White-Jacket, or, The World in a man-of-war

As the Articles of War form the ark and constitution of the
penal laws of the American Navy, in all sobriety and earnestness
it may be well to glance at their origin. Whence came
they? And how is it that one arm of the national defences
of a Republic comes to be ruled by a Turkish code, whose
every section almost, like each of the tubes of a revolving pistol,
fires nothing short of death into the heart of an offender?
How comes it that, by virtue of a law solemnly ratified by a
Congress of freemen, the representatives of freemen, thousands
of Americans are subjected to the most despotic usages, and,
from the dock-yards of a republic, absolute monarchies are
launched, with the “glorious stars and stripes” for an ensign?
By what unparalleled anomaly, by what monstrous grafting
of tyranny upon freedom did these Articles of War ever come
to be so much as heard of in the American Navy?

Whence came they? They can not be the indigenous
growth of those political institutions, which are based upon
that arch-democrat Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence?
No; they are an importation from abroad, even
from Britain, whose laws we Americans hurled off as tyrannical,
and yet retained the most tyrannical of all.

But we stop not here; for these Articles of War had their
congenial origin in a period of the history of Britain when
the Puritan Republic had yielded to a monarchy restored;
when a hangman Judge Jeffreys sentenced a world's champion
like Algernon Sidney to the block; when one of a race—by
some deemed accursed of God—even a Stuart, was on the
throne; and a Stuart, also, was at the head of the Navy, as

347

Lord High Admiral. One, the son of a King beheaded for
encroachments upon the rights of his people, and the other,
his own brother, afterward a king, James II., who was hurled
from the throne for his tyranny. This is the origin of the
Articles of War; and it carries with it an unmistakable
clew to their despotism.[1]

Nor is it a dumb thing that the men who, in democratic
Cromwell's time, first proved to the nations the toughness of
the British oak and the hardihood of the British sailor—that
in Cromwell's time, whose fleets struck terror into the cruisers
of France, Spain, Portugal, and Holland, and the corsairs of
Algiers and the Levant; in Cromwell's time, when Robert
Blake swept the Narrow Seas of all the keels of a Dutch Admiral

348

who insultingly carried a broom at his fore-mast; it is
not a dumb thing that, at a period deemed so glorious to the
British Navy, these Articles of War were unknown.

Nevertheless, it is granted that some laws or other must
have governed Blake's sailors at that period; but they must
have been far less severe than those laid down in the written
code which superseded them, since, according to the father-in-law
of James II., the Historian of the Rebellion, the English
Navy, prior to the enforcement of the new code, was full of
officers and sailors who, of all men, were the most republican.
Moreover, the same author informs us that the first work undertaken
by his respected son-in-law, then Duke of York, upon
entering on the duties of Lord High Admiral, was to have a
grand re-christening of the men-of-war, which still carried on
their sterns names too democratic to suit his high-tory ears.

But if these Articles of War were unknown in Blake's
time, and also during the most brilliant period of Admiral
Benbow's career, what inference must follow? That such
tyrannical ordinances are not indispensable—even during war
—to the highest possible efficiency of a military marine.

Taking for their basis the above-mentioned British Naval Code, and
ingrafting upon it the positive scourging laws, which Britain was loth
to recognize as organic statutes, our American lawgivers, in the year
1800, framed the Articles of War now governing the American Navy.
They may be found in the second volume of the “United States Statutes
at Large,” under chapter xxxiii.—“An act for the better government
of the Navy of the United States.”

1 For reference to the latter (L'Ord. de la Marine), vide Curtis's “Treatise on the
Rights and Duties of Merchant-Seamen, according to the General Maritime Law,”
Part ii., c. i.

[1]

The first Naval Articles of War in the English language were
passed in the thirteenth year of the reign of Charles the Second, under
the title of “An act for establishing Articles and Orders for the regulating
and better Government of his Majesty's Navies, Ships-of-War,
and Forces by Sea.” This act was repealed, and, so far as concerned
the officers, a modification of it substituted, in the twenty-second year
of the reign of George the Second, shortly after the Peace of Aix la
Chapelle, just one century ago. This last act, it is believed, comprises,
in substance, the Articles of War at this day in force in the British
Navy. It is not a little curious, nor without meaning, that neither of
these acts explicitly empowers an officer to inflict the lash. It would
almost seem as if, in this case, the British lawgivers were willing to
leave such a stigma out of an organic statute, and bestow the power
of the lash in some less solemn, and perhaps less public manner. Indeed,
the only broad enactments directly sanctioning naval scourging
at sea are to be found in the United States Statute Book and in the
“Sea Laws” of the absolute monarch, Louis le Grand, of France. 1

University of Virginia Library

71. CHAPTER LXXI.