Smuggler Nation (14 page)

These clashes between national law and local practice in American ports—including widespread complicity of customs officials—would be just the opening salvos of an all-out battle between the Jefferson administration and American merchants. Historian Gautham Rao emphasizes that, as relations with France and Britain deteriorated, the national government’s approach toward regulating America’s merchants shifted from an initial pattern of loose accommodation late in the eighteenth century—including tolerance of local complicity between customs houses and merchants in ignoring the law—to growing confrontation in the first years of the nineteenth century. Yet as Jefferson’s ill-fated embargo would starkly reveal, more policing of merchants and merchant-friendly customs houses did not automatically translate into a successful policy. Indeed, merchants would become even craftier and more brazen in defying trade restrictions. Customs houses consequently “became the terrain of a pitched battle over the institutional and political character of the early American republic.”
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Evading Jefferson’s Embargo

In what surely qualifies as the boldest and most ambitious experiment in restricting trade in American history, in December 1807 Jefferson imposed an embargo on all U.S. commerce with the rest of the world. What provoked such a radical move, especially from an administration otherwise loath to expand centralized political power and authority? Indeed, the series of progressively more coercive and invasive embargo laws between late 1807 and early 1809 violated the core minimalist government tenets of Jeffersonian republicanism. Circumstances trumped ideology. Jefferson calculated that, denied the benefits of U.S. trade, France and especially England would come to realize the importance of American commerce and treat the country and its vessels with more respect. The embargo, it was hoped, would both punish and teach a lesson. England was viewed as especially vulnerable to an embargo, given the sheer magnitude of her trade with the United States.

Most importantly, Jefferson saw the embargo as an alternative to going to war—a war he was both ill prepared to fight and desperate to avoid. But instead he found himself at war with America’s merchants, which turned into the biggest blunder of his administration. Secretary of Treasury Gallatin doubted the wisdom of the embargo from the start. He wrote to Jefferson shortly before the passage of the Embargo Act, “Governmental prohibitions do always more mischief than had been calculated” and concluded that the law was “of a doubtful policy.”
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He warned Jefferson that customs collectors must “depend on physical force to detain vessels, and there are many ports where we have neither the revenue cutters nor perhaps more than one single officer.”
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Resistance to the embargo intensified and spread over time, starting in trade-dependent New England. Jefferson nevertheless proclaimed that the embargo necessitated sacrificing “private interests for this greater public object.”
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But merchants were in no mood for such lofty appeals.
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Jefferson’s optimism seemed naïve and disconnected from commercial realities. In May 1808, he explained to a former member of the Continental Congress, Benjamin Smith, that the embargo would continue to be enforced because America is a country where “every man feels a vital interest in maintaining the authority of the laws, and instantly engages in it as in his own personal cause.”
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Yet just a few
months later, in August, Jefferson was noticeably less upbeat, writing to Gallatin: “This embargo law is certainly the most embarrassing one we have ever had to execute. I did not expect a crop of so sudden & rank growth of fraud & open opposition by force could have grown up in the U.S.”
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Jefferson nevertheless remained staunchly committed to the embargo to the very end, and he was greatly dismayed when Congress finally lifted it in 1809.

Embargo busting took three main forms. The first involved overland smuggling into Canada by inland farmers in Vermont and New York long accustomed to (and indeed dependent upon) selling their produce across the border. The second involved violations committed under the guise of the coastal trade (maritime trade between U.S. states). This could involve legally transporting goods to border towns and then smuggling them into British Canada or Spanish Florida. Alternatively, it could involve blaming an equipment malfunction or a bogus distress such as inclement weather for “forcing” the ship into a foreign port, often in the West Indies.
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The third form of embargo evasion
involved clandestinely sailing from an American harbor directly to foreign ports without clearance papers (most often to Canada, Florida, or the West Indies, but also to Europe).

Figure 4.1 Political cartoon of a smuggler during Jefferson’s unpopular trade embargo. “Ograbme” is “embargo” spelled backwards (Granger Collection).

The ease and methods of evading the embargo varied from place to place, partly depending on the degree of cooperation or conflict between merchants and local customs houses. Many customs agents, as in Delaware, New Jersey, North Carolina, and Maryland, simply threw up their hands, claiming they lacked the manpower to effectively enforce such a far-reaching prohibition. Moreover, repeating a pattern from earlier colonial times, some merchants predictably responded to stepped-up enforcement in major ports by shifting to smaller nearby inlets and bays where there was no customs presence. Alternatively, they used fraudulent paperwork to disguise their trade as domestic coastal commerce rather than foreign. Given the magnitude of the enforcement task, some customs agents found it easier to simply turn a blind eye to, or even directly collude in, embargo busting. Merchants would sometimes deliberately divert their cargoes to customs houses known for accommodation.
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Enforcement was most challenging—and most openly defied—along the nation’s remote northern and southern frontiers. In the north, the “hot spots” were Passamaquoddy Bay (where Maine, then still part of Massachusetts, met British Canada) and the Lake Champlain region of Vermont and upstate New York.
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As Carl Prince and Mollie Keller write in their history of the U.S. Customs Service, “The demand for flour and grain in Europe had generated a profitable illegal market in ports along the borders of Maine, Vermont, and New York. Merchants claimed that they were loading flour, corn, rice, or rye for their coastal trade. Little found its way to other American ports, however, for in Canada these goods sold for up to eight times their American value.”
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Jefferson labeled the smugglers the “most worthless part of society.”
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Yet the perpetrators clearly enjoyed considerable popular support. New York Governor Daniel Tompkins even warned Gallatin that the embargo threatened to provoke “open insurrection” along the Canadian border.
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In Passamaquoddy Bay, where the embargo was dubbed “the Flour War” (flour was the leading smuggled export to Canada
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), Benjamin Smith explains, “borderland residents possessed an attitude that
rejected the arbitrary authority of the state, an almost libertarian view that de-emphasized commercial restrictions and borders imposed by distant governments. Smuggling was the most obvious manifestation of this disregard for governmental interference in the economy. The more government forces attempted to halt unregulated trade, the more apparent it became to locals that the state was an unwelcome and alien force.”
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Adding to the enforcement problem was Britain’s active encouragement of such embargo busting. For instance, they designated official “places of deposit” to facilitate smuggling, and the Royal Navy sometimes even escorted smuggling vessels.
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Open boats of various sorts—rafts, skiffs, reach boats, canoes—were the favored vehicles used by local fishermen to ferry goods across the short distance of water to the New Brunswick side.
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“Only the timely arrival of American military and naval units,” notes Smith, “prevented the complete collapse of federal authority in the area.”
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Boston served as a key transshipment point for Maine smuggling, legally shipping flour and other supplies up the coast where they would then be ferried illegally into Canada. Faced with intense anti-embargo sentiment in his state, the Republican governor of Massachusetts facilitated this trade by providing clearance papers to ships carrying “needed” flour to Maine coastal towns.
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Tiny Maine ports experienced a sudden economic stimulus from an influx of supplies that far outstripped legitimate local demand.
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The town of Eastport became a particularly important entrepôt for smuggled goods, attracting merchants from far and wide hoping to cash in on the embargo-busting trade boom.

The country’s southern periphery was equally porous, particularly the St. Mary’s River and Amelia Island along the Georgia-Spanish Florida border, as well as the newly acquired port city of New Orleans. Gallatin reported to Jefferson in December 1808 that “the system of illegal exportations is carried on the largest scale, and embraces all the sea-coast of Georgia.”
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St. Mary’s Georgia, the southernmost port of entry, and Amelia Island on the Florida side of the border a mile away at the mouth of the river was a particularly busy smuggling hub for illicit cotton exports to England.
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The cotton was typically ferried by small boats to waiting ships offshore. An alarmed Jefferson called for
the destruction of “all boats” in the area, but the order was never carried out.
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Customs agents on the ground were placed in an impossible situation, squeezed between growing national government pressure from above and intensifying local merchant resistance from below. With close ties to the merchants and communities within which they worked and lived, customs officials could not be expected to suddenly become stringent enforcers of a deeply unpopular embargo that strangled the local economy. Those who did so risked ostracism, intimidation, or worse. In Vermont, for instance, where resistance to the embargo approached armed insurrection, smugglers shot and killed several government officials attempting to seize their vessel.
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Typically, however, smugglers did not need to resort to such lethal methods. They often used sympathetic local courts and juries to block many federal prosecutions of embargo violations.
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“As to judiciary redress,” observed Gallatin with dismay in July 1808, “there is very little hope.”
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In other words, embargo busters successfully used local legal instruments to subvert national laws—very much reminiscent of the colonial experience, except now U.S. laws rather than British laws were being undermined. Sometimes, seized goods would simply be stolen from warehouses. The smuggling sloop
Hope
was captured by a revenue cutter in March 1809 and placed under guard in New Haven, Connecticut. But the guards were overwhelmed on the very first night by a mob, and the sloop was plundered and then burned.
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The mounting backlash against the embargo was an eerie replay of the pre-Revolution years of increasingly brazen and violent resistance to British customs enforcement. Outraged mobs revived protest songs from the Revolutionary era, some commentators disparagingly compared Jefferson to King George III, and there was even talk of secession.
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And similar to the colonial-era British rulers, Jefferson’s response to resistance and protest was to stubbornly escalate rather than reevaluate—including turning to military force. Embargo enforcement became the Navy’s main mission.
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The most draconian and coercive of the embargo laws, the Enforcement Act of 1809, called for arming thirty new federal gunboats and authorized the president “to employ such part of the land or naval forces of the United States … for the purpose of preventing the illegal departure of any ship … or riotous
assemblage of persons, resisting the customhouse officers.”
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Also replicating a move by his British predecessors, Jefferson replaced many customs collectors considered too accommodating and compromised, and he gave collectors sweeping new search and seizure powers without a court order.