Continuing on from the first part of this series, we shift our gaze away from the general impact on war economies of both the host and enemy nation to the roles in which privateers operate. There is a plethora of different ways in which privateers fit into the battlefield itself. As the outfitting of these ships could range from simply ten men on a whaleboat with a swivel gun all the way up to custom built vessels that British captains would recognize as frigates, privateer tactics ran the gambit from ambushes utilizing false flags to direct confrontation with naval vessels. This mix of both unconventional and conventional capabilities naturally make them a hybrid threat.1 Privateers can share aspects of different fighting forces with which many are familiar. They can be as business oriented as mercenaries, with money being a primary motivator in what they will do. Alongside that, these more professional privateers are seen to go after vulnerable military ships, rather than simply merchants. On the other side of the metaphorical coin, Privateers can function like guerilla fighters. They can be under-gunned and opportunistic while also being hard to tackle and deal with for a conventional force. These things make a privateer a hard thing to categorize as simply an analog to something on land, as they can often fill multiple roles at once. This section will attempt to highlight their part in hybrid warfare, while also demonstrating how these different roles a privateer could fill often clashed or melded together.
Hybrid Warfare: Lion Hunters
It was April 14th, 1781. Three British Naval vessels exited the Potomac River. A soft warm glow may have been seen, specifically on the Maryland side of the river.2 One could likely spot plumes of smoke rising out from smoldering husks of buildings. The three vessels had made their way down the river, burning plantations and homes along the way. Captain Thomas Graves of the Savage had led the force. Graves had coincidentally encountered the Virginian plantation of George Washington, Mount Vernon, which at the time was being managed by his cousin Lund Washington. After discussing with Lund, Graves promised he would not burn down the arch-traitor’s home. Lund had been so thankful that he had sent sheep, hogs, and other things to the British sailors. When George Washington heard that his home had been spared, though, he considered it an insult.3 He stated in a letter to Lund that “It would have been a less painful circumstance to me, to have heard, that in consequence of your noncompliance with their request, they had burnt my House, & laid the plantation in ruins.”4 George Washington doubted their raiding would stop without “the arrival of a superior naval force.”5 While the Savage’s raid along the Potomac was quite successful, the British sloop-of-war would run into a superior naval force in September of 1781. Still, it would not be a ship from the Continental Navy or the French Navy.
September 6th, 1781.6 Captain Charles Sterling held fast to one of the railings near the helm of the Savage, waiting for one of his subordinates to hand him his spyglass. They were about 35 miles from Charleston and had just encountered an American vessel. As he was handed his spyglass, he attempted to appraise the vessel. With the intelligence he currently had, he believed it to be an American privateer with only 20 nine-pounders.7 It was barreling full sail towards them, seeming to think it could go toe-to-toe with the Savage. Likely trusting in his ship’s sixteen six-pounder guns and the fact it was purposefully built for war, he went to meet the vessel. He soon realized his catastrophic mistake as the Savage drew closer. It was the Congress, one of the Americans’ most fearsome privateer vessels. 8 One of which bristled with over twenty twelve-pounders on its main deck alone. Her majesty’s vessel was no longer a hunting lion but rather a lion being hunted. Stirling watched as, in an instant, the Congress tore into the Savage. Within the first hour of the four-hour engagement, Stirling saw crucial components, cannons, and crew of the Savage being blasted away. The Congress would eventually capture the Savage, with the prize’s mast threatening to fall and over thirty-four of its crew, including Sterling, wounded.9
This first account highlights a few aspects of privateers. First, the more mercenary character of a privateer comes out. For a privateer vessel that was large enough, a British warship represented a target that was even juicier than your average merchant vessel. This was due to the American government at the time being entitled to half of the value of a captured merchant ship but letting a privateer keep the full value of any enemy naval ship they captured.10 With a bigger payday on the table, certain privateers were much more willing to enter direct combat with an enemy’s navy in a conventional, albeit opportune, way. It is hard to argue that there are few things more conventional than foregoing the false flag strategy that so many privateers liked to use in favor of just charging straight at a British warship in the hope of a payday. Though, unlike mercenaries, they were not paid for simply the battle, but rather their plunder after it. Unfortunately for the case of the Congress, they were unable to get their prize back to port as it was recaptured by the British.11 Yet, that is just at the level of a battle.
At a grander strategic level, something else is revealed by this account. While the Congress had acted conventionally by charging at the Savage outside of Charleston, its home port was all the way in Pennsylvania. In terms of good cruising grounds for British merchant ships, few would think the South Carolinian port of Charleston to be a place for such clientele. Whether or not the Congress had specifically gone down to Charleston to hunt British warships is unknown, but one would wager that it is unlikely. Considering that the British warship had set off south from the Potomac, it is a much more likely scenario that the Congress was simply returning to its home port after hunting British merchant vessels from some area down south like the Caribbean. This flow of privateers once more creates an unconventional defensive screen. It likely did more to protect the colonies than the Continental Navy could hope to do by that time. With only nine vessels in the Continental Navy by 1781, it wasn’t cut out for patrolling the waters. In contrast, a flow of 449 privateer vessels armed with an average of fifteen cannons proved dangerous to British Naval vessels who found themselves alone.12 This massive difference in the number of privateer vessels compared to Continental Naval vessels was due to one of the critical strengths of privateers, which is that there is simply no fleet to defeat.
Hybrid Warfare: Pirate Ports
It was September 6th, 1781. If one had been asleep in New London on that night, they would have been awoken at 3:00 AM by the sound of two rapid cannon shots. Two shots meant an alarm, and a pang of anxiety would likely start filling the souls of those who had awoken. Yet, for many, the pang would dissipate as a third shot would follow. It was not a two-cannon alarm, but rather a boisterous three-cannon celebration to salute a captured ship coming into port, which was a common occurrence for New London. After all, the port was home to many privateers and their investors. For the local fort to fire those three shots at such an early hour likely aggravated many, but was no cause for alarm. However, there was one issue more pressing than the timing of the cannon shots.13
The third shot was made by the British.
The ruse to fool the Americans had worked. After subduing the town, the streets of New London were desolate other than reeling civilians and British soldiers under the command of Benedict Arnold, a loyalist who had grown up only twelve miles from New London. The soldiers were moving in squadrons, under the orders of Arnold, to torch every significant structure that aided the American rebellion. This included things like mills and warehouses, but also vessels tied in harbor and the homes of those who owned privateer vessels. The destruction of the privateers was the explicit secondary goal of the attack, as given by Arnold’s superior, the commander-in-chief of British troops in America, Sir Henry Clinton.14 In total, over 143 buildings and twelve vessels were destroyed.15
The destruction of New London, while meant to create a diversion and disrupt the coastline, was also a part of the strategy to help curb American privateers. Other attacks had occurred on other privateer ports such as Martha’s Vineyard and Little Egg Harbor in New Jersey in 1778, usually spurred on by the taking of very valuable merchant ships by the American privateers.16 In the instance of New London in 1781, the most valuable ship was the Nancy, which was valued at over £80,000.17 This stratagem was brought on due to the British Navy’s inability to deal with privateers by simply hunting them at sea and escorting merchant vessels, something which the likes of Rear Admiral James Gambier complained about. He lamented that “we have such a range of coast and such a multiplicity of various services, convoys, army requisitions and attendance, that it is an Augean labor to attend and find means to encounter such a variegated choice of numberless difficulties.”18
This all points to another aspect of hybridity in the character of privateers which hits close to that of guerilla fighters in a hybrid war. However, for those uninitiated in how guerrilla warfare looks in a hybrid war, it is useful to give some insight on the subject. Firstly, referencing one of the earliest works on hybrid warfare, Conflict in the 21st Century: The Rise of Hybrid Wars, it states that hybrid threats use a full range of Conventional capabilities and irregular tactics.19 One perfect place to find hybrid threats is within the Eastern theory of guerilla warfare. The Eastern theory of guerilla warfare is meant to be a transitional style of warfare in which the forces start as guerilla fighters, become a hybrid mix of conventional forces assisted by guerrilla forces, and finally reach full-scale conventional capabilities that allow for victory.20 As there is a defined stage of hybrid tactics in the theory, it is one of the few models in which there is apparent strategic usage of hybrid tactics rather than simple opportunity. It should be noted that much of the theory and literature that is written on the Eastern theory of guerrilla warfare begins to appear post-1930, starting with Mao Tse-Tung’s On Guerrilla Warfare. Even when the military theory started to be named and formed, those writing on it state that strategy did not just start in the 1900s. There is a distinct tradition of returning to past conflicts to discuss the aspects of modern guerrilla warfare that appear in them, such as Mao’s reference to the Russian usage of guerrilla warfare against Napoleon’s army in 1812.21 It is keeping with that very same tradition to examine privateering using the hybrid tactics similar to those displayed by practitioners of the eastern theory of guerilla warfare.
Pulling from a practitioner of the eastern theory of guerrilla warfare, General Huang Van Thai organized guerrilla activity into three areas: “guerrilla base areas,” “guerrilla zones,” and “enemy-occupied zones.”22 The base areas were in friendly territory behind conventional forces, and the guerrillas were to aid in their maintenance. This matches very closely to the privateer ports, as British forces had to launch ground offensives against conventional forces with the intent to destroy them. Privateers directly aided these ports by bringing in stolen cargo and, if they were powerful enough, hunting British ships off the coast. The guerrilla zones were in areas where the enemy forces and allied forces came into contact, which, in the case of privateers, would be along the American coastline. In these areas guerrillas are meant to harass the enemy as to assist the conventional forces. This can be seen in the previous discussions on attacks on British supply vessels and direct confrontation with British Naval vessels. Any British ships the navy had to deploy to hunt down said privateers also brought down the number they had available to bombard the coastline or to dispatch to deal with the French, Spanish, or Continental Navies. The final area is areas behind enemy lines, in which case the guerrilla is supposed to advance the struggle politically, which the privateers indirectly did by putting pressure on parliament through the disgruntled merchants they robbed and by diverting resources off of the search for American powder ships.[/note] Thai, Some Aspects of Guerrilla Warfare, 1724 Comparatively, a suitable privateer vessel could accomplish massive economic damage. An example of this is the Holker, which captured a value of over £2,000,000 in a single cruise during the Revolutionary War.25 These amounts were no one-time flukes either, as in the war of 1812, the Leo captured another vessel valued the same.26 The British Navy would explode in size by the end of the war, going from less than 100 operationally ready ships at the start of the war to 468 by the end of it.27 This is due to the compounding threats that had arisen. By the war’s end, the British navy not only had to wrestle against the Spanish, Continental, and French navies but also American privateers that threatened supplies and commerce. The privateer numbers exploded themselves as more allied ports to openly operate from appeared, with the French and Spanish joining the war, going from 136 to over 328 by the end of the war.28
- Frank G. Hoffman, Conflict in the 21st Century: The Rise of Hybrid Wars, (Arlington, Virginia: Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, 2007), 8.
- Eric Dolin, Rebels at Sea. (New York: Liverright Publishing, 2022). 150-151.
- Dolin, Rebels at Sea, 150-152.
- George Washington, “From George Washington to Lund Washington, 30 April 1781”, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/99-01-02-05583.
- Washington, “From George Washington to Lund Washington, 30 April 1781”.
- At this point, Captain Graves was transferred to another ship and Charles Sterling took control of the Savage.
- Charles Sterling, “An Account of the Action betwixt the Savage Sloop of War of 16 Guns, Capt. Stirling, and the Congress, an American Frigate of 20 Guns, Capt. Geddis; from a Letter of Capt. Stirling’s to Rear-Admiral Graves,” The Annual Register, Or a View of the History, Politics, and Literature, for the Year 1781, (London: J. Dodsley, 1791), 251-253.
- The Congress is also one of the few privateer ships that wasn’t a refitted Schooner or Brig. Graves explicitly calls it a frigate.
- Dolin, Rebels at Sea, 152-153.
- Risch, Supplying Washington’s Army, 25.
- Dolin, Rebels at Sea, 153
- Edgar Maclay, A History of American Privateers, (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1899), viii
- Dolin, Rebels at Sea, 171
- Dolin, Rebels at Sea, 170
- Dolin, Rebels at Sea, 172
- Dolin, Rebels at Sea, 167-169
- Dolin, Rebels at Sea, 170
- Morgan, William, ed., Naval Documents of the American Revolution, (NDAR), Vol. 13, (Washington, D.C: Naval History Division Department of the Navy, 1972). 283
- Frank G. Hoffman, Conflict in the 21st Century: The Rise of Hybrid Wars, (Potomac Institute for Policy Studies: Arlington, 2007), 8
- Charles Townshend, “The Irish Republican Army and the Development of Guerrilla Warfare, 1916-1921”, The English Historical Review, Vol. 94, No. 371, 318-345. (Oxford University Press, 1979), 318
- Mao Tse-Tung, Mao Tse-Tung: On Guerrilla Warfare. ProQuest Ebook Central Leased, (San Francisco: Hauraki Publishing, 2015), 38
- Hoang Van Thai, Some Aspects of Guerilla Warfare, (Hanoi: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1965), https://vva.vietnam.ttu.edu/repositories/2/digital_objects/176094, 17
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These guerrilla-like features made the privateers a near weed-like problem for the British Navy. They could not just let the issue go unanswered, as the privateers would simply sap the British economy through piracy, which would then go to fund more privateers. Trying to cut the weeds down one by one would also be useless, as more would take their place. Yet, even pulling the weed out by the roots was ineffective and costly. The assault on New London only destroyed twelve vessels for such an investment of time, manpower, and energy.23 Dolin, Rebels at Sea, 172
- Dolin, Rebels at Sea, 144
- Maclay, A History of American Privateers, 351
- Gardner Weld Allen, A Naval History of the American Revolution, Vol. 1, (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1913)
- Maclay, A History of American Privateers, viii
