Forged by War: The Federal Courts and Foreign Affairs in the Age of Revolution

The Age of Revolution was an era of maritime war, in which epochal struggles for imperial dominance and national self-determination were defined by the seizure of merchant vessels at sea. Though American statesmen largely sought to keep the new nation out of the burgeoning transatlantic conflicts, the United States' deep involvement in maritime commerce meant that international controversies over the prizes of war routinely washed up onto American shores. And when the United States itself went to war in 1812, the importance of privateering in the struggle against British maritime hegemony ensured that the seizure of merchant ships at sea remained central to the new nation's wartime foreign relations.;As this dissertation establishes, in adjudicating the legality of these maritime captures the federal courts assumed a central role in defining the new nation's legal relations with a world at war. As American policymakers, foreign diplomats, distressed merchants, and acquisitive privateers all sought to vindicate through law the competing rights they claimed to maritime property, the courts were charged with applying general legal principles governing wartime sovereign relations in ways that respected foreign prerogatives while protecting American national interests. Though judges were cautious at first about intervening in disputes with deep implications for American foreign relations, repeated (if not always unanimous) insistence by public officials and private parties alike that the courts were best suited to resolve diplomatically sensitive controversies fostered a growing confidence in the wisdom and propriety of judicial intervention in the affairs of state.;The courts' adjudication of prize cases in this era was central to the establishment of the United States' sovereignty and independence. In resolving critical disputes respecting the wartime prerogatives of foreign nations, federal judges articulated a controversial set of doctrines that gave the United States---and the courts themselves---broad authority to promote the United States' sovereign interests in times of both peace and war. In so doing, the courts articulated a version of American rights and obligations under law that sought to place the new nation on equal footing with the established powers and emergent polities of the revolutionary Atlantic world.