Washington signs duties on rum, molasses and tea to pay the nation's debts
In 1790, the United States owed money it had no reliable way to raise. Congress had already rejected sales taxes as unenforceable and an income tax as impractical, so Alexander Hamilton proposed tariffs collected at the docks. On August 10, President Washington signed the Tariff of 1790, placing duties on imported spirits, molasses, wine, sugar, coffee, and tea. Four days earlier, Congress had authorized a fleet of armed cutters to make sure smugglers didn't slip past the customs houses with the money uncollected.
This was the Constitution's revenue power made concrete: a tax collected quietly at a handful of ports rather than visibly at every farmhouse door, sidestepping the kind of anger that would later fuel the Whiskey Rebellion. The cutters built to enforce it became the Revenue-Marine, the nation's only armed sea service for eight years, and eventually the Coast Guard.
QWhat did a British captain say after capturing an American cutter in the War of 1812?
When HMS Barbadoes, commanded by Captain Thomas Huskisson, captured the revenue cutter James Madison off Savannah in 1812 after a seven-hour chase, Huskisson sized up his prize with a professional's eye: she was "coppered and copper-fastened, is two years old, and sails remarkably fast." It sounds more like a compliment than a combat report. The Revenue-Marine's small, fast-built cutters were good enough that the enemy wanted to keep them rather than sink them, and several captured cutters ended up serving in British hands for the rest of the war.
QWhat instructions did Hamilton personally give the first cutter captains?
Hamilton wrote the captains a letter of instruction warning them against heavy-handedness on the water: "They will always keep in mind that their countrymen are freemen, and, as such, are impatient of everything that bears the least mark of a domineering spirit." He told them to rely on "a cool and temperate perseverance in their duty" rather than "vehemence or violence." It was a notably gentle rulebook for a service built to seize goods and arrest smugglers.
QHow did a British officer honor an American captain he had just defeated?
In 1813, after a brutal hand-to-hand boarding fight left the cutter Surveyor in British hands, Lieutenant John Crerie of HMS Narcissus handed Captain William S. Travis back his own sword. It was a formal gesture of respect for what Crerie called Travis's "gallant defense," made with only six 12-pounder carronades against a much larger force. The sword's return was recorded as one of the few courtly moments in an otherwise lopsided fight.
