbour, yanked in some crewmen from British merchantmen conducting trade ashore, and detained any foreign sailors who had the misfortune to cross their path. “Among them were a few Americans,” noted one of
Macedonian’s
crew. “They were taken without respect to their protections, which were often taken from them and destroyed. Some were released through the influence of the American consul: others, less fortunate, were carried to sea to their no small chagrin. To prevent recovery of these men by their consul, the press-gang usually went ashore in the night previousto our going to sea so that, before they were missed, they
were
beyond his protection.” 4
    The U.S. government denounced impressment of Americans to no effect. Britain argued that there was no cause for complaint because merchant shipping was not sovereign territory. Therefore it could be boarded, searched, and any British subjects aboard impressed. Not so, countered the Americans, who consented only to the Royal Navy’s having a right of search during wartime for contraband trade and “persons … in the military service of the enemy.” 5 Accordingly, French sailors aboard an American ship could be removed, but no Britons or Americans.
    But who was a legitimate American and how was one to tell? America held to a doctrine of voluntary expatriation, whereby a man could freely apply for American citizenship and renounce loyalty or obligation to the land of his birth, but this practice had no basis in international law. Great Britain considered all Britons subjects of the Crown and bound by “indelible allegiance.” They could not, without consent of the state, change nationality or escape the obligations of subjects to the state. There was no middle ground between these two views of the rights of man relative to the rights of the state.
    Through revolution America had gained independence from British rule only scant years before. Every American over thirty years of age had initially been a subject of the Crown, indeed a subject of King George III, who, although increasingly mentally incapable and having been unofficially superseded by his son, the Prince of Wales, George Augustus Frederick, still wore the crown. Before coming to think of themselves as Americans, there were hardly any who had not previously been English, Scottish, Irish, or Welsh. Indeed, many still held fiercely to their national roots even as they maintained they were now first and foremost American. They generally thought of America as a British nation in its traditions, laws, and values. In America, however, the state served the