🏴☠️ DAY 4: How Pirates Inspired American Government
When revolutionaries gathered in Philadelphia to set up the United States of America, they may have had the Pirate Republic founded eighty years earlier in Nassau in mind.
When we teach about the founding fathers of the United States, and what inspired them, we mostly talk about philosophers from the grand salons of Enlightenment Europe—Locke's theories of natural rights, Montesquieu's separation of powers, or Rousseau's social contract. So I was kinda surprised when the Standard Ebooks blurb for A General History of the Pirates said that they were inspired by pirates, too.
When revolutionaries gathered in Philadelphia to found a continental republic, it was with a memory of the Pirate Republic founded eighty years earlier in Nassau and its attempt at self-government, ship-board democracy, and defiance of empire.
I did a little digging and this seems legit. In his book Outlaws of the Atlantic, University of Pittsburgh professor Marcus Rediker (which I haven’t read, but have added to my list of interesting books) discusses how multiethnic pirate crews were a driving force behind the American Revolution.
Many colonial governments, like Pennsylvania and New York, welcomed pirates due to the financial gain.
Captain Bartholomew Roberts (who we’ll get to in Chapter IX) had eleven codes, including “Every Man has a Vote in Affairs of Moment; has equal Title to the fresh Provisions, or strong Liquors, at any Time seized, and use them at pleasure, unless a Scarcity (no uncommon Thing among them) make it necessary, for the good of all, to vote a Retrenchment.”
Some folks consider this the beginnings of democracy and the precursor to the Declaration of Independence, or the Constitution. Many pirates wanted to get away from British control — much like the leaders of the American Revolution. That said, after the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, they got to be a lot less tolerated in America. By the time of the war, piracy was all but eradicated — though privateering picked up around that time.
I wasn’t able to find any explicit evidence that the founding fathers were inspired by Captain Bartholomew Roberts. It’s mostly stuff like this (via Peter Leeson of George Mason University)
Thomas Jefferson owned a copy of both of the two most important late 17th-century and early 18th-century books that describe pirate governance, Alexander Exquemelin's Buccaneers of America, and Captain Charles Johnson's General History of the Pyrates.
Does this prove that pirates' constitutional democracy influenced Jefferson? Of course not. For one thing, Jefferson had many books in his personal library. That doesn't mean all of them played a role in his thinking about American government. Further, I don't know when Jefferson acquired these books. His copies were published (in 1774) before the Declaration of Independence; but that doesn't tell us when Jefferson bought or read them.
I’m really curious whether Jefferson was inspired by Captain Roberts, or if it’s just wishcasting on the part of modern-day historians. It might just be convergent evolution, after all.
I figure that if a guy like Peter Leeson (who Wikipedia assures me is not only an expert on pirates and economics but quite an impressive thinker overall) can’t be sure either way, I at least feel like I can set aside my research and be sure I’m not missing any smoking guns.
But it’s fun to think about. What do you think is more likely? Convergent evolution of political philosophy, or Jefferson &co quietly cribbing from Caribbean pirates?
Extra Credit
The essays linked above are interesting, well written, and worth reading in their entirety if you’re interested in the relationship between piracy and the American Revolution.
Also, it isn’t really about pirates — it owes more to the history of Haiti than anything — but the Crown of Slaves spinoff series by David Weber feels pretty relevant here. It involves a radical freed slave organization, the Audubon Ballroom, taking control of a critical planet and then trying to build a government that won’t fall apart due to how fundamentally untrusting and ungovernable the various factions involved are. It opened my eyes to the fact that ‘winning your freedom’ is only the first stage of political independence; actually building a functioning society is really hard, and doing it with the sorts of people who become pirates and violent rebels is even harder.
If you’ve got some extra free time or like to switch between fiction & nonfiction when your brain gets tired, it’s an interesting contrast to the pirate book not least of which because the Honorverse that it takes place in is pretty explicitly “the Napoleanic Wars in Space” and indeed Honor Among Enemies (the sixth book in the Honor Harrington series) sees Honor return to active duty from her political exile on Grayson to command a Q-ship and fight space pirates.
Has anybody read this or any other fiction books that seem similarly related to the project of democratic nation-building in important ports of trade?
Having not read the literature (or all of the fiction) you referenced I’d offer that I believe it likely Jefferson studied the Nassau pirates deliberately. I would not say that he was influenced by them, but if you’re trying to charter a new democracy you’d be a fool not see look at the existing scholarship and experiments.
The freed slaves on the planet variously named Verdant Vista or Congo or Torch were not pirates. The actual pirates in the Honorverse, mostly operating in the Silesian Confederacy, are extremely nasty and not the sorts of people you'd think of as building a decent democratic nation.
Beyond that, nation-building themes come up pretty often in science fiction but I'm not sure how specific your criteria are. Examples that come to mind range from classic Heinlein, both in *The Moon is a Harsh Mistress* and *Tunnel in the Sky*, to Stirling's Nantucket series starting with *Island in the Sea of Time*, all of which emphasize conservative notions of civic duty. More libertarian perspectives come up in Vernor Vinge's work, both in the series starting with *The Peace War* and *The Ungoverned*, and in the Zones of Thought universe, particularly in *A Deepness in the Sky*. It is often the case both in these books and in real life that the people trying to form a new society were seen as outlaws by the more established nations around them. As for the more specific case of nation-building among people thought of as pirates, the only example that immediately comes to mind that may fit is the Outer Planets Alliance in *The Expanse* (which had just the sorts of instability problems that you mention).