William Bingham, a twenty-something Philadelphia merchant, spent most of the American Revolution on the French island of Martinique practicing what he called “the art of uniting war and commerce” (216). As an agent for the Continental Congress, Bingham purchased munitions for the American army and lobbied French officials for support all while pursuing his own trading ventures and distributing as many privateering commissions as he could, despite the fact that most of the takers had only a tenuous connection to the rebelling colonies. Regardless of their less than fully legal origins, these privately owned warships had a devastating effect on Britain's merchant marine. Within six months of starting work, privateers from Martinique had captured 250 enemy vessels carrying upwards of $10 million in cargo. When Bingham returned home, he was a wealthy young man who had also helped America gain its independence.

Bingham is one of the characters that come to life in Robert H. Patton's Patriot Pirates: The Privateer War for Freedom and Fortune in the American Revolution. Patton, the grandson of General George S. Patton, contends that privateers played a key role in America's victory in the Revolutionary War. Privateers captured or destroyed more British ships than the Continental navy; seized materiel that helped supply the army; boosted struggling wartime economies in port cities with their demands for provisions and repairs and their delivery of captured European goods; buoyed the morale of patriots who followed their exploits; and demoralized British merchants so that the enemy's will to fight slowly waned. Privateers accomplished all this, according to Patton, because they combined self-interest and public interest in a powerful way. Everyone involved in privateering had the same motivation, he writes, “to make money and whip the British besides” (xxi).

More than 2,000 vessels sailed as American privateers during the war, not only from North America but also from the West Indies and from France. Rather than surveying the breadth of such a wide-flung enterprise, Patton focuses on a handful of men who encouraged privateering, showing how it fit into their other activities. In addition to Bingham, the reader meets John Brown, the merchant, smuggler, and slave dealer after whom Brown University would be named; Nathaniel Greene, another Rhode Islander, who although a Quaker became one of George Washington's most trusted generals; Robert Morris, a Philadelphia merchant, war financier, and one of the richest men in the colonies; and Silas Deane, a representative of Connecticut in the Continental Congress, American procurement officer in France, and would-be international wheeler-dealer. Some of these men were enthusiastic backers of privateers. Brown was typically aggressive in buying shares in armed vessels and Deane could never get his hands on enough commissions to distribute in France. Others were more reluctant. Morris initially balked at privateering because he had so many connections with British merchants. By 1777, however, he was asking Bingham “to increase the number of my engagements in that way” (73).

This is a popular history, with the usual pluses and minuses of the genre. Memorable characters abound, and between each chapter Patton inserts a mininarrative of an individual seafarer. My favorite is Christopher Vail, a native of New London, Connecticut, who joined the Continental army in 1776 at the age of seventeen. Vail also sailed in the navy and aboard an American privateer, from which he was captured by the British and forced to serve in the Royal Navy before he escaped and joined the French navy. While in port at Cadiz, Spain, Vail found an American privateer bound to New England. He deserted the French and sailed home. Two days after returning to New London, he signed aboard another privateer.

As for Patton's contribution to scholarship … well, that is not his goal. However, a greater attention to the literature on privateers would help Patton better explain his subject. Contending that Revolutionary privateering was begun “offhandedly” when Washington wanted to supplement his 1775 siege of Boston with a naval force and that it was initially a “New England fad” ignores the long history of privateering (xvi, xxi). During every imperial war of the eighteenth century, privateers swarmed from Britain's North American colonies—Massachusetts in particular but also New York and Pennsylvania. That is a very enduring fad.

Furthermore, Patton fails to distinguish between the different types of American armed vessels in the war. There were naval vessels, private vessels leased to the government, privateers commissioned by the Continental Congress, and privateers commissioned by the states. There were also what can only be described as mob actions directed against British vessels, which do not fall into any formal category (such as the John Brown–led burning of H.M.S. Gaspee in Providence, with which the book begins).

Then there is the issue of piracy. Since the British government did not recognize the legitimacy of American independence, the protection a privateering commission might offer was uncertain. The reader gets a few glimpses of what this meant, especially when Patton brings up Britain's so-called Pirate Act of 1777. Yet, he does not discuss why this law was passed, how it worked, or whether American privateers were executed as pirates under it.

At sea there was a lot of overlap between all these categories, and one of Patton's strengths is his ability to show how the same men engaged in multiple ventures. However, it would help the reader to understand that boundaries were being blurred, even if they existed more in theory than in practice. The best popular books explain complex historical issues to their audience in an accessible, engaging way. Privateering, with all the colorful characters that seem drawn to it, can be an excellent window onto the past, but only if its complexities are laid bare for the reader to see.