Smuggler Nation (19 page)

British officials viewed the clandestine transatlantic movement of men and machines with growing alarm. George Hammond, the first British minister to the United States, sent a secret dispatch to Lord Grenville, the British foreign secretary, cautioning that “No small degree of vigilance will be required in Great Britain to prevent the emigration of artists and the export of models of machines.” He promised to give “unremitting attention” to the task of uncovering British-based labor recruiters.
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Phineas Bond, the British consul in Philadelphia, similarly warned that the drain “of many useful and laborious inhabitants” out of England was so embraced in the United States and “lucrative to those who are engaged in it will be carried on extensively, and with great spirit unless speedily corrected.”
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By 1788 London ordered its consuls in the United States to keep tabs on the entry of British immigrants and collect any information on how they made the trip, how it was paid for, whether they were induced, and so on.
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Evading British Prohibitions

British efforts to guard its industrial secrets began in the colonial era.
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Britain banned most manufacturing in its American colonies as part of the larger imperial strategy of privileging domestic manufactures and keeping the colonies dependent. England prohibited the export of all silk and woolen manufacturing tools in 1749, and this ban was expanded in 1774 to include cotton and linen equipment. In 1749 it also outlawed attempts to entice a skilled immigrant from the British Isles to the colonies and in 1774 imposed a ban on the emigration of mechanics to the colonies. These restrictions were further tightened after the American Revolution, with the period between the 1780s and 1824 the height of the British prohibition laws. Starting in the early 1780s, skilled artisans were prohibited from leaving British territories for work, and textile printers could not even leave the British Isles. Britain, which had jump-started its own textile industry by wooing Flemish weavers,
Huguenot silk workers, and other foreign artisans to England, was now determined not to let other countries do the same.
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The penalties for lawbreakers were severe. Emigrants could lose both property and citizenship; recruiters could be fined £500 per worker enticed to leave and serve a twelve-month prison term. Shipmasters could be fined £100 for each passenger leaving Britain illegally. The smuggling of a machine brought a fine of £200 (£500 if involving textile machines), confiscation of equipment, and a one-year prison sentence.
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At least six British government departments took part in enforcing these prohibition laws.
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Nevertheless, the controls proved difficult to implement. In the case of interdicting illicit machinery exports, port inspection facilities were typically lacking, large cargoes were difficult to sift through without causing long delays, and even when customs officials discovered machinery they did not always know how to identify what was banned. To further confuse inspectors, smugglers would mix up and combine parts of different machines, frustrating efforts to identify the equipment.
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Those who managed to smuggle equipment back to America were celebrated as heroes. For instance, after Joseph Hague traveled to England and illicitly brought back a cotton-carding machine to Philadelphia, the Pennsylvania Society for the Encouragement of Manufactures and the Useful Arts hailed his success in the press, announcing “that the ingenious artizan, who counterfeited the Carding and Spinning Machine, though not the original inventor (being only the introducer) is likely to receive a premium from the Manufacturing Society, besides a generous prize for his machines; and that it is highly probable our patriotic legislature will not let his merit pass unrewarded by them. Such liberality must have the happy effect of bringing into Philadelphia other useful artizans, Machines, and Manufacturing Secrets which will abundantly repay the little advance of the present moment.”
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Historian Doron Ben-Atar notes that when Philadelphia celebrated July 4, 1788, with a large parade, the Pennsylvania Society for the Promotion of Useful Knowledge sponsored a float that “featured workers operating a carding machine and a spinning machine—both of which had been smuggled by Joseph Hague.”
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But there were built-in constraints to smuggling textile equipment. The machines were bulky, heavy, and cumbersome, making them
especially hard to import illicitly. Loading heavy machinery required heavy-duty wharves—which also tended to be the most policed. Unlike other forms of smuggling, illicit traders could not circumvent inspections by using smaller and more remote docks.
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An American industrial spy in Ireland wrote to George Washington in November 1791 about the difficulty of smuggling out the new Crompton mule machines:

[They were] of such a size as not to be admissable in the hold of any common Ship, & are brought coverd upon the quarter deck, one on each side only; They might be got to America with a little address, & some risque both to the person shipping them & to the ship—The Vessell must be English & she cannot clear out direct for America, but may clear for Cork or the Isle of Man & so proceed on—They stop no sorts of Machinery coming from Manchester or Liverpool to this Country wch are not pattented or can be got from the Inventor. But they are so watchful in England as well as here for any going to America that upon the slightest suspicion they stop & search the Ship.
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But the most important limitation to smuggling machines was that they were useless without knowing how to assemble, use, and maintain them. After all, they did not come with operating instructions or user manuals.
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In Philadelphia, a disassembled carding machine and three spinning machines illicitly imported from Britain shortly after American independence sat idle for more than three years. At first, no one could figure out how to even put the machines together; and once the machines were sold to someone who managed to assemble them, he still could not figure out how to get them to work. The machines were eventually bought by a patriotic Manchester cotton merchant, Thomas Edemsor, who then shipped them back to Britain in 1787—as he put it, “to Check the Advancement of the Cotton Manufactory in America.”
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This provoked such outrage in Philadelphia that Edemsor had to go into hiding and sought refuge in the office of Phineas Bond, the British consul.

Thus, even more important than the machines were the machinists from the British Isles who knew how to build and operate them. Thousands made the clandestine crossing to America, though we will
never know exactly how many. And yet we do have one telling indicator. When war broke out between the United States and Britain in 1812, the U.S. State Department announced that all male “alien enemies” over the age of fourteen were required to register. Some ten thousand men and youths complied with the order. Of the seventy-five hundred whose occupations are identified, at least three thousand can be categorized as industrial workers. Therefore, from the British perspective they were illegally in the United States. One-seventh self-identified as engaged in manufacturing cloth, and they made up the single largest occupation group in Delaware, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Pennsylvania.
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Despite strict prohibitions, British efforts to interdict the outflow of industrial workers had clearly failed; at best they slowed the flow. And the tremendous turmoil and conflicts in Europe between 1793 and 1815 only further fueled the exodus. It was simply too difficult for the authorities to weed out and differentiate skilled from unskilled emigrants on U.S.-bound ships. Checking passenger manifests was not enough, since travelers could lie about their occupational backgrounds, give false names, and avoid carrying incriminating evidence such as a bag of machine tools.
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Other emigrants bypassed the departure checks entirely, going out in rowboats or small sailboats to board ships after they had cleared port. Complicit ship captains would hover close to shore to pick up the additional passengers. In one case, a mechanic put his wife aboard the ship in port and then “with much difficulty and hazard, and by the aid of respectable friends” met up with her shortly after the ship had set sail; but he had been “obliged to leave his tools behind him, lest his departure might have been prevented.”
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Samuel Paterson, a bookseller from Edinburgh, wrote to Hamilton in February 1791 advising that shippers be given extra compensation for smuggling artisans to counter British enforcement: “Penalties & Forfeitures, are so very heavy & so easily incurred, that No person Unacquainted with the Laws durst Venture upon Such a Measure. But the European Captain & owners know how to agree with Passengers so as to Escape the Penalties.”
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The Englishman Henry Wansey, visiting the United States in 1794, observed the proliferation of British machines and workers to operate them. One New York factory he toured had “twelve or fourteen
workmen from Manchester” who used “all the new improvements of Arkwright and others.” These machines “were made on the spot from models brought from England and Scotland.”
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To encourage the British brain drain, a handful of labor recruiters covertly operated in England in the late 1780s and early 1790s. Abel Buell—a Connecticut inventor, silversmith, and convicted counterfeiter—traveled to England on a recruiting mission. One of his recruits, William MacIntosh, an Essex Worsted manufacturer, set up shop in New Haven in 1791.
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The American Thomas Digges was probably the most successful industrial spy and recruiter of skilled labor, and certainly the most controversial. Based in England during the Revolutionary War, he had organized the smuggling of munitions to the Continental Army. But he had also developed a shady reputation as a kleptomaniac and embezzler and was despised by Benjamin Franklin and distrusted by many others.
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Fortunately for Digges, his old Virginia neighbor George Washington came to his defense and vouched for his character. “I have no hesitation in declaring,” wrote the president in April 1794, “that the conduct of Mr. Thomas Digges … has not been only friendly, but I might add zealous.” He added: “Since the War, abundant evidence might be adduced of his activity and zeal (with considerable risque) in sending artizans and machines of public utility to this Country.”
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Even as America’s first president praised Digges, the British denounced him as a spy and criminal and threw him in jail multiple times.
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A British pamphlet aimed at discouraging emigration, published in the mid-1790s, railed against Digges and other recruiters as “agents hovering like birds of prey”; it singled out Digges as a “designing villain” and a “very dangerous character” who preyed upon the “credulity of his audience.”
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The covert nature of the recruiting effort meant that one could not openly advertise in British newspapers and other outlets. As a substitute, in 1792 Digges printed up a thousand copies of Hamilton’s
Report on Manufactures
in Dublin and distributed it as a recruitment tool in targeted manufacturing communities in England and Ireland. In April 1792 Digges wrote to Hamilton that he was confident the report would “induce artists to move toward a Country so likely to very soon give them ample employ & domestic ease.”
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Digges devoted much of
his recruiting efforts to the manufacturing towns of Lancashire and Yorkshire. Here, he believed, “many are ready to move for America, but the difficultys of so doing are very great. By the laws of England they can stop an Artist from migration, & the smallest particle of machinery, tools &ca. will stop the Ship if informed against—the person attempting to inveigle away an artist is subject not only to a very rough treatment, but a fine of 500 £ & 12 months imprisonment.”
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Writing from Dublin, Digges reported to Thomas Jefferson that his recruiting of “useful mechanics” had caused him troubles, and that several of his new recruits were “under rigorous trial in the Courts here for attempting to ship themselves with their Tools implements &ca &ca.”
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Digges informed Jefferson that England was “making Laws and trying all possible means to stop the Emigration of Artists and their tools. I need to tell you,” he said, “that it is not only difficult to get such away, but highly dangerous to those concerned; Therefore, the more secret it is kept the better.”
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Digges claimed to have recruited, “by some art, and very little expense,” between eighteen and twenty “valuable artists and machine makers” over a twelve-month period in 1791–92.
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His most prized recruit was William Pearce, a mechanic from Yorkshire who claimed to have worked for Arkwright and Cartwright. Digges reported to Jefferson that “a box containing materials and specifications for a new Invented double Loom” was about to leave for America and that Pearce and two assistants would soon follow to reassemble the machines for production in the United States.
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Pearce, whom Digges called “a second Archimedes,” barely managed to evade the British authorities. According to Digges, “A Cuter pursued and search[ed] the Vessel twice for His double Loom and they would have brought him back had He not entered and given a different name—this was done in my sight and within a half hour after I had parted with him sailing out to Sea.”
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Pearce arrived in America with letters of introduction from Digges to key figures, including Washington, Jefferson, and Hamilton. Pearce was subsequently hired by the Hamilton-led company, the Society for the Establishment of Useful Manufactures. President Washington and his entourage visited Pearce’s cotton manufactory in 1792. According to the local newspaper, the President “attentively viewed the Machinery,
etc.
and
saw the business performed in its different branches—which received his warmest approbation.”
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