1798: Boarded and Press-Ganged: the Kidnapping of 55 American Sailors That Nearly Sparked a War
Impressment was the Royal Navy's practice of forcibly seizing men from other vessels to crew its own warships, a kind of state-sanctioned kidnapping that Britain justified by claiming the right to reclaim its own citizens wherever it found them. Off Havana, Cuba, a British squadron led by a seventy four gun warship stopped the American frigate USS Baltimore as it escorted a merchant convoy. Outgunned, Captain Isaac Phillips let British officers board and muster his crew, and on 16 November 1798 they marched off 55 men they claimed lacked proof of American citizenship.
Five were kept as British subjects; the rest were eventually handed back, but the damage was done. Phillips was dismissed from the US Navy without a court martial for surrendering without a fight, and Washington issued new orders forbidding any American commander from ever again letting a foreign warship search a US naval vessel.
The grudge festered for nine years until a US frigate, obeying those very orders, was fired on for refusing a search in the Chesapeake-Leopard affair. Impressment remained the rawest wound between the two nations, cited by President James Madison among his reasons for declaring the War of 1812.
