Contraband: Smuggling and the Birth of the American Century - Hardcover

"[A] well-researched and well-written account of the underside of America's growth as an economic power." -- Publishers Weekly "Featuring a host of colorful characters, Contraband is a fascinating and revealing book, which makes a compelling case that smuggling, and efforts to suppress it, offer a window into broader historical issues, including the American state, political machines, and economic enterprise." -- Eric Foner, author of Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad "Andrew Wender Cohen has revolutionized our understanding of nineteenth-century America, putting smugglers and rogues, custom-house workers and naval gunboat officers, Jews and Gentiles, Confederates and Unionists at the heart of one of the liveliest and most consequential histories I have read in years." -- Nelson Lichtenstein, author of A Contest of Ideas: Capital, Politics, and Labor "Cohen not only uncovers a heretofore hidden history, but anchors this invisible world in the central events of the American past." -- Timothy Gilfoyle, author of The Pickpocket's Tale "Andrew W. Cohen has written that rarest of books: a gripping narrative filled with colorful characters whose exploits will cause readers to rethink their understanding of the American past. Deeply researched, powerfully argued, and beautifully written, Contraband is at once a page-turner and an important reframing of the nation's history." -- Ari Kelman, author of A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek "Andrew Cohen smuggles a rich and exotic cargo into this tale of American taxation and its discontents. Forget tea parties and the IRS; think rum, silk, opium, erotica, rakish con men, and corrupt revenuers. Highly readable and heroically researched, Contraband gives us the hidden prehistory of our ongoing war over how to fill the public coffer." -- Tony Horwitz, author of Midnight Rising

In the frigid winter of 1875, federal agents tracked Charles L. Lawrence, an intimate of Boss Tweed and the most promiscuous smuggler in American history. Leading a network spanning four continents and lasting half a decade, "Charley" smuggled silk worth $60 million into the United States. Since the American Revolution, smuggling had tested the patriotism of the American people. Distrusting foreign goods, Congress instituted high tariffs making the custom house the nation's protector. It waged a "war on smuggling", inspecting every traveller for illicitly imported silk, opium, tobacco, sugar, diamonds and art. The Civil War's blockade of the Confederacy heightened the obsession with contraband but smuggling entered its prime during the Gilded Age and only as the United States became a global power did smuggling lose its scurvy romance.