Freebooters and Smugglers: The Foreign Slave Trade in the United States after 1808

2. “A Particular Kind of Force”

“A Particular Kind of Force” JUDICIAL PURSUITS, RESISTANCE, DISPERSION,AND THE FRONTIER When Beverly Chew reported for duty as collector of customs at New Orleans in 1817, he brought with him some issues from his own past that made many in the community skeptical about his ability to conduct fair, impartial, and honest administration of the Abolition Act. Born inVirginia in 1773, Chew settled in New Orleans during Spanish rule and nurtured business relations throughout the city which made him one of New Orleans’s most notable personalities. In 1804, Chew was appointed president of the Bank of United States in New Orleans. In 1811 he was named as one of the executors in the will of Daniel Clark, a wealthy New Orleans shipper and trader. It was then that many of his real troubles began. For the next several months Chew was embroiled in a bitter controversy with Clark’s daughter Myra Clark Gaines, who believed that the agent had improperly gained access to her father’s personal information and shrewdly connived his way into becoming a key player in the allocation of his assets.The fact that one of Chew’s companies had fallen on hard times just prior to Clark’s passing raised suspicion about his 46 2 “A Particular Kind of Force” 47 appointment as executor of the businessman’s will—an association with controversy that was to characterize his life and professional career.As the lead federal agent at the Port of New Orleans, his credibility was called into question ,and more importantly, his sincerity toward the enforcement of American law. Chew’s behavior typified life on the frontier, although few criminals feared its criminal justice system. Slave smugglers and traffickers especially manipulated the process, and in cases where they encountered jurisdictional changes that threatened the security of their vocation they casually moved across borders to areas where institutional structures were less developed and less capable of curbing their interests.1 Economic and territorial expansion in the United States during the nineteenth century initiated migration and immigration into the frontier, which spawned a movement to redistribute slaves.The post-1808 foreign slave trade was indispensable in this traffic. It was also critical in the early development of the judicial systems along the emerging frontier, where courts provided a means for slave smugglers and traffickers to circumvent the commands of the Abolition Act.As borders and boundary claims shifted, the dispersal of slave-smugglers and traffickers into the frontier tested the limits of slave trade suppression. It stretched resources and exposed corruption among frontier customs agents, U.S. marshals, governors, and other public figures . Boundaries and borders meant one thing to central authorities but something different for slave smugglers and traffickers.To central authorities, jurisdiction, sovereignty, and compliance were of paramount importance. For slavers, opportunity and financial gain through the foreign slave trade lay at the heart of their motivation. For them, geographical lines of demarcation represented minimally restrictive barriers. Judicial Pursuits The emerging frontier during the nineteenth century attracted a range of characters, but none more important than those who sought to capitalize on its unregulated economy.The frontier judicial system helped shape this maverick identity. Under-policed and experimental judicial practices provided a base from which judges, juries, and attorneys operated in concert with and deference toward the economic needs of local populations. For those who understood the importance of slave labor, judicial support could function as a benefit to the foreign slave trade. Because American slavery and the foreign slave trade were such critical parts in the transformation of the frontier, juries, judges, and lawyers had to develop their own peculiar rules and procedures to accommodate both.The judicial systems within the slaveholding regions essentially acted to uphold the exploits of slave smugglers and traffickers . Examination of court cases involving the foreign slave trade uncovers a de-centered legal system that floundered in legal minutiae and handed out an insignificant number of criminal convictions.Although formal legal structures and procedures had been established, the actual judicial practices and conduct of court officials, prosecutors, defense lawyers, and jurists exposed their identification with and legitimization of the trade. Particular circumstances made the application of justice a partial and biased affair. Judges often prosecuted the more flagrant violators of the 1808 Abolition Act, but their accountability to the needs of local societies often trumped the rules of procedural justice. By rationalizing their logic, communities...