Rough Waters. Rodney Carisle
AOTC
The flag of a nation is a powerful symbol, and protection of the flag is no mere ritual. When the flag is physically attacked, the people and the government naturally respond. Thus, the story of the merchant fleet’s flag is a crucial and central part of the history of a nation’s engagement abroad, in peace and war.
The United States has a rich history of engagement with the sea. The thirteen British colonies in North America that declared their independence in 1776 all had seaports on the Atlantic coast or on waterways that led to the Atlantic Ocean. Some of the grievances that led to the Declaration of Independence were maritime in nature—particularly the Sugar Act of 1764 and the Tea Act of 1773. With the exception of some of the Indian wars, all of America’s wars engaged the American Navy, and indeed, many of the wars that the United States fought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were caused by incidents involving attacks on U.S. naval or merchant shipping or bombardment of a fortification in a harbor. In the twenty-first century, the U.S. Navy remains the strongest in the world, but its flagged merchant fleet is small, ranking at twenty-second in the world in registered tonnage.1
The United States’ sensitivity to the reception of its merchant flag in foreign ports and on the high seas is deeply related to the nation’s sense of its identity. In the eighteenth-century world in which the United States declared its sovereignty, acceptance of and respect for U.S.-flagged ships were both essential to national identity. If the flag were not respected, foreign trade by American merchants in U.S. ships would have been nearly impossible. Recognition of the merchant flag was a matter not only of practical business or legal national status but also—and perhaps most important—of national honor. The principle of freedom of the seas, which held that ships of all nations had equal rights to travel on the high seas (out of the territorial waters of any nation), had been articulated in 1609 by Hugo Grotius in Mare Liberum. U.S. statesmen and journalists were well aware of this principle in the early years of the republic and understood that failure to recognize the right of ships under the U.S. flag to sail the open seas would be a failure to recognize the United States as a nation.2
Flags, of course, are highly emotional symbols, not only in the United States but around the world. Often the presence of a national flag on board a merchant ship is a source of pride, but if a ship is attacked, disrespected, or discriminated against, its flag can be a source of dismay.
When the United States entered into treaties of commerce and navigation and exchanged consuls, ministers, and ambassadors with other nations, recognition of the nation took legal, economic, and diplomatic form. But the symbol of that recognition was respect and honor shown to the flag itself, both on ships and at the diplomatic outposts of the nation abroad. Later in the nineteenth century, Americans developed their version of the cult of the flag, a phenomenon found in Europe and Asia in the same period. As the cult flourished in the United States, it was replete with ceremonial practices and a pledge of allegiance to the flag; the symbolism of the stars and stripes became even more deeply embedded in the American psyche.
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