'Contraband,' by Andrew Wender Cohen: Part of what made America great

Contraband

Smuggling and
the Birth of the American Century

By Andrew Wender Cohen

W.W. Norton.

384 pp. $27.95

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Reviewed by

Paul Jablow

nolead ends Even as double lives go, Rose Eytinge's was unusual.

A leading actress best known for her portrayal of a "bibulous prostitute" in the stage production of Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist, Eytinge nonetheless needed extra income to supplement her extravagant lifestyle. Her solution: smuggle silks, satins, and other precious cloth in from England on her vacation trips. If she feared getting caught by the customs officer, as Andrew Wender Cohen writes in an elegant pun, there was "the ultimately obliging captain to help her skirt the inspector."

Eytinge is just one of a series of intriguing characters paraded across the 19th-century American stage by Cohen, an associate professor of history at Syracuse University. We meet silk smuggler Charles Lawrence; Jean Lafitte, who started with slave smuggling and branched out into merchandise; cotton smuggler Joseph Solomon Moore.

Smuggling was acceptable when the colonies were resisting Britain's control, but was outlawed almost immediately after the Revolution as a protectionist measure against foreign goods, including tobacco, sugar, and precious stones. Not surprisingly, the larger customs houses became centers of political power, patronage, and often corruption. Its leading occupants included none other than future president Chester A. Arthur, named to head the New York customs house. Cohen says he had "the wardrobe of a fashion model and the mind of a machine boss."

At its root, Cohen writes, protectionism depended on the belief in American exceptionalism: "By isolating the domestic market from the wicked world, the tariff seemingly maintained Congress' sovereignty over business, allowing it to democratically address industrialization.

"Even better, having protected workers from competition with the world's paupers, many Americans could imagine they needed little additional government at all."

Today, one hears little about smuggling except in connection with the drug trade - and here the contrast with the 19th century is ironic. Then, the object was to keep opium away from degenerate upper classes, who also smuggled in art and other high-end luxury items.

Cohen occasionally stumbles in trying to tie a messy subject into a coherent historic narrative, but this is a quibble. The chaos of it all is most enjoyable.

Paul Jablow is a former Inquirer reporter and editor. pjablow@comcast.net