Napoleon's American Prisoners with Anne Morddel

Today’s special episode is an interview with Anne Morddel. Morddel has worked in libraries and archives across the world. She has written The French Genealogy Blog for more than fifteen years, producing nearly one thousand posts about the many aspects of French genealogical research. While researching in French archives she discovered records regarding 1500 American merchant seamen held prisoner in Napoleonic France. Today we are discussing the culmination of that work, her recently-published book: Napoleon’s American Prisoners, which details the capture, imprisonment and freedom of these American sailors in France.

Gary:

Thank you very much for being on the show, Anne Morddel. I want to talk about your new book, Napoleon's American Prisoners.

There was a lot of mythologizing about life at sea during this time. What was life like as a sailor at the turn of the century in the Atlantic world, particularly for American sailors?

Anne:

Well, nothing that I have found exists by way of first-person account. We have no letters that say very much what it was like to experience life at sea. There are a few accounts of having been impressed, a few accounts of explaining perhaps how a ship was captured.

So knowing what life was like requires a bit of extrapolation from other basic accounts and imagination. Certainly, it was physically demanding.

There was very little in terms of technology. There obviously strong machines, but it took large numbers of men to operate things. So it was physically demanding.

Though the men may have been very strong, especially after many months of having worked on board. They may also have been quite sick. It was a time when there wasn't much by way of public health or vaccines.

So they were exposed to disease on shore, sexually transmitted diseases, local outbreaks of cholera, especially in the Mediterranean. There was plague in the North African ports.

In Marseille, Toulon, there was a a fair amount of plague. So they could have been exposed to that. I think... Surely before adulthood any seamen would have survived at least some of the quite deadly childhood diseases such as scarlet fever, rheumatic fever, diphtheria, rubella, measles.

Any one of those could have damaged or weakened a man's body. So even though they were quite strong, they could also have been poorly, uncomfortable, unhealthy, bad teeth, stomach pains, headaches.

On board, they had no privacy at all. Even on a merchant vessel, which had a smaller crew than say a Royal Navy vessel, which had hundreds and hundreds of men crammed, a merchant vessel was much smaller.

So the men still were crammed into small spaces. This exacerbated diseases that were borne by lice, such as typhus, and lack of privacy, which in some could have exacerbated mental illness.

They had a reputation of being rowdy drunks on shore. Certainly many of them were, but I think we should recall that many of these were young men in their late teens to mid-20s.

That's an age when young men pretty much everywhere all the time are rowdy. Those who were older in their 30s and 40s may not have participated so much in that behavior, but certainly everywhere they had that behavior, they were viewed as a almost a difficult horse, a violent source of labor that required control and management. They weren't entirely viewed as members of the same human species as their employers.

They had a constant risk of when they went to see many different kinds of dangers. The greatest, of course, was a being impressed by a Royal Navy vessel, but also, especially in the West Indies, seas attacked by pirates, a violent storm that could destroy the ship, shipwreck on shoals on shore, captured by a French privateer once they got into the English Channel,

being abandoned in a foreign port by an unscrupulous captain, not being paid. Those were the risks. Their work was quite fluid in some ways, in that American seamen would work on vessels of any nationality, but they weren't so fluid in working across different types of work.

A merchant seaman might also be in the Navy, but they didn't switch then to whaling, then to fishing, then to coastal voyages as opposed to Atlantic voyages.

In that sense, they didn't change quite so much, it seems, but the nationality of the ship, if it were in a port when they were looking for work, that didn't seem to matter at all.

Gary:

Quite a lot to take in. You note that France was taking in many prisoners of war because of the Napoleonic Wars, swelling the number of foreigners held in their prisons.

What were the actual prisons and life inside them like?

Anne:

Pretty bad. Pretty bad. Very primitive. Initially, men, when taken prisoner, would be brought into a port on the French Atlantic coast. If they were on the Mediterranean coast, they were taken into the lazaret, a sort of quarantine area because there was so much plague down there. And often from there, they seem to have been released. But on the Atlantic coast, and my book concerns the prisoners brought in there.

Many times they were taken into Brest, the most common port for a arrival. They first were held in these big fortresses at the ports that were used as prisons, as military prisons, and these were medieval stone dungeons. So it was damp, it was wet, it was cold.

They were fed quite often in these port jails on just bread and water in an effort to coerce them into joining French privateers immediately.

If they did not do that, Then they were waiting for the ship that they had been on, that had been captured, to be judged in a French court, the prize court, as a legitimate capture or not.

So if they were captured on an enemy ship, say a British merchant vessel sailing from Liverpool, that was a legitimate prize, and they were automatically prisoners.

If it were an American ship that for no other reason could be judged a legitimate prize, it might then be released, and they would be released there at the port.

If they were not released, if the ship were a legitimate prize, and they were prisoners, they then were marched to a prison depot, as they were called. They weren't called prisoner of war camps at that point.

And that was often hundreds of kilometers. In all weather, they marched all day, often chained two by two. They stopped wherever was possible and slept in barns or local jails, whatever large capacity building there might be, putting a great strain on the villages through which they passed.

At the depot, they were housed with British prisoners of war because they had been taken from British ships, and the French pretty much treated them as if they were British.

There, again, they were crammed many to a small space. The British prisoners almost all received some sort of financial charitable donation that was collected in Britain.

The American prisoners, for the most part, did not receive that, so they had no money to supplement their food or clothing. The food was minimum. If the men operating the prisons stole, then it was even less food of a poorer quality.

They were given clothing on arrival, but it usually wore out very quickly. They slept on straw. It was dismal Some died, some hung on for the entire 11 years of their capture.

Those people are quite heroic, but it was extremely uncomfortable and difficult.

Gary:

Yeah, it doesn't sound like the ideal working situation. How did these seamen try to win their freedom? How did the U.S. consulate and politicians support or hinder their efforts?

And what challenges did both of these groups face?

Anne:

The challenges were many and everything, in spite of all the negotiations through many diplomats and through many French ministries, everything depended on Napoleon and his final decision and his interpretation of who these people were.

So at that time, as I indicated earlier, the flag of the ship determined the nationality of the ship and of its crew.

If they were captured on a British ship flying a British flag, they were treated as British prisoners. When they would arrive in prison, or sometimes even on the march, they would immediately try to contact a consul, an American consul, either in a the French port where they were brought in, or in Paris. They would write a letter or have a letter writer do this, pleading their case, saying that they were American and please help get them released.

They supported their claim of being American with their seaman’s protection certificates. They clearly believed that these protection certificates, which would have made their case of being American and helped them get out of the Royal Navy in Britain, they thought it would have the same effect in France.

But they were not impressed into those prisons in France. They were captured on enemy vessels. So simply being American did not constitute an argument for freedom.

And the Consuls and the American minister of Plenipotentiary, whoever was in the post at the time, tried to make that case, but in the end, that was not what would get a man out.

The consuls and the diplomats ultimately had to prove not only that a prisoner was American, but that he had been captured on an American, not a British vessel.

Those were much fewer, certainly. So there was one important case in 1807 where John Armstrong, working with forward Skipwith, the consul, managed to get 60 or 70 men released.  Napoleon made it quite clear at the time that this was a favor. The men didn't necessarily have right to be released. Another way that men could be freed was if they betrayed the British in some way.

And this is the only way they really won their freedom, and there were very few cases of this. There was a wonderful man named George D. Wilson, who reported to the authorities in his prison at Briançon an escape attempt that was being planned by British officers so that the escape was aborted and the officers were not allowed to run away. They were put in greater security. There was enormous anger, naturally, at George D. Wilson. The French authorities moved him out of the prison to another place of safety while they decided what to do with him.

Many times when I have told this story to British people, they said, oh, he turned traitor. But in his mind, he was not a traitor because he wasn't British. This was actually after the beginning of the War of 1812. So his country was at war with Britain.

He was simply reporting on enemy behavior. From his place of safety, the French finally decided to release him to join the second group of American prisoners who were allowed to be released in 1813 to join an American privateer sailing out of France called the True-Blooded Yankee. That group of men, about 100, 113, who were released, were the last group to be released through diplomatic negotiations.

When America declared war against Britain in 1812, France said, all right, we're not really co-belligerents, but we have the same enemy. And Napoleon said that the American prisoners, all approximately 1,500 of them could be released.

But somehow in that first group of 100 plus men to be released, to fight on the True-Blooded Yankee, a number of British prisoners were included.

Most of them were captains, many of them were Irish or Scottish, some of them certainly did sail on the True-Blooded Yankee. The Ministry of the Marine, Denis de Crepe, was furious that some British had been released, and he convinced Napoleon to rescind the order for the release of Americans so no others were released until the end of the Napoleonic Wars.

So in this case, the Americans, and it's unclear just who actually put those British names on the list, but the Americans caused the blockage of the release of all the rest of the prisoners.

Gary:

So, that is a fascinating way that many Americans were able to get their freedom.  Let’s look at the global picture.  How did global events such as the XYZ affair or the War of 1812 impact the prisoners fight for freedom?

Anne:

Well, the book covers the period of the Napoleonic Wars, 1803 to 1814, which is really after the XYZ Affair of 1798. However, that affair had consequences in how administrators in the two countries, the United States and France, felt about one another, and particularly Talleyrand,

who had been the Minister of Foreign Affairs demanding the bribe in the XYZ affair. He demanded bribes from everyone. he was also the Minister of what became the Ministry of External Relations, essentially the same thing, during much of this period. So though I found no evidence of his demanding a bribe for the release of American seamen, it's entirely possible that he did so.

And the Americans who had witnessed that XYZ Affair had a great deal of suspicion of him. The War of 1812, as I said, Napoleon had been trying to maneuver America into this war for some time.

It should have meant the release of all of the American prisoners of war. But because some British were included in that list, it didn't.

The War of 1812 also meant peripherally that some privateers, some American privateers, were being operated out of France.  That's not very many at all. There was really the True-blooded Yankee, the Bunker Hill, just a few others were actually based in France.

Many came from the United States and used French ports because France granted the American privateers the right to bring in their captured ships, their prizes, to French ports and, most unusually, the American consul, not the French courts, could decide whether or not the vessel were a good prize and sell the vessel and its cargo.

So that really affected privateering, but it didn't help with the release of the prisoners because, as I say, some British were released in that first group and Napoleon said, that's it, no more releases.

Gary:

Now, fascinatingly, some Americans won their freedom by serving French privateers. What was this like? How many chose to serve?

And were any of them captured by the British in turn?

Anne:

Yes. Firstly, I cannot say that they won their freedom. It was a temporary release. It was not seen as they're showing any loyalty to France.

It was just a temporary release. It was granted to seamen of other nationalities, that were also neutral, obviously not to the British, not to Spanish when Napoleon was fighting Spain.

So it wasn't really winning freedom, but they did get a temporary release. The recruitment agents would visit the prisons, the prisons known for having seamen, ordinary seamen, not officers. The officers were mostly held at Verdun.

The recruitment agents didn't go there, which is why you don't read very much about their existence, because most of the firsthand accounts are from officers who were at Verdun.

But in *20:50 Arab, Combray, Valenciennes), in those prisons, those were mostly for seamen, and recruitment agents went there.

The best surviving records of recruitment come from 1809. There was something of a surge of French privateering at that point.

So a fair number, 100 men did join these French privateers. It gave them a chance to get out of prison.

They were marched to the coast, put directly on the vessel. Some of them managed to escape, not on the march, but once they got into port. They either escaped from the vessel or just before they were put on the vessel.

It seems that three or four of them claimed sickness, perhaps really were sick, and were put in the port naval hospital and escaped from the hospital.

More often what happened was they worked on board the French privateer attacking merchant vessels. Often those were American merchant vessels and they were sending their own countrymen into French prisons.

I can't imagine what that felt like on board.

The way that many were captured by the British afterward is each time a privateer caught a vessel, what it would do is take off some of the vessel's crew onto it its own ship, the privateer, and hold them below in a sort of in the hold in a sort of dungeon situation.

They were locked in the hold. Then they put their own men, privateersmen which were called the prize crew onto the prize vessel and it would race madly to get into a French port trying to evade recapture, remember there was massive blockade around the coasts of France by the British Royal Navy a blockade that was maybe four layers deep in some places so not only Did they have to sail quickly?

They had to maneuver quite brilliantly to get into a French port safely to be able to sell the vessel, sell the cargo, get the prize money. Many times those prize vessels were recaptured by a Royal Navy vessel and the crew sent to prison.

The Americans on those crews were sent to British prisons as French prisoners of war because they'd been captured on a French vessel with a French flag, though probably not flying much of a flag at all when it was a prize vessel.

Some of them made it to a French protected port, particularly up in Bergen in Norway. They seem to have managed to escape from there.

Some did escape and didn't go back to the privateer vessel from having brought in the prize vessel. Some actually went back to the privateer vessel, preferring to carry on with that.

Some of those who escaped in Bergen were recaptured by the British and again sent to British prisons as French prisoners. So an American merchant seaman could have been held as a British prisoner in France and then worked on a French privateer and then held as a French prisoner in Britain.

Then in the release of 1814, at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, when America was still at war with Britain, he might have been released as a French prisoner, gone to France, managed to get onto an American vessel to fight the British, been captured again, and sent back to, say, Dartmoor Prison in Britain as an American prisoner of war.

Or he might have made it home.

Gary:

You mentioned a particularly interesting case by American John Armstrong in Freeing American Sailors.

How did this widely hated figure secure a victory for Americans in need?

Anne:

Well, I wish I had had access to his personal archive, which is in New York, but I did not. And perhaps there's something there that explains his motivations and thoughts.

He certainly was amongst the American ministers,  potentiary who were in office during that period. He was the one who managed to release some without the aid of the War of 1812.

contributing to Napoleon's willingness to let them go. He was working with the American consul Fulwar Skipwith. Why was Armstrong so hated? He obviously had a very, very difficult personality. but He was irascible. People saw him as lazy or indolent.

He was arrogant. He was obviously quite intelligent, wrote very well, but seemed to... make a bad impression as a person just about everywhere he went.

And then, of course, he was the secretary for war but when the British burned Washington and the White House during the War of 1812, and he was very much blamed for that, though that's really after his time in France.

He really did work very hard to get the Americans released. He engaged in negotiations not only with Talleyrand in the Ministry of External Relations, but with General Clark, who was Minister of War, whom he liked and appreciated, probably because Clark spoke very good English.

Armstrong didn't speak any French at all. So that could have added to his problems in France. Somehow, he actually seemed to care about these poor people of low rank, of no importance in terms of social hierarchy, in terms of military hierarchy.

They were just ordinary young men suffering. And he seemed to care about that and work quite hard with them. That's not to detract from the work to release the seamen that was done by some of the counsels as Fulwar Skipwith.

I just wanted to say that's not to detract from the work to release the semen that was done by some of the consuls, in particular for Skipwith, who had arranged briefly for semen to receive some financial aid.

Armstrong he stopped that, saying that the United States government had not authorized that and had not budgeted for it. Money was a grave problem in the aid that American seamen needed anywhere, whether it was in port, whether it was in prison.

And all of the consuls sent in bills because they were paying out of pocket for these poor men who sometimes had no clothing, had no shoes, were held in jails on a minimum amount of food and needed support and aid.

So Skipwith was one of the ones who tried to help, but there was no money.  So, other consuls also tried to help.

William Lee tried to help. But there were some who clearly did not take that part of their jobs seriously. Aaron Vale in Lorient resented so much having to pay out of pocket that he simply refused to allow the other consuls to send to his port any American seaman to take ship for the United States. He was fed up and he wouldn't do that part of his job.

Isaac Cox Barnett, another consul, was... very wordy about saying how much he would help them, but he seems to have been the one to demand a bribe for helping some people in particular.

He seems to have offered to help British prisoners escape as Americans for money. I would have to research that a great deal more, but what I have found does point something of a finger of guilt at Isaac Cox Barnett.

Gary:

So finally, happened to the American seamen who were finally released at the end of the Napoleonic Wars? How were they received back in the United States?

Anne

Well, it seems pretty much anonymously and with indifference. They were released at the general release of all prisoners after Napoleon was conquered the first time, abdicated the first time, and sent to Elba.

In April of 1814, all the prisons were opened and all the prisoners just began walking to the Atlantic coast. However, now France was being held under a provisional government headed by the duke of Wellington therefore it was really under the control of Britain which was at war with America still No American ships were allowed to come into French ports, so the American seamen could not find a ship home.

They also desperately didn't want to get onto the cartel ships, taking British seamen and prisoners back to Britain, because they would immediately have been seized as prisoners of war and put into British prisons. So they really were in a terrible, terrible situation, and they were simply gathering at various French ports, hoping somehow for an American vessel to get through.

The American minister, Pliny Potenti, at that time was William H. Crawford. He was writing back to the State Department saying, we need more ships.

These men are in a desperate situation, we can't get them up, but he was having to negotiate, not really with a supportive French government, but with the restoration French government, which was under the thumb of Britain.

So it was a very, very difficult situation for them. When they finally did manage to drift back home or maybe to walk to another port, and their take-ship and they came back in dribs and drabs. There seems to be no press about them at all.

At that point, all of the press was focused on the prisoners of war in Britain. They were being held by the enemy, again in terrible conditions, especially then in 1815. There was what is called the Dartmoor Massacre, and some men who had been prisoners in France had been captured, and were and not killed in that massacre, but certainly witnessed it and were in Dartmoor at that time. But there was no word at all about these men coming home from France.

Actually, they were held much longer in France, some of them for the full 11 years of the war, than they ever, ever had been in Britain. It's quite sad, I think. No one knew about them or cared about them.

Gary:

I guess that’s just the life of a sailor.

The book is Napoleon's American Prisoners. Go get it now. Again, thank you very much for giving this interview.

Anne:

Thank you for having me.