Combat· West Indies Anti-Piracy Campaign
USS Erie vs Federal
A capture that turned on the thorny question of privateer versus pirate.
At St. Bartholomew in the West Indies, the sloop USS Erie took the Federal, a vessel sailing under an Argentine privateering commission, the Marine guard providing the boarding party. By the late 1820s the great age of Caribbean piracy was over, but a related problem lingered: the new South American republics, at war with Spain and Brazil, issued letters of marque to privateers whose conduct often shaded into plunder of neutral, including American, shipping. Seizing such a vessel raised delicate diplomatic questions about the legitimacy of its commission, exactly the issue that ran through the whole era. The capture was bloodless. It illustrates how the anti-piracy mission evolved into a broader policing of armed vessels whose legal status was murky, a recurring friction between the United States and the emerging Latin American states.
Record no. 284