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The primary federal agency with maritime authority for the United States, the U.S. Coast Guard is the smallest of the United States’ five armed services. A full-time military organization with a true peacetime mission, the service numbers 90,000 strong with all components added in, including Coast Guard Reserve and Coast Guard Auxiliary.
Spanning more than 200 years, the history of the Coast Guard is as diverse as it is long. Unlike some federal agencies, the Coast Guard did not begin at any one time or with any single purpose. Today’s Coast Guard is a collection of other federal organizations no longer in existence. The Revenue Cutter Service, forerunner of the Coast Guard, was established in 1790 under the Department of the Treasury. Congress authorized the building of the first fleet of ten cutters (a vessel 65 feet in length or more that can accommodate a crew for extended deployment).
The Service was renamed the Coast Guard in 1915 when it merged with the Life-Saving Service, which began in 1878. Established in 1789, the Lighthouse Service joined the Coast Guard in 1939. In 1946, the Bureau of Navigation and Steamboat Inspection was permanently transferred to the Coast Guard. After 177 years in the Treasury Department, the Coast Guard transferred to the newly formed Department of Transportation on April 1, 1967.
The Coast Guard is a complex organization of people, ships, aircraft, and shore stations. The Service is decentralized administratively and operationally. Coast Guard personnel respond to tasks in several mission and program areas. This multi-mission approach enables a relatively small organization to respond to public needs in a wide variety of maritime activities and to shift focus at short notice.
The Coast Guard’s four main missions are maritime law enforcement, maritime safety, environmental protection and national security. These missions mandate the Coast Guard remain constantly ready to defend the United States while also ensuring national security and protecting national interests. The service is also to minimize loss of life and property, personal injury and property damage at sea in U.S. waters; enforce U.S. laws and international agreements of the United States; ensure the safety and security of maritime transportation, ports, waterways and shore facilities. The Coast Guard also promotes maritime transportation and other waterborne activity in support of national economic, scientific, defense and social needs. It protects the marine environment and its wildlife and ensures an effective U.S. presence in polar regions It also protects the interests of the United States in relationships with other maritime nations worldwide; assists other agencies in performance of their duties and cooperates in joint maritime ventures while providing an effective maritime communications system. Finally, it operates under the U.S. Navy, when directed by the President.
AFRICAN AMERICANS IN THE REVENUE CUTTER SERVICE
Today’s U.S. Coast Guard is an amalgamation of five predecessors: the Revenue Cutter Service; the Life-saving Service (this and the Revenue Cutter Service merged in 1915); the Lighthouse Service (absorbed in 1939); and the Bureau of Navigation and Steamboat Inspection, itself a merger of two agencies (added to Coast Guard in 1942).
The Coast Guard traces its primary root to the Revenue Cutter Service, which was a "military" organization from its inception and which element has modeled the character of the Coast Guard probably more than any other.
The first Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, proposed the Federal government accept public responsibility for safety at sea. On August 7, 1789, President George Washington approved the enabling Ninth Act of Congress. To counter the smuggling and other illegal activities rampant at this time, Hamilton proposed a seagoing military force to support national economic policy. Mere legal-paper status was not enough to combat criminal activity: on August 4, 1790, the Revenue Cutter Service’s predecessor, the Revenue Marine, was born.
The enabling legislation, the Organic Act, provided for establishment and support of ten cutters (vessels 65 feet in length or more, that can accommodate a crew for extended deployment) to enforce the customs laws. Hamilton also requested a professional corps of commissioned officers.
The first commissioned officer was Hopley Yeaton, commanding officer of the Revenue cutter Scammel. Yeaton, a veteran of the Continental Navy, owned a slave named Senegal who served Yeaton on many cruises. Alexander Hamilton’s request for "ten boats" for the protection of revenue specified each be armed with swivels, small cannons on a revolving base that could be turned and fired in every direction.
Historical records of the Service reveal that the practice of officers using slaves as stewards, cooks and seamen on board Revenue cutters appears to have been a common one. A Service regulation dated November 1, 1843 officially banned this practice by prohibiting any slave "from ever being entered for the Service, or to form a complement of any vessel of the Revenue Marine of the United States."
Before 1843, Revenue cutter captains’ use of slaves and other African Americans had been restricted. Captain W.W. Polk, USRCS, commanding the Revenue cutter Florida, wrote Treasury Secretary Samuel D. Ingham on June 22, 1831:
In the general instructions for the government of the Revenue Cutter service of December last, by one paragraph is prohibited the employment of persons of color, unless by the special permission of the Secretary of the Treasury
I beg leave here to observe that I have never owned a slave in the Cutter Service. I have however a colored boy, a native of N. York and of course free, he was given to me by Capt. M.C. Perry of the Navy. He is now bound to me under Laws of Delaware until age 21.
If it would not be incompatible with the rules laid down by the Hon. Secretary I have respectfully to suggest that I may be permitted to employ the boy as a servant on board. He is an expert sailor for his age and competent to the duty of a boy of the first class. I would further respectfully ask if the Commanders of Cutters are permitted to employ apprentices, and if so how many.
Secretary Ingham replied six days later that there "will be no objections to your retaining your servant Boy and shipping colored persons as cooks and stewards." The following month, Acting Secretary Asbery Dickens assured Captain Richard Derly, USRCS, commanding the Revenue cutter Morris, that he had "permission of the department to employ free colored persons as cook and steward of the Morris."
Since 1794, the Revenue Marine Service had been carrying out the important mission of preventing importation of slaves into the territorial limits of the United States. Although the law of March 22, 1794, prohibiting the slave trade between the United States and foreign countries, did not specifically direct the revenue cutters to aid in its enforcement, "they were nevertheless instructed to do so; and their connection with efforts to suppress the traffic, begun under this Act, did not cease until the occasion for such efforts had entirely disappeared."
Illustrating this mission, the revenue cutters stationed at South Atlantic coast ports and operating under the authority of the Acts of March 2, 1807 and March 3, 1819, captured numerous vessels with almost 500 persons to be sold as slaves.
The following entry in the Service’s annual report for 1846 was typical: "Several captures of piratical vessels, which at the time infested the Florida keys, were made by Captain Jackson and others, and, having full cargoes of slaves destined for Amelia Island, were carried into American waters and confined."
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