To Begin the World Over Again

by Matthew Lockwood

  Of all the criminal activities that grew and thrived during the desperate years of war, none caused more disorder, more concern and fear for the British government than smuggling. Britain’s coasts became hives of disorder as many desperate and enterprising Britons seized the opportunity presented by the war to join a booming smuggling trade. Americans may have bristled at the imposition of duties on luxury goods such as the ubiquitous tea, but such taxes were in line with similar duties on tea, tobacco, and spirits paid by the inhabitants of Britain. These taxes were a crucial component of the growing fiscal-military state, raised in times of war as a key component in funding the almost constant conflicts of the eighteenth century.5

  The monopoly on the importation of tea granted to the East India Company (EIC) only made the problem worse. The EIC used its privileged position to control the volume of sales and to increase prices, artificially inflating the cost of tea relative to the prices found in other European countries. While tea could be had for 6 pence per pound in Amsterdam, in London it cost 5 shillings or more, with 4 shillings and 9 pence of the British price a direct result of the customs duty. With the difference between prices so great and the distance between Britain and the Netherlands so small, illicit trading was bound to explode alongside the legal trade that had been moving between the Low Countries and the British Isles for centuries.6

  Deep resentment of consumption taxes was a transatlantic phenomenon, and smuggling in Britain and America had flourished for as long as tariffs had existed. The Seven Years’ War, and the American Revolution it helped to spawn, however, witnessed both an explosion of anger over consumption duties and a surge in smuggling. With taxes on such luxury goods as tea and spirits high, those who dared to skirt the customs house stood to make a fortune. This increased financial incentive led to a wave of smuggling throughout the British Isles in the years of the American Revolution.

  So rampant was the contraband trade that by 1783 it was estimated that at least 120 large ships and 200 smaller vessels along with 20,000 people were employed in smuggling full time. When one considers that the population of Britain was roughly 8 million people in the late eighteenth century, the sheer scale of illicit trade comes into focus. While a large and growing segment of the population benefited from smuggling, either directly through the profits of the trade in contraband, or indirectly through the greater availability of cheap tea, tobacco, spirits, and silks, the British government was losing a fortune in lost revenues at a time when it could ill afford to do so. In 1783 a report issued by the Board of Customs estimated that a staggering 21.1 million pounds of tea were being smuggled into Britain every year at a monumental cost to government finances. It was estimated that £1 million of revenue was lost to the illicit trade conducted through the Channel Islands alone.7

  The increased tariffs of the 1760s and 1770s were not the only spur to this astonishing growth in black market activities. As the army and navy’s need for men grew with the outbreak of war in America, the manpower of the customs service was rapidly drained to fill the gaps in Britain’s armed forces. With fewer men and fewer ships to patrol the coasts, smugglers were left with a relatively free hand. In Sussex, at Cuckmere Haven in 1783, the smugglers had more to fear from the tempestuous autumn seas than the customs service. It was reported that

  between two and three hundred smugglers on horseback came to Cookmere [sic] and received various kinds of goods from the boats, ’till at last the whole number were laden, when, in defiance of the King’s officers, they went their way in great triumph. About a week before this, upwards of three hundred attended at the same place; and though the sea ran mountains high, the daring men in the cutters made good the landing.8

  The rewards of smuggling were such that whole communities were often involved, or at least complicit, in the black market. While many took an active role in landing, hiding, or transporting contraband goods, others were simply guilty of providing a market for duty-free merchandise or looking the other way, studiously ignoring the illegal activity in their midst. By the late eighteenth century, the British had become a nation of tea drinkers, with much of the population consuming the aromatic brew twice a day or more. Much of this tea, however, was contraband. A government estimate surmised that two-thirds of the tea consumed in the British Isles had not passed through customs, and was thus illegal. The consumption of illicit tea, brandy, and tobacco, and dealing with smugglers, however, had become an everyday fact of living in the eighteenth century.9

  Even if local populations and many local officials felt sympathy, or at least ambivalence, regarding smuggling, the government could not afford to take such a lenient tack. In the best of times smuggling undermined the revenue of the state, but in the midst of war with America, France, Spain, the Netherlands, the Marathas, and Mysore, the funds derived from tariffs were a crucial part of Britain’s very survival. In such times, when every shilling was needed to pay for troops, ships and armaments, smuggling could not be tolerated. With both smugglers and the government highly motivated by the heightened stakes of wartime profits and revenue needs, violence was inevitable.

  Armed confrontations between smugglers and customs officers multiplied after the onset of the American Revolution, taking on a bloody aspect that reflected the tensions of the era. With France, Spain, and the Netherlands joining the war in 1778, the encounters only intensified. The Orford militia was forced into a firefight with a local band of smugglers in July of 1778, when they attempted to land a cargo of uncustomed goods on the Suffolk coast. The militiamen had received the full force of the smuggler’s cutter’s broadside when they attempted to challenge them on the beach, and it was only the arrival of the army that prevented a victory for the smugglers. Five years later bloodshed returned to the beaches of Suffolk when seventy smugglers, their faces “blacked” to avoid detection, clashed with a combined force of customs agents and dragoons at Southwold beach. When the smoke cleared, one smuggler lay dead on the sandy Suffolk shore.10

  The east coast of England was not alone in seeing the grim consequences of the contraband trade. In July 1784 William Allen, captain of the Royal Navy sloop HMS Orestes, received information that smugglers were attempting to land a cargo of contraband brandy and tea on Mudeford beach just outside the harbor at Christchurch, Dorset. When the Orestes, accompanied by a pair of revenue vessels, rounded the point and Mudeford beach hove into view they espied two luggers newly arrived from the Channel Islands laden with illicit goods. The beach swarmed with activity as 300 smugglers and sympathetic locals hurried to unload the roughly 120,000 gallons of brandy and 25 tons of tea from the smugglers’ ships and move them inland on 50 carts drawn by upwards of 300 horses. Captain Allen knew how desperately the war-ravaged fleet could use the revenue such a large quantity of goods should supply, and so he was in no mood to let the smugglers make their landing unchallenged. Allen ordered his men to lower six boats packed with armed sailors and commanded them to row to the beach and seize the luggers and their contraband.

  The arrival of the revenue service did not go unnoticed by those onshore, however, and John Streeter, a notorious local smuggler, quickly rode to the Haven House, a nearby pub, to recruit more men to transport the tea and brandy and resist the representatives of the law. While some helped move the goods inshore to designated hiding places, others dug in on the beach and readied themselves for a fight. They did not have long to wait. As Captain Allen and his men neared the luggers he demanded that the smugglers surrender, a demand met by a volley of shot from the brazen criminals. The sailors returned fire and eventually pushed the smugglers from the shore before following them to Haven House where a firefight erupted that lasted for more than three hours.

  In the end, the costs of the battle were high. Captain Allen was struck down early in the fighting and died of his wounds a short time later. Christchurch Priory was damaged by an errant shot from the Orestes’ guns, which had attempted to reduce the Haven House to rubble. The luggers had been seized, but the smugglers and
their prize had escaped, with only one man arrested and charged for the murder of Captain Allen. George Coombes was convicted and hanged for his role in the fight, and his corpse hung in chains at Haven House Point as a message to other smugglers. The community, however, was hardly cowed by the hanging and cut down Coombes’ body for proper burial. For government and smuggler alike, the financial stakes of customs duties were great enough to fight for, even enough to die for.11

  By 1783 it was becoming clear that something had to be done. Smuggling was rampant, revenue was desperately needed, and the current state of affairs was having little impact on contraband or revenue. When the Fox–North Coalition swept into power in April of 1783, and the Duke of Portland replaced Lord Shelburne as prime minister, the time to act had come. The famed orator, philosopher and Member of Parliament Edmund Burke was appointed Paymaster of the Forces and quickly looked for ways to balance the revenues. He called for the Board of Customs to produce a report on illicit trade, the results of which at last shocked the government into action. Before it could finish its custom reforms, the Fox–North Coalition, and Burke with it, was replaced by the new ministry of the 24-year-old William Pitt the Younger. Burke’s East India Company Bill had been defeated, and with it the Coalition, but the much-needed customs reforms were continued by Pitt.

  It had long been recognized by some in Britain that moderate customs duties might actually bring in more revenue than heavy duties simply by undercutting the incentives for avoiding the tariffs. In his 1776 economic opus The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith argued that by creating a rational incentive for avoiding customs, high duties would invariably lead to reduced revenue, the opposite of its intent. Rather than blame the smuggler, who was merely behaving rationally in relation to the conditions of the market, Smith considered such a man to be one who, “though no doubt highly blameable for violating the laws of his country, is frequently incapable of violating those of natural justice, and would have been, in every respect, an excellent citizen had not the laws of his country made that a crime which nature never meant to be so.” Poorly conceived customs laws made criminals where none should have existed. Thus, the solution to smuggling was not ever-higher duties or repression, but lower duties.12

  The newly empowered Pitt took this suggestion to heart, and in 1784 began a massive overhaul of the customs. He reduced the tax on tea from 119 per cent to 12 per cent and the tax on brandy from over £90 a tun to just over £43 per tun. In addition, Pitt also streamlined the system of accounting and eliminated the practice of differential tariffs, all while using a firm hand with those who continued to ply the trade in smuggled goods. With the Hovering Act of 1784, Pitt gave the government the power to seize any and all ships under 60 tons found to be carrying tea, coffee, or wine within 3 miles of the coast. Similarly, any ship carrying spirits in barrels smaller than 60 gallons could be confiscated. In 1785, when a storm drove the smugglers’ ships into the harbor at Deal, Pitt wasted no time in putting his new principles into action. He sent an army regiment to that notorious den of smugglers and had every ship in sight seized and burnt. With reduced customs duties came harsher treatment of those who continued to flout the law.13

  The impact of Pitt’s reforms was real and impressive. Prior to the reforms, 4.96 million pounds of tea went through customs as required by law. In 1785, only one year after the reduction in duties, 16.3 million pounds of tea, an almost fourfold increase, were customed. Pitt, and Smith before him, were vindicated. The reduction in duties both cut smuggling significantly and increased the revenue of the nation. The attitude of many in the country began to shift as well, with smugglers increasingly seen as a menace rather than an acceptable part of everyday economic life. Penalties for smugglers noticeably stiffened, with more men executed for what had previously been penalized with a fine. By 1785, the outburst of smuggling that had greeted the American Wars had largely been contained and the days of pitched battles between excise officers and smugglers were quickly becoming a relict of another age. The American War, and the crime wave it caused, however, forced Britain to fundamentally rethink its justice system. For just as crime and disorder were on the rise, the war cut off Britain’s traditional safety valve.14

  The burgeoning number of criminal trials was not a result of growing criminality alone. Fear of disorder was also a significant driver of prosecutions. During previous wars, the government responded to changed conditions by granting greater numbers of pardons, especially for non-violent offenses. During the American War, however, heightened concerns over internal disorder meant that such leniency was unconscionable. Thus, as the war intensified and concerns about crime and disorder increased, new measures were sought to combat this emergent scourge. One of the first results of these growing fears was a violent crackdown on criminals appearing in the courts of the capital. At the Old Bailey, capital sentences tripled in the war years and executions rose fourfold as the authorities began to reduce the number of pardons it allowed. Whippings and brandings—the traditional punishment for theft—also surged during these years, all part of a growing intolerance of criminality in an atmosphere riven with fear. The sheer number of those punished is astounding. Between 1780 and 1787, 500 individuals were hanged in London alone, a third as many executions as occurred over the previous 80 years combined.15

  The end of the war only made things worse. War, especially a global war such as the American Revolutionary War, expanded the army and navy by leaps and bounds, offering the prospect of regular wages to a segment of society often living hand to mouth, day to day in an economy of makeshift, where temporary, seasonal work was the norm. But mass mobilization had dire societal consequences as well. Britain had long feared that a standing army would lead inevitably to the monarchical tyranny they saw across the Channel in France and so would not abide a professional army quartered in Britain in peacetime. If such tactics kept the nation safe from domestic tyranny, they also created the need to raise large numbers of troops quickly at the outbreak of war and the concomitant need to rapidly disperse soldiers at war’s end. Mass mobilization might have been a boon for those unable to find steady employment elsewhere, but the subsequent mass dismissals put the country at risk from the predatory potential of well-armed, well-trained men without jobs or prospects. In times of war, and especially in the liminal moments between war and peace, the line between hero of empire and criminal villain was fine indeed. When safely abroad fighting for the crown in America or India or on the high seas protecting the homeland, soldiers and sailors were easy to portray as upholders of British interests, useful cogs in the war machine. Once home again, they instantly transformed into a potentially dangerous, criminally inclined excess population. War could provide a wonderful opportunity to use marginal elements of the population for strategic purposes, but brought with it the reality that trained killers, mostly poor and underpaid, would in time be let loose on British shores.

  In the eighteenth century, international peace usually meant domestic disorder. Crime waves followed in the wake of every major war as tens of thousands of surplus soldiers and sailors found themselves suddenly, all at once, unemployed. The outbreak of war was seized by governments as a means of both pursuing strategic interests and ridding Britain of its marginal, excess population. Conscription for both army and navy tended to target the poor and unemployed, young men most likely to turn to crime. At every level of the judicial system—before trial, during trial, and after conviction—military service was used an alternative punishment, swelling the ranks rather than crowding the gallows.

  Those who returned from the war, which was hardly guaranteed given the mortality rates of the eighteenth-century military, were left with no employment and often with their pay severely in arrears. They descended on London and the ports of the south in swarms, causing crime rates to skyrocket. In the 1780s, more than 130,000 men were demobilized, representing fully 2 per cent of the entire British population and 20 per cent of the adult male laboring poor. The country, racked by years of war
, could in no way accommodate so many men so fast, and crime rose by 35 per cent or more in the years surrounding the end of the American conflict; it would remain alarmingly elevated until the commencement of war with revolutionary France in 1793. As one contemporary ruefully remarked, “the age that makes good soldiers mars good servants, cancelling their obedience and allowing them too much liberty.”16

  John Fitzpatrick, a gardener from Fulham, had first-hand experience of the potential danger of poor, demobbed soldiers. In March 1783, Fitzpatrick was traveling on the highway between London and Fulham. In those days Fulham was still a rural community, separated from London by fields and heath. The roads in and out of London were notoriously the hunting grounds of highwaymen, so Fitzpatrick must have already been on edge when two men appeared out of the “star-light night” and commanded, in the traditional language of British highwaymen, that the terrified gardener stand and “deliver.” One of the men had a knife “putting him in fear,” so Fitzpatrick complied, losing his watch and chain, some seals, a key, and two half-crowns to his nocturnal assailants. After the robbers had disappeared into the night, Fitzpatrick called the night watch, who captured one of the suspects. The second highwayman was apprehended a few weeks later when Fitzpatrick recognized him in Litchfield Street.