Unlike the Continental Army, the Navy recruited both free and enslaved blacks from the very start of the Revolutionary War -- partly ... more inclined to serve on privateers than in Pennsylvania ...

click image for close-up This portrait of an unidentified Revolutionary War sailor was painted in ... rather than with a privateer.

(In the Revolutionary era ... as a small-navy nation, it needed privateers. In the Civil War, Congress authorized the president to commission privateers, and the Confederacy made use of privateers.