To The High Seas!

This Week in 1776, Week 4

Late January, 1776. The Brits just got spanked out of Norfolk, Virginia, so they’re trying to stack dubs up north. Where exactly, might you ask? Well, that’s tricky.

See, the Big State up north was Massachusetts, whose borders changed in the early 1800s. At the time, MA also included parts of present-day Maine and New Hampshire.

On January 23rd, the Brits attacked Falmouth, MA, which is now Portland, ME. They fired cannons and bombarded the place, destroying a lot of the waterfront, which crippled commerce and livelihood. The goal was to make the Patriots feel bad for rebelling, but lol, it didn’t work.

A day later, Congress adopted a resolution that would cut off all trade with Britain. No more sending them stuff if they were gonna keep screwing us over. If they wanted tobacco they’d have to go beat up minorities for it, as was tradition.

This mattered because now the fight was military and economic. In six months, it would become utterly legal too, with the Declaration of Independence, but no spoilers.

Speaking of combining military and economic warfare, Congress also started to issue letters of marque! You may have heard about these in the news recently. Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) wanted to issue them again. I found this cool, because Lee usually spends all day on Twitter and doesn’t actually propose legislation. He’s very good at complaining about stuff. For once he proposed a real and historic solution to ongoing naval issues between the U.S. and other countries. (In this instance, Venezuela, but we solved that one didn’t we boys! Ha ha! ‘Merica!)

Now that the colonies had lost income through the trade embargo with Britain, it was necessary to shore up their finances in other ways, so privateering was back in style! What’s privateering, you ask? It’s piracy, only it’s legal—sanctioned by the government—so it’s not piracy. You just get to do everything pirates do without getting arrested for it. Like being deputized to fight crime. It’s so badass and I wish we did this more.

Stay tuned for next week.