Smuggler Nation (27 page)

The new law, which gave the federal government sweeping new powers and responsibilities in defending slavery and policing slaves, provoked highly publicized episodes of resistance and confrontation. Forcible rescue incidents were rare but dramatic, and thus useful as antislavery spectacles. The first forcible slave rescue took place in Boston in February 1851. A waiter named Shadrach was arrested on a federal fugitive slave warrant, but then set free by a crowd of black Bostonians who broke into the courtroom and spirited him away to Canada. Outraged southerners demanded forceful action from Washington. President Fillmore responded by calling for the prosecution of those who had aided the escape, and Secretary of State Daniel Webster denounced such illegal actions as the equivalent of treason.
¹⁰³

Even as enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act in its first three years led to the return of about seventy escaped slaves, antislavery militancy continued to grow and exploded again in 1854. In March, a fugitive slave named Joshua Glover was forcibly freed from a Milwaukee jail by an angry mob, and local authorities refused to cooperate with federal officials in punishing the perpetrators. In a direct challenge to federal power, the Wisconsin Supreme Court declared the Fugitive Slave Act to be unconstitutional. In Boston a few months later, a guard was fatally shot in a botched effort to liberate a captured slave, Anthony Burns. Marines and army troops were deployed to escort Burns to the Boston wharf, keeping thousands of antislavery protesters at bay. Although such a heavy-handed display of force was effective, it generated intense political aftershocks and would be the occasion for the last fugitive slave recovered from New England.
¹⁰⁴

Meanwhile, in the wake of the Burns case, state governments in Michigan, Wisconsin, and throughout New England unleashed a flurry of new personal liberty legislation from 1854 to 1858 aimed at hobbling the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act. A hostile local environment had already made it virtually impossible for slave owners to recover fugitive slaves in these states, but such legislation represented blatant defiance of federal authority, further alienating and angering southerners. From the southern perspective, the issue was less about
the failure to apprehend a relatively small number of escaped slaves than about the failure to protect constitutionally guaranteed rights.
¹⁰⁵
Flagrant disrespect of the fugitive slave law was thus viewed as a broader threat to the very institution of slavery and was commonly cited as justification for breaking from the Union.
¹⁰⁶

Even with the outbreak of the Civil War, the fugitive slave issue remained far from resolved. And it was further complicated and magnified by the sheer number of slaves fleeing to the protection of Union forces. Some Union officers returned escaped slaves—labeled “contrabands”
¹⁰⁷
—to their owners, until Congress prohibited the practice in 1862. And even then, there were documented cases of Union soldiers being paid to smuggle escaped slaves back across the line to the original owners.
¹⁰⁸
The fugitive slave laws remained on the books until 1864, long after contrabands had been fighting in the Union army.

THE ILLICIT SLAVE TRADE
was not the only (or the numerically most significant) episode of smuggled human cargo in American history, but it was the first and certainly the most inhumane. As we will see later in our story, millions of foreign workers clandestinely came to America through the back door, but in violation of U.S. immigration laws rather than antislave-trade laws. As cheap immigrant workers came to replace slaves as America’s most exploitable labor force in the late nineteenth century, the federal government became far more involved in immigration control than it had ever been in policing the slave trade. But before we get to that story, we must first turn to the illicit-trade side of the war that finally brought slavery to an end.

9
Blood Cotton and Blockade Runners

MORE AMERICANS PERISHED IN
the nation’s Civil War than in any other conflict; well over six hundred thousand soldiers lost their lives, and hundreds of thousands more were injured. Smugglers contributed to this heavy human toll by arming Confederate forces and thus enabling the war to drag on much longer than would otherwise have been possible. The illicit flow of arms and other materials could not in the end shift the military balance on the ground and change the ultimate outcome of the war, but it did profoundly shape its character and longevity. Although attracting far less attention than the Civil War’s famous battles, southern success on the battlefield depended on commercial success in the underworld of smuggling. The North attempted to impede such clandestine commerce by imposing an ambitious naval blockade on southern ports. Yet at the same time, the Union undermined its own blockade through extensive trading with the enemy across the front lines. Profits and politics often trumped military logic.

King Cotton

The South entered the war hugely disadvantaged. It had no navy and no real capacity to build one. The nation’s industry was overwhelmingly concentrated in the North—including virtually all of
the capacity to manufacture arms, rails and locomotives, cloth, pig iron, and boots and shoes.
¹
The South suffered from supply problems from the very start, including an arms and gunpowder shortage. The Confederate rebels, much like the revolutionary rebels of 1776, attempted to compensate for these severe deficiencies by developing clandestine commercial links to the outside world, especially Britain. This time, the British would be supplying, rather than fighting, the American rebels. The Confederacy sent James D. Buloch to the Liverpool shipyards in early 1861 with the task of covertly acquiring warships. Caleb Huse was similarly dispatched to England to acquire arms and ammunition. These Confederate representatives, posing as private citizens, hired commercial agents to buy up large quantities of war materials.
²

More than anything else, the Confederacy counted on cotton as a political and economic weapon. The South placed all bets on its near monopoly of the world’s supply of cotton to outweigh the many disadvantages it faced at the start of the war. British mills, in particular, depended upon the South for some 75 to 80 percent of their cotton imports. British textile manufacturing, the country’s most important industry, imported almost two million bales of southern cotton per year.
³
Deprived of cotton, Britain would have little choice but to intervene on the side of the South. Or so the Confederate government hoped. It was assumed to be just a matter of time before the pain of cotton shortages took an unbearable toll. And to try to hurry things along, southerners imposed an informal embargo on cotton exports in 1861 and even burned some 2.5 million bales at the beginning of the war to show they were serious.
⁴

The intensity of southern faith in “King Cotton” was captured by a Charleston merchant who told a reporter for the London
Times
in early 1861 that “if those miserable Yankees try to blockade us, and keep you from our cotton, you’ll just send their ships to the bottom and acknowledge us. That will be before autumn, I think.”
⁵
In Montgomery that spring, W. H. Russell reported to
The Times
that Southerners “believe in the irresistible power of cotton to force England to intervene.… The doctrine of ‘cotton is king’ to them is a lively, all powerful faith.”
⁶
And that summer, Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens asserted that “in some way or other [the blockade will] be raised, or there will
be revolution in Europe.… Our cotton is … the tremendous lever by which we can work our destiny.”
⁷

But King Cotton was a mirage. The Confederacy badly miscalculated. There was no British intervention; Britain never even formally recognized the Confederacy or openly challenged the Union blockade.
⁸
King Cotton was partly a victim of its own success. Bumper cotton crops in 1859 and 1860 had saturated the British market. Large stockpiles of cotton and a surplus of cotton manufactured goods in British warehouses dampened and delayed the impact of sharply reduced cotton imports in 1861. British textile manufacturing was hit hard by the cotton shortages starting in the summer of 1862, and nearly two million people in Britain were left destitute by the end of the year.
⁹
But this was not enough to provoke intervention. And other British industries, such as armaments and shipbuilding, were stimulated by the war and profited by its perpetuation.

Moreover, by this time the Confederacy had abandoned trying to use cotton as a political tool to provoke British intervention and was instead eagerly encouraging the clandestine shipment of cotton through the Union blockade to obtain desperately needed arms and other supplies. The Confederacy was aggressively selling “cotton bonds” in Europe at attractive prices as a creative mechanism to finance imports of war materials. The catch was that the bondholder could redeem bonds for cotton only at certain southern ports—which meant smuggling, in the form of breaking through the Union blockade. Whereas King Cotton had failed politically, the South now held out hope that it would succeed economically, enticing foreign merchants to aid the South in the pursuit of profits.

Britain’s proclamation of neutrality in May 1861 proved to be not only politically pragmatic but also financially rewarding. Just as American merchants had commercially exploited their country’s neutral status during the Napoleonic Wars, British merchants were now doing the same. And just as American merchants had earlier risked having their cargoes seized by the British as contraband, so too were British merchants now taking similar risks as they attempted to sneak contraband cargoes through the northern blockade. When London complained about Union warships harassing, searching, and seizing British-flagged commercial vessels, Washington could point to British precedent from
more than a half-century earlier.
¹⁰
And when Washington complained about British commercial complicity in the war, London could similarly point to American precedent. The solicitor general reminded Parliament in 1863 of the words of U.S. Secretary of State Daniel Webster from two decades before. “It is not the practice of nations,” Webster stated in 1842, “to undertake to prohibit their own subjects from trafficking in articles contraband of war. Such trade is carried on at the risk of those engaged in it under the liabilities and penalties prescribed by the law of nations.”
¹¹

Diplomatic relations between London and Washington were often tense, but both sides exercised restraint by limiting conflicts to disputes over contraband of war rather than actually going to war. The Union resented British neutrality and commercial complicity in supplying the South; this was, however, far preferable to London formally recognizing the Confederacy, openly challenging the legitimacy of the Union blockade, and intervening militarily. Even as the British government was unwilling to forcibly break the blockade, British merchants were more than willing to profit by evading it. In this case, commercial interest in supporting the slaveholding South trumped British antislavery sentiment.

Blockaders and Blockade Runners

On April 19, 1861, President Lincoln announced a naval blockade on the South—soon dubbed the “Anaconda Plan”—with the aim of squeezing the Confederacy into submission by blocking contraband of war. Although it was an impossible task to police the 3,549-mile Confederate coastline, blockaders could focus primarily on the handful of major southern ports with the requisite infrastructure and transportation links to handle large volumes of external supplies. During the course of the war, the Union’s four blockading squadrons captured 136 blockade runners, and eighty-five more were destroyed.
¹²

But the runners usually outmaneuvered the blockaders. Historian Stephen Wise calculates that almost three hundred steamships were involved in blockade running between the fall of 1861 and spring 1865, and out of an estimated thirteen hundred runs, more than a thousand succeeded.
¹³
Blockade runners managed to smuggle out roughly half a
million bales of cotton, and smuggle in a thousand tons of gunpowder, half a million rifles, and several hundred cannon.
¹⁴
Wise estimates that blockade runners provided the South with 60 percent of its weapons, one-third of the lead for its bullets and the ingredients for three-fourths of its powder, and most of the cloth for its uniforms.
¹⁵
Clearly, the Confederacy could not have survived without this clandestine lifeline to the outside world.