Smuggler Nation (11 page)

The sale of British prizes sometimes took peculiar forms. For instance, British merchants from Antigua, Bermuda, and Grenada reportedly made regular trips to Martinique to buy back goods that had been seized by American privateers. One British captain allegedly even repurchased his captured slave ship through agreement with William Bingham, who had been sent to the island to oversee the procurement of military wares.
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Bingham mastered what he termed “the art of uniting war and commerce,” and Martinique provided the perfect locale.
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The island turned into a bustling wartime commercial center, including trade in captured goods and a transshipment point for French war supplies destined for the American colonies. Once France officially entered the war, however, the boom times were over. Martinique lost the neutrality that had provided such a convenient cover for wartime commerce.
Bingham, meanwhile, returned from Martinique a rich man: “The sum total of Bingham’s public and private ventures in Martinique provided the capital for his later career.”
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As business on Martinique went bust with the end of French neutrality, it boomed on the still officially neutral Dutch island of St. Eustatius (otherwise known as “Statia” by merchants and seamen), becoming the shopping center for the American Revolution and the wealthiest port in the Caribbean.
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The island also served as a market outlet for smuggled American exports, such as timber, tobacco, horses, and indigo. Dubbed the “Golden Rock” for its profitable trading opportunities, St. Eustatius had all the ingredients to make it an ideal transshipment point: the cover of Dutch neutrality, the status of a free port with no customs duties, a convenient location amid many foreign territories (English, French, Spanish, and Danish), and a harbor able to accommodate some two hundred ships at a time. The island’s population boomed along with its economy, increasing from just a few thousand residents before the outbreak of the American Revolution to eight thousand by 1780.
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British warships patrolling the international waters around the tiny island played a high-stakes cat-and-mouse game with the vessels coming and going from the American colonies. In an effort to pacify outraged British officials, in early 1775 the Netherlands imposed an embargo that formally prohibited supplying munitions and other war materials to the American colonies. The local authorities, however, ignored the order and continued to turn a blind eye.
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The American agent on the island, Abraham Van Bibber of Maryland, reported that “the Governour is daily expressing the greatest desire and Intention to protect the trade with us here. Indeed they begin to discover their Mistake and are now very jealous of the French’s running away with all their trade.”
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The motive was commercial interest more than political sympathy; the island’s livelihood was dependent on the mushrooming contraband trade. As Van Bibber also reported, “The Dutch understand quite well that enforcement of the laws, that is, the embargo, would mean the ruin of their trade.”
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The English captain of the
Seaford
, anchored at the nearby British island of St. Kitts, complained that the port of St. Eustatius was “opened without reserve to all American vessels.”
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Dutch merchants could sell gunpowder to the Americans in
St. Eustatius at up to six times the going rate in Holland. To disguise their destination, Dutch ships would at times set sail for Africa as the official destination but end up at St. Eustatius. Gunpowder was also disguised as nonmilitary supplies, hidden in containers such as tea chests and rice barrels.
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Figure 3.2 The Continental warship
Andrew Doria
receiving a cannon salute from the Dutch fort at St. Eustatius, West Indies, November 16, 1776. This was the first official salute to the American flag in a foreign port. Formally neutral St. Eustatius owed much of its existence to smuggling arms and other supplies for the American revolutionary war effort. Painting by Phillips Melville (U.S. Navy Art Collection).

The Golden Rock also brought together the twin businesses of smuggling and privateering, affording a convenient place for American privateers to dispose of captured British goods. Perhaps appropriately, St. Eustatius was famously the first foreign port to salute the American flag, greatly offending the British and provoking loud official protests.
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No wonder, then, that when Holland entered the war in 1781 one of the first British moves was to sack the island, where they found more than two thousand American merchants and seamen.
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St. Eustatius had been operating as virtually a fourteenth colony, devoted largely to smuggling and other related illicit commercial activities.

Trading with the Enemy

Wartime illicit trade also included trade between the rebel colonies and British possessions that was prohibited by both sides. Rather than trade between England and the colonies simply ceasing with the outbreak of war, direct trade was replaced by more indirect forms of illicit trade. American tobacco was shipped to England via St. Eustatius and St. Thomas, and British manufactures were smuggled into the colonies via Nova Scotia.
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Make-believe “captures” also constituted a mechanism to access markets in enemy territory. At one point, American agents in Holland allegedly even purchased British-manufactured clothing for the Continental Army.
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Yet economic incentives and the profit motive did not always coincide with serving the revolutionary cause. For example, private contractors in Pennsylvania opted to sell flour to the New England colonies at higher prices rather than supply Washington’s troops nearby, who were desperately short on rations. Even more worrisome was that colonists were trading directly with the enemy. For instance, some farmers near Philadelphia chose to supply the British in exchange for hard cash rather than accept Washington’s promises of future payment.
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Even lumber—which is particularly bulky and thus difficult to hide and transport—was quietly sold to the British. In 1780 the Philadelphia authorities arrested a number of lumber smugglers and charged them with trading with the enemy.
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The British occupation of New York in 1776 stimulated an extensive illicit trade with neighboring areas. New Jersey smugglers brought foodstuffs to British headquarters in New York City and returned with luxury items such as silks and satins.
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According to Governor Livingston, this illicit trade was so extensive in 1777 that shops were even set up to sell British goods.
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Connecticut farmers similarly supplied British forces in the city, reducing their dependence on European provisions. Some of this illicit trade was more about basic survival than profits, carried out by desperate refugees who had escaped to Connecticut in the aftermath of the British occupation of New York. Connecticut produce was clandestinely exchanged for much-coveted British dry goods and West Indian produce. In the summer of 1782, John Chester of Wethersfield wrote of the “cursed illicit trade” that “our own people
begin to get into” and “some few of us” began to justify openly.
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The Connecticut government became increasingly alarmed about this illicit trade but was unable to do much about it, given its tenuous hold over southern Connecticut and the large British military presence in New York.
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The frontier zone between Connecticut and New York was a fertile environment for trading with the enemy. Such illicit commerce also made this frontier zone less violent than one might otherwise have expected. The profits from continuous trading would sometimes trump raiding, and indeed some of those commissioned to carry out raiding missions instead used it as an opportunity for trading.
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Similarly, a number of ship captains commissioned to police such illicit trading instead facilitated it.
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Clandestine trading was also used as a cover for intelligence gathering by both sides.
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But Washington was skeptical of its value: “Those people who undertake to procure intelligence under cover of carrying produce into New York,” he complained, “… attend more to their own emoluments than to the business they have charged, and we have found their information so vague and trifling, that there is no placing dependence upon it. Besides, it opens a door to a very extensive and pernicious traffic.”
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Part of the difficulty in stopping wartime trading with the enemy was the long-established colonial preference for British goods. At first, the patriotic fervor of the Revolution helped keep this in check. But over time, old habits and commercial preferences returned. The Virginian Carter Braxton described the situation in 1779: “They [English manufactures] are so much preferred that America now winks at every importation of their goods.”
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George Washington remarked in 1781: “Men of all descriptions are now indiscriminately engaging in it, Whig, Tory, Speculator. By its being practiced by those of the latter class, in a manner with impunity, Men who, two or three years ago, would have shuddered at the idea of such connexions now pursue it with avidity and reconcile it to themselves (in which their profits plead powerfully) upon a principle of equality with the Tory.”
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Take, for instance, the case of the Rhode Island merchant Nicholas Brown. At first he proclaimed that purchasing British goods was unpatriotic but later backtracked to such an extent that he indicated a preference for only British goods—even if this required engaging in
commerce he described as “the Clandestine Way.”
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Or consider a letter with smuggling tips sent to Jonathan Amory of Boston in June 1782: British goods “are prohibited by Congress, yet I think they might be so managed that by Invoice and mixed with Holland goods, that there would be but little difficulty. And English goods sell best.”
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Aware of the strong American preference for British goods, another Boston merchant wrote abroad that same year that French textiles could be “pack’d & marked the same as tho’ manufactur’d in England to as great deception as the English formerly imitated the French for the Quebec market.”
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The one realm of trading with the enemy that was temporarily tolerated and even encouraged by revolutionary leaders was the salt trade. Demand far outstripped supply early on in the war, so much so that it sparked riots, ration cards were used in some places, and salt even served as a form of currency. Salt had vital military as well as civilian use, since it was used for preserving meat. To cope with the severe shortages, the Virginia government authorized ships to purchase salt supplies at British-controlled Bermuda (and Bermuda, in turn, was in great need of the food supplies exchanged for salt). Scarcity created conditions for exceptionally high profits. Nicholas Brown in Providence, for instance, quietly tripled his salt investment in 1777. The historian Stuart Brandes suggests that had this “become public knowledge, he certainly would have been denounced as undevoted.” Charges of price gouging were widespread. In 1781 the Continental Congress outlawed the wartime Bermuda salt trade.
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THE BRITISH BATTLE AGAINST
the rebellion in the American colonies was also a battle against smuggling: they attempted to shut off smuggling pipelines to colonial forces by occupying major ports of New York in 1776 and Philadelphia in 1777. Cornwallis also apparently concluded that the Southern colonies could only be defeated by impeding the Chesapeake Bay smuggling of tobacco, cotton, and other exports to acquire arms and ammunition.
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Meanwhile, smugglers trading across the English Channel were doing their part to keep London preoccupied closer to home: in 1781, Lord Pembroke was so exasperated by the extent of local smuggling that he demanded, “Will Washington take America or the Smugglers England first? The bett
would be a fair, even one.”
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The British lost the war in the American colonies for many reasons, including geographic disadvantage and French intervention. But losing the war on smuggling—failing to deter and interdict desperately needed clandestine shipments of arms and other war supplies to Washington’s forces—played no small role.