The State of the Market: Smugglers, Statecraft, and the Failure of Jefferson’s Embargo

This paper studies the failure of Thomas Jefferson’s Embargo of 1807-9 to argue that that the Atlantic marketplace figured significantly in the rise of the American state.  While conventional accounts describe the Embargo in theory, this paper turns to the waterfronts of the early republic to offer a ‘bottom-up’ narrative of the actual practices of governmentality and exchange that defeated Jefferson’s policy. 

The central claim is that at this level of government and mercantile practice, the Embargo was a clash of competing market moralities in the early republic.  On the one hand, the Jefferson administration justified the Embargo as a moral police action with a familiar critique of commerce and European mercantilism.  Only by withdrawing entirely from the corrupting forces of Atlantic market culture, argued Jefferson, could the United States morally readjust both the national economy the world economic order.  Yet, in practice on the waterfronts of American ports, key commercial personae perceived the Embargo as an unjust restriction upon the wellspring of American prosperity.  Most importantly, among the adherents of this critique were the federal customs employees responsible implementing the Embargo.  Dismissing administrative orders from superior officers, the customhouses consistently accommodated local merchant communities by any number of methods of obfuscation, delay, or outright dishonesty.  That is, these officials, merchants, captains and seamen, shared an understanding of the Atlantic market as a wellspring of possibility, rather than peril.  The paper concludes by suggesting that this clash of market moralities during the Embargo of 1807-9 explains a fundamental feature of statecraft in the early American republic: that, more than any modern concepts of ‘public administration’ or ‘bureaucracy,’ an international market culture shaped the texture of government authority, and the character of the American state.