Smuggler Nation (26 page)

Spain’s control of Amelia Island was already tenuous, but it lost total control in 1817 when the Scottish adventurer and South American revolutionary Gregor MacGregor invaded the island.
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Many in MacGregor’s invasion force were American sailors and officers recruited in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charleston, and Savannah. MacGregor boldly announced the independence of the Republic of the Floridas and for a brief time turned the island into his own privateering, smuggling, and slave-trading fiefdom. Another European adventurer, Louis Aury, supplanted MacGregor in September 1817, relocating his slave-trading base from Galveston to Amelia Island. Although Aury’s rule was similarly short-lived, it was more significant. In less than two months Aury reportedly sold more than a thousand Africans. Many runaway slaves were also captured and sold off.
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At the same time, there were widespread reports that Aury employed black mercenaries and sailors, making Georgians especially anxious about the presence of armed blacks so close to their plantations.
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Spain was already under growing pressure from the United States to cede Eastern Florida, so losing control of Amelia Island only made matters worse for the decaying empire. Indeed, to the dismay of Spanish officials, Washington quickly pounced on the opportunity to use concerns about slave smuggling and a lawless border as a pretext to invade and occupy the island in late December 1817. Rampant smuggling, U.S. officials declared, demonstrated that Spain was simply incapable of controlling its side of the border. In his first annual message to Congress, on December 2, 1817, President Monroe announced his decision to take Amelia Island, claiming that it had become “a channel for the illicit introduction of slaves from Africa into the United States, an asylum for fugitive slaves from the neighboring states, and a port for smuggling of every kind.”
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A congressional investigating committee was appointed in early December to report on the situation. South Carolina Representative Henry Middleton, the chairman of the committee, announced the findings on January 10, 1818: “Your committee are of opinion that it is but too notorious that numerous infractions of the law prohibiting the importations of slaves into the United States have been perpetuated with impunity upon our southern frontier....”
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American concerns about smuggling along its southeastern border thus offered a convenient rationale for a U.S. invasion and occupation that happened to coincide with diplomatic efforts to convince Spain to relinquish Florida. Regardless of the sincerity of these concerns, alarm over border smuggling and illicit slave trading ultimately advanced Washington’s annexationist ambitions.
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American forces never left Amelia Island, and in 1819 the Florida Purchase added forty-three million acres to the United States. The U.S. seizure of Amelia Island, which had been officially justified as an anti-smuggling intervention, helped to set Florida on the road to statehood.

The illicit slave trade also played an important role in America’s territorial ambitions in the southwest. The smuggling of slaves contributed to the early development of a plantation economy in Texas, where Anglo settler thirst for slave labor was increasingly at odds with national laws after Mexico’s independence from Spain in 1821. Mexico banned the slave trade in 1824 and outlawed slavery in 1829. A variety of exemptions and creative settler schemes to import and hold slaves, including the legal fiction that slaves were long-term contract laborers, helped to
circumvent these laws. And local Mexican officials showed little enthusiasm for enforcing rules handed down by a distant central government in disarray.
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The introduction of slaves into Texas by American settlers also violated U.S. antislave-trade laws, since it was illegal for a U.S. citizen to traffic slaves into a foreign land. Slavery and the slave trade became growing irritants in settler relations with the increasingly antislavery Mexican government and played no small part in calls for revolution in 1835 and the war of independence in 1836.
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Mexico’s decree of April 6, 1830, outlawed further immigration into Texas, yet the influx of slaveholding Americans continued unabated, and by 1836 they greatly outnumbered native Tejanos.

In defiance of the Mexican authorities, maritime slave smuggling into Texas grew in the years leading up to the Texas Revolution: “Beginning in the early spring of 1833 … one boatload after another of Africans (totaling four documented cases in the next eighteen months) arrived by way of Cuba at Galveston Bay for distribution to labor-hungry farmers. At least two ventures lured free blacks from the Caribbean into Texas and then treated them as slaves on their arrival.”
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Buying their slaves in Cuba, Texan blackbirders (slave traders) “included such future luminaries as Benjamin Fort Smith and James W. Fannin, and prominent planters like Monroe Edwards and Sterling McNeel purchased human cargoes.”
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Slave smugglers also helped finance and supply the Texas Revolution,
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and some, such as James Bowie, directly participated in fighting Mexican General Antonio López de Santa Anna’s forces.

The illicit importation of slaves into Texas continued after independence. Of course, when Texas entered the Union on December 29, 1845, what had previously been illegal slave smuggling between the United States and Texas became part of the legal interstate slave trade. With legal access to the domestic U.S. slave market, Texas slaveholders were now no longer dependent upon illicitly importing labor; and slaves previously smuggled into Texas became part of the legal U.S. slave population.

The Divisive Politics of Policing Fugitive Slaves

Just as it was illegal to import foreign slaves into the American South, so too was it illegal for southern slaves to leave without their masters’
consent. But just as profit-seeking smugglers defied the law by bringing in new slaves, freedom-seeking slaves stole and smuggled themselves to northern states and neighboring countries. This reverse form of slave smuggling—the illegal cross-border movement of slaves to freedom—typically involved self-smuggling (and self-stealing, since slaves were defined as property) more than the highly organized “underground railroad” wildly imagined by both slaveholders and abolitionists alike. As historian Larry Gara notes, both slaveholders and abolitionists found much propaganda value in constructing an image of runaway slaves being aided by a sophisticated clandestine network. For southern slaveholders, this represented a vast abolitionist smuggling conspiracy to woo otherwise content slaves away from their protective masters. For abolitionists, in contrast, this was boastfully celebrated as evidence of their humanitarian reach, influence, and risk taking. In both constructions, the slave is passive, with abolitionist outsiders depicted as either predators or rescuers. In reality, slave escapes tended to be more self-planned and reliant on self-sufficiency than either of these narratives suggested. Yet these dominant accounts were politically useful for all sides and long outlived slavery (and indeed the abolitionist version continues to shape the popular imagination).
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The problem of runaway slaves had long frustrated slave owners. Indeed, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were among the many slaveholders who took out advertisements for the return of their runaway slaves.
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Though the number of escaped slaves was always small relative to the overall size of the slave population, it became a hugely consequential political issue, especially in the divisive years leading up to the Civil War. The possibility of escape was of greatest concern to slaveholders who lived in close proximity to free states or to countries where slavery was banned. U.S. officials turned this concern into a high-priority foreign policy issue.
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Thousands of slaves (including several owned by Sam Houston) found refuge by crossing the Rio Grande into Mexico despite U.S. diplomatic protests and incursions to recover fugitives.
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Most slaves had to find their way to the border on their own, but in one clever scheme the abolitionist smuggler John Short colluded with sympathetic slave “buyers” in repeatedly selling and reselling the escaping slaves all along the route to the border. In other words, transportation to the border
was carried out through a series of legal ownership-transfer schemes as a cover for escape. The humanitarian side of Short’s criminal career came to an end, however, when his cattle theft and counterfeiting operations were busted and he and his son were put to death at a public hanging.
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In any event, the fugitive slave issue remained a great source of tension in U.S.-Mexico relations all the way up to the Civil War, with Mexico persistently refusing to sign an extradition treaty with the United States that included rendition of escaped slaves.

Canada was the favored foreign destination for escaped slaves, with an estimated twelve thousand former slaves crossing the northern border by 1842.
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In the 1850s, the number of blacks in Ontario alone reportedly doubled to eleven thousand.
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Even if opposed to slavery, most northerners did not welcome fugitive slaves (or free blacks, for that matter
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). Northern states remained deeply racist; only a few considered free blacks to be citizens. Part of northern opposition to the slave regime, in fact, was that it was viewed as an incentive for slaves to smuggle themselves north. The anxiety-producing specter of a mass influx of fleeing slaves was one strand of abolitionist sentiment. Ending slavery, many hoped, would end the motivation for blacks to leave the South.

Canada was also a more attractive destination for escaped slaves because U.S. fugitive slave laws made it possible, with enough funds and persistence, for owners to hire a slave catcher to reclaim their “stolen property.” The jurisdiction of such laws did not extend across the border, of course, and Canada typically refused U.S. requests for cooperation in rendition of fugitive slaves.

The fugitive clause in the Constitution denied escaped slaves legal protection in nonslave states. George Washington signed the first fugitive slave law in 1793, and enforcement obligations were federalized with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act as part of the Compromise of 1850. These fugitive slave laws contributed to a climate of fear not only for escaped slaves but also for free blacks, since they facilitated kidnapping free blacks and selling them into slavery in the South.
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The kidnappers ranged from part-time opportunists wishing to make a quick buck to veteran slave catchers fraudulently claiming free blacks as fugitive slaves. Some were members of gangs that also engaged in other forms of theft, such as horse thieving.
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Many states passed antikidnapping laws,
but the abuses continued. Southern politicians blocked efforts to pass similar legislation at the federal level.
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The most important impact of the fugitive slave issue was ultimately political rather than demographic. As a political lightning rod, it greatly contributed to the deepening and widening sectional cleavages and gave entrepreneurial abolitionists their most potent issue. For most northerners, even if they found slavery distasteful and abhorrent it was still distant and abstract, far removed from their daily lives. The fugitive slave issue, in contrast, made slavery much more visible and immediate. It personalized slavery, brought it home, and gave it a human face. Equating slave catching with the evils of the slave trade, in 1843 the Illinois abolition society resolved that “to aid the slave catcher in the free States, is no better than to aid the kidnapper on the coast of Africa.”
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With the antislavery movement gaining steam and making the fugitive slave issue a focal point, southern slaveholders and their hired slave catchers found northern states increasingly uncooperative in their efforts to recapture runaway slaves. In 1850, southerners countered by pushing through the Fugitive Slave Act, which for the first time gave the federal government jurisdiction over the detention and return of runaway slaves.
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Southerners viewed the enforcement of the new law as a litmus test of the government’s commitment to upholding its constitutional obligations to defend slavery. “The continued existence of the United States, as one nation,” warned the
Southern Literary Messenger
, “depends upon the full and faithful execution of the Fugitive Slave Bill.”
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Beyond its questionable utility in dealing with runaway slaves, the real value of the law for southerners was to make a loud statement reaffirming and strengthening national commitment to slavery.

But the unintended consequence of the law was to provide new ammunition for the abolitionist movement and greatly magnify public awareness and antislavery sympathy.
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Most famously, the law inspired the publication of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
in 1852, with twenty thousand copies printed in the first three weeks, three hundred thousand in the first year, and more than two million within a decade. It was also a huge hit in England and was translated into multiple foreign languages. Frederick Douglass commented that “The fugitive slave bill has especially been of positive service to the antislavery movement.” It showed
the “horrible character of slavery toward the slave, … revealed the arrogant and overbearing spirit of the slave states towards the free states.”
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