By Julia Purdy, Rutland
President Trump’s trade war with long-time trading partners, posing as protection, threatens to create waste, loss, and undue expense for American businesses and households alike. Tariffs are an outmoded tactic to bolster goods made in the U.S. against imports – but the tactic backfires as U.S. access to manufacturing materials is blocked, markets are stifled, and industry and consumers pay extra to cover the tariff cost. Projects are halted, U.S. export goods sit in the loading docks, and purchases cannot be made.
While it would take a long memory to recall an economic crisis as potentially severe, it is not the only time a president has put pride and pique before people whose interests he has sworn to serve.
It happened during the presidency of Thomas Jefferson, drafter of the Declaration of Independence, who, in his 1809 farewell speech to the Republicans of Washington County, Maryland, said, ironically, “the care of human life & happiness, & not their destruction, is the first & only legitimate object of good government.”
Trade with Canada was formalized when the United States became an independent nation. By 1807, customs records in the Canadian port of entry, St. John, showed total exports from Vermont valued at slightly over $3.6 million, brought in by small vessels plying the rivers and lakes. Pot ash – potassium carbonate – was a significant commodity easily produced from wood ashes and an extremely lucrative cash crop for the cash-starved frontier settlements. It was critical to the manufacture of glass, fulling soap for processing wool, gunpowder, dyestuffs, and baking powder. England needed all it could get for its wool industry, and by the time of the revolution, about $500,000 worth was being shipped from the colonies.
1807 was the year that Thomas Jefferson shut down all sea trade with Europe. The U.S. had remained neutral in the trade war between Napoleon Bonaparte and Britain, but those two antagonists tried to score by blocking American shipping to each other. Schoolchildren may have learned about the infamous British practice of impressing American sailors to augment the King’s naval strength. When the H.M.S. Leopard fired on the U.S.S. Chesapeake in an attempt to board her, American sailors were killed, prompting President Jefferson to retaliate.
The closing of the sea trade did affect landlocked Vermont, as goods were transported overland to seaports in southern New England and New York City. But when Jefferson followed it with a land embargo, Vermonters were also galvanized to action.
Burlington, Vermont’s principal seaport and the land gateway to Canada and Europe, led the resistance. The Vermont Centinel of April 22, 1808, reported on a town meeting in Burlington the previous week, which had been called to discuss what, if any, measures could be taken “to avert the evils of the late Embargo act, as it relates to this part of the Union.” The meeting deemed Jefferson’s move “highly injurious and unequal” and noted his failure to explain why he added the land embargo. It was agreed to draft a memorial to Congress pleading the case and requesting either repealing or exempting the Lake Champlain and land trade routes.
The drafting committee attempted to do Congress’ thinking for it. The committee noted that a full generation of Vermont’s producers had “with great labor and toil” cultivated the land to the point where it promised a bright future. Lake Champlain was the export corridor for “the produce of our forests and farms,” which had found “a ready and profitable market” in Canada.
The news was so sudden that goods were piled on the wharves ready for shipping, including “lumber, chiefly Pine,” worth $400,000 and “a large amount in pot and pearl ashes [worth $5.7 million in 2002 USD] which by the prohibitions of the last-mentioned act, have become useless to their proprietors.”
The memorial goes on: “Your memorialists … cannot discern the smallest similarity between … [oceangoing] vessels and the petty boats and rafts on Lake Champlain and the merchandise commonly carried to Canada, nor can they possibly divine any reason, which may or can be given to justify restrictions upon the former … individuals will be the only sufferers.”
In return, northern New England received salt, necessities, and hard currency. The committee predicted economic disaster: “The country will be drained immediately of its circulating [cash]. There being no market to which our lumber, potashes, and surplus produce can be carried, a sacrifice of the conveniences, if not necessaries of life, must ensue; … industry and enterprise will cease; our farms will be neglected; debtors of every description will be pressed for the payment of their debts; … laudable ambition and enterprise will be succeeded by despondency, poverty, jealousy, and despair. …Is this a picture of a distempered brain – a heated imagination? God grant that it proves not a serious reality!”
Printed circulars went out to surrounding towns, asking them to support Burlington’s request with requests of their own. Castleton, Shelburne, Milton, and others held protest meetings, declaring that without commerce with Canada, their produce became “useless trash” and pledging “to examine the measures of government.”
“I propose a toast!”
The strength of anti-embargo sentiment also inspired some wry Yankee humor. Toasts proliferated during the Fourth of July festivities: “To Commerce — All Trade Is Dead and Navigation Fails,” “To the Embargo — May those who discern the Wisdom of the measure, enjoy the Benefits of its effects,” “To Vermont — May her green hills become barren when her sons become slaves.” A political cartoon showed a would-be shipper being grabbed in the seat by a snapping turtle over the caption “O GRAB ME.”
As discontent mounted, Jefferson, who reputedly had not liked Vermont weather during his 1791 visit here, became aware of the possibility of insurrection. In 1808, he published a proclamation in the well-read Spooner’s Vermont Journal that since insurrection would be too time-consuming to be prosecuted in court or too widespread to be halted by marshalls; he was ordering all “insurgents” to go home and authorized military officers to enforce the order.
Vermonters stoutly rejected that characterization. St. Albans retorted that in no way was their conduct at fault, even if it was caused by citizens “finding themselves and their families on the verge of ruin and wretchedness”; there was no reason to smear the entire district, unless by “some evil-minded person or persons.”
Smuggling became the only recourse. Big log rafts plied Lake Champlain with armed crews. One celebrated cargo bateau, the Black Snake, was small enough to navigate the coves, creeks, and inlets along the western shore of Lake Champlain, picking up contraband from willing contributors.
Historians closer to those times have cataloged the many ingenious devices used to transport contraband across the international border by land, untouched by human hands. One way was to send cattle across the line to commence grazing in Canada. Another example was the hut built on a hillside facing Canada, filled with goods, and then given a nudge so it would topple down the hill into Canada. Canadian relatives and friends would bring cash across the line into Vermont. Wharves were built that straddled the international boundary.
In November 1808, Sen. Hillhouse of Connecticut reported that “patriotism, cannon, militia and all” were helpless against the smuggling traffic, saying that Vermonters along the border were “absolutely cutting new roads to carry it on land.”
Coventry settlers shipped pot ash via the Barton River and brought salt, flour, and leather back. Men of Danville and Peacham cut a route between Irasburg and Troy to transport pot ash and pearl ash to Montreal. Smugglers became even more brazen: historian Ralph Nader Hill wrote that in winter 1808-1809, “100 sleigh loads were said to have crossed through Swanton to Canada every day for fifteen days.”
Finally, proven as unenforceable, the Embargo Act was repealed in 1809, and Jefferson signed the Non-Intercourse Act, which opened trade with Europe, but it too prohibited trade with France and Britain.
They responded in kind. In 1810, Macon’s Bill No. 2 reopened trade with France and Britain. However, during its contest with Napoleon for domination of Europe, Britain once again interfered with American sea trade. What followed was a three-way economic tit-for-tat that culminated in the War of 1812.
But smuggling had become a way of life and continued over the by-now well-worn routes into 1813 and 1814. Craftsbury, Albany (Vermont), Barton, Lowell, Irasburg, and Underhill – were all scenes of skirmishes between customs officers and armed smugglers in a battle of wits, if not weapons.
Ironically, fortunes could be and were made once the smuggling activity was established and the Vermonters had the last laugh. Of course, Canada had no problem with any of this. Beef and pork, fresh vegetables, and fruit were in constant demand by the British army, billeted just over the line in Stanstead and St. Regis. The Embargo was strictly an American issue.
The rules of international trade still applied, and customs at St. John did not impose any penalty for receiving contraband and still recorded the values of such goods as they reached it. The law of supply and demand still operated. In one year (1807-1808), Canadian customs records show that total exports to Canada – pot ash and pearl ash, lumber, pork, cheese, butter, grain, and other products of the Champlain Valley — increased in value by about 70%. Pot ash was an essential industrial product with many uses, whose value the Embargo inflated by 90% by 1808.
