Sailing Toward Freedom is about work and political protest in the decades leading up to the American Revolution. Specifically, I explore the work performed by merchant seamen and try to uncover why so many of them participated so often in the protests of the 1760s and 1770s. Early American merchant mariners viewed themselves as a breed apart. Of course, so did the wigged elites and the people who wrote the histories. It is just that their view of mariners as the dregs of society was in direct opposition to mariners' view of themselves. Mariners understood liberty and freedom in unique ways...