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The Maritime Code Duello

Naval officers in the United States in the first two decades of the nation’s independence were drawn from the self-defined gentleman class. Speaking of gentlemen in southern folkways, David Hackett Fischer noted that status “could be shattered by loss of honor.” An honorable gentleman never “lied, cheated, stole, or betrayed his family or friends.” However, when a gentleman was accused of such behavior, he was obliged to defend his honor. The honor code was a widespread phenomenon, influencing public discourse not only in the South but also in the North. Among historians, Bertram Wyatt-Brown, in A Warring Nation, described the honor code’s national power in the early republic. The language, rhetoric, and values of honor shaped national discourse on matters of international relations and the personal conduct of prominent figures.¹

Among several recent studies of the honor code’s influence is Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic by Joanne Freeman. As Freeman points out, “Far more than directives for negotiating a duel, the code of honor was a way of life.” She continues, “The code of honor did more than channel and monitor political conflict; it formed the very infrastructure of national politics, providing a governing logic and weapons of war.”²

Paul A. Gilje, in Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights in the War of 1812, sees the British challenge to national honor and the way it evoked the principles of the code duello as forming the basis for the rhetoric of political leaders in the era. He argues further that the fundamental causes of the War of 1812 were British challenges to national honor, especially affronts against American shipping and merchant sailors. Hence, Gilje shows, the motto of the war, Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights, perfectly captured the central importance of defending national honor.³

In the early days of the republic, most naval and political leaders lived by the underlying values of honor. Few New Englanders participated in duels, although one, Congressman Jonathan Cilley of Maine, felt obliged to respond to a personal challenge in 1838. His death in that duel led to widespread efforts (largely unsuccessful) to suppress the practice of dueling in the years before the Civil War.⁴ As Joanne Freeman points out, “Northerners were as well versed in the code as southerners; it was in their utilization of violence that they differed most noticeably. . . . In a sense northerners and southerners spoke different dialects of the language of honor, balancing the conflicting value systems of honor, religion, and the law in regionally distinct ways.”⁵

Naval officers, southern or northern, were conscious of a gentleman’s code that applied both in private life and in naval warfare.⁶ Among naval officers, honorable behavior on board a ship or ashore was so well understood that its principles did not need to be articulated in a formal statement. Historians can glean the maritime application of the gentleman’s code from contemporary and historical accounts of events of naval warfare, which suggest that naval officers were expected to behave at sea in accord with many of the same principles that governed their personal lives. By twenty-first-century standards, the values of the gentleman’s code were not only redolent of class arrogance but also deeply rooted in sexist and racist attitudes. Because these values are so scorned in the modern era, it is difficult to recognize how natural and coherent they were at the time and how they shaped discourse between individuals as well as discussions of national politics, international commerce, foreign affairs, naval engagements, and military preparedness. The early status of the maritime flag for merchant ships was intimately connected to these broader systems of the honor code and the rhetoric of honor.

Honor was associated with the flag even though there was no specific design for either the national flag or the maritime flag flown from ships in the period before the 1820s. Several alternate designs of the flag were in common usage simultaneously, although all had either thirteen or fifteen red and white stripes and a blue field in the upper left corner (the canton) with varying numbers of white stars. However, even though different ships might have flown different versions of the flag in these decades, at a distance and viewed through a telescope of the era, the white-starred blue canton and the red and white stripes identified the naval or commercial ship as from the United States. Highly revered as a symbol of the nation’s honor, the flags in use on board ships continued to vary even after Congress enacted a law in 1818 specifying the official design with twenty stars.⁷

Quite broadly, the issue of national honor was frequently invoked when people discussed the treatment of the nation and its flag abroad. On an international level, the mutually understood honor code was shared by officers in Britain, France, Spain, and, to a great extent, other navies of the period.⁸

Maritime Code Duello Standards and Expectations

The honor code applied to warships in very conscious and explicit ways, in effect regulating encounters between naval ships and the way naval battles were fought in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The expectations and standards of the personal honor code extended to a wide variety of ship-handling and battle etiquette issues, not only for U.S. officers but also for the officers of naval ships of Britain, France, and Spain in the period.

The codes were not always explicitly stated. As in encounters between gentlemen, one ship might offer a challenge to another. This could result from an insult to the flag or to a ship. When at war, the master of a naval ship would sometimes directly issue a challenge to an equivalent enemy ship.⁹ A duel between warships was explicitly characterized as two equally matched ships confronting each other—frigate to frigate, for example.¹⁰ Sometimes, the British Admiralty forbade its officers from entering single ship-on-ship frigate battles on the grounds that some foreign “frigates” were more equivalent to a Royal Navy line-of-battle ship (in modern parlance, a battleship), and thus, to avoid a ship-on-ship duel was no reflection on honor.¹¹

Not only were one-on-one ship engagements rhetorically dealt with as duels, but they were sometimes specifically set up in much the same fashion as gentleman-to-gentleman duels, with a location specified and rules of engagement agreed between combatants, often ensuring no third ship become involved that would make the battle unequal. At sea and on shore, it was understood that the weapons should be equivalent. Thus, there was great emphasis at the time and in later literature on the issue of equivalency of ship size, speed, manning, and weight of guns. Frequently, at-sea engagements were noted as occurring within “pistol shot” distance.

The victory of a lesser-armed ship against a better-equipped ship represented an unequal contest; such a victory demonstrated manly qualities: seamanship, bravery, and superior fortitude at the guns. Skills, character, bravery, and honor were expected. These qualities of the individual were also attributed racially to the seamen, and the vocabulary of honor was often employed when discussing military engagements. A reverse victory (of a stronger ship against a weaker) should not have been fought, but the weaker could simply have evaded the encounter or, if trapped, should have surrendered with honor; for a stronger ship to continue to fire on a weaker ship without providing a chance for honorable surrender was a violation of the code and was dastardly.

On the high seas, ships were due a set of ritualized courtesies, such as greetings and the showing of flags; outrages or affronts could come in the form of the inappropriate use of a naval or armed coastal patrol. Apologies could take the form of firing gun salutes. Gentlemen on board a ship (officers and midshipmen) were expected to demonstrate courage by standing up when being fired on. The lower orders (especially passengers who were nongentlemen or women and children) were expected to lie down, go below, or take cover. Someone claiming to be a gentleman would lose that status if he took cover; a midshipman (a youth) could be forgiven lying down because of his age. Officers and petty officers who took cover would be court-martialed.¹²

U.S. naval officers were particularly prone to engage in duels in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Naval historian Charles Oscar Paullin wrote, “During the first fifty years of the Old Navy, 1798–1848, the mortality of naval officers resulting from duels was two-thirds that resulting from naval wars.”¹³

In addition to using the same language at sea as was used to talk about honor on land, seamen followed practices in maritime engagements that very directly reflected the personal code of honor: insults were avenged, challenges were issued, to refuse a challenge was dastardly, the stuff one was made of (e.g., whether one was red-blooded and courageous) was revealed in battle or in a duel, ceasing resistance after being wounded (overwhelmingly damaged in ship battle) was expected in order to preserve life.

An unarmed ship that was fired on was being treated as of lower social standing than the ship that fired; the firing on an unarmed U.S. merchant ship by a ship crewed or controlled by people perceived as racially or politically inferior was therefore an outrage. U.S. officers often regarded Spanish Americans as inferior; Spaniards themselves were sometimes so regarded. U.S. seamen and naval personnel did not perceive British, French, and other northern Europeans as ethnically inferior, but all people of color were seen as lower caste and, therefore, any action by them against a U.S. ship was an outrage. The notorious capture and retention as forced labor of U.S. crews by the corsairs of the Barbary States were perhaps the most famous such outrages of the era. Americans perceived the North Africans as “primitive, sordid, and cruel.” The term “outrage” is often encountered in reference to episodes at sea in this and later periods.¹⁴

Historical treatments written later in the nineteenth century (and some written in the twentieth century) reflected many of the underlying values of the maritime honor code: naval officers were expected to be cool under fire, equivalence of ships was considered in evaluating the performance of officers, and officers and men desired a fair fight. Mines (known then as “torpedoes”) were regarded as “infernal machines.” Because they provided no opportunity for a fair fight, they were despised by naval officers.¹⁵

That naval officers, drawn from the gentleman class, would carry the values of the honor code to their conduct as officers on board ships is perfectly understandable. Their definitions of proper personal behavior, particularly in situations involving mortal risk, would naturally carry over to conduct in warfare or in situations in which well-armed potential adversaries met in the lawless reaches of the high seas. Exchanges of identification; careful determination of whether a strange ship was a friend, foe, or neutral; and determination of whether that ship should display deference were all regulated by the mutually understood rhetoric and rules of gentlemanly intercourse. Because these values were shared by officers of the English, French, Spanish, and other navies, most encounters between ships had a degree of predictability. Identification by flag and hailing within earshot were crucial parts of ship-on-ship behavior at sea.

For these reasons, the naval honor code had certain very practical functions, not only for the United States but for all the navies of the period. In the sailing ship era, when armed warships of different nations encountered each other at sea, the rituals and practices embodied in the honor code actually prevented unnecessary loss of life. The understanding that a lesser-armed ship (such as a frigate) could honorably surrender without an extended exchange of gunfire to a heavier and better-armed line-of-battle ship meant that the surrendering officers and men could live; later, they might be released under a prisoner exchange or cartel, or peace treaty, and live to fight another day. In strict terms of labor and warfighting capability, this aspect of the naval honor code had a humane, practical function. The practices spelled out in documents of the era were all quite suited to the demands of independently sailing naval and merchant ships in a time before rapid radio communication between ship and shore or ship and ship.

So, stripped of the emotional, symbolic, and rhetorical appeals to underlying psychological values of the era, the U.S. flag on board naval ships was recognized and respected internationally for practical economic and military reasons. Similar principles carried over to merchant shipping and the merchant flag, as did the need to prevent the violation of those standards on U.S. naval and merchant ships.

The Honor Code in Diplomacy and International Affairs

From the earliest days of the republic, the application of the honor code and its language to maritime and international affairs became embodied in treaties, public pronouncements, founding documents, political disputation, and presidential statements. When the United States obtained its independence, almost its only contact with the other nations of the world was by sea.¹⁶ If U.S. merchant ships were recognized and treated at sea with the same respect as ships from other independent nations, that respect would represent the world’s acceptance of the United States’ equal status as a sovereign state. If U.S. merchant ships and seamen were not extended the rights and status on the high seas that went with sovereignty, that disrespect would represent both a failure to treat the United States as a sovereign nation and a failure to accord the U.S. ships the freedom of the seas. In territorial waters, diplomatic recognition and respect were not the only concerns; treatment of ships engaged in mundane practices—such as entering and leaving harbors, discharging and receiving cargoes, paying port and harbor charges, and being subject to quarantine in times of plague or contagion—was also important. Recognition of and respect for the U.S. merchant flag was both a matter of honor and a matter of practical importance.

These practical matters were regulated by amity, commerce, and navigation (ACN) treaties, which defined exactly how U.S. honor was to be protected and respected. Such treaties, later called friendship, commerce, and navigation (FCN) treaties, were signed by the United States and dozens of other countries.¹⁷ One of the first of these treaties, which served at least as a partial model for later such treaties, was Jay’s Treaty with Great Britain, signed in 1794. Jay’s Treaty used vocabulary common in the honor code.

The ACN treaties of the era all reflect similar language, and all were intended to record other nations’ obligation to treat U.S. merchant ships with the proper expected courtesies and procedures, under the principle of freedom of the seas propounded by Grotius. The use of terms such as “word of honor,” “respect,” “insult,” and “outrages,” and the courtesy that small boats be used when a crew approached another ship to avoid giving offense—all suggest the degree to which the code of honor carried over to the relations between states on the high seas and in ports. The language was not merely a colorful reminder of the internationally understood honor code or a common maritime rhetoric; it created a set of practical, functioning arrangements designed to facilitate commerce and to ensure that U.S. merchant ships were treated equally with those of other recognized nations.

The honor code and the maritime side of it, with its focus on the flag as the emblem of national identity, thus applied to the merchant flag. A series of clashes between the United States and foreign powers over the treatment of U.S. merchant ships abroad characterized the diplomatic issues of the first few decades of the nation’s existence. The Quasi War with France of 1798–1799, the Barbary Wars of 1803–1808, and the War of 1812 all grew out (wholly or in part) of the failure of foreign nations to extend to U.S. merchant and naval ships the respect or deference consistent with the treatment by one gentleman of the prerogatives and status of another gentleman or the treatment of one recognized sovereign state by another.¹⁸

Notably, the rhetoric used in discussing the merchant marine and naval skirmishes that engendered these military clashes was used not only by the gentleman class of the South but also by journalists, politicians, and public assemblies found throughout the fledgling nation. In that era, gentlemen frequently made it clear that they did not regard any journalist as a gentleman; when insulted in an editorial, the proper response was to horsewhip or thrash the offender. Nevertheless, the rhetoric did not simply reflect the elite that dominated the Navy. Nor was it simply a carryover of that language from personal and naval circles to diplomacy. Rather, the rhetoric and the set of values it represented were part and parcel of all national discourse over international affairs.

Honor Code Rhetoric in International Affairs

The use of this language by people other than naval officers, including northern civilians and political leaders of various persuasions, was common throughout the period from the ratification of the Constitution to the War of 1812. Selections from the vast public literature and journalistic comment of the period concerned with maritime issues and foreign policy reflect this theme.

Guadeloupe Incident, 1786

In 1786, during the period of the Articles of Confederation, eighteen U.S. merchant ship masters signed a petition complaining of indignities suffered in Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe. The complaints indicated a rising demand for a more effective national identity embodied in a national constitution and a national government. In part, the ship masters said, “The little respect that is paid to the American flag and the repeated insults which subjects of the United States meet with in foreign ports, must convince the good people of this continent, that it is absolutely necessary we should invest Congress with a power to regulate our commerce and to support our dignity as free and independent states; without which, we must soon become a reproach and bye-word among the nations.”¹⁹

Ratification of the Constitution

A review of the 1787–1788 debates over ratification of the U.S. Constitution reveals numerous discussions regarding the establishment of a navy. Antinavalists argued that a navy would impose a burden on an essentially agricultural and isolated people, that it would favor New England and other coastal regions engaged in maritime pursuits, and that it would be an unneeded expense. Navalists argued that a navy would be necessary to protect U.S. commerce in times of American neutrality and the nation itself in time of war.²⁰

While this strategic thinking appears logical enough by modern standards of realpolitik, some of the vocabulary used was based on appeals to honor and respect. For example, at the Pennsylvania constitutional ratifying convention, James Wilson said, “With what propriety can we hope our flag will be respected, while we have not a single gun to fire in its defence?”²¹ James Madison reflected a similar sentiment in his choice of words: “Weakness will invite insults.”²²

In the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton logically spelled out the strategic-commercial reasons for having a navy. However, even in his dispassionate analysis, one sees the evocation of some emotional terms that echo the underlying code. Without a navy, Hamilton reasoned, “our commerce would be a prey to the wanton intermeddlings of all nations at war with each other; who, having nothing to fear from us, would with little scruple or remorse, supply their wants by depredations on our property as often as it fell in their way. The rights of neutrality will only be respected when they are defended by an adequate power. A nation, despicable by its weakness, forfeits even the privilege of being neutral.”²³

Hamilton was a passionate follower of the honor code in his personal life, although he had objections to killing someone, out of concern with both the law and religious principles. One study shows he engaged in eleven personal “affairs of honor,” that is, duels, and of course, he famously died in the 1804 duel with Aaron Burr.²⁴

John Jay warned that oversensitivity to foreign “insult” could lead to unjust wars, and he thought the moderating influence of a federal government would help temper such excitements.²⁵

Algerine Pirates and Funding a Navy

Thomas Jefferson, who was generally not in favor of a strong navy, advocated the use of force to preserve national honor in the face of demands for ransom from the Algerine (Barbary) pirates in a letter to John Adams on July 11, 1786.²⁶

George Washington, in his last address to Congress in December 1796, alluded to the problems of U.S. captives in Algiers who, despite Jefferson’s arguments, had been ransomed. He went on to recommend that Congress see to the financing of a navy to protect the nation’s ability to carry on foreign trade as a neutral during time of war between two major foreign belligerents. Washington echoed the themes of respect and insult:

To an active external commerce, the protection of a naval force is indispensible. This is manifest with regard to wars in which a State is itself a party. But besides this, it is in our own experience, that the most sincere neutrality is not sufficient guard against the depredations of nations at war. To secure respect to a neutral flag requires a naval force, organized to vindicate it from insult or aggression. . . . It would seem as if our trade to the Mediterranean, without a protecting force, will always be insecure, and our citizens exposed to the calamities from which numbers of them have but just been relieved.²⁷

The debate over the funding of the Navy in 1798 was cast in terms of defense of national honor. Historian Martin Smelser argues convincingly that the XYZ affair of 1798 represented the turning point in U.S. support for a navy; he demonstrates how the public press at the time reacted to the demand from French officials for a bribe in order for U.S. delegates to meet with French authorities. The demand for a bribe was widely perceived as an insult to U.S. honor, a point also made by Paul Gilje in his recent study of the period.²⁸ Democratic Republican opponents of a strong navy were thrown into disrepute on the grounds that they willingly accepted such French insults.²⁹ Out of the refusal to pay the bribe to French officials in the XYZ affair came the famous line “Millions for defense, not a penny for tribute.”³⁰

Thomas Jefferson had expressed some ambiguity on the issue of naval forces, and by the time of his presidency, he generally opposed an expansion of the Navy. Like John Jay, he warned that maritime incidents could be blown out of proportion or wrongly and rashly misconstrued. Nevertheless, the language he used in his 1803 State of the Union address (in those days written, not delivered orally) reflected exactly the same underlying values that we have observed among more hawkish writers of the time:

In the course of this conflict [between France and Britain], let it be our endeavor . . . to punish severely those persons, citizen or alien, who shall usurp the cover of our flag, for vessels not entitled to it, infecting thereby with suspicion those of real Americans, and committing us into controversies, for the redress of wrongs not our own; to exact from every nation the observance, toward our vessels and citizens, of those principles and practices which all civilized people acknowledge; to merit the character of a great nation and maintain that of an independent one, preferring every consequence to insult and habitual wrong.³¹

In his oblique fashion, Jefferson first warned that misuse of the flag by others could wrongly lead the United States into conflict. However, he also asserted that the United States should prefer “every consequence,” that is, armed confrontation, to accepting “insult.” Jefferson preferred economic sanction and diplomatic negotiation to war, but he, like his Federalist opponents, was sensitive to issues of national honor, and if it came to that, he preferred war to accepting an insult.

Official State Department correspondence of the era reflected the same language. Charles Pinckney (Thomas Jefferson’s minister to Spain, 1801–1805), writing to the Spanish minister of state in 1804, provided a list of complaints regarding Spanish mistreatment of U.S. shipping, indicating that the United States had shown forbearance even when the “honor of our flag” had been violated: “Under all these accumulated injuries and sufferings of our citizens, under the breach of solemn treaties, of the laws of nations, and in many instances, violations of the honor of our flag, what has been the conduct of the United States?”³²

During the Jeffersonian period, the development of a naval force was seen as designed to “protect the flag from insult.” Although the principle could be expressed less symbolically by stating that the Navy would protect merchant shipping from abuse by foreign powers, the language used in a pronaval expansion editorial from 1805 was typical, reflecting the underlying honor code with terms such as “respect” and “insult”: “We may venture to predict, that the time is not far distant when America shall be respected as one of the most powerful of nations, and when her flag shall sail on the ocean, without any daring to insult it.”³³

When reporting on specific episodes seen as insults to the flag, U.S. consular officials abroad used similar vocabulary. In 1805, when an American merchant sloop was attacked by a Spanish privateer schooner and personal goods were stolen from the crew, John Gavino, U.S. consul in Gibraltar, filed a report of the incident concluding with this phrasing: “The commander and crew of the said schooner privateer behaved in a most insulting and abusive manner and they seemed by their appearance, language, dress, and manners to have been Spaniards, wherefore [the officers of sloop Ranger] make this declaration and protest, not only the robbery committed, but also for the insult shown the flag under which they sailed.”³⁴

Chesapeake Affair, 1807

In the Chesapeake affair, an overzealous British naval officer arrested four British deserters from a U.S. warship. The event was seen then, and in numerous historical treatments, as a broader insult to U.S. honor, as well as a specific and clear insult to the honor of the U.S. naval commander of the Chesapeake, James Barron. In the public debates over the incident (and other seizures by British officers of seamen from U.S.-flagged merchant ships), those seeking to engage the United States in retaliatory naval engagements construed the episode in terms reflecting honor. A wide variety of individuals used the same rhetoric whether they were speaking from commercial interest, patriotic fervor, or political motives seeking to bring into disrepute either pro-French Jeffersonians or pro-English Federalists. That is, the appeals for action very often took the form of seeking satisfaction for an insult or affront to the merchant flag as well as to the U.S. flag on board naval ships, both of which were taken to symbolize the nation’s honor. Those opposed to action, following John Jay’s thinking, believed that some merchant shippers unnecessarily exposed the flag to insult. Opponents and proponents shared the same rhetoric and used similar language to express opposing viewpoints.

The notion that national honor, like personal honor, had to be redeemed by obtaining satisfaction ran throughout the written editorial commentary on the Chesapeake incident. A physical and manly response to an insult to national honor, similar to the proper response to a personal insult, was deemed appropriate in the press at the time.³⁵

A public meeting in Culpepper County, Virginia, succinctly resolved “that an insult to the American flag is an insult to the nation, and that until the former is treated with respect, the sword of vengeance ought not to be sheathed by the latter.”³⁶ An insult to the flag was seen as an insult to the nation, and an insult to the nation should be taken personally by every man; a challenge to the national honor should be felt as a challenge to the individual’s honor. The sentiment was almost self-evident then. Similar sentiments were expressed in a wide variety of memorials and editorials.³⁷

As an example of the rhetoric used in response to the Chesapeake incident, the National Intelligencer and Washington Advertiser reported “a respectable meeting of the inhabitants of Fairfax county, held at their court house, on the 11th of July, 1807, for the purpose of taking into consideration the late atrocious outrage committed on the U.S. frigate Chesapeake, by a British ship of war the Leopard.”³⁸ The Niles Register and other periodicals of the era, both Federalist and Democratic Republican, provide numerous further examples of honor code rhetoric used in reporting on the Chesapeake incident and other maritime affairs.

Insults from Low-Status Opponents, 1810

Writers for the public press were often more explicit in their evocation of honor and the related concept that insults from the “lower orders” should be met with direct punishment without the benefit of a challenge and an evenly matched duel. For example, “An American” writing from the ship Aurora in St. Bartholomew in the West Indies in 1810 reported on an “insult offered to the flag” entirely separate from the growing conflict with Britain:

Being at this island on commercial pursuits, for a few days past, a circumstance has occurred, which excited my sensibility as an American, in the highest degree, and as I consider it the duty of every citizen to make notorious any insult offered to the flag of the United States, or any violence committed on the person of any of their fellow citizens in a foreign country. . . . [I seek to] make known to my fellow citizens the insult offered to the American flag and the unprecedented violence committed on the person of one of our fellow citizens by the government of this insignificant island.³⁹

The insult consisted of a local official, accompanied by a “crew principally composed of negro slaves,” forcing the chief mate, Mr. Johnson, of the ship Mary Ann Eliza off the ship after the local official’s crew had beat him. Johnson was further beaten on order of the colony’s governor. The affront, it seemed, was considered more egregious because of its racial component.

Honor Rhetoric and the War of 1812

The War of 1812 against Britain tended to be favored by westerners and southerners more than by representatives of New England seafaring communities. Many westerners and their congressional representatives believed that Canada could be readily conquered, and they also resented British support for hostile Native American tribes on the frontier. New England merchants had more to fear from British raids, blockade, and interference with seaborne commerce; maritime New England almost seceded from the Union over opposition to the war after it had begun. The Federalist leanings and the generally pro-British views of New Englanders also played a role in the lack of support there for the War of 1812. Furthermore, both then and later, southerners and westerners showed more concern with issues of honor than New Englanders; this perhaps reflects the different religious and cultural origins of the regions’ settlers.⁴⁰

When President James Madison finally asked Congress to support war measures against Britain, he explicitly did so in order to “maintain the honor of the flag.”⁴¹ While such a turn of phrase might seem so conventional as to go unnoticed, in fact it reflects the deeper and widespread honor code attached to the flag as the symbol of the nation.

By the War of 1812, the issue of respect shown to the U.S. maritime flag had become deeply entrenched in the U.S. psyche. Certainly, the rhetoric reflecting the honor code permeated all public discourse about the issue of U.S. shipping abroad and U.S. relations with Britain, France, and other nations. The honor code, as noted by several historians, became the basis for political rhetoric when dealing with maritime and international affairs.⁴²

The vocabulary of honor surrounding maritime issues had several levels of meaning and usage: at one level, the language had practical functional value in regulating affairs at sea; at another level, it evoked deeply held emotional values reflecting the social usages of the era; at the political level, it represented a tool for enlisting broad support for economic and power goals. The American merchant flag had become an emblem of the nation, and its recognition by diplomats had been one of the first orders of business of the new nation. With the Quasi War, the Barbary Wars, and the War of 1812, the United States had gone to war three times in defense of that flag in the first three decades of the nation’s existence. In domestic politics as well as international affairs, the merchant flag on board privately owned trading vessels had become, like the Stars and Stripes over Fort McHenry, a symbol of the nation.