story.  Privateering, like all irregular service, was demoralizing, not alone to the men engaged in it, but to the youth of the country as well.  The stories of the easy life and the great profits of the privateersmen were circulated in every little town, while the revels of these sea soldiers in the water-front villages were described with picturesque embellishments throughout the land.  As a result, it became hard to get young men of spirit into the patriot armies.  Washington complained that when the fortunes of his army were at their lowest, when he could not get clothing for his soldiers, and the snow at Valley Forge was stained with the blood of their unshod feet, any American shipping on a privateer was sure of a competence, while great fortunes were being made by the speculators who fitted them out.  Nor was this all.  Such was the attraction of the privateer’s life that it drew to it seamen from every branch of the maritime calling.  The fisheries and the West India trade, which had long been the chief mainstay of New England commerce, were ruined, and it seemed for a time as if the hardy race of American seamen were to degenerate into a mere body of buccaneers, operating under the protection of international law, but plunderers and spoilers nevertheless.  Fortunately, the long peace which succeeded the War of 1812 gave opportunity for the naturally lawful and civilized instincts of the Americans to assert themselves, and this peril was averted.

It is, then, with no admiration for the calling, and yet with no underestimate of its value to the nation, that I recount some of the achievements of those who followed it.  The periods when American privateering was important were those of the Revolution and the War of 1812.  During the Civil War the loss incurred by privateers fell upon our own people, and it is curious to note how different a tone the writers on this subject adopt when discussing the ravages of the Confederate privateers and those which we let loose upon British commerce in the brave days of 1812.

A true type of the Revolutionary privateersmen was Captain Silas Talbot, of Massachusetts.  He was one of the New England lads apprenticed to the sea at an early age, having been made a cabin-boy at twelve.  He rose to command and acquired means in his profession, as we have seen was common among our early merchant sailors, and when the Revolution broke out was living comfortably in his own mansion in Providence.  He enlisted in Washington’s army, but left it to become a privateer; and from that service he stepped to the quarter-deck of a man-of-war.  This was not an uncommon line of development for the early privateersmen; and, indeed, it was not unusual to find navy officers, temporarily without commands, taking a cruise or two as privateers, until Congress should provide more ships for the regular service—­a system which did not tend to make a Congress, which was niggardly at best, hasten to provide public vessels