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Our press-gang, unlike the press-gangs of New York or Chicago, had nothing to do with morning publications, and would have failed to comprehend us had we ordered the preparation of a sensation leader, or a report of the last great meeting at Union Square. Our press-gang devoted its time and energies to putting our cotton into bales of the proper size and neatness.
Men and women were executed for what at the present day would only have been held to deserve a few weeks' or months' imprisonment. Every liberal opinion was crushed, men were entrapped into the army by promises which were never kept, and press-gangs tore merchant seamen from their families, and forced them to serve in the navy, where they were miserably provided for.
I belie' me she first began to think on him time o' t' fight aboard th' Good Fortune, when Darley were killed, and he would seem tame-like to her if he couldn't conquer press-gangs, and men-o'-war. She's sooner think on him drowned, as she's ne'er to see him again.
Reporting on 11th March he says that 'Last Thursday and yesterday' the day of the sensational report above given 'several useful hands were picked up, mostly seamen, who were concealed in the different lodgings and were discovered by their girls. He adds, 'Several prime seamen were yesterday taken disguised as labourers in the different marble quarries round the town. On 14th October the report is that 'the different press-gangs, with their officers, literally scoured the country on the eastern roads and picked up several fine young fellows. Here, again, no distinction is drawn between men really impressed and men who were arrested for being absent beyond the duration of their leave.
My father wanted to take her back to Ladykirk it is so safe and peaceful. No soldiers or press-gangs or smugglers ever go there, for Miss Aline is like something sacred so unable to take care of herself that everybody must look after her!" "And particularly Julian?" observed the Princess, with a spark in the blue eyes.
They bore a petition to the Governor from the town, which protested against the right of Parliament to tax the Colonies, and denied the legality of press-gangs in Massachusetts.
No fish was caught, for the fishermen dared not venture out to sea; the markets were deserted, as the press-gangs might come down on any gathering of men; prices were raised, and many were impoverished; many others ruined. For in the great struggle in which England was then involved, the navy was esteemed her safeguard; and men must be had at any price of money, or suffering, or of injustice.
There may have been such things as amiable negro-drivers and sentimental masters of press-gangs; and here and there, among the odd freaks of human nature, there may have been specimens of men who were 'No tyrants, though bred up to tyranny. But it would be as wise to recommend wolves for nurses at the Foundling on the credit of Romulus and Remus as to substitute the exception for the general fact, and advise mankind to take to trusting to arbitrary power on the credit of these specimens."
Still more, that was a period when the uttermost resources of England were taxed to the quick; when the masts of her multiplied fleets almost transplanted her forests, all standing to the sea; when British press-gangs not only boarded foreign ships on the high seas, and boarded foreign pier-heads, but boarded their own merchantmen at the mouth of the Thames, and boarded the very fire-sides along its banks; when Englishmen were knocked down and dragged into the navy, like cattle into the slaughter-house, with every mortal provocation to a mad desperation against the service that thus ran their unwilling heads into the muzzles of the enemy's cannon.
But in that matter there are not a few considerations to be kept in mind. In the first place a large number are not really very enthusiastic, but simply join because pressure to do so is put upon them by their "masters." The press-gangs of old exist no longer, but substitutes for them revive in subtler form.
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