The Argument for Privateering Today

A Blimp of the same class as the Resolute

One of the cultural features that characterized warfare in the twentieth century was the virtual absence of privateers. Arguably, there were a few privateers, but even that has been discounted recently. The current entry on privateering in the Wikipedia says:

20th century

In December 1941 and the first months of 1942, Goodyear commercial L class blimp Resolute operating out of Moffett Field in Sunnyvale, California, flew anti-submarine patrols. As the civilian crew was armed with a rifle, many thought this made the ship a privateer, and that she and sister commercial blimps were operated under letter of marque until the Navy took over operation.^[32] Without congressional authorization, the Navy would not have been able to legally issue any letters of marque.

The last time I read this entry, prior to writing my novel Theodosia and the Pirates, it was much more positively in favor of the the idea that the blimp in question was issued a letter of marque. But whether or not the United States government did issue such a document authorizing the deployment of the Resolute is not the only question we should ask. Because in point of fact, historically many well known American privateers received their letters of marque from governments other than that of the United States. For instance, Jean Laffite had a letter of marque from the Republic of Cartagena. Later, he awarded other privateers letters of marque as head of the government in Galveston, as described in Theodosia and the Pirates: The War Against Spain. 

Recently, Austin Petersen, who is competing with two others for the Libertarian nomination for president of the United States, spoke at great length about the idea of issuing letters of marque and reprisal without declaring war against any nation. This way we can go after terrorists without starting a war. I am certainly in favor of that.

 Petersen mentioned the War of 1812 and American privateers, but not Jean Laffite, the most  important privateer contributor to that war on the American side. Is it because Laffite was not issued a letter of marque by the United States government? His letter of marque from the Republic of Cartagena allowed him to go after Spanish ships at a time when the United States had not declared war against Spain, even as Spain and Britain plotted together to take down the United States and return America to its status as a British colony. When Captain Lockyer approached the Baratarian privateer with an offer from the British, the letters he bore said that England had a treaty with Spain and had not an enemy in the world except the United States. He offered Laffite a chance to earn money and a position in the British Navy, but Laffite turned it down, because he wanted to be an American and an independent privateer, not a government employee. Laffite informed the United States of the British offer and of the British fleet's current location off the coast of Mobile. Instead of going after the British, the American Navy then attacked Laffite and his fleet of light privateering ships. Why? Because already privateering had gone into disrepute, and people like Commodore Daniel Patterson saw private fleets as an infringement on the career Navy officer's prerogative to a monopoly on waging war. 

Patterson did not use the ships he plundered from Laffite to fight the British. He sold them at auction to line his own pockets. But Laffite nevertheless managed to save the United States at the Battle of New Orleans by providing flints and gunpowder, which the Americans had run out of, as well as artillery and men to man it. And when his service was done, all he was granted for it was an empty pardon, and a flippant fare-thee-well. He was never compensated for his looted ships, and in the history books he has gone down as a pirate.

There are many reasons to prefer privateers over a standing army, not the least of which are these:

• Privateers can run a fleet on a shoestring budget, and always at their own expense. It is the enemy that pays their wages, not the American people.
• Privateers are a volunteer force, so nobody has to be drafted and nobody has to be taxed, and nobody need lose life or limb who does not get a share in the booty.
• Privateers can take care of business while the United States maintains neutrality, but this can only work if they are allowed to use letters of marque issued by countries other than the United States.

This last point is the one under contention between those like Austin Petersen, who favors privateering, and the vast majority of the American political establishment, who are against it. Neither side is very good at articulating what the problem is, so I will spell it out for you here: We must repeal the Neutrality Act so we can go back to the state of privateering at the time when the United States came into being.

http://theodosiaandthepirates.blogspot.com/2014/03/whats-wrong-with-neutrality-acts-of.html

For an in depth discussion of the Neutrality Act, read the article linked above. But here is a short recap. At the time the constitution of the United States came into effect, there was nothing to keep individual US citizens from fighting on any side they wished of any war going on anywhere in the world.  Many American privateers had letters of marque from France that allowed them to wage open war against Britain on the high seas. This was legal and moral and made sense, because France had helped the United States win its war of independence against Britain.

Now the government of the United States was not at war with  Britain. In fact, they were at peace. But it was legal and lawful and right for each citizen to pursue his own foreign policy, none of them binding the United States or bringing about any breach in the peace. The constitution provides that the executive branch cannot go to war unless Congress authorizes an official declaration of war. But the constitution also provides that any powers not granted to the United States government explicitly are reserved to the States and to the people. And by "the people" the constitution does not mean "collectively" as in "People's Republic of China" where everybody has to agree in order for one person to do something. "The People" in the United States constitution refers to the individual citizens, one by one. Any of them could go to war any day they wished, so long as the US as a whole was not involved in it. And this is exactly what Americans did, until 1794 when the Neutrality Act was passed.

Who lobbied for the Neutrality Act? Why, Britain, of course! They did not want to be beset by those pesky American privateers, so they threatened the United States diplomatically, saying the peace between our two nations depended on the passage in the United States congress of a law outlawing privateering. Should we let Britain make our laws? What good was the revolutionary war, if they can dictate terms from afar?

The Neutrality Act does not outlaw privateering if the United States picks a side in a foreign war and grants letters of marque to Americans to go to war against declared enemies. But it makes it illegal for an individual American to go to war against a country with which the United States is at peace.

Jefferson initially opposed the Neutrality Act. It was Adams who wanted it, so he could pursue an undeclared Quasi-War against  France. Jefferson and Burr came to power after Adams' one single term in office, on a platform of repealing all those laws that the Federalists had put into effect in order to quash anyone who opposed Britain. But... Jefferson forgot all about that when Aaron Burr set out to conquer Mexico as a private citizen, acting at his own expense. Did you know that Burr was found not guilty of treason, but guilty of violating the Neutrality Act? When it served Jefferson's purposes, the law passed at the behest of Britain was allowed to stand.

http://www.historiaobscura.com/the-meaning-of-treason-united-states-v-aaron-burr/

Privateering came more and more under attack after the War of 1812, largely due to international accords that went contrary to the United States constitution. Today, most people do not know the difference between a pirate and a privateer. This situation will not be remedied unless we deal with the Neutrality Act head on. It is unconstitutional, as it abrogates the rights reserved to the people in that document. But you can be sure that no Supreme Court Justice, conservative or liberal, is going to rule it unconstitutional, because they are all Statists, right wing or left. So it is up to Congress to repeal it, once the Libertarian Party takes over.

Letters of Marque May Be Making a Comeback

Today I saw something that gives me hope. Someone was arguing in favor of letters of marque.

http://thefederalist.com/2015/03/25/is-it-time-to-bring-back-letters-of-marque/

However, they were afraid this solution to a current problem would be seen as a move to privatize warfare: as in in privateers! That's the etymology.

Some less rational factions will undoubtedly hail this as a crazy right-winged conspiracy to privatize the military. But Founders did not design a Constitution with powers that undermine other powers. If letters of marque were a tool of privatization, what good would it have been to include provisions, just a few lines below this, “to raise and support armies” and to “provide and maintain a Navy”?

And exactly what would be wrong with that? It wasn't as if the constitution provided for a standing army. However, in order to give people the opportunity to take advantage of a letter of marque, we would also need to repeal the Neutrality Act. Is anyone prepared to do that?

http://theodosiaandthepirates.blogspot.com/2014/10/the-neutrality-act-of-1817.html

The Importance of Context: Self Interest and Good Behavior

Recently, a time capsule buried by Sam Adams and Paul Revere has been opened, containing a number of items, including coins and a silver plaque.

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jan/07/after-220-years-boston-time-capsule-finally-gives-up-its-secrets

Such tangible messages from the past, however, are fairly meaningless, unless we understand the context. The question is not what do these items mean to us, but rather what did they mean to them.

One of the problems with historical documents and historical events is that people tend to view them from their current perspective, and so whatever changes in morality or outlook or social expectation that have occurred can be entirely obscured for the average person.

Take the ten commandments.  Most people today, religious or not, see them as the basis of modern morality. But why is there an admonition to honor your father and mother and nothing whatever telling you to nurture your children? Because in the times when this list of dos and don'ts was written, nurturing your children was something people did out of self-interest. They did not need to be told. The more children you had, the richer you were. During your prime, your children worked for you. In your old age, they supported you. In many of the Biblical stories, people were tested by being asked to harm their children. Taking care of your children was seen as selfish, and a mark of loyalty to a god was the willingness to sacrifice them. On the other hand, the duty of children to be supportive of their parents was something less natural, that had to be drummed into them. People were told not to strike their parents on fear of death, but they were told that sparing the rod would spoil the child.

All of this has been changed, because having children is no longer seen as profitable, and hence the interest in child welfare and state involvement in child-rearing has become the norm. Nobody is told to honor parents, but children are being encouraged in school to report it if they feel their parents discipline them too harshly. And this change of circumstances is misunderstood by both the right and the left, so that some campaign to protect unborn children from their own parents, while others campaign to protect children who are already born -- again, from their own parents. All these people purport to follow a morality that is based on the ten commandments, completely ignoring the context and the underlying values that are left unspoken in those rules.

The same kind of context blindness is at the root of historical misunderstandings of  the war powers as enumerated in the constitution, and by extension, the importance of privateering to the early American way of life.

From Article I, Section 8: The Congress shall have the power ...

To define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas, and Offenses against the Law of Nations;

 To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water; 

To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;

To provide and maintain a Navy; 

To make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces; to provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the laws of the Union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions;

Why did the framers of the constitution lump all these things together: defining and punishing piracy, granting letters of marque and reprisal, raising and supporting armies, but maintaining a single Navy?Why was it raising and supporting armies -- plural ', but maintaining a Navy -- singular and with a capital 'N'? Why was it indefinite Armies? Why was it the Militia? Why was a very formally capitalized Navy indefinite? Inquiring linguistic minds want to know.

In discourse, the little function words are telling. They are the words to look to in order to spell out the unspoken context. They let us in on what is assumed, what is common knowledge and what is new information.

The militia already existed. It was known. It could be raised or not raised, but it was a given. Armies come and armies go, but no standing army was to be tolerated, because that would be too much like the British they had just rebelled against. A Navy was something they planned to build, but not something they currently had.

  And what do piracy and letters of marque have to do with this? Why did they want a standing Navy, if they abhorred the idea of a standing army?

Why was there nothing in Article I, section 8 about preventing citizens from waging war on their own? What's so special about a Navy and not an Army? Why is piracy such a big deal? And why are letters of marque mentioned in the same breath? Why no provision for a Department of Homeland Security?

The context that might be missing for the average modern day  reader of the constitution is this: the framers were not afraid of  home-grown terrorists. They were home grown terrorists. They were not afraid of popular uprising. They were the uprising. There was nothing in the constitution telling people not to go around attacking each other, because that wasn't the issue. The thing the framers feared the most was that the government would get out of hand and attack the citizens. So they wanted nobody at home policing things except for the militia, which consisted of the people themselves.

They did want a Navy, but it was not so much to engage in all out foreign wars: it was to make sure that American vessels were not attacked at sea by foreign powers and out-and-out pirates. For this reason, they saw a small, standing Navy as a kind of police force to make sure that American commerce would remain unmolested, and as an added protection, in times of war, they wanted to grant letters of marque and reprisal to private ship owners so as to deputize them to attack foreign vessels. There was to be no heavy military spending, and the privateer was to finance his war operation at the expense of the enemy.

Now if we understand this, we understand the importance of privateering, and we see it as positive force, both in times of war and in peace time. We also understand that Jean Laffite, acting on behalf of the United States in War of 1812 was the ultimate hero of the American constitution. He was living the life that the founders envisioned.

But historians today writing about Jean Laffite do not know any of this about the context of the constitution, and so they see Jean Laffite as an opportunistic person acting for his own gain -- as if this were somehow unpatriotic!

Take this article by David Head:

http://www.nola.com/military/index.ssf/2015/01/jean_lafitte_didnt_save_new_or.html

Head writes:

"Laffite persisted, not out of patriotism but from his assessment of conditions in the Gulf. Aiding the Americans might win pardons for his men and the return of the valuables seized by the Navy. Plus, with the British out of the way, Laffite could return to his old business, in the old way."

Yes, Jean Laffite expected to be able to go back to his old business of being a privateer and an importer. That he could not is a shameful fact about the way the constitution was subverted in the wake of the War of 1812, as people began to forget the reasons for the specific provisions in Article I, Section 8. Just as the context of the ten commandments has been entirely forgotten, so it goes with the American constitution.


People used to take good care of their children, because it was in their own best interest. People were expected to defend their country for the very same reason. The idea that profit and duty have to clash is something new, something that ignores the historical context of how peoples and nations rise and fall.

Private Fighter Pilots and Other Modern Day Privateers

Most of us have grown up in an era where the government monopoly on war machines was just a given. It was not even an issue for public discussion. We didn't question it, because it did not occur to us to question. That's how much the fabric of American society has changed since the War of 1812.

However, it used to be understood that private owners of war ships and cannons and other primarily military equipment were just as important if not more so than government funded combatants.

The second amendment is not specifically limited to any particular type of weapon. Arms include anything that can be used in battle, and it is not merely for self defense or for the defense of the country at large. In fact, there's nothing in the second amendment to indicate that such weapons are to be used in defensive maneuvers only.  A citizen could be envisioned to go on the offense, too, for the benefit of the national security.

Recently, I saw someone complaining that if Americans wanted to fight for their country, then they should join one of the Armed Forces of the United States. But there could be any number of reasons why they might not want to or might not be able, even if they did want to.

• People in the armed forces have to give up many of their civil rights while serving. They are not allowed to publish their political opinions or to be actively engaged in the shaping of public policy. But a very patriotic person might want to serve his country while retaining his first amendment rights
• The need to obey orders might conflict with the desire to allow one's own conscience to dictate what behavior is appropriate in any given situation. Refusing a direct order to fire at civilians can be problematic in a war zone. 
• Sometimes very able bodied people are rejected by the military for failing to meet certain very strict physical criteria.

What if you wanted to be a fighter pilot and the United States Air Force rejected you? Maybe your vision wasn't perfect or some other aspect of your person or background was not completely up to spec. Should this be allowed to deter you from pursuing that dream?

While being a fighter pilot is not my personal dream, I have known a number of people who faced this dilemma. Should they be allowed to fly fighter jets outside the military? Can they in fact?

I did a search and found this:

If you are interested in this possibility, their site is here:

http://www.migflug.com/en/

Somehow I feel that this is not a real opportunity for combat training, but if you know of other, better possibilities, please speak up in the comments.

The provision for letters of marque and reprisal is still there in the United States constitution. Could it apply to fighter jet pilots as well as ships' captains?