The King's Customs: Philadelphia, 1763-1774

Abstract

T HIS is a story with a strange hero. In terms of contemporary American folklore he should not have been a hero at all but an unsympathetic character, slightly contemptible, slightly sinister, since he was a civil servant, an administrative official in Britain's bureaucracy. Are not bureaucrats like that? John Swift, collector of customs in Philadelphia during the crucial period before the American Revolution, was, however, of quite different metal. Intelligent, honest, hard-working and patriotic, he demands admiration and sympathy. British policy and British navigation laws put Swift in an impossible situation; but although damned by supervisors and by taxpaying merchants alike, he continued to enforce the laws as best he could. The unsuccessful efforts of this customs officer to achieve a balance between official regulations and reasonable practice demonstrate the problems inherent in a system grown too cumbersome for efficient operation. The basic principles of the English navigation laws, though far from universally approved or condoned by the people they affected, were well understood by the middle of the eighteenth century. Enumerated commodities, direct shipment, British goods and crews, and permanently or temporarily closed trades were legal facts.1 The day to day operation along the waterfront of the law in which these legal facts were embodied provides an interesting, at times an amusing, view of the bureaucratic maze in which the honest port officer sometimes came perilously close to losing himself. *Mr. Martin's study is a part of his doctoral dissertation written at the University of Iowa. 'By far the best available study of the navigation laws is L. A. Harper, The English Navigation Laws (New York, 1939).