Seaborne Citizens: What 10,000 Captive Sailors Taught America About Its Revolution
Citizenship & Constitution Day 2008
Date and time
September 17, 2008, at 10 a.m.
About this event
History Professor, Denver Brunsman, delivers an address for this year's Citizenship and Constitution Day – a federal holiday that focuses on the rights and responsibilities of U.S. citizens both native-born and naturalized. This event also commemorates the events of September 17, 1787, when the United States Constitution was signed by delegates from 12 states at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia.
The British Royal Navy impressed (or forced) approximately 10,000 American sailors to serve in its vessels between 1793 and 1812. Scholars have long considered British naval impressment a leading cause of the War of 1812, but few have explored how the practice permanently altered notions of American citizenship. The American Revolution forever changed the rules that governed the relationship between the individual and the state in the western world by replacing the quasi-medieval notion of perpetual allegiance to a monarch with the idea of volitional, or voluntary, allegiance to a country of one’s choice. Yet it took a new crisis with Britain, over impressment, for Americans to reflect on the radical implications of their revolution. Public discourse before, during, and after the War of 1812 often located America’s identity in the difference between the free American sailor citizen and the impressed British “slave.” In protesting the re-subjugation of their impressed countrymen under British rule, Americans defined for themselves in language clearer than at any time since the Revolution what it meant to be a citizen of the United States.
Location
Wayne State University
Detroit, MI 48202