Smuggler Nation (16 page)

Commercial interest in trading with the enemy extended well beyond the borderlands and crossed party lines. For instance, despite being a member of the prowar party, the prominent Republican New York merchant John Jacob Astor—America’s first multimillionaire—was heavily invested in importing furs with his business partners in Montreal and was determined not to let an inconvenient war get in the way. In one of his smuggling schemes shortly after the war started, Astor hired the Burlington-based smuggler Gideon King, “the Admiral of Lake Champlain,” to clandestinely import thousands of wolf skins.
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No doubt Astor did not consider himself disloyal and unpatriotic. Business was business, after all.

Some illicit trade across the U.S.-Canada line was seasonal. During the winter months, one wartime smuggler from Orleans County, Vermont, later recalled, “the goods and merchandise which came from Canada were smuggled in winter when the swamps and rivers were frozen and when the deep snows could be made into a hard road over the roughest ground.” He noted that the main threat in
the Vermont countryside was not confiscations by the authorities but rather the armed gangs who used the cover of patriotism as an excuse to rob smugglers.
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Meanwhile, during the summer, entire herds of cattle were smuggled through the forests of Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, and New York into Canada to feed the Royal Army.
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With the largest herds of cattle in the Northeast, Vermonters were especially well placed to take advantage of a tripling of the price of beef during the war.
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In late July 1813, an exasperated American General George Izard complained, “On the eastern side of Lake Champlain, the high roads are found insufficient for the supplies of cattle which are pouring into Canada. Like herds of buffaloes, they press through the forest, making paths for themselves.… Nothing but a cordon of troops, from the French Mills [in northern New York] to Lake Memphramagog [in northern Vermont] could effectively check the evil.—Were it not for these supplies, the British forces in Canada would soon be suffering from famine, or their government subjected to enormous expense for their maintenance.”
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Two years into the war, the British governor-general in Canada reported to the Foreign Office that “Two-thirds of the army in Canada are at this moment eating beef provided by American contractors, drawn principally from the States of Vermont and New York.”
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Some New England cattle smugglers never even had to step foot into Canada: after marching their livestock to the border, their Canadian counterparts would woo the animals across with a basket of corn.
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The border was equally porous further east, with the major smuggling hot spots changing with the shifting geography of the war.
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When the British invaded and then occupied part of eastern Maine in the summer of 1814, British merchants flocked to the town of Castine to exploit wartime trading opportunities for the next eight months. The British authorities fully encouraged the brisk cross-border illicit trade to compensate for the severe shortage of foodstuffs and other supplies in Canada.
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Wartime smuggling was about everyday survival, but it was also about profits. Take the case of William King, a successful Maine merchant who also headed the local militia: he supplied the British military with provisions, and the British supplied him with blankets, which he then sold at a profit to the American
military.
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King went on to be elected the first governor of Maine in 1820 and later served as the collector of customs at Bath from 1830 to 1834.
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Early on in the war, the British government even sold trading licenses to American merchants that exempted them from seizure by British privateers and the Royal Navy. American naval officers had an especially difficult time identifying U.S. merchant ships operating with these licenses, since the captain would keep the license hidden unless boarded by a British ship. To dupe the captain into voluntarily producing the incriminating license, American naval officers would at times masquerade as British when boarding the vessel, wearing British uniforms and showing the British flag. These ruses sometimes worked, but smugglers became less gullible and warier of such deceptions over time. The owners of a licensed American merchant ship smuggling goods into Canada warned the master that “you must be aware of the facility with which American cruisers may pass as English.… When in with any of the B.[ritish] B.[lockading] squadron, come forward with your Ex.[port] Li.[cense] which will safely pass you.… If you have any suspicions destroy all at once.”
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The British favored New England shippers in allocating trading licenses, since the commercially oriented Northeast was most opposed to the war.
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Britain’s blockade of the eastern seaboard initially did not extend to New England, a strategy meant to secure illicit supplies but also to create division and discord between the antiwar Federalist Northeast and the Republican administration in Washington. It was certainly politically awkward that New Englanders were supplying British vessels blockading the rest of the American seaboard. Even after the Royal Navy extended its blockade to include New England in April 1814, the British continued to facilitate and encourage illicit American trade (especially to Canada) so long as it aided their subjects and military forces.
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Rhode Islanders on Block Island, for instance, regularly brought both supplies and intelligence to British ships off the coast.
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The British openly used the harbor at Provincetown, Massachusetts, to resupply their ships: small American vessels reportedly brought “[f]resh beef, vegitables, and in fact all Kind of supplies” to these ships on a regular basis.
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“The fact is notorious,” announced the Lexington
Reporter
, “that the very squadrons of
the enemy now annoying our coast … derive their supplies from the very country which is the theatre of their atrocities.”
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At the same time as American smugglers supplied enemy forces, the battle against smuggling distracted U.S. troops from their war-fighting mission. In October 1813, General Wade Hampton even ordered military raids into Canada from the Lake Champlain region of Vermont to try to disrupt the “shameful and corrupt neutrality of the lines, for the purpose of gain.”
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Similarly, the following March, Colonel Clark headed a detachment toward Missisquoi Bay, Vermont, “with a view to cut up by the roots the smuggling intercourse which had been carried on to a great extent; besides it was necessary to prevent the constant supply of provisions which were daily passing to the enemy from this state.”
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These militarized U.S. interdiction efforts not only failed but at times backfired. In 1813 a lieutenant and his soldiers attempted to apprehend a gang of smugglers in a small northern New York border town. Yet not only were the smugglers released from jail but the lieutenant himself was arrested in retaliation (his commander ended up bailing him out).
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In another incident, in 1814 near Burlington, Vermont, thirteen infantrymen sent to apprehend smugglers were assaulted by a group of thirty smugglers; one soldier was killed and five taken prisoner.
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Finally, privateering, for all its contribution to the war effort, also presented an added smuggling challenge. While American privateers traumatized British commercial shipping, at times they also used this as a cover for illicit trading. When ships were prohibited from leaving U.S. ports in late 1813, this did not include privateers—leading some vessels, particularly in New England, to declare privateering intentions but in reality load up with hidden supplies for the British. Privateers also engaged in mock captures at sea as a ploy to trade with the enemy.
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And after disposing of the “seized” goods, the privateer could ransom the vessel back to the original owner—which itself was an opportunity to ship illicit goods in the other direction.
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Mock captures also took place on Lake Champlain, where the entrepreneur John Banker Jr. used his vessel,
The Lark
, to make prearranged “captures” of barges loaded with U.S.-bound goods, which he would then send on for sale in New York duty-free.
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The Baratarian Pirate-Smugglers and the Battle of New Orleans

The southern port city of New Orleans was far removed from the main battlefields during the first years of the war, but it took center stage in dramatic fashion at the conclusion. Geography and historical timing conspired to make the city and surrounding area one of the most notorious havens in the Gulf of Mexico for pirates, privateers, and smugglers. The alliance of convenience that developed between outlaws and government authorities in repelling a British invasion of New Orleans is one of the most remarkable stories of the war.

When the United States acquired New Orleans as part of the Louisiana Purchase, the change in government authority did not change the attitudes and behavior of the city’s merchants, many of whom were French and Spanish and long accustomed to openly disregarding the law. It also did not change the consumer habits of the city’s twenty-five thousand residents, primarily of French origin. They had become accustomed to deeply discounted prices on goods captured by pirates and privateers in the Gulf and then smuggled into New Orleans or illicitly sold at regular auctions on islands in the swamps and bays near the city. The influx of cheap smuggled merchandise captured at sea was especially welcome by city residents during a time of shortages and inflated prices induced by the embargo and subsequent war. Smugglers also won the support of plantation owners in the lower Mississippi Valley by supplying them with clandestine shipments of slaves in defiance of the 1808 federal prohibition on the slave trade.

With no convenient French ports remaining in the Caribbean, privateers flying the French flag turned to the Louisiana coast and the port of New Orleans to illegally dispose of their captured goods.
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One favorite privateer ploy was to feign distress and make an emergency stop in New Orleans for repairs, where they could then clandestinely unload their goods.
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But the less risky and increasingly favored alternative was to entirely bypass the New Orleans port and its customs agents. Barataria Bay, some fifty miles south of New Orleans—with its many canals, marshes, waterways, bayous, and islands at the mouth of the Mississippi—provided a perfect base and depot for privateers and pirates to warehouse their captured merchandise. From there the goods
could be moved into the city with relative ease through various smuggling routes.

The pirate-smugglers candidly acknowledged the nature of their business and even boasted they were performing a vital public service. In response to a letter to the
Louisiana Gazette
complaining about the introduction of illicit cargoes into the city, a spokesperson (who signed his name “The Agent of the Freebooters”) wrote:

Gentlemen:

Your paper of Wednesday contained a letter written by some idiot … [who] makes a great outcry against a few honest fellows of us, who are using extraordinary exertions to punish the common enemy, the British and their allies, the Spaniards.… Does he wish to discourage our profession and put an end to trade altogether?

Cannot the booby perceive that without us there would not be a bale of goods at market; and does he not see, by the open manner in which our business is done, that the government of the United States has no objection either to the fitting out of our prizes and the sale of their cargoes, without troubling ourselves about the payment of duties; which I assure you we would find extremely inconvenient when we sell so low for real cash in these hard times....
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The spokesperson concluded with a promotional pitch, informing readers where they could purchase captured ships and their cargoes at wholesale prices; he even expressed hopes for opening convenient retail shops in Conde and Toulouse streets in New Orleans.
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New Orleans businessmen and brothers Jean and Pierre Laffite emerged as the ringleaders of the sprawling Barataria operation. At first they simply served as brokers, handling the purchase and transport of the illicit merchandise from Barataria into the city. “In the streets of New Orleans,” observed architect and businessman Arsène Lacarrière Latour, “it was usual for traders to give and receive orders for purchasing goods at Barataria, with as little secrecy as similar orders are given for Philadelphia or New-York.”
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Eventually, Jean Laffite relocated to Barataria to directly oversee operations, becoming the de facto head of the rapidly growing community of outlaws. His brother Pierre, meanwhile, remained in town as a silent business
partner, maintaining close connections to local merchants and compromised officials.

In addition to clandestinely moving merchandise into New Orleans, the Laffites also organized regular auctions at places such as “The Temple,” a large shell mound halfway between the Barataria smuggling headquarters and New Orleans. Buyers from New Orleans and other nearby areas flocked to the auctions to purchase trafficked slaves and smuggled goods at bargain prices. Showing little apparent concern about hiding their business, the Laffites would even publicly advertise their auctions in advance. Outraged by such open violation of the law, the collector of customs dispatched a small force to shut down one of the auctions, but they were repelled by gunfire, leaving one customs officer dead and two others wounded. The auction went on as scheduled.
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