Liberty on the Waterfront. Paul A. Gilje

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      1. While on liberty in a port, sailors spent money freely on liquor. Notice the woman in the window, probably a prostitute, and the black man in the background walking in front of the oyster and clam shop. “Sailors Ashore.” From Hawser Martingdale, Tales of the Ocean… (Boston, 1840). New Bedford Whaling Museum.

      A few more years, and many more adventures at sea, led to a change of heart. Lane recounts his conversion to hard living. He had agreed to deliver a letter to a young woman who worked at “French Johnny's,” a notorious dance hall on George Street in New York. As he worked his way through the crowd outside, he approached the door blocked by a chain and a guard. After paying the cover charge, Lane stepped into “a spacious room, illuminated with glittering chandeliers hanging in the centre, and lamps all around.” He was awestruck. “Never was there a greater invention contrived to captivate the mind of a young novice.” Three musicians sat on their high seats and there were “about fourteen…damsels, tipped off in fine style, whose sycophantic glances and winning smiles were calculated only to attract attention from such as had little wit, and draw money from their pockets.” Lane admitted that he “was just the man” and declared, “This was felicity indeed.” Lane bought some hot punch, finding that after a while it tasted good. He summarized the rest of the experience in verse:

      So I spent my money while it lasted,

      Among this idle, gaudy train;

      When fair Elysian hopes were blasted,

      I shipp'd to sail the swelling main.²

      Horace Lane offers us a wonderful view of liberty ashore. He allows us to follow him into the sailor's haunts by evoking a powerful sense of the sounds, sights, and even smells that enticed many young men into a particular mode of life. At first repulsed by the depths to which he sees his comrades of the Sampson have fallen, marked by the racial mixture of the waterfront dive, he is seduced by the light of chandeliers and damsels “tipped off in fine style” at French Johnny's. Lane's saga goes downhill from there, leading to a round of drunken debauchery and criminality, interspersed with adventures spread across the seven seas. Ultimately his is a tale of redemption that condemned the depravity that seemed to accompany liberty ashore.

      Others viewed the sailor's liberty differently. Richard Henry Dana, Jr., and Herman Melville knew a great deal about the sea, both having served in the forecastle—where common seamen slept—in the nineteenth century. Dana wrote that “a sailor's liberty is but for a day; yet while it lasts it is perfect.” The tar thus experienced an exuberance of liberty that was denied most others. Released from shipboard discipline, Dana asserted that he was “under no one's eye, and can do whatever, and go wherever, he pleases.” Of his own initial “liberty” Dana exclaimed, “this day, for the first time, I may truly say, in my whole life, I felt the meaning of a term which I had often heard—the sweets of liberty.”³ Melville, in his own sardonic style, reiterated this point and captured the spirit of a world turned upside down when he declared that “all their lives lords may live in listless state; but give the commoners a holiday, and they out-lord the Commodore himself.”⁴

      Implicit in the views of both Dana and Melville is a political meaning of the word “liberty” that appears to belie the experience of Horace Lane. For Dana, the sailor's liberty gave him a sense of personal freedom, a release from restraints that bound his life at sea. Melville, whose work speaks more directly to the American democratic soul, has an understanding based on the collective experience of liberty. The sailor's holiday liberates not only the individual, but also the group, and enables the commoners to rule triumphant even if only momentarily. Lane, in contrast, bemoans the liberty ashore, viewing it as both a trap and a release that in many ways defined his very essence as a sailor. Lane sees this liberty as one component of the life of Jack Tar.

      To understand the world of the waterfront, we must take a careful look at the sailor's liberty ashore, exploring the widely held image of the jolly tar. Sailors were not a proletariat in the making, nor were they a peculiar brand of patriot. They were real people who often struggled merely to survive. Sailors were a numerous and diverse body of people who shared a common identity. The great variety of men who comprised the waterfront and shipboard workforce, and the fact that many sailors did not fit the stereotype, will be the focus of this chapter.

      At sea the sailor worked hard. His life was one of regulation from above and dangers all around. Ashore there was a sudden release. He could drink, curse, carouse, fight, spend money, and generally misbehave. For the sailor ashore there was no future, only the here and now. Although this image was not flattering, sailors were also often described as generous and tenderhearted. More important, the stereotypical sailor represented a culture and value system that challenged the dominant ideals of both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Not only did the sailor ashore reject the traditional hierarchy of pre-revolutionary society, but his behavior represented the antithesis of the rising bourgeois values that became the hallmark of the Age of Revolution. Whether consciously or not, sailors played a role that had profound implications for the waterfront community and workers throughout society.

      Drinking was a central part of the sailor's liberty ashore. Minister Andrew Brown's sermon in the 1790s on the dangers of the seafaring life focused as much on intemperance on land as on the perils of the deep. He cautioned that “the spirit of prodigality and wastefulness,” terms he used synonymously with drinking to excess, “has long been regarded as one of the distinguishing characteristics of the seafaring life.” He believed also that drinking “has been sanctioned by custom, and is now almost converted into a professional habit.”⁵ Forty years later, the members of the New-Bedford Port Society recognized “the exuberant joy” a sailor experienced once he came ashore and his eagerness for drinking whetted by the relative abstinence at sea. The New-Bedford Port Society also acknowledged the social pressures felt by a tar, admitting that he drinks “in token of cordiality and good will,” and that “he treats his acquaintance in sign of generosity, or to escape the imputation of meanness.”⁶ After a long voyage, as other sailors busied themselves with calculations of “airy castles,” one man honestly admitted that he would get drunk as soon as he got ashore, declaring, “it is the only pleasure he has in the world, and when he is pretty well in for it, he is as happy as any man in it.”⁷ The centrality of drinking to both the image and the reality of the sailor can be seen in popular depictions. Infused with a spirit of patriotism, and perhaps recognizing that sailors enjoyed the stage, creators of theatrical performances in the 1790s often included songs and portrayals of the American tar. In Songs of the Purse sailor Will Steady sings:

      When seated with Sall, all my mesmates around,

       Fal de ral de ral de ri do!

      The glasses shall gingle, the joke shall go round;

      With a bumper! then here's to ye boy,

      Come lass a buss, my cargoe's joy.

      Here Tom be merry, drink about,

      If the sea was grog we'd see it out.⁸

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