A foreign nation stops you on a ship. Forces you at gunpoint onto their ship and forces you into work. That’s slavery sport.
Play word games if you want. Defend the Brits if you are one of those types. But please don’t pretend the Brits abhorred slavery. In our amendment we called it involuntary servitude except as punishment for a crime.
That is what slavery was defined as in 1865. It was still fresh on their minds then.
Impressment is involuntary military service. Slavery includes ownership of human beings. You appear to be one of the very few not to know the difference.
“Impressment, colloquially “the press” or the “press gang”, is the taking of men into a military or naval force by compulsion, with or without notice.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impressment
George Washington famously forced some uncooperative farmer to act as his guide during the Battle of Trenton. I’m unaware that Washington then made him go live at Mount Vernon with the rest of the slaves. Or maybe he sold him. Or maybe he wasn’t a slave at all, he was just impressed for one night. So there you go, sport, you can surely find it defined in the dictionary, that big book of word games.
Not so neat as you put it. According to British law, once British always British. In the years before the war with them in 1812, the Royal Navy lost lots of sailors to the American service. We paid better, our ships were easier to work, and American Captains resorted to the cat considerable less often than Royal Navy captains.
When A British ship stopped an America ship they were looking for British citizens that had deserted the Royal Navy. The search criteria was look for those sailors that had welts on their backs, sure signs of a cat. Those are the sailors that they took off our ships. They didn’t just stop any American ship and grab any American sailor for their ships. The were looking for deserters from the Royal Navy.