National Duties: Custom Houses and the Making of the American State

National Duties

AMERICAN BEGINNINGS, 1500–1900

A series edited by Edward Gray, Stephen Mihm, and Mark Peterson

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National Duties

Custom Houses and the Making of the American State

Gautham Rao

The University of Chicago Press

CHICAGO & LONDON

Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Bevington Fund.

GAUTHAM RAO is assistant professor of history at American University.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2016 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2016.

Printed in the United States of America

25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-36707-1 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-36710-1 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226367101.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Rao, Gautham, author.

Title: National duties : custom houses and the making of the American state / Gautham Rao.

Other titles: American beginnings, 1500–1900.

Description: Chicago; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2016. | Series: American beginnings, 1500-1900

Identifiers: LCCN 2015037498 | ISBN 9780226367071 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226367101 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Customs administration—United States. | Customs administration—England—Colonies—America. | United States— History—1783–1 815.

Classification: LCC HJ6622 .R36 2016 | DDC 3821/.7097309033—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015037498

♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

To Nerissa Hamilton-vom Baur

Contents

Acknowledgments

A Note on Archival Sources

Introduction

Part I. Revolution: Philadelphia, 1769

1. Custom Houses, Negotiated Authority, and the Bonds of Empire, 1714–1776

Part II. Revenue and Empire: Bermuda Hundred, 1795

2. Political Economy and the Making of the Customs System

3. Negotiating Authority in Federalist America, 1789–1800

Part III. Revenue and Crisis: Baltimore, 1808

4. Commerce or War?

5. Jefferson’s Embargo and the Era of Commercial Restrictions, 1807–1815

Part IV. Reform: Boston, 1817

6. Dismantling Discretion, 1816–1828

Epilogue: Charleston, 1832

Abbreviations

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

It is a privilege to thank the many people who made this book possible. At the University of Chicago, the late Peter Novick pushed me to get into the history racket, and Jim Sparrow convinced me to stay in it. Kathleen Conzen taught me how to do research and told me that there was a book to be written about custom houses. Amy Dru Stanley pushed me harder than anyone else, and I am grateful that I continue to benefit from our conversations. I thank Bill Novak for his incredible friendship, camaraderie, and scholarly vision. More than anyone else, Bill pushed me to ask the big questions and propose big answers.

Max Edling and Richard John generously read drafts of the project for years and years and provided incisive comments at every turn. Dan Ernst has been a great critic and friend. As a Samuel I. Golieb Fellow in Legal History at the New York University School of Law, I learned so much from Lauren Benton, Richard Bernstein, Bernard Freamon, and John Phillip Reid. Daniel Hulsebosch and Bill Nelson have been tireless advocates for this project. As a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Program in Early American Economy and Society at the Library Company of Philadelphia, I benefited from the advice of Albrecht Koshnick, Sally Gordon, James N. Green, Daniel Richter, Michelle Craig McDonald, and Roderick McDonald, and especially the incomparable, indefatigable Cathy Matson. At the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, I benefited greatly from feedback by Roman Huret, Cecile Vidal, Jean Heffer, Emmanuelle Perez, and especially Nicolas Barreyre. The Hurst Summer Institute at the Institute for Legal Studies at the University of Wisconsin Law School was a life-changing event for me, due in large part to the mentorship of Barbara Welke. The American Society for Legal History is a remarkable community of scholars who have helped me a great deal over the years, especially Bruce Mann, Maeva Marcus, Chris Tomlins, Mike Grossberg, Sally Hadden, Elizabeth Dale, John Witt, and Holly Brewer.

My colleagues in the Federated Department of History at Rutgers/New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark helped shape this project at an early stage, especially Stephen Pemberton, Richard Sher, Kyle Riismandel, Kornel Chang, Beryl Satter, Jonathan Lurie, Stuart Gold, Jan Lewis, Whitney Strub, Amita Satyal, Lisa Nocks, and the late Clem Price. Neil Maher was a wonderful mentor and model colleague. Jessica Witte provided extremely helpful administrative assistance. I am also indebted to several NJIT students for their assistance: Taquesha Owens, Franklin Chou, Sandra Moryto, and Marquise Hargrove. Maureen O’Rourke deserves special mention for spending countless hours talking with me about this project and keeping me sane while I was commuting between DC and Newark.

At American University, Sarah Adler, Laura Nitzberg, Kelsi Schagunn, Tracey Livingston, and Lauren Pav were always quick to offer help from the History office. Jordan Grant, Terumi Rafferty-Osaki, Lauren Duval, Amy Langford, and Allison Jobe have been more like colleagues than students. My amazing department chair, Pamela Nadell, has fiercely protected me and supported me at every turn. Dean Peter Starr and the College of Arts and Sciences provided a generous teaching leave and funding, including an Andrew Mellon Fellowship. Michael Brenner, Laura Beers, Allan Lichtman, Richard Breitman, Eileen Findlay, Daniel Kerr, Pedram Partovi, April Shelford, and Alan Kraut read portions of the manuscript and provided excellent suggestions. Lisa Moses Leff and Kate Haulman have gone out of their way as friends, colleagues, and mentors, and I am especially indebted to both.

I cannot possibly do justice to all the wonderful libraries and librarians who have helped this project in innumerable ways. I must, however, acknowledge Clement Ho, Alex Mackintosh, and Martin Shapiro of the American University Library, Patrick Kerwin and the staff at the Manuscript Reading Room of the Library of Congress, The Center for Legislative Archives at the National Archives, Sara Heim and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and James N. Green, Cornelia S. King, and the Library Company of Philadelphia.

Mark Peterson, Ed Gray, and especially Stephen Mihm deserve thanks for seeing promise in the project and bringing it into the American Beginnings series. At the University of Chicago Press, it was a joy to work with Robert Devens and Tim Mennel and their super assistants, Nora Devlin and Logan Smith. Caterina MacLean, Katherine Faydash, Marian Rogers, and Ashley Pierce ably helped push the book over the finish line. J. Naomi Linzer Indexing Services did a wonderful job on the index, and Dennis McClendon and Chicago CartoGraphics valiantly put together the historical maps for the book.

My intellectual and social universe has brought me amazing scholarly connections and friendships. Thank you to Tim Stewart-Winter, Thomas Adams, Stephan Endicott, Arissa Oh, Nate Holdren, Mike Osman, Esther Na, Sadia Shirazi, Nishi Gupta, Sanjay Gupta, Arman Schwartz, Gregory Karelas, Maribel Morey, Cynthia Nicoletti, Kelly Kennington, David Tanenhaus, Matthew Sherman, Ariel Ron, Andrew Wender Cohen, Mark Wilson, Nicholas Parrillo, Michael Willrich, Ajay Mehrotra, Kim Reilly, Tracy Steffes, Kyle Volk, Reuel Schiller, Joanna Grisinger, Abigail Swingen, Dael Norwood, Joseph Adelman, Kenneth Owen, Hannah Farber, Joshua Barkan, Tony Freyer, Chris Desan, and Seth Rockman for their help and encouragement. Karen Tani, Ariel Ron, Christopher Swope, Joshua Stein, Paddy Reilly, Sophia Lee, Christopher Beauchamp, Kevin Arlyck, Serena Mayeri, and Sam Erman deserve special mention for their camaraderie and for helping me with specific chapters and arguments. Alison Lefkovitz gave countless hours of her time to making this project better and countless more tolerating my bad jokes. Finally, special thanks are owed to Jonathan Levy for his part in our sprawling, ongoing conversation about all things history and beyond.

My friends and family continue to be a source of seemingly limitless support. Hilary Conway, Josh Alcorn and Andrea Peterson, Emily and Aric Merolli, and Jenna and Matt Einstein always bring good cheer. The Siddiquis, Clabaults, Plazas, Dedolphs, Swopes, Oblers, and Pranios have welcomed us into a remarkable community on Mansfield Road. I received constant encouragement from Stephen and Zoe Lamb, David Hamilton, and Daphne vom Baur, who also deserves special mention for allowing me to use her beautiful painting for the book’s jacket. My aunts, uncles, and cousins—the Swamy, Dwarakanath, Nath, Curtis, Srinivasan, Johnson, Gupta, Pillutla, and Shetty clans—have known me from my earliest days and humored my tweedy conversations at family events. Bharath Nath and Kara Braciale hosted me on several research trips to Worcester and Boston. Nagendra Prasad has always helped me think through complicated aspects of the project. My remarkable siblings, Vikram and Nandini, have helped me in so many ways that I will forever be in their debt. My parents, Jayanth and Hemalatha, will always be my inspiration as scholars, parents, and people.

This book is dedicated to my wife, Nerissa Hamilton-vom Baur, and my two amazing daughters, Saskia and Mirabel. You three are the lights of my life. Sasi and Mira, welcoming you into the world and watching you grow—your smiles, giggles, jokes, hugs, and kisses—have given me my most cherished moments. Nerissa, what a life we’ve enjoyed together since our paths first crossed in an undergraduate history class in Pick Hall. You have done so much for me. Thank you for encouraging and supporting me from my first days in graduate school through my years on the academic job market. Without your love I’d be nowhere at all. I’d be lost if not for you. And you know it’s true.

A Note on Archival Sources

Spelling and punctuation varies widely in the numerous archival sources used in this study. To provide readers with the most accurate portrayal of these sources, original spelling and punctuation are preserved throughout, unless otherwise noted. Italic for emphasis in archival sources is also preserved.

Introduction

The story of the creation of the American federal government could concisely be told through the writings of Alexander Hamilton. The first secretary of the treasury’s reports on public credit, manufactures, and a national bank are remembered for advocating a muscular federal government capable of taxing, spending, and shaping the nation’s destiny. Less known, though, is that the reports were beset by anxiety. Hamilton had no shortage of concerns about the numerous threats facing the young United States. Chief among these problems was a crisis of government revenue. The Articles of Confederation had just spectacularly failed, and the national debt had risen to the dizzying height of $80 million. True, the new Constitution gave Congress the power to tax. And Congress exercised that power by creating a tariff and federal custom houses to collect taxes on imported goods. This customs revenue was to supply the national purse. But Hamilton remained concerned. The problem was the fragile relationship between the federal government and the merchants who paid the customs duties. Above all, Hamilton feared contravening the sense of the body of the merchants or violating the merchants’ impressions of what is reasonable and proper.¹

Hamilton’s reputation as a friend of merchants and commerce preceded him, so his concern is not all that surprising. But there was much more to it than this. The merchants were the ones who paid customs duties that were to be the main source of national revenue (see table 1). As Hamilton explained of the federal government, the merchants who paid customs duties had seconded its operation. Seconded. Like deputies of some sort, the merchants had done much to shoulder the burden of building a new American state. In just one short year the United States had begun to build a revenue system from customs duties on merchant capital. A foundation was now in place. The once-distant dreams of national legitimacy, sovereignty, and power were now imaginable. Nurturing the customs revenue system meant taking seriously the sense of the body of the merchants.²

Table 1. Federal Revenue, 1789–1836

Source: John Joseph Wallis, Federal Government Revenue, by Source: 1789–1939, Table Ea588-593, in Historical Statistics of the United States, Earliest Times to the Present: Millennial Edition, ed. Susan B. Carter, Scott Sigmund Gartner, Michael R. Haines, Alan L. Olmstead, Richard Sutch, and Gavin Wright (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/ISBN-9780511132971.Ea584-678.

Hamilton’s concern suggests that a tax system based on customs duties made the early federal government dependent on merchant capital. The government gained revenue and stability. But the merchants also stood to gain. They had forced their voices onto the pages of Hamilton’s report. Now they were poised to shape the nation’s political economy. The federal government’s dependence on custom duties, then, had empowered the nation’s importing merchants. But Hamilton’s tidy writings contain only cryptic hints about this reciprocal relationship between the federal government and the merchants who supported it. Things become much clearer on the waterfront, and inside the federal government’s custom houses. There, as ships came and went, federal officers collected revenue from and enforced regulations on merchants’ imported goods. But how did they do so, what with the federal government’s dependence on importing merchants and their capital? Then there was the problem of historical precedent, as only years before, the British Empire had tried but failed to collect revenue from its own custom houses. How would federal officials extend the tentacles of the state into the notoriously volatile Atlantic marketplace? And finally, what would this governance mean for American politics? Although Hamilton and his successors in the Treasury continued to wrestle with these questions for decades, surprisingly few have paid them much attention since. These questions are at the heart of this book.³

The Custom House from Above and Below

The custom house is a new if unsurprising venue for telling the story of the early federal government.⁴ Just as oikos—ancient Greek for house—was the root of the concept of the economy, so the custom house was a pillar of political economy, the early modern science devoted to increasing government wealth and power.⁵ In theory, the custom house was the pulse of increasingly centralized states where sovereigns enforced trade regulations and collected revenue on imported goods. In the fiscal-military states of early modern Europe, sovereigns used customs duties to secure credit, service debt, finance governance, and bankroll military expeditions.⁶ The founders of the United States envisioned the new federal government as the center of their own fiscal-military state. And so they too turned to customs duties. Admittedly, there were few alternatives to customs duties, especially because the founders feared that any serious discussion about taxing slaves would alienate the South. But customs duties were also convenient because of how they worked. Merchants paid customs duties on imported goods directly to the government. The merchants recouped their losses by adding the cost of duties to the prices of the imported goods at sale. Most Americans, then, would experience national customs duties only through consumer prices. No federal tax man would cometh. Customs duties left the lightest of footprints on society and seemed to fulfill revolutionary republicanism’s ideological promise of limited government.⁷

Despite their importance custom houses were often unremarkable structures. In smaller ports they were rooms in officers’ homes, shacks, or apartments. Custom houses in important ports were modest multistory buildings. Inside were two or three officers with a few weighers, gaugers, or carters nearby. Within the custom house a visitor was likely to encounter volumes of federal laws and a small cache of tools, such as hydrometers, chains, scales, and ropes. Here and on the waterfront, customs officers collected revenue and inspected an enormous range of goods, from spirits to linens to slaves (see fig. 1). Their actions produced a remarkable paper archive—accounts, abstracts, letters, tables, statutes, chits, and correspondence shuffled between the Treasury, Congress, courts, and custom houses—that occupies tens of thousands of cubic feet in the U.S. National Archives. This archive is the spine of National Duties.⁸ The story that emerges from this archive is a dramatic confrontation between two great revolutions of early modernity—the consumer revolution of the marketplace and the fiscal-military revolution of the state.⁹

Fig. 1. Cellar floor plan of the Bath, Maine, custom house (1853). Custom houses were not only important in the nation’s biggest ports. In Bath, Maine, for instance, the federal government drew up plans for a custom house in which the entire cellar would be a storage area for goods awaiting inspection or seized items subject to prosecution. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division (LC-DIG-ds-04568).

On the one hand, when viewed through the lens of high political economy, the history of custom houses in the early republic is a fairly straightforward story about the creation of an active and energetic federal government. Though most Americans never stepped foot within a custom house, few would have disputed its significance. The custom house became the most visible icon of federal governance in American culture, from the architecture of Robert Mills to the fiction of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville.¹⁰ Americans in the early republic recognized the importance of the custom house because of what happened there: it was an indisputable fact that customs revenue almost singlehandedly funded the federal government. Between 1789 and 1836 the federal government collected about $830 million in revenue (see table 1). Approximately $682 million of that sum came from the custom houses. The federal government used this revenue to fund its military; pay veterans’ pensions; prosecute wars; acquire territory; expropriate, murder, and dislocate American Indians; and pay down the national debt. To be sure, this federal government appears slight alongside the hulking leviathans of modernity—the 11,491 federal civil servants in 1831 would constitute but a minor agency within the bureaucratic archipelago of the modern federal government. But size bore no relation to significance. So understood, this early federal government was anything but weak (see figs. 2, 3, and 4).¹¹

The view from the custom house itself is quite different. Customs officials possessed formal commissions and police powers. But most were slow to use coercive tactics against custom-house clientele because of the inchoate nature of federal authority in the first years of the early republic. In fact there was a certain art to being a successful customs officer. In the early republic, presidents selected customs officials and other federal officers on the basis of their reputation and status—proper characters, as George Washington was fond of saying. The customs officials who appear throughout this book were deemed proper for different reasons: for instance, Jeremiah Olney of Providence for his social clout, Henry Packer Dering of Sag Harbor for his commercial knowledge, Sharp Delany of Philadelphia for his military service, and John Lamb of New York for his revolutionary reputation as a Son of Liberty. No matter their particular niche, it was hoped that men of this ilk possessed reputation enough to compensate for the fragility of early federal authority. In short, these officers were expected to gin up federal authority from their own distinction.¹²

Fig. 2. British imperial custom houses (1760). By the mid-seventeenth century, the British Empire maintained forty custom houses in North America of varying sizes and importance. Chicago CartoGraphics.

Fig. 3. Federal custom houses (1789). As the new federal government came into existence, Congress apportioned sixty-six custom houses throughout the country. In adding twenty-six facilities to those the British Empire had stationed in North America, Congress hoped to install a federal presence on the nation’s coasts that would suffice to deter smuggling and maximize tariff revenue. Chicago CartoGraphics.

Fig. 4. Federal custom houses (1832). By the Jacksonian era, the number of custom houses had grown significantly to 107. The sharp increase since the founding of the republic reflected the emergence of new river ports in the nation’s interior, as well as a renewed ideological commitment to combating smuggling and tax evasion. Chicago CartoGraphics.

The unique power relations of the early modern waterfront made things all the more complicated for the first customs officials. They were few, and their outposts were slight. Against them crashed the tide of the Atlantic market, as North American merchants imported innumerable goods, human chattel, and bewildering webs of credit from abroad. In this moment within the history of capitalism, too, imperial rivalries and global warfare filled the market with both immense wealth and risk.¹³ Accordingly, the class of men—variously referred to as merchants, merchant communities, men of the market, and perhaps most aptly, commercial peoples—who lived in this roiling world were understood to be important.¹⁴ Leading merchants—for instance, Welcome Arnold and John Brown of Providence, Archibald Gracie of New York, and Stephen Girard of Philadelphia—were distinguished figures in their communities. A great many middling merchants pooled risk, borrowed from one another, vouched for each other, and shipped goods as a group. Sailors and mariners manned the vessels that carried goods and credit across the oceans, and they too held stakes in the commercial marketplace. Together this group plied the trade that supplied government coffers, fueled fads and revelry, and supplied cosmopolitanism and transatlantic political currents. Commerce was more than a thing or a vocation. Commerce was a force, and the American republic was born a commercial society.¹⁵

The importance of commerce in revolutionary America and the early republic gave merchants social, cultural, and political power.¹⁶ Not unlike the residents of the eighteenth-century English countryside made famous by labor historian E. P. Thompson, the merchants who did business at American custom houses expected that their local norms would influence the ordering of economy and society. They accepted the legitimacy of the federal government’s intervention into the marketplace in the institution of the custom house. Many paid the duties that bankrolled the federal government in the early republic.¹⁷ But they expected to have the power to shape how the custom house would function, from the hours it would operate to the manner of inspections, and even to exceptions and exemptions from the letter of the law. Above all, local merchants expected customs officials to align the law with local commerce’s need to access and exploit the Atlantic marketplace. And just as Thompson’s crowd in eighteenth-century England used protest and violence to mark the limit of free-market logic, so importing merchants in the early United States resorted to the same tools to define the boundaries of the state. Mobs of merchants, sailors, and other waterfront characters had stormed British imperial custom houses during the American Revolution to express anger over British political economy. And the custom-house mob would persist into the first decade of the nineteenth century.¹⁸

At the custom house, then, importing merchants and commercial interests came to enjoy a privileged position. But this was not patronage, as merchants rarely demanded appointments from customs officials. Nor was this a story of capture, because, as we shall see, customs officials could and did flout the merchants’ interests. Corruption is also not a very helpful concept because, while customs officials governed in ways that benefited local commerce, very few of those officials materially profited from their activities.¹⁹ In addition, the modern-day concept of corruption presupposes that the state and the market are distinct and should be distinct. Not only did Americans in the revolutionary era and early republic understand corruption very differently, but a central claim of this book is that when the United States came into existence, the modern liberal belief that the state and the marketplace must be distinct simply did not exist.²⁰ Quite the opposite, in fact. In classical political economy, it was necessary for the state to tap into merchant capital. Doing so required incorporating merchants and their capital into the fold of the state. In the eighteenth-century British colonies, then, commerce was governance by other means, and merchants executed crucial functions for the state. Overseas commerce extended borders, settled colonies, supplied armies and navies, and circulated credit and information. By 1776, removing commercial influence from governance would have been as unwise as it was impossible. Commerce was crucial to how the British Empire worked.²¹

And it is empire, rather than capture or corruption, that proves most useful in reconciling the custom house of political economic theory with that of the waterfront. Governance at federal custom houses mirrored that of the British imperial custom houses. On the periphery of the eighteenth-century British Atlantic, officeholders negotiated authority with colonial subjects in a variety of ways. At the custom houses, imperial customs agents interpreted the Navigation Acts in ways that benefited and facilitated swashbuckling American merchants.²² In London, the Board of Trade and the Exchequer tolerated the rash of smuggling, trading with the enemy, and other commercial crimes that were everyday occurrences in North American ports, because the benefits of American commerce far outweighed losses of revenue and dents to the rule of law.²³ Since Great Britain drew most of its revenue from internal excise taxes, it was easy to overlook colonial smuggling. Also, American violations of the Navigation Acts, while occasionally embarrassing, helped weaken Great Britain’s main competitors, France and Spain.²⁴ For this reason colonial customs agents devised a wide-ranging discretion to negotiate their authority with American merchants. A main argument of this book is that federal customs officers did the same after the American Revolution. Empire persisted into the early American republic, then, not only as an intellectual framework for the founders to understand federalism, rights, and citizenship. It persisted in practice, too. The negotiated authority between officeholders and merchants that had helped cohere the British Empire would help sustain the early federal government on its maritime frontier.²⁵

The imperial lineage of custom-house governance should suggest the broader possibility of understanding the early federal government as part of an empire. With its center in the nation’s capital, this empire had several peripheries beginning with the states themselves and ending on the maritime and western frontiers.²⁶ Like British imperial governance in North America, federal governance operated through extremely complicated relationships with connected political units. It was also subject to powerful currents from competing empires on its borders.²⁷ Customs officials were tasked with enforcing revenue and commercial laws in the face of these challenges. They did so by using discretion—the ability to choose which laws they would seek to emphasize, and how they would seek to do so. This discretion was not strictly legal, for it was nowhere to be found in federal law. In fact, Congress would repeatedly assert that customs officials were subordinate to the secretary of the treasury.²⁸ At the custom houses, however, officers would continue to rely on discretion. They decided which laws to apply, and which laws to ignore; when to make an example out of a lawbreaker, and when to sweep transgressions under the rug. Most often, they used their discretion to align federal revenue and regulatory law with local commercial communities’ expectations about how governance should work. This negotiation of authority between officeholders and merchants anchored federal governance at the custom houses during the early republic, just as it had once helped structure British imperial governance in North America.²⁹

The subtle negotiations between officers, importing merchants, and other waterfront characters that took place routinely in and around the custom houses are the crux of this book. Yet they are almost impossible to pin down.³⁰ Only a handful of merchants copped to their attempts to unduly influence the inner workings of the custom house. Likewise, few officers recorded the specific moments when negotiations occurred. Fewer still considered their governing practices negotiations. But over and over in the early republic customs officials interpreted laws generously toward merchants, limited enforcement of purportedly intrusive legislation, and looked the other way when confronted with illicit waterfront activity. When they failed to do so, they inevitably faced abuse, intimidation, shaming campaigns, tax avoidance, violence, riots, and lawsuits from angry merchants. The Treasury Department occasionally intervened, not to rebuke wayward officeholders, as one might expect, but to urge customs officers to take seriously the opinions of the commercial community in which they resided.

The story of the custom houses in the early republic sheds new light on the inner workings of the early American state. Though the idea of a stateless American past has sharply receded, the federal government is generally considered far less significant than states and municipalities, which developed robust coercive powers over spaces, property, persons, families, and local markets.³¹ Yet the early federal government was incredibly important. The founders patterned the Constitution on the blueprint of the European fiscal-military state so the federal government would be chiefly oriented outward toward the world, involving itself in issues of commerce, borders, diplomacy, and war.³² Much is known about how the federal government expropriated and murdered American Indians in the West and Southwest. A great deal is also known about how the federal government acquired territory and subsidized western expansion. Communication and infrastructure policy are also well understood.³³ An examination of how the federal government developed the means to regulate commerce and extract revenue from merchant capital reveals an important dimension of the early American state.

National Duties recovers the lost history of custom houses in the early American republic to explore the persistence and ultimate dissolution of imperial governance in the federal government of the United States between the American Revolution and the Jacksonian era. The argument proceeds chronologically in four parts to illustrate how British imperial custom houses functioned through negotiated authority in colonial America; how early federal customs officials replicated imperial governance by negotiating authority with importing merchants in the first two decades of the early republic; and how imperial governance became a political and moral problem requiring reform in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars.

Americans have always been conflicted about their federal government. Tea parties past and present embody profound ambivalence about taxation, spending, regulation, and coercion by a distant central government. But this ambivalence began long ago. When Alexander Hamilton launched his plea for expansive federal power, he watched as federal customs officials negotiated their authority with the very merchants they were supposed to tax and regulate. Subsequently, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, so often understood as the intellectual flag bearers for the cause of limited central government, tried to replace older patterns of imperial governance with more centralized control of the custom houses. But there is more than irony here. The story that unfolds in the pages that follow reveals that the history of the early federal government cannot be understood without considering local confrontation and contestation, foreign intrigues and affairs, and perhaps most importantly, Atlantic capitalism itself. That story begins on a shadowy waterfront in 1769, as the American Revolution laid siege to the Philadelphia custom house, and laid bare a crisis of empire.³⁴

Part I

Revolution: Philadelphia, 1769

On an October day in 1769, a mob descended on the custom house. The day before, an imperial customs official named John Swift, acting on an informant’s tip, seized 5,000 gallons of the colonists’ prized Madeira wine, which smugglers had attempted to land without first paying customs duties. It did not take long for the merchants to suss out the informant’s identity. A mob quickly materialized near Carpenter’s Wharf and caught up with the informant next to the custom house. The informant "was attacked by some Sailors, who were set on him by the merchants. They threw him into the River, dragg’d him out and poured some Buckets of Tar upon his Head, & then Feathered him; they dragged him over the Stones half the length of the Street (the mob still gathering as they went) till they came