America began as a maritime nation. Before expansion across a continent and the mythology of the western frontier captured imaginations, Americans traversed the deep Atlantic, and were entranced by the oceanic eastern frontier. Before settlement and urbanization scarred the landscape, commerce and the specter of the seascape transfixed the nation. Before Americans proclaimed their mastery of industrial technology, they built incredible sailing machines that spread across the globe. Americans have all but forgotten their maritime origins.

To Swear Like a Sailor seeks to resuscitate that memory by exploring the intimate connections between maritime and mainstream cultures. In Liberty on the Waterfront I traced the impact of the age of revolution (1750–1850) on the people of the American waterfront, examining how their world was and was not changed by the ideals of liberty and equality. When I finished that book, I wished to study further certain issues and questions concerning how to decipher the diverse sources I had been examining. I therefore started writing To Swear Like a Sailor as a series of semiautonomous essays on how historians can gain insight into the world of Jack Tar – the deepwater sailor – through creative reading of the types of documents at our disposal. If the chapters in this book began as semiautonomous, they have not remained that way. This book has become more than a study of the methodologies in “reading” maritime culture. As I wrote chapter after chapter I came to realize that, although there is much that is unique and peculiar to the world of Jack Tar, the bigger story was that despite many differences, maritime culture was merely one component of a larger Anglo-American culture coated with saltwater. Perhaps this relationship is most evident in material not in this book. When I started to write about the political slogan “Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights,” I discovered that I had so much to say that it quickly ballooned into a book on its own. That work centers on the welding of Enlightenment ideas about political economy espoused by many of the Revolution's leaders – the Founding Fathers – with the practical concerns of personal freedom by common seamen – the Jack Tars – in one catchphrase that emerged at the beginning of the War of 1812.