Impressment: The British Press Gangs That Helped Start the War of 1812

"Without a press, I have no idea how our Fleet can be manned."
— British Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson

British officers look over American sailors to press into the Royal Navy, about 1810, in a drawing by Howard Pyle. American naval officers did the same to British sailors. Library of Congress.

A cause of the war

One of the main causes of the War of 1812 was Britain's habit of boarding American merchant ships to hunt for Royal Navy deserters — and taking men off them. Americans said the British weren't careful whom they took, and that free sailors were impressed (forced into British service) along with deserters.

Why Britain needed men

• War with Napoleon. Britain's wars against Napoleon nearly tripled the sailors its ships needed between 1793 and 1812 — from 36,000 to 114,000.
• A brutal life. Discipline grew harsher and conditions more dangerous; as many as 100,000 Royal Navy men died in those twenty years.
• Press gangs. Volunteers could never fill the need, so press gangs forced men into service. As many as half of all Royal Navy seamen were impressed — about 10,000 of them Americans during the Napoleonic Wars.

Britain said the men it took had deserted its navy. When Americans protested, British officials answered that being a British subject outweighed any claim of American citizenship.

An insult to independence

In the months before the war, Americans read the British stopping of their merchant ships as a sign that the United States wasn't treated as an equal among nations — galling to a country that had beaten Britain in the Revolution. The run of clashes at sea between Britain and its former colony led some to call the War of 1812 a "second American Revolution."

Left unsettled

Three years of war settled nothing on this point. Britain refused to give way on impressment. The American peace commissioners at Ghent never even raised it, and the final treaty doesn't mention it.

Sources

Based on "Impressment and the War of 1812," National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. Howard Pyle's drawing is in the public domain.