Definition
Shanghaiing of sailors refers to the criminal practice of coercing, deceiving, or incapacitating a person — typically through drugging, intoxicating, or physical force — in order to compel that person to serve as a sailor aboard a vessel without their free and informed consent. The term describes both the act itself and the broader criminal enterprise that surrounded it, which was common in major port cities during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The practice typically involved crimps (labor brokers who preyed on seamen), boardinghouse keepers, and sometimes corrupt ship's officers conspiring to deliver incapacitated men to vessels in need of crew. A victim might wake aboard a ship already at sea with no legal recourse and no way to return to shore. Federal law eventually criminalized the practice explicitly, targeting anyone who, with intent that a person perform labor or service aboard any vessel engaged in interstate or foreign commerce, procured that person through force, fraud, or intoxication.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): To shanghai someone means to coerce or trick a person into doing something against their will, often by underhanded means. In general speech it has broadened far beyond its nautical origin and is used casually — "he was shanghaied into chairing the committee."
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): To intoxicate and ship as a sailor; to put on a ship by deception or violence and carry off. The dictionary treated it as informal but recognized its specific seafaring context.
The gap between common and legal meaning is significant. In ordinary modern usage, "shanghaied" is a mild metaphor for any unwanted obligation. In its legal and historical sense, it described a serious federal crime involving kidnapping, forced labor, and fraud — criminal conduct with direct connections to involuntary servitude law and admiralty jurisdiction. A researcher encountering the term in legal sources must not read it through the softened modern lens.
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Common Confusion
Shanghaiing is sometimes conflated with impressment, the practice by which naval authorities — most famously the British Royal Navy — forcibly conscripted men into military service. The two practices are related in character but differ in legal treatment: impressment was a state action historically claimed as a sovereign right, while shanghaiing was a private criminal enterprise. The legal responses to each developed along different tracks. Researchers should also distinguish shanghaiing from ordinary desertion law and from the broader law of seamen's contracts, both of which are adjacent subjects in historical maritime sources but address different legal problems.
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Why It Matters in Research
This term sits at the intersection of admiralty law, federal criminal law, labor history, and civil liberties — and researchers can easily miss the full picture by searching only one body of sources.
Chronological trap: The practice predates its federal criminalization. Sources from the mid-nineteenth century will discuss shanghaiing as a recognized social problem long before dedicated criminal statutes addressed it. Early legal discussions appear in admiralty contexts — suits over seamen's wages, discharge, and conditions of service — rather than in criminal law reporters.
Statutory layer: Congress addressed shanghaiing through federal legislation, including provisions in the Revised Statutes and later in the Seamen's Act of 1915 (known as the La Follette Seamen's Act), which broadly reformed the rights of sailors and attacked the crimp system. Researchers looking for the criminal prohibition should trace through the federal statutes rather than relying solely on common law sources.
Corpus connections: This term connects directly to the broader Law Mind materials on admiralty and maritime law, seamen's rights, involuntary servitude, and the history of federal labor regulation. The crimp and boardinghouse system that sustained shanghaiing also appears in social reform literature and congressional hearings from the Progressive Era, which may supplement strictly legal sources.
Jurisdictional focus: While the practice occurred internationally, its legal suppression in American sources is primarily federal — both because vessels in interstate and foreign commerce fall under federal jurisdiction and because the relevant criminal statutes were federal enactments. State-level prosecutions did occur, particularly in California and Oregon port cities, but the doctrinal development is largely federal.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's treatment is brief but precise, defining shanghaiing as shipping a person as a sailor when drugged or drunk and immediately flagging the federal criminal statute. The citation to the Standard Dictionary signals that Bouvier recognized the term as having entered recognized usage by the time of his edition. The partial statutory language Bouvier preserves — targeting anyone acting with intent that a person perform labor aboard vessels in interstate or foreign commerce — reflects the federal criminal statute as it stood in the early twentieth century and tracks the commerce power framing that Congress used to reach the practice.
What Bouvier does not supply is any discussion of the full legal ecosystem: the civil remedies available to shanghaied sailors, the admiralty dimensions, or the crimp system as a legal institution. His entry is a starting point, not a complete treatment. Researchers should not treat it as exhaustive.
No other historical dictionary in the Law Mind corpus covers this term with a dedicated entry, which itself signals that the primary sources are statutory and case-law rather than treatise-based.
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Jurisdictional Note
The primary legal framework is federal. Port cities including San Francisco, Portland, and New York were notorious centers of the practice and generated the bulk of relevant state-court and federal-court records. The La Follette Seamen's Act of 1915 represented Congress's most comprehensive response and effectively restructured the legal relationship between sailors and shipowners in ways that undermined the economic conditions that had sustained shanghaiing.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Admiralty and Maritime Law; Seamen's Rights and the Law of the Sea; Involuntary Servitude and the Thirteenth Amendment.
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