To one who spends time in the archives of the first quarter-century of the American republic can avoid references to one Jonathan Robbins. Probably in reality the Irish tar Thomas Nash, the pseudonymous Robbins scarcely ranks up there with other major figures of the period. But then why is his name braided so thickly through the last years of the presidency of John Adams and the first of Thomas Jefferson and even invoked later in the nation’s history? Why is Robbins widely mentioned in congressional debates and in contemporary newspapers and correspondence?
Those are the questions that provoke Roger Ekirch’s lively book American Sanctuary. Unintimidated by the shelves already teeming with volumes on the sulfurous politics of the 1790s, the complex election of 1800, and the Jeffersonian aftermath of both, Ekirch manages to add much to our understanding of this formative period of American history by posing questions never before ventured. And he does so with a clarity and flair that will draw in not only readers of history but all readers who enjoy a good adventure tale.
The story begins in 1797, when, in a world gone topsy-turvy in the wake of American independence, the French Revolution, and unrest in Great Britain’s maritime ranks and adjacent Ireland, the British experienced the most violent naval mutiny in their history. In a bloody rampage, crew members of HMS Hermione took over their frigate off Puerto Rico’s coast, murdered its officers, and eventually sailed it into safe harbor in a Spanish port in what’s now Venezuela. From there they scattered to the winds.
No navy can tolerate mutiny or piracy; no military force can tolerate insurrection. And Britons’ pride in their navy and anxiety about their island nation’s security were in those years heightened by the threat that revolutionary fervor and democratic demands were posing to their highly stratified society. Rebellion and sedition inside the realm were considered menaces as great as military attack from outside it. So after Hermione’s crew members tried to lose themselves on land and at sea, the Royal Navy wasted no time in going on the hunt, with the aim of making examples of the mutineers. That’s how, in 1799, the United States became involved.
By provision of the treaty of 1795 with Britain—popularly known as the Jay Treaty, after its principal American negotiator, John Jay—the pact’s signatories were each obliged to extradite to the other upon request “all persons, who, being charged with murder or forgery, committed within the jurisdiction of either, shall seek an asylum within any of the countries of the other.” From the moment the treaty’s terms were announced, it had been unpopular in the young nation. While it seemed to secure peace with the former mother country, some Francophile critics believed it was too generous to the British. And it did not end the hated British practice of forcibly seizing (“impressing”) seamen deemed to be British subjects from American ships on the high seas. That missing treaty provision deeply rankled Americans.
Two years after the Hermione mutiny, Robbins was apprehended and jailed at the request of the British consul in Charleston, South Carolina. The British, who believed he was actually Thomas Nash, one of the ringleaders among the mutineers, wanted him handed over—a request for extradition that Britain had earlier lodged with American authorities regarding other mutineers held in American jails. Some of those earlier requests had been refused. That option also presented itself in this case. Claiming that he was actually a Connecticut-born American who had been impressed into service in the Royal Navy, Robbins was in an American jail. But even if, as was alleged, he had participated in the Hermione mutiny, had he mutinied in British jurisdiction—which would mean, under the Jay Treaty, that he would have to be extradited—or, as many Americans argued, on the high seas, where territorial jurisdictions were more fluid?
American law and practice granted leeway to federal judges on whose dockets cases like this one ended up. If President John Adams, a Federalist, had not been distracted by other matters and under political attack, he and his administration might have found a way to forestall Robbins’s transfer to British authorities or facilitate his release under some pretext. Instead, badly advised by Secretary of State Timothy Pickering, Adams pressured the local federal judge to hand over Robbins to the British.
At first, the judge resisted doing so over questions about Robbins’s citizenship. Was he the Irish Thomas Nash or the American Jonathan Robbins? But given Pickering’s determination not to anger the British, as well as the poor representation of their client by Robbins’s defense attorneys, the judge acceded to the British application for Robbins’s person. Turned over to the British, Robbins was hanged in the summer of 1799. Now, in addition to political opposition and the unanswered legal questions about Robbins’s surrender, the United States had created a martyr to British impressment.
Thomas Jefferson—who was Adams’s vice president but was also, as the foremost of the Democratic-Republicans, his chief rival for national leadership—saw right away what had happened. “I think no one circumstance since the establishment of our government has affected the popular mind more” than the Robbins affair, he wrote in late 1799. That is to say, Jefferson believed the Robbins matter was more politically significant than even the controversy over the notorious Alien and Sedition Acts (a judgment that historians have never shared). Once again revealing the boneheadedness to which Adams and the Federalists were often susceptible, they failed to see what was at stake in turning Robbins over to the British.
In Ekirch’s view, that failure created “daunting” political obstacles for the Federalists: “A purported American, who had been impressed by the Royal Navy, surrendered by the federal government in the absence of probable cause for committing a crime that enjoyed widespread support in the United States.” In his book’s principal contribution to historical understanding, Ekirch makes a plausible, even convincing, case that the uproar over Robbins’s extradition and execution played strongly enough into the hands of the Democratic-Republican opponents of John Adams that the affair was a major factor in the election of 1800.
Adams’s political opponents excoriated him for interfering with the judiciary. Even moderate Federalists threatened to abandon him. The public outcry was tremendous. This gave Jefferson’s political troops the ammunition to move for the president’s censure—the effort that, Ekirch argues, kicked off the election campaign of 1800. Why the Federalists failed to see what was at stake for them has never been entirely clear. No doubt everyone’s sheer inexperience with organized partisan politics played a role, and the Democratic-Republicans had the advantage of being on the offensive. Also, Federalists were blinkered, failing to see that at least the next few years, if not the whole future, favored the loosening of elitist political apron strings in favor of greater public participation in debates and campaigns. But the equally blind stupidity of British naval leaders in provoking the latent nationalist loyalties of American citizens by continuing to search for Hermione’s mutinous survivors and impressing American seamen in the process also meant Adams paid heavily for actions for which he was not altogether responsible.
“If the Robbins affair did not render the election’s outcome inevitable, it is also difficult, in its absence, to imagine the Republicans’ razor-thin triumph,” Ekirch writes. Jefferson’s victory led to the establishment by the Democratic-Republicans of the nation’s first majority party. It was that party that held the presidency, with only modest interruptions, for the next 60 years. And, as we now understand all too clearly, Jefferson’s election and his party’s ensuing dominance of the presidency and Congress allowed the slaveholding South to keep a stranglehold on American politics until the Civil War. If Ekirch is right in his assessment, the Robbins case, previously overlooked by historians, lay behind one of the major political turning points in American history.
Beyond politics, the affair’s consequences were “profound and lasting.” As soon as Congress fell under the control of the Democratic-Republicans, they restored to five the number of years required for the naturalization of alien immigrants, a number that the Alien Act had raised to 14. More significant was the boost the Robbins affair gave to Americans’ sense of national identity and of the rights of Americans. Ekirch demonstrates how the partisan brouhaha, the debates about individual rights under law, and the tension between Robbins’s debated American citizenship or British subjecthood all contributed to fresh views of American national identity. The declaration of war against Britain by Congress in 1812 is inconceivable without this awakening of nationalism. With more mixed results, the Robbins affair also contributed to the growing American sense of exceptionalism.
Of course, what Ekirch terms “national self-consciousness” could work in many ways, as it has ever since. Immigrants seeking the protection of the American flag came to be seen in a more favorable light than that which anti-immigration Federalists had thrown upon them. But both law and culture also began, more than before, to feel the pressures of immigrant origins, numbers, and claims to rights that law and culture had not previously had to sustain. Those issues remained long after Robbins went to the gallows, as could be seen by political references to the Robbins affair well into the 19th century. They unsettle the nation still.
Ekirch’s book will please and enlighten all who read it. The work of a master historian who is also a superb prose colorist, it is an example of what can result from historians’ endless search for additional understanding. In this case, the material is ideal for narrative treatment, and Ekirch treats it rip-snortingly. Until now, few had noticed that the case of Jonathan Robbins might have had profound consequences for early American politics and diplomacy and the larger history of American self-consciousness. Didn’t we already have the story of the Adams and Jefferson administrations—the Alien and Sedition Acts, naval battles with French and British forces, Jefferson’s election, the Embargo Act of 1807—pretty much straight? Well, yes, but not straight enough. Along comes Ekirch, a historian who says, Hold on! Here’s something you haven’t noticed.
And thus it always is: New minds, new sensibilities, new approaches to the past open up new routes to new understanding. In the line of historians who engage in a never-ending quest for deeper knowledge, Ekirch now takes an honored place.
James M. Banner Jr.’s second edition of The Elements of Teaching, coauthored with the late Harold C. Cannon, has just been published by Yale.
