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Sailors, Crimps, and Commerce: Laws Protecting Seamen, 1866–1884
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 September 2022
Abstract
Nineteenth-century seamen were subject to exploitation by boardinghouse keepers who recouped seamen’s debt by pocketing their advance wages from a future voyage. New York’s 1866 Act for the Better Protection of Seamen, the U.S. Shipping Commissioners Act of 1872, and the 1884 Dingley Act all purported to respond to this practice of “crimping,” but each of these acts simply allowed for new arrangements that continued to exact money from seamen. Even when corruption or collusion operated and were publicly known, such practices were tolerated because they continued to provide a steady supply of maritime labor, which promoted maritime commerce. This article considers the misleading political development of this legislation in the context of the early years of spoils reform.
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Footnotes
The author is grateful for support from The National Endowment for the Humanities’ Munson Institute of American Maritime Studies at Mystic Seaport, the Ohio University Research Council, the Ohio University Undergraduate Summer Internship Award, and Taylor Vickers.
References
NOTES
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160. Skowronek, Building a New American State, 61–62.
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164. “In the Matter of the Accounts of the Shipping Commissioner … 1876 and 1877,” 97.
165. The successful 1884 investigation against Commissioner Duncan takes great pains to absolve these prior circuit court judges of any guilt, noting that the circuit court judges involved in prior reviews of Duncan lacked all of the pertinent facts.
166. “In the Matter of the Accounts of the Shipping Commissioner … 1876 and 1877,” 95.
167. Letter from the Secretary of Treasury in Response to Resolution of the House passed February 4, 1884, communicating a statement of the sums paid by the shipping commissioner of the Port of New York, H.R. Ex Doc. No. 48-85 (1884), in Index to the Executive Documents of the House of Representatives for the First Session of the Forty-Eighth Congress 1883-’84 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1884).
168. Theriault, “Patronage, the Pendleton Act, and the Power of the People.”
169. “Mark Twain Excited”; Scharnhorst, “Twain and Duncan Trade Insults,” 31.
170. “Captain Duncan’s Testimony,” New-York Tribune, March 5, 1884, 2. When Congress discussed the Duncan dismissal as it was considering a bill to replace the 1872 Shipping Commissioners Act, members relied on Duncan making his books available in this trial so that anyone could see that his office absorbed all of the revenue. See 15 Cong. Rec. S3870 (daily ed. May 6, 1884) (statement of Sen. Vest).
171. “Mr. Duncan’s Nepotism,” The Sun, April 20, 1884, 8.
172. “The Fee-Eating Duncans,” The Sun, May 6, 1884, 1.
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174. “In the Matter of the Accounts of the Shipping Commissioner of the Port of New York for the Years 1876 and 1877,” 102; “The Fee-Eating Duncans.”
175. 15 Cong. Rec. S3871 (May 6, 1884).
176. An Act to Remove Certain Burdens on the American Merchant Marine and Encourage the American Foreign Carrying Trade Pub. L. No. 48-23 Stat. 53 (1884).
177. Report of the Commissioner of Navigation 1884, 26.
178. Report of the Commissioner of Navigation 1884, 26.
179. Report of the Commissioner of Navigation 1884, 26. Emphasis added.
180. Annual Report of the Commissioner of Navigation 1885 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1885), 163.
181. Report of the Commissioner of Navigation 1885, 164.
182. Report of the Commissioner of Navigation 1885, 167.
183. Gilje, Liberty on the Waterfront, 25; see also Billy Smith, “The Lower Sort”: Philadelphia’s Laboring People, 1750-1800 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990).
184. Report of the Commissioner of Navigation 1884, 50–51.
185. Report of the Commissioner of Navigation 1885, 168.
186. No. 16 Letter sent to the Commissioner of Navigation by Silas & Weeks, shipping and commission merchants of New Orleans, November 17, 1884, Letters Received from Merchants Respecting the Law Prohibiting the Payment of Advanced Wages to Seamen, in Report of the Commissioner of Navigation 1884, 82.
187. No. 7 Letter addressed to the Commissioner of Navigation by Darrah & Elwell, November 11, 1884, Letters Received from Merchants Respecting the Law Prohibiting the Payment of Advanced Wages to Seamen, in Report of the Commissioner of Navigation 1884, 77.
188. No. 7 Letter addressed to the Commissioner of Navigation by Darrah & Elwell, 77.
189. “Report of San Francisco Commissioner,” Annual Report of the Commissioner of Navigation 1885, 271.
190. Report of the Commissioner of Navigation 1885, 272.
191. Stephen Schwartz, Brotherhood of the Sea; Hearings Before the Committee on Merchant Marine and Fisheries, 53d Cong., 2d Sess (March 16, 1894) (statement of Andrew Furuseth of San Francisco, CA), 1–19.
192. James Gray Pope, “The Thirteenth Amendment at the Intersection of Class and Gender: Robertson v. Baldwin’s Exclusion of Infants, Lunatics, Women, and Seamen,” Seattle University Law Review 39, no. 3 (2016): 901–926.
193. An Act to Promote the Welfare of American Seamen in the Merchant Marine of the United States, Pub. L. No. 63-302, 38 Stat. 1168 (1915); Henry Farnam, “The Seamen’s Act of 1915: Address Delivered at the Ninth Annual Meeting of the American Association for Labor Legislation,” presented to the U.S. Senate by Mr. La Follette, S. Doc. No. 64-333 (February 19, 1916), https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015063906542?urlappend=%3Bseq=3%3Bownerid=13510798885614465-3.