The American Revolution and the importance of commerce in the new republic led to the rise of Jack Tar in American popular consciousness. The revolutionary experience strengthened the idea that sailors had rights by bringing together the interest in protecting sailors from the impress and the crowd action against imperial regulation. Beginning with the Stamp Act riots of the 1760s, the “Sons of Neptune” – waterfront workers – became the shock troops of the Revolution. Sailors and those tied to the maritime trades had a direct interest in liberating colonial America from restrictions on trade that limited their employment opportunities, and they sought to protect themselves from impressment. The conjoining of these two issues enhanced the popular mobilization of the waterfront crowd and strengthened a growing egalitarianism that fed the democratic impulse of the American Revolution. The importance of the waterfront went beyond crowd action and opposition to the impress. The fact that so many Americans fought on the high seas, and that the British captured many of these men, who then suffered as prisoners of war, furthered the sense that mariners played a special role in the creation of the United States. In the decades immediately after the war, the involvement of sailors both in commerce and as protectors of the United States only enhanced Jack Tar's visibility. By 1800, few Americans doubted that sailors were a part of the political nation.