Smuggling, Globalization, and America's Outward State, 1870-1909

On May 16, 1870, U.S. federal marshals raided the fashionable Manhattan home of José de Bessa Guimarães, seeking $30,000 in diamonds smuggled from Rio de Janeiro. Customhouse officer Capt. James Chalker alleged that Guimarães, a wealthy Portuguese merchant, had used his position to import the gems without paying duty. The officers found nothing until one of the inspectors “intercepted” Guimarães's American-born daughter Celia fleeing the domicile. Searching the five-year-old girl, agents discovered a box containing “several thousand dollars” in gems. Federal marshals arrested the foreign national, holding him on $50,000 bail (equal to over $850,000 today).1 Guimarães's smuggling arrest was but one of many during the spring of 1870. Throughout March and April newspapers routinely reported the confiscation of jewelry, silk, and bay oil, legal items imported without the payment of proper duty. The New York Times ran daily articles and features on deception by immigrants, travelers, and professionals. Its competitor, the New York Herald, denounced Charles L. Lawrence, a former customs inspector charged with running a smuggling ring in the heart of the port of New York. In May 1870 the pressure on smugglers intensified. On the tenth, officials arrested a former ship's captain, William Hall, for unsuccessfully helping a young woman smuggle her bridal trousseau into New York. On the eighteenth, customs inspectors detained a German immigrant for hiding birch brooms in his luggage, a lady milliner for attempted bribery, a man secreting watch chains, and another man holding hundreds of dollars in undeclared velvet. On May 23, Special Treasury Agent Gen. Newton Martin Curtis arrested David Tilton and John Tilton for smuggling $3,000 in Canadian nutmeg into New York City. Two days later, Secret Service agents seized three thousand cigars on the Cuban steamer Morro Castle.2