Vermonters weren’t particularly concerned when President Jefferson signed the Embargo Act into law in December 1807. They assumed the new law, which was bound to have a chilling effect on the nation’s economy, wouldn’t affect them.
It wasn’t a crazy assumption. After all, the law barring international trade pertained specifically to “all ships and vessels in the ports and harbors of the United States.” Vermonters believed they could use the state’s sizeable border with British Canada, since the law made no reference to trade conveyed by land. Local customs officials agreed with this reading of the law. Furthermore, much of the commerce on Lake Champlain was, arguably, also left unaffected, because it was conducted using lumber rafts, not “ships and vessels.”
The state’s economy was heavily reliant on trade with Canada, with Vermont wheat, beef, pork, potash and timber among the major exports. In return, Vermont imported liquor, manufactured items, foodstuffs and other goods.
But if Vermonters believed they were exempted from the law and immune to the economic pain it would cause, they were sorely mistaken.
Let’s back up a moment. In late 1807, rumors had reached Vermont that the Jefferson administration was planning to take drastic action to address an international conflict that had been brewing for years. Great Britain and France were at war, and the United States had been desperately trying to stay out of the fight. As a neutral intermediary, the country traded with both warring nations, which didn’t sit well with either of them. Viewing commerce with their adversary as taking sides, both Britain and France seized American merchant ships and their cargoes as contraband.
Britain was being particularly aggressive. Over the course of several years, it had snatched an estimated 10,000 sailors from American merchant ships, claiming that the men had deserted from their navy. In fact, only about 1,000 of those captured were proven to be British citizens. The situation came to a head in June 1807, when a British Navy vessel, hunting for suspected deserters, had attacked an American frigate, killing three men and injuring another 18.
Over the months that followed, Vermonters received conflicting reports about what Washington would do next. Some claimed that America would make the British pay reparations for the deadly attack, while others said war was inevitable. Still others suggested another response: an embargo on all foreign trade—if other countries wouldn’t respect American neutrality, they could try living without American trade.
Some in Vermont speculated that an embargo had probably already been declared and that the news just hadn’t reached the state. The Burlington Centinel newspaper wrote, “Such an event, like the lightning, will strike before we hear the report.”
On Dec. 28, 1807, the North Star newspaper in Danville informed readers that three weeks earlier President Jefferson had sent Congress a confidential message “which is said to be the most important ever submitted to their consideration since the declaration of independence.”
“By private information from Washington,” the North Star reported, “it is stated, that we shall have an embargo.”
Jefferson had indeed signed the Embargo Act into law on Dec. 22. But thanks to the period’s primitive transportation system, on Jan. 4, 1808, nearly two weeks after the embargo went into effect, the Weekly Wanderer of Randolph could still only report gossip. “The rumor out of doors” the newspaper wrote, “is that the Executive has recommended an immediate Embargo, and that the Congress is now deliberating on the subject.”
Within days, news of the embargo reached every pocket of the state and Vermont’s newspapers started offering opinions about the law. The Reporter of Brattleboro defended the embargo by arguing that it “violates the rights of none. Its object is to secure ourselves. It is a measure of precaution, not of aggression. It is resorted to by all nations, when their great interests require it.”
The Vermont Watchman of Montpelier took the opposite tack, printing a letter to the editor harshly critical of the embargo. “As the friends of the measure did not condescend to assign any reason in favour of their vote, we are left to grope in the dark. Against the measure there was talking enough,” the unidentified letter writer stated. “…The minority regarded the measure as inadequate and destructive, injuring foreign powers very little in comparison with the extreme and irreparable injury to ourselves.”
How Vermont’s press responded to the embargo depended largely on politics, since newspapers were then closely tied to the political parties. Vermont voters, men over the age of 21, mostly supported Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party over the Federalist Party. Three of the state’s four Congressmen and both of its U.S. Senators were members of Jefferson’s party. Furthermore, the state had voted for Jefferson’s reelection in 1804.
That support for the Democratic-Republicans counted for nothing when Congress became aware of the gaps Vermonters were exploiting in the law. On March 12, 1808, Congress closed the loopholes by passing the “Land Embargo,” which clearly stated that it was illegal to export “in any manner whatever any goods, wares or merchandise.”
Jabez Penniman, the head U.S. customs official in Vermont, saw trouble coming. Writing to U.S. Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin, he warned that unless he was given “an adequate force,” the substantial flow of timber to Canada would continue unabated. When word reached Jefferson, the president was shocked by the situation in Vermont. He told Gallatin to instruct Penniman to hire and arm enough men to enforce the law, ordered the building of two gunboats to patrol Lake Champlain, and called on Vermont Gov. Israel Smith to dispatch the state militia if necessary.
Vermonters were alarmed by the effects of the embargo. A week after the land embargo went into effect, The Reporter printed a piece called “The Times,” which described how merchants “stand idle in the streets, inquiring if there is any news from Washington,” how a shop owner “is obliged to dismiss his journeymen—his customers desert him, or call to tell him they cannot pay on account of the embargo,” how a farmer can “find no vent for produce—His notes given for land will be due in the spring. To raise money, his oats hay and corn were to be sold, but no-body will buy.”
The piece concluded: “All—all are exclaiming what does all this mean? Congress have laid an embargo. They have bound their fellow citizens hand and foot. They will not condescend to tell the people their reasons for this measure, so important, so unexpected, so pregnant with mischief.”
The embargo proved particularly unpopular in and around the Champlain Valley, which relied greatly on trade with Canada. The Burlington Centinel announced on April 15 that a town meeting would be held the next day. Leaving no doubt where the paper stood on the issue, it reported that the meeting’s purpose was to “deliberate on the question whether any, and what measures can be adopted to avert the evils of the late embargo act, as it relates to this part of the Union. As the object is of such infinite magnitude to inhabitants of this part of the State, it is hoped and expect that there will be a general and punctual attendance.”
Burlington residents at the meeting argued that the embargo, so devastating to the local economy, would do nothing to alleviate the “dangers to our vessels, our seamen and merchandise, upon the high seas.” Those present formed a committee to write a letter to Congress, calling for the embargo to be repealed, or modified so it didn’t apply to Vermont and Lake Champlain.
Town meetings held that spring in Castleton, Shelburne, Milton and North Hero also called on Congress to lift the ban on trade in Vermont.
A man named John Henry reported to a Canadian official the situation he witnessed in the border town of Swanton. “(T)he clamor against the Government and the measure (the Land Embargo) particularly is such,” he wrote, “that you may expect to hear of an engagement between officers of Government and the sovereign people” if goods are blocked from export to the Montreal market.
Many Vermonters simply ignored the embargo and continued to trade with Canada. Some people, not wanting to be branded as smugglers or fearing arrest, sought creative ways to stay within the letter of the law. Some built wharves right on the U.S.-Canadian border. They would have an American crew unload a boat’s cargo onto the American side of the wharf, then have a British crew move the goods across the wharf and into a boat waiting in Canadian waters, safe from U.S. Customs agents.
A New Yorker named John Banker Jr. devised a more elaborate scheme. He is said to have obtained a commission as a privateer operating on Lake Champlain. The commission gave him the legal right to attack enemies of the United States. Banker outfitted a small sailboat with three muskets, and used it to intercept smuggling vessels. The smugglers, who were in on the plan, willingly surrendered their goods, which under international law Banker could do with as he pleased. Banker sold the goods to customers in Canada at a price prearranged with the smugglers, and then gave the money to the smugglers, minus a fee for himself.
Other smugglers relied on strong south winds to do the work for them. In one case, two sloops carrying tea were sailed north to just short of the international border, then the men disembarked and let the wind carry the vessels across the line to their trading partners.
At one point, militia members seized a giant log raft that smugglers were transporting north on Lake Champlain. The raft, which would be broken apart and sold as timber, covered two acres and was valued at $25,000, a fortune in the era. A couple of nights later, a group of about 60 local men retook the raft with the assistance of one of the soldiers guarding the raft.
The most serious clash occurred in August, when a revenue cutter cornered the smuggling vessel the Black Snake near the mouth of the Winooski River in Burlington. A smuggler and a local teenaged boy shot at the militiamen, killing two of them, Asa Marsh and Ellis Drake, as well as Capt. Jonathan Ormsby, a local farmer and Revolutionary War veteran. (Marsh and Drake are considered the first U.S. customs agents killed in the line of duty. Their names are carved in the Customs Valor Memorial in Washington.) One of the smugglers, Cyrus Dean, was convicted of murder and executed before a huge crowd in Burlington, though probably not the 10,000 later claimed.
But the successful capture of smugglers was rare. There were just too many smugglers and Penniman, the head customs official in Vermont, had too few men to stop them. As one soldier explained, “there are a number of roads, and we cannot make a calculation how many loads go over the lines.” One estimate made in wintertime suggested that 100 loaded sleighs per day crossed the border at Swanton during a 15-day period. By one estimate, the amount of good crossing the border actually increased during the embargo.
Having devastated the country’s economy, the embargo was a political liability. The public blamed its architect, Jefferson, and his party. In March 1809, at the end of Jefferson’s term in office, Congress replaced the failed Embargo Act with the Non-Intercourse Act, which maintained the embargos on Britain and France, but allowed trade with all other nations. The new act made hardly any difference for the economy, which still struggled. It also failed to deter the British from impressing American sailors into the Royal Navy. These continued clashes with Britain would lead to war three years later in 1812.
Vermont had a complicated relationship with Thomas Jefferson, which can still be seen on maps of the state today. Many Vermonters shared his view of America’s future, one led by farmers rather than by banks and businessmen. So they had supported him twice in presidential elections and, despite the embargo, backed his successor, James Madison, in the elections of 1808 and 1812. Vermont was the only New England state to do so.
In 1810, when Democratic-Republicans held a slim majority in the Vermont legislature, lawmakers had created a new county in the middle of the state, taking land from four surrounding counties. They named it Jefferson County. But four years later, when Federalists held a majority, they renamed it in honor of George Washington.
However, Jefferson still had admirers in Vermont, even after his death on July 4, 1826, on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. At Cambridge’s town meeting the following year, voters changed the name of Cambridge Center to the village of Jeffersonville.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Then Again: The embargo with Canada, and its many local smugglers.