The Liberty to Take Fish: Atlantic Fisheries and Federal Power in Nineteenth-Century America

By Thomas Blake Earle

In The Liberty to Take Fish, Thomas Blake Earle offers an incisive and nuanced history of the long American Revolution, describing how aspirations to political freedom coupled with the economic imperatives of commercial fishing roiled relations between the young United States and powerful Great Britain.

The American Revolution left the United States with the "liberty to take fish" from the waters of the North Atlantic. Indispensable to the economic health of the new nation, the cod fisheries of the Grand Banks, the Bay of Fundy, and the Gulf of St. Lawrence quickly became symbols of American independence in an Atlantic world dominated by Great Britain.

The fisheries issue was a near-constant concern in American statecraft that impinged upon everything, from Anglo-American relations, to the operation of American federalism, and even to the nature of the marine environment. Earle explores the relationship between the fisheries and the state through the Civil War era when closer ties between the United States and Great Britain finally surpassed the contentious interests of the fishing industry on the nation's agenda.

The Liberty to Take Fish is a rich story that moves from the staterooms of Washington and London to the decks of fishing schooners and into the Atlantic itself to understand how ordinary fishermen and the fish they pursued shaped and were, in turn, shaped by those far-off political and economic forces. Earle returns fishing to its once-central place in American history and shows that the nation of the nineteenth century was indeed a maritime one.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Aug 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9781501770869

Thomas Blake Earle

THOMAS BLAKE EARLE is an assistant professor at Texas A&M University, Galveston, and the author of “For Cod and Country: Cod Fishermen and the Atlantic Dimensions of Sectionalism in Antebellum America” in the Journal of the Early Republic.

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Cover: The Liberty to Take Fish, Atlantic Fisheries and Federal Power in Nineteenth-Century America by Thomas Blake Earle

THE LIBERTY TO TAKE FISH

ATLANTIC FISHERIES AND FEDERAL POWER IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA

THOMAS BLAKE EARLE

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

Ithaca and London

For the fish

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Fisheries and the Flotsam of Revolution

2. The Limits of Peace

3. The Ruby and Reindeer Affair

4. Our Living Is Truly That of Fishermen

5. Fishermen at High Tide

6. Sea Changes

7. Abandoning the Fishermen and Embracing the British

Epilogue

Notes

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It feels right, as a maritime historian, to start with a nautical metaphor. So I’ll just say that the voyage has been long but I’ve had the good fortune to share it with many good shipmates who have helped me stay the course and steady the vessel through clear skies and squalls. This book began as a doctoral dissertation completed at Rice University under the direction of Caleb McDaniel. Caleb was an enthusiastic, if deeply skeptical, proponent of this project from the beginning. Jim Sidbury is in some ways responsible for this book as I began formulating the topic as a first-year student in his Atlantic world seminar. Randal Hall deserves mention if only for fostering my early interest in environmental history. I benefited immensely from serving with Randal and the other editors, including Bethany Johnson and Suzanne Gibbs, during my time at the Journal of Southern History. I also had the fortune of learning how to be a historian at Rice from Allen Matusow, Ussama Makdisi, Fay Yarborough, John Boles, and Alida Metcalf. But my tutelage began even earlier. Mark Lawrence first put me on the track to becoming a professional historian during my undergraduate years at the University of Texas.

During my time at Rice, I was lucky enough to meet Wright Kennedy, Ben Wright, Whitney Stewart, and Bill Black. While knowing them has made me a better historian, more importantly, they made those years and the years since more enjoyable and more meaningful. This book also benefited from conversations, in seminars and at bars, with my graduate-student colleagues, including Keith McCall, Edwin Breeden, Suraya Khan, John Marks, Sam Abramson, Sean Smith, Andrew Johnson, Maria Montalvo, David Ponton, Joe Locke, Andy Lang, Eddie Valentin, and Miller Wright. The larger community of scholars has also left its imprint on this book, and I am grateful for the input and advice, comments, and conversations I’ve enjoyed with Brian Rouleau, Jeff Bolster, Helen Rozwadowski, Marcus Rediker, Matthew McKenzie, Brian Payne, Eric Roorda, Glenn Gordinier, Kurk Dorsey, Chris Morris, and Megan Black. Of course, historians would be lost without archivists. I’d like to extend my appreciation to the archivists and staff members of the National Archives at College Park, the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Archive, the G. W. Blunt White Library at Mystic Seaport, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and The National Archives at Kew.

While this project was born at Rice, it matured at Southern Methodist University (SMU) while I was a postdoc at the Center for Presidential History (CPH). I can’t thank Jeff Engel enough for allowing me to join that community and for showing me how to be a publicly engaged historian. This book and my career probably would have turned out different without his mentorship. Brian Franklin likewise deserves recognition for making the CPH such a welcoming and stimulating place. Both Jeff and Brian also made my years at SMU enjoyable by selecting a wonderful group of fellow postdocs, including Lizzie Ingelson, Lindsay Chervinsky, Paul Renfro, and Greg Brew. Also, my appreciation goes out to Ronna Spitz, who kept the CPH running. The CPH played a major role in this book coming to fruition by inviting Jay Sexton and Amy Greenberg to Dallas to comment on the manuscript. Their many insightful comments made this book all the stronger. I’d also like to thank the baristas at the since-closed Mudsmith on Lower Greenville in Dallas. I didn’t do all my writing there, but I think I did my best. After leaving SMU I was lucky enough to land at Texas A&M University at Galveston, a fitting place to write maritime history. My colleagues, including JoAnn DiGeorgio, Liz Nyman, and Jenna Lamphere, have made Galveston a fine place to finish this book. I would be remiss not to thank Michael McGandy, who saw the promise in this project, and the staff at Cornell University Press, who have made the publication process as smooth as could be expected.

Portions of chapter 5 were previously published in two journal articles. First was For Cod and Country: Cod Fishermen and the Atlantic Dimensions of Sectionalism in Antebellum America, Journal of the Early Republic 36, no. 3 (Fall 2016): 493–519; copyright © 2016 Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, all rights reserved. Second was Transatlantic Diplomacy, North Atlantic Environments, and the Fisheries Disputes of 1852, Environmental History 23, no. 4 (October 2018): 774–796; published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Society for Environmental History and the Forest History Society, all rights reserved.

I owe a debt of gratitude to Marisa Knight, who, while thoroughly uninterested in fish, did show me what’s most important in life and what makes it worth living. Finally, I’d like to express my thanks to Chris and Sherri Earle. I don’t think they will ever know how deep my appreciation runs because I’m not sure I possess words adequate enough to express it. This book, and pretty much anything else I’ve done in life, wouldn’t have happened without them.

Introduction

The World the Fish Made

In 1852 the United States seemed to inch toward crisis. Just two years earlier, many Americans felt they had quelled the rising tide of sectional antagonism with yet another compromise that they hoped would stave off disunion for another generation. But indignation over the continued existence of slavery in the national polity still burned. In March 1852 the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s incendiary novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin exposed the inhumanity of human bondage to a national audience. In July the formerly enslaved orator and abolitionist Frederick Douglass queried his audience in Rochester, New York, What to the slave is the Fourth of July? In doing so, he questioned the very efficacy of the United States as a nation purporting to guarantee liberty but inextricably bound to slavery. And symbolic of a coming crisis, that same month, Henry Clay, the ardent nationalist and architect of compromise, was the first American to lie in state in the rotunda of the national capitol. With his passing, an era passed.

Meanwhile, Secretary of State Daniel Webster addressed an audience at his home in Marshfield, Massachusetts. The aging statesman did not, however, address the inequities that Stowe’s novel vividly described, the broken promises of US nationhood Douglass decried, or even the death of the nation’s most prominent politician. Instead, Webster talked about fish.

Since before independence, Americans had gone forth from the coasts of New England to the fishing waters of the Northwest Atlantic in search of cod. In the summer of 1852 Great Britain made known its intention to curtail US access to the fisheries by removing US fishermen from those waters for real or imagined violations of the series of international agreements that governed the use of this maritime resource. Such action threatened the livelihoods of thousands of New England fishermen while striking a blow against an industry that had defined the nation since the colonial era and that drew tight the economic bonds that tied the United States together and drew closer the faraway markets of the Caribbean and Mediterranean. The British decision also raised fears over the fragility of US independence, as such heavy-handed action suggested that London looked to undermine the nation’s sovereignty at sea. A crisis—one born not of domestic disunion but of foreign friction—gripped the nation that summer, as Americans across the union and across the political spectrum reacted viscerally to this affront to a right the nation had enjoyed for decades.

As tension between US fishermen and the Royal Navy mounted in the aftermath of Britain’s announcement, Webster departed Washington. The secretary of state was nearing the end of his illustrious career in national politics. He left the capital to escape the oppressive heat of a Washington summer and returned to his home on the New England coast. On his arrival he was greeted by throngs looking to catch a glimpse of the statesman and perhaps even hear what the federal government was prepared to do in response to the unfolding drama on the North Atlantic. They were not to be disappointed.

Betraying his sober, even conservative approach to diplomacy, which ordinarily leaned toward Anglophilia, Webster struck a defiant tone that day from his home in Marshfield. He promised the federal government would counter British designs on the fisheries: The fishermen shall be protected in all their rights of property, and in all their rights of occupation. The Millard Fillmore administration would not falter, but would, Webster said, in words that no doubt resonated with an audience in a seaside town, protect the fishermen hook and line, bob and sinker.¹ Despite such unequivocal language, the question remains: why was Daniel Webster so concerned about fish?

The answer, in part, lies in the fact that for nineteenth-century Americans, fish were never merely fish and the fisheries were not just another mine of natural wealth that undergirded national prosperity. As Webster observed that day, The most potent consequences are involved in this matter, including questions about national security. Our fisheries, the statesman continued, have been the very nurseries of our navy. If our flag ships have conquered the enemy on the sea, the fisheries are at the bottom of it—the fisheries were the seeds from which these glorious triumphs were born and sprung. Perhaps of more importance to Webster’s audience, the economic value of the fisheries was among the potent consequences that impelled action on the subject. Speaking of the fisheries, Webster remarked that they employ a vast number. Many of our own people are engaged in that vocation. There are perhaps among you some who have been on the Grand Banks for forty successive years, and there hung on to the ropes in storm and wrecks. Webster steeled his audience: You may be assured it is a subject upon which no one sleeps at Washington.² Over the coming weeks and months, news of Webster’s speech and of the brewing dispute on the fisheries raced across the nation. Showing that this was not merely a regional issue concerning a trifling subject, papers from farming districts like Pittsfield, Massachusetts, Gulf ports like New Orleans, and places even as far away as Honolulu carried Webster’s words and breathlessly reported on any developments emanating from the fisheries.³ By the mid-nineteenth century, the nation eagerly consumed any information about conflict over the North Atlantic fishing grounds. That conflict was as old as the nation itself.

The Treaty of Paris (1783) left the new United States with a statutory claim to the fisheries, along with formal independence. From the beginning, then, fisheries and independence were tied in the minds of American statesmen, if not Americans more generally. Subsequently, those statesmen used the power of the state to safeguard this totem of US nationalism from any threat. The North Atlantic fisheries would help define the limits of federal authority for nearly a century.

Cod fishing in places like the Bay of Fundy, the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and the Grand Banks operated as a central facet of US statecraft for much of the nineteenth century. The fisheries stood at the nexus of multiple forces—economic, social, and cultural—making the fisheries the fodder of politics at multiple levels—local, regional, national, and international. The phrase fisheries issue will serve as shorthand for the series of questions that surrounded US commercial fishing in the North Atlantic. Internationally, the question was one of who could fish where, while domestically, the central question concerned the degree to which the US state would support the fishing industry both politically and economically. How the federal state addressed those questions shows us the extent to which the state could and did use its power.⁴ Commercial fishing occupied such an important place in the operations of the federal government because it represented so much more than just fish. The fisheries became an environment on which the US political community ascribed various meanings. Fundamental beliefs like independence and national security were tied to the daily operations of fishing to make this maritime environment an important element of US state making.⁵

Ocean fisheries are an extraordinarily well-situated prism through which to study statecraft. These aquatic resources are most often tied to the problems of regulating elusive, mobile, yet ubiquitous organisms, with little concern for humanity’s political and regulatory regimes. Often, these kinds of resources demanded the attention of political establishments not only because of their value as commodities but also because of their mobile nature, making them fundamentally different than other resources. Active political regimes have been necessary to facilitate the extraction of this resource because of its peculiar nature. Histories of fisheries are often tied to how governments at various levels work, and often fail, to claim, manage, and defend the rights of their citizens to exploit a maritime resource. In that way, then, the history of fisheries is the history of statecraft.⁶ The relationship between fishing, if not the maritime world more generally, and the development of the US state and US nationalism during the nineteenth century was not unique. Great seaborne powers, from the British Empire and the Dutch Republic to ancient Athens and Carthage, not to mention a host of intermediate powers like Norway, Denmark, Portugal, and Japan, have all defined themselves in terms of their historical relationship with sailors, the sea, and its resources.⁷

At Marshfield, Webster spoke forcefully but he did not say anything new. He tapped into decades of rhetoric that placed the North Atlantic fisheries at the heart of US statecraft. The economy, commerce, war, sectionalism, nationalism, and domestic politics all met at the fisheries. But it was not the unique position of the fisheries in relation to all these forces that gave the fisheries issue its importance. Instead, it is how the federal government sought to solve the fisheries issue that revealed the limits of state power in a world of competing actors.⁸

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Foreign relations was but the most obvious arena in which concern for the fisheries steered state power. But with the fisheries issue, the exercise of that power was never straightforward. While at times the federal government could impose its vision on the actors and environments in the region, just as often, fishermen and the fish themselves were the primary agents of US foreign relations. This kind of give-and-take relationship typified the fisheries issue and shows that the operative question was not whether the federal government possessed power enough to impose on the lives of its citizens, but rather how that power operated.

While New England fishermen ranged much closer to home than the merchant mariners and whalers who traversed the globe, they were vitally important in defining the nation’s relationship with the wider world and, crucially, with Britain. From the American Revolution through the Civil War, the fisheries were a central concern in Anglo-American relations, tacking with the ups and downs, the cooperation and confrontation that defined the United States’ most important foreign relationship. The fisheries were not merely another line item on the laundry list of concerns that echoed across the Anglophone Atlantic. While debates tied to things like commerce, finance, and culture were the meat of Anglo-American relations, nothing else, with perhaps the exception of slavery, reached the level of ubiquity in that relationship that the fisheries issue did. At every turn, diplomats found fish—at times, fostering closer transatlantic ties, and at other times acting as the harbinger of friction. The fisheries issue, like Anglo-American relations more generally, defied simple characterization apart from its close association with the most important inflection points in that relationship. Anglo-American relations during the nineteenth century simply cannot be understood without the North Atlantic fisheries occupying a central place.

The fisheries issue was enshrined in Anglo-American relations from the beginning. In the 1783 Treaty of Paris US diplomats secured recognition from Great Britain that the United States would enjoy forever the liberty to take fish on the Grand Banks and along the coasts of Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and Labrador.⁹ Yet, sown within the unassuming language of the fisheries article were the seeds of Anglo-American friction that would ripen into the bitter fruit of transatlantic discord. The 1783 treaty set three precedents that structured the nature of the fisheries issue in Anglo-American relations for nearly a century. First, it established that the fisheries would be a subject of consideration for Anglo-American diplomats. By allowing US fishermen a perpetual claim to waters so far from their own shores, British diplomats ensured that the waters of the Northwest Atlantic would be a transimperial environment subject to the periodic wrangling of diplomats. Second, by including the fisheries in a comprehensive agreement that recognized US independence, Americans made an explicit connection between the fisheries and independence itself. As the fisheries issue continued to resurface in transatlantic relations, US diplomats and the US public reacted so viscerally to any encroachment on the rights of US fishermen because it seemed to represent an encroachment on independence. And finally, the Treaty of Paris demonstrated how diplomatic agreements were doomed to fail when addressing the fisheries. Anglo-American diplomats treated the fisheries as a passive subject that would naturally comply with their dictates. In reality, the fisheries were a dynamic environment whose shifting nature ensured that any static treaty would be out of date as soon as the ink dried. The Treaty of Paris, like the string of treaties that would follow over the next century, was steeped in irony as it only exacerbated the very tensions it sought to address. For the statesmen who drafted and debated these treaties—men far removed from the everyday operation of the fisheries—this was a difficult lesson to learn, and it demonstrated the necessity of including fishermen and the fish themselves in this story.

These trends continued to influence the tenor of fishery diplomacy as US and British representatives addressed and readdressed tension in the North Atlantic. In 1818, in 1854, in 1871, and again in 1877, Anglo-American statesmen looked to hammer out the differences that continued to dog the situation on the fisheries. At each turn, they failed. In fact, with each new agreement, these diplomats created the conditions under which tensions would transform but never abate. Yet, crucially, it was never just the fisheries these statesmen discussed. Borders, tariffs, trade, and slavery were just some of the issues this series of treaties also addressed. At times the fisheries became an entrée, a necessary prerequisite to addressing this myriad of concerns, as it was fish that got diplomats to the table.¹⁰

The story of fisheries is a story of the limits of US power. The fisheries issue was concerned with the very shape of the US state. As Anglo-American statesmen time and again turned their attention to the North Atlantic fisheries, they were in fact shaping the emergent US imperium. By determining where US fishermen could or could not fish and where the lines between US and British imperial sovereignty were, the fisheries issue set the limits of the US state. This story is also the story of the limits to the exercise of US power. The British Empire was the most obvious check on Washington, but the marine environment also limited the ability of the state to impose its vision. We cannot fully understand the operation of state power absent how that power was brought to bear on the nonhuman world.¹¹

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The centrality of the fisheries in US politics during the first century of the United States’ existence was not merely a product of transatlantic politics—it was a product of the Atlantic itself. When Webster addressed the crowd at Marshfield, he was just a couple miles from where the steel-gray waters of the North Atlantic lapped the New England shore. Twenty thousand years ago, however, the land and seascape were drastically different. At the peak of the Wisconsin glaciation, two massive ice sheets, thousands of feet thick, descended across North America. The larger, the Laurentide Ice Sheet, covered a wide swath of the continent extending from the Arctic to Long Island and ran in a curve that reached as far south as the modern-day Ohio River and as far west as the Missouri River before receding north and joining the smaller Cordilleran Ice Sheet, which rested on the furthest western parts of the continent. With so much of the world’s fresh water locked up in these icy behemoths, global ocean levels were hundreds of feet below where they are now, exposing land masses that now lie below water. A map of this glacial landscape would look strikingly different from the familiar lines that demarcate land and sea in modern atlases. The spot where Webster promised the resolve of the federal government was then dozens of miles inland.¹²

Figure 1: Map of the Northwest Atlantic.

FIGURE 1. Map of the Northwest Atlantic. By Bill Nelson.

Particularly striking was a peninsula of dry land that extended to the northeast from Long Island Sound into what would become the North Atlantic. A series of raised ridges, formed by earlier tectonic processes, were shaped and gouged by the fringes of the mammoth ice sheet. These ridges would become the chain of banks that harbored rich fish communities as the ice sheet regressed for good and inundated the area with water some fifteen thousand years ago. Georges Bank, Banquereau, and the Grand Banks, among others, stand as underwater cliffs, hundreds of feet above the sea floor around them, with only Sable Island Bank still barely peaking above the waves as a reminder that these prominent formations were once dry land.¹³

The physical structure of these underwater formations helps explain why this region became a dynamic home to a number of fish and other marine organisms. These banks stand at the confluence of two major ocean currents: the cold Labrador Current from the Arctic and the warm North Atlantic Drift originating further south. In a process driven by the uneven solar heating of the earth, these two currents collide at the banks before being forced to continue along a northeasterly path that terminates in the waters of northern Europe. This collision stirs the waters, creating localized gyres that encourage the mixing of these distinct water masses. As a result, nutrients that would otherwise remain buried in the depths of these waters are forced upward on the banks where they interact with sunlight that can penetrate the surface water in what is called the photic zone. Here, chlorophyll-bearing, autotrophic phytoplankton thrive, feeding zooplankton and, ultimately, maritime organisms up the food chain. This process, dubbed primary production by ecologists, explains the biological productivity of this portion of the ocean, as the necessary nutrients are brought together with the required oxygen, water temperature, and sunlight to feed the microscope organisms that then, in turn, feed everything else. Chemically and biologically, not all ocean water is the same, nor can all ocean water support complex ecologies. But this portion of the North Atlantic stands at the confluence of factors that allow for such a rich ecology.¹⁴

While the environmental perspective opens up new narratives, it presents a series of methodological conundrums. Reconstructing environmental conditions and how historical actors understood those conditions remains the environmental historian’s primary task, one that, at its best, is necessarily interdisciplinary in nature. To borrow from historian Geoffrey Parker’s work on climate and crisis in the seventeenth century, environmental history is built on two archives: the natural archive, consisting of the physical evidence of the earth’s historical climates found in ice cores, pollen deposits, and tree rings, and the human archive, consisting of sources more familiar to historians.¹⁵ The book that follows is based, primarily, on the human archive, to interrogate how nineteenth-century Americans understood the political value of North Atlantic fisheries. But this work engages the natural archive as well in order to understand what Donald Worster describes as the autonomous, independent energies that do not derive from the drives and inventions of any culture.¹⁶ Attuned to the nonhuman world, this work recognizes that many of the forces that shape the human experiences operated independently of humanity. During the nineteenth century, changes in the sea were, most often, beyond human consciousness and control, even when the ramifications of those changes were not.

Ocean historians like W. Jeffrey Bolster and Helen M. Rozwadowski have rooted their studies in both the archive of sources generated by scientific disciplines and an appreciation for the culturally constitutive aspects of environmental analysis. In doing so, they have created scholarly models worthy of emulation.¹⁷ The pages that follow find the natural archive within the human archive. While the marine environment is not the only or even the primary force driving change in this story, it is omnipresent. As fishermen compiled logs, as consular agents penned reports, and as politicians delivered speeches, they all communicated their understanding of the North Atlantic environment, leaving traces of the changing state of the environment on the sources that inform this study.

The source base I work from is, in many respects, entirely ordinary. I rely heavily on diplomatic correspondence, politicians’ papers, congressional reports, and newspapers. While this corpus of documentation is a trove of information about the state of Anglo-American relations and the nature of domestic politics, there is also a wealth of information about the environment. By bringing the perspective of an environmental historian to this source base, I am better able to see that there is much more to the story of narrowly defined politics. Consular reports are the most helpful in gleaning environmental information from ostensibly political documents. During the nineteenth century, consuls were at the vanguard of US foreign policy as they worked to ensure economic success in penetrating and exploiting foreign markets. While the hundreds, if not thousands, of microfilm reels housed at the National Archives contain page after page blandly documenting the comings and goings of commerce, consular agents directly commented on local conditions—political, commercial, and environmental. From this correspondence comes invaluable information about the state of North Atlantic fisheries and how actors ranging from fishermen to diplomats understood that environment and its changes.

Maritime laborers, like the environments they operated in, also emerge as a central element of this source base and, consequently, this story. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries sailors were tied to some of the most important political, economic, and social changes that shaped the Atlantic. Revolutionary citizenship, the creation of the African American community, and even the advent of capitalism are but a few of the epochal transformations sailors drove. While unique in their mobility, sailors of the Atlantic world were bellwethers of the changes that swept through landed communities.¹⁸ Sailors were especially important in the foreign relations of the early United States. For much of the nineteenth century, the diplomatic corps of the nation was small and clustered in the courts of Europe and the emerging states of Latin America. Consular agents were more numerous, but still a paltry number abroad. Sailors were by far the largest group of Americans to go abroad as commercial ships ranged from the Caribbean to the Mediterranean, and even penetrated the Asian markets of the South Seas. In the early United States, sailors were de facto diplomats. As historian Brian Rouleau notes, Sailors, simply stated, were nineteenth-century America’s largest class of representatives overseas, and thus the principal engine of its foreign relations at the time. They were, Rouleau continues, ambassadors in the forecastle.¹⁹

North Atlantic fishermen were in the same metaphorical boat, as Americans who had left US shores yet brought distinctly American ideas about their place in the international order and their relationship with the environment as they interacted with foreign peoples and foreign places. They were the nation’s face abroad along the coasts of British North America. The decisions fishermen made in pursuit of their catch were largely, though not entirely, shaped by economics and environments, but they had important political implications for the conduct of US foreign policy. At times, perhaps at most times, the federal foreign policy establishment reacted to the decisions fishermen made on the water, thus implicating these maritime laborers in the foreign policy process. As US fishermen were captured by the British navy for plying their craft in forbidden waters, they displayed their knowledge of international politics and operated in the vulnerable political space available to them to address current crises while influencing future policy. Even if the specific decisions fishermen made about how they practiced their vocation were shaped by their economic and environmental contexts, fishermen, like other sailors, were undoubtedly political actors.

This story points to the importance of maritime laborers in the nineteenth-century United States, but it also points to the importance of the ocean. An appreciation for the ocean’s role in history is crucial for rendering a more faithful picture of the United States in the nineteenth century. As scholars are increasingly appreciating, the ocean was fundamental to the development of national identity and the functioning of US statecraft.²⁰ This work joins the oceanic turn of the nineteenth-century United States by placing the seas at the center of the story.

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While North Americans had fished the North Atlantic for decades, if not centuries, before independence, this story begins in earnest with the peace negotiation in Paris in 1783. Fishermen played a vital role during the Revolutionary War as they mustered into service on land and at sea and as they maintained the supply lines that provisioned those fighting forces. Chapter 1 considers how that service influenced the conduct of the US delegation at the Paris peace negotiation. John Adams’s clever diplomacy ensured the fisheries were a central point of the negotiation and was pivotal in securing this liberty to Americans in perpetuity. With this diplomatic win, however, the fisheries issue did not recede from its central position in the emergence of US statecraft. The questions that dogged the early republic—the relationship between the states and the federal government at home and the relationship between the nation and others abroad—were the same questions that were part and parcel of the fisheries issue. Chapter 2 introduces fishermen as diplomatic actors in the era of the War of 1812. In the aftermath of war, it was apparent that the recent round of hostilities had done little to pacify Anglo-American relations. Nowhere was this more evident than with respect to the fisheries. Great Britain insisted the war had abrogated the US liberty to fish those waters. US fishermen, realizing that such a diplomatic decision directly threatened their livelihoods, continued to fish, risking capture by the British navy. During the summers of 1816 and 1817 scores of US fishermen were detained. With each boatload of US citizens taken by the British navy, diplomats moved with greater and greater urgency to address the situation. This action culminated with the Convention of 1818, yet this landmark treaty would have never been had fishermen not consciously made decisions that brought diplomats to the bargaining table.

The Convention of 1818 stipulated Americans could fish all British waters with the exception of those within three marine miles of the coasts. Despite this clarity, tensions remained. Throughout the antebellum era the fisheries remained a constant irritant to those on the ground and sporadically interrupted Anglo-American relations at key points. Chapter 3 examines a paradox in Anglo-American relations. During the 1820s transatlantic relations seemed to tilt toward reconciliation, at least at the level of high diplomacy. The Monroe Doctrine indicated the nations could work in concert to articulate shared diplomatic goals, yet on the fisheries, collisions between US fishermen and the British navy for real or alleged infractions of the three-mile line continued apace. A particularly dramatic series of captures during the 1824 fishing season illustrated how such friction could provoke an international incident. Even as fishing was implicated in high-level politics, its everyday operations were embedded in a series of environmental, technological, and industrial changes as midcentury approached. Chapter 4 offers a fine-grained examination of the fishing industry from the perspective of fishermen and the US consuls who became intimately intertwined with the business of fishing as they were forced to deal with the fallout from the repeated collisions between fishermen and British sailors. As the experiences of those closest to the environment showed, the British were only one of the obstacles US fishermen had to contend with. The series of diplomatic and environmental changes that defined the antebellum era culminated with the Fisheries Dispute of 1852, the subject of chapter 5. While this crisis owes its short-term causes to changes within Britain imperial trade policies, the environment directly abetted the confrontation. Changes in the sea, which, in turn, forced changes in US fishing patterns, brought US fishermen and the British navy into direct conflict that even threatened to devolve into war. This confrontation was also fodder for domestic debate as sectional issues came to the fore of national politics. Strangely enough, this episode offered an instance of national unity, even as the nation lumbered toward disunion.

The era of the US Civil War brought irrevocable changes to the fisheries issue—permanently changing the place of the fisheries in the US political economy. While for nearly the first century of US independence the federal government had uniformly defended the rights of US fishermen and protected the industry from foes domestic and foreign, during the 1860s and 1870s it became obvious that ordinary fishermen in the North Atlantic could no longer count on federal support. In an era of US Civil War and Canadian Confederation, authority was increasingly consolidated in imperial and national capitals. This consolidation limited the ability of actors along the periphery—like fishermen—to influence what happened at the center.

In the aftermath of the Civil War, chapter 6 discusses, Anglo-American diplomats set about addressing the elements of transatlantic relations that prevented a larger rapprochement amidst the ongoing commercial and economic integration of the two nations. The Alabama Claims resulting from the depredations of British-built Confederate warships topped this list, but the fisheries remained ever present. Changing environmental and industrial conditions had rendered the Convention of 1818 woefully out of date. Although this process was hamstrung by US indignity toward Great Britain on account of the latter’s flirtation with supporting the Confederacy, Anglo-American diplomats came to an agreement in 1871 that settled the Alabama Claims and subjected the fisheries issue to arbitration. Although this move seemed innocuous, it was evident that the federal government valued a transatlantic rapprochement over continuing its unblemished record of defending the interests of the fishing industry. Chapter 7 brings this story to a close by examining the fisheries arbitration that occurred in Halifax in 1877 where US diplomats not only failed to preserve the rights of US fishermen but also alienated them from the process of diplomacy. Where once fishermen were viewed as valuable symbols of US independence and operated on the front lines of US foreign relations, they were now relegated to a secondary role. Although cod fishing continued in the North Atlantic for the next century, US fishermen had become a symbol of a bygone era, left behind by a government that had changed its diplomatic priorities. This world the fish made came to pass. But although the place of North Atlantic cod fishermen in the US political economy underwent a dramatic change, some things didn’t. Across the nineteenth century, into the twentieth, and still with us today are Americans’ insatiable appetite for fish and the willingness of the US state to use its power to feed it.

CHAPTER 1

Fisheries and the Flotsam of Revolution

Looking back on his career in the foreign service of the burgeoning United States, John Adams recalled the fisheries as being the primary factor that took him from his home on the shores of the North Atlantic to the courts of Europe. On receiving word of his appointment as minister to France in the winter of 1777, Adams considered the countervailing draws of family and country. Forsaking the comforts of home, Adams sailed to France in order to defend US interests, not least of which were the North Atlantic fishing grounds. Priding himself on his familiarity with life and labor in Essex, Plymouth, and Barnstable Counties, Adams boasted of having more knowledge both of the Cod and whale fisheries and of their importance both to the commerce and Naval Power of this Country than any other man. Thus, he feared that refusing this commission would put the fate of this maritime resource in the hands of men unfamiliar with—or worse, hostile to—this industry. As Adams resolved to devote my family and my Life to the Cause, he did so with the implicit understanding that the cause of independence was the cause of fishermen.¹

In the immediate aftermath of independence, cod fish were synonymous with independence itself. US state making—and war making, for that matter—fused these two so that by a kind of political alchemy, fish became far more than a natural resource. Independence was the watchword for early US foreign relations. Statesmen were racked by an all-consuming anxiety that international forces were conspiring to render independence a worthless label. During the first couple decades of independence, US statecraft was devoted to the mission of affirming that independence, and the fisheries issue showed the extent to which the national government would wield its power to achieve that end.

Accordingly, the fisheries issue would