Commerce raiding

“ Duties were levied both on imports and on exports, and included not only rates of 50 to 100 per cent but also many absolute prohibitions. Spanish commerce would have been starved out of existence if the government which set these rules had not, by its inefficiency and corruption, furnished the means of evading them. A veritable army, including, it is said, 300,000 persons, of whom one third were armed, found its chief occupation in smuggling; Spanish manufacturers maintained factories only to mask the sale of contraband goods, and even members of the government engaged in the contraband trade. ”

“ It is, however, prudent to obstruct criminal attempts even when we cannot hope entirely to defeat them, and, therefore, I am of opinion, that no provisions ought to be exported without some method of security, by which the governours of every place may be assured that they will be conveyed to our own colonies. Such securities will easily be contrived, and may be regulated in a manner that they shall not be defeated without such hazard, as the profit that can be expected from illegal commerce, will not be able to compensate. ”

“ A maritime and commercial people, suddenly deprived of all honest employment, or the means of respectable subsistence, either sunk into apathy and indolence, or expended their natural energies in piratical attempts to recover, by force and plunder, what they had been deprived of by policy and fraud. In this state of decay, they continued to degenerate, till the appearance of the British traders revived their suppressed and nearly extinguished energies, and awoke to new life the commerce and enterprise of this interesting portion of the globe. ”

“ And in war-time the neutral merchant, being a mere man of commerce, appears to be quite ready to ‘pay for the boundless gain’ which the sale of munitions gives him by taking the ‘boundless risk’ of seizure and condemnation, keeping the property in his cargoes while they are on the high seas. Should disaster follow, there is always ‘the Government’ to fall back on ”

“ The heavier articles now in demand require more industry with the hands, and a settled life. Trade thus becomes inconsistent with slavery, and hostile to it; and the more so as it becomes more dependent on the collection of oil, ground-nuts, and other products of agriculture. Covering the coast now with trading establishments, excludes the slaver. The efforts of the squadrons were necessary to carry out this proceeding, for commerce needed to be protected against the piracies of the slaver afloat and the ravages of the slaver on shore. ”

“ The period of revolution was a jubilee for the smuggler. At some points of the frontier he was suddenly converted into a fair trader by the abolition, decreed by juntas, of all import duties. But, amidst the confusion consequent on the revolution, he nowhere had any difficulty in carrying on his commerce. From Gibraltar, from Portugal, from France, foreign goods poured in, to the exhaustion of the smuggling depôts in those three countries. Those large illicit importations must for some time to come have a serious effect on the custom-house revenue. ”

“ A single consideration will suffice to assuage our apprehension of a conspiracy among foreign nations, not to take our agricultural surplus in exchanges. Foreign commercial regulations are all made by governments for the purpose of getting money, and this end is a full security that none will be made, which by destroying commerce, would defeat it. They will never destroy their best instrument for fleecing industry, by an entire prohibition of exchanges ”

“ The happy idea of licensing private adventurers to build and equip vessels to make private war upon smuggling craft, and to capture them and their cargoes, was an extension of the original plan of issuing letters of marque to owners of vessels for the purpose of inflicting loss upon an enemy’s commerce; but persons intending to engage upon this private warfare against smuggling had, in the first instance, to give security to the Commissioners of a diligence in the cause thus undertaken, and to enter into business details respecting the cargoes captured. ”

“ This branch of industry, indeed, suffered not merely by the war itself, but by the hordes of privateers, buccaneers, and pirates which, up to the close of the last century, infested the seas whenever war was declared, thus interrupting legitimate commerce, and plundering wherever they had an opportunity, either by land or sea, too often with little regard whether the property they plundered was that of a friend or a foe. ”

“ As one or the other party has prevailed and obtained possession of the ports open to foreign commerce, they have seized and confiscated American vessels and their cargoes in an arbitrary and lawless manner and exacted money from American citizens by forced loans and other violent proceedings to enable them to carry on hostilities. The executive governments of Great Britain, France, and other countries, possessing the war-making power, can promptly employ the necessary means to enforce immediate redress for similar outrages upon their subjects. ”

“ Reprisals led to wanton aggressions, like those of the buccaneers, and wanton aggressions produced reprisals again. All governments encouraged their merchantmen to rob those of rival peoples as a means of promoting commerce, just as the warring fur traders on the American frontier were encouraged in their fights waged to the same end.
[54] The encouragement of reprisals was at all times more or less covert. In war times the armed merchantmen were openly commissioned and sent afloat not only to prey upon the ships of the enemy but upon those of neutral powers as well. ”

“ In that age of lawless violence, there was so little force in government, everywhere, and so entire a want of co-operation between governments, that the operations of trade were exposed to piracy, robbery, and black-mail, on every sea and in every land. ”

“ The purchasers have the coops loaded on trucks and hauled to their places of business where, without avoidable delay, they sell, slaughter, and deliver to retailers. Marketmen organized the Chamber of Commerce and allocated retailers among themselves and agreed to and did increase prices. The chamber, through a levy of a cent a pound upon poultry sold by the marketmen, raised money-more than $1,000,000 in the first year-to pay for enforcement activities. To accomplish various purposes of the conspiracy, the conspirators hired men to obstruct the business of dealers who resisted. ”

“ Now we are running into the crimes to which strong nations are liable. Our diplomatists unblushingly moot the question of taking foreign territory by force if it cannot be purchased; our executive prevents piratical expeditions against the lands of neighboring States as feebly and slowly as if it connived at them; we pick quarrels to gain conquests; and at length, after more than half a century of public condemnation of the slave-trade, after being the first to brand it as piracy, we hear the revival of the trade advocated as a right, as a necessity. ”

“ Seeing then, I say, there are yet so many people want employ, and so much wool unwrought up, and which for want of being thus wrought up, is carried away by a clandestine, smuggling, pernicious trade, to employ our enemies in trade, the French, and to endanger our manufactures at foreign markets, how great is our negligence, and how much to the reproach of our country is it, that we do not improve this trade, and increase the consumption of the manufactures as we ought to do? ”

“ But remember, that though the law only punishes the illegal trader by confiscation of his goods when taken, it punishes the kidnapper with personal pains, and sometimes with—death!—And, more—remember that the line which divides smuggling from piracy is easily past, while the return becomes impossible. ”

“ Political organization just barely above the tribal level—thousands of petty kingdoms and republics and principalities and feudal holdings and robbers' roosts. The principal industries are brigandage, piracy, slave-raiding, cattle-rustling and intercommunal warfare. They have a few ramshackle steam railways, and some steamboats on the rivers. We sell them coal and manufactured goods, mostly in exchange for foodstuffs and [Pg 17] tobacco. Consolidated Outtime Foodstuffs has the sector franchise. That's one of the companies Thalvan Dras gets his money from. ”

“ If, when a producer of cotton, tobacco, grain, beef, pork, butter, cheese, or any other commodity, in our own country, has carried it abroad, and exchanged it for iron or woolen goods, and has brought these latter home, the government seizes one-half of them, because they were manufactured abroad, the robbery committed upon the owner is the same as if the government had seized one-half of his cotton, tobacco, or other commodity, before he exported it ”

“ To say nothing of the impolicy of our permitting the carrying trade and home market of such a country to pass out of our hands into those of a commercial rival, the Government, in the first place, would be certain to suffer most disastrously in its revenue by the introduction of a system of smuggling upon an extensive scale, which an army of custom-house officers could not prevent, and which would operate to affect injuriously the interests of all the industrial classes of this country. ”

“ Any such merchants found in our country at the outbreak of war shall be detained without injury to their persons or property, until we or our chief justice have discovered how our own merchants are being treated in the country at war with us. If our own merchants are safe they shall be safe too. ”

“ I have heard several volleys of small arms being fired off, as if in platoon exercise. All the shops are shut, people being afraid that the authorities may deal severely with the butchers, and that bad characters will profit by the excitement to rob and plunder the shops. ”

“ The civil authorities were powerless to [Pg 228] prevent crime. 'Inter arma silent leges!' The agents and employees of different blockade-running companies lived in magnificent style, paying a king's ransom (in Confederate money) for their household expenses, and nearly monopolizing the supplies in the country market. Toward the end of the war, indeed, fresh provisions were almost beyond the reach of everyone. ”

“ Here, were men of wealth, and intelligence, and education, for the lust of gain inducing their fellow-men to commit a serious crime. They had relays of fleet horses, with light carts and wagons, running regularly to the coast, in which the smuggled goods were conveyed up to London. They bribed, when they could, the revenue men, and they had spies in every direction to give notice of the approach of those whom they could not bribe. They had lookout men on the watch for the approach of an expected smuggling vessel, and spots-men to select the best place on which she could run her cargo. ”

“ The foremost smugglers were no men of straw, for, like all other trades, the free-traders’ business had its capitalists and its middlemen, who financed the buying of cargoes and received their share of the plunder, taking their ease at home while their less wealthy fellow-sinners worked in fear of capture and condemnation. ”

“ Where force decides right, no sovereign is possessed of paramount authority to sweep this pest from his shores; no vessel is safe, no flag is respected. The trade is thus confined to desperate adventurers only, to whom the existence of piracy is more advantageous than the unmolested security of navigation, as the danger which it creates drives away all competitors of a less daring character, and gives them a monopoly of these ports. It is too true, also, that European traders have materially contributed to the strength of the pirates, by the supply of arms and ammunition. ”

“ Still, the epicenters of the illicit trade in weapons are in the Balkan, in Russia, and in the republics of the former Soviet Union. Here, domestic firms intermesh with Western intermediaries, criminals, terrorists, and state officials to engender a pernicious, ubiquitous and malignant web of smuggling and corruption. ”

“ The laws and regulations of trade, are esteemed in England, as sacred. An estate made by smuggling or pursuing an illicit trade, is there looked upon as filthy lucre, as monies amassed by gaming, and upon the same principle, because it is obtained at the expence, and often ruin of others. The smuggler not only injures the public, but often ruins the fair trader. ”

“ The raw material from which these chiefs recruited their bands was of a very varied description. Vagrants without visible means of subsistence, who in ordinary circumstances supply their needs in the way of rice and opium through theft or (especially in the highlands and sparsely populated districts of the West Coast) through murder and rapine, could choose nothing better than to turn from their evil ways and pursue their old trade under an honourable name, with the certain expectation of plunder or an incomparable recompense after death. ”

“ As for the defeated negroes who were not killed, they were carried down to the sea and sold. And as time passed the passion for blood grew on the raiders until it was greater than their greed. They tortured to death many whom they might have sold. Before the end of the eighteenth century these raids, called wars by those who owned the slave-ships, were the chief source of supply for the coast market, and after the trade was declared illegal they were, practically, the only source of supply ”

“ The port of the enemy may be his granary; he may have no ships of his own, no other carrier may be found there; no other permitted to be thus employed, or no other serve him as faithfully, or on as good terms. So, also, with regard to the produce of his own industry, his only market may be in the port of one of the belligerents, and his only means of access to it through the use of the carriers of that port. ”