dartmouth history journal vol. i no. 1

Dartmouth History Journal Vol. I No. 1

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“An Apprenticeship to Liberty”: The Louisiana Purchase, Creole Society, and the Limits of Republicanism

James Shinn

Promised “A Comedy,” the audience at the Charleston Theatre on April 4, 1804 instead

received a heavy-handed lesson in the blessings of republican government. James Workman’s Liberty

in Louisiana; A Comedy tells the story of two resourceful Tennessee backwoodsmen and their

attempts to infiltrate—through a series of elaborate ruses—the upper crust of Spanish New Orleans

on the eve of US takeover.1 But the light-comic escapades of the main characters are periodically

interrupted by weightier action set in the New Orleans audiencia, where the corrupt judge Don

Bertholdo de la Plata presides. Don Bertholdo, a classic bureaucratic villain, flagrantly demands graft

and payoffs as the price of dispensing (dubious) justice. In one scene, two suitors requesting

settlement of the ownership of a small farm “consisting of fifty acres of good cotton land, and as

many of useless pine-barren” bring their case before Don Bertholdo—but neglect to remember the

customary kickback. Learning of this oversight, the judge flies into a rage:

Insolent knaves! How dare they trouble me with their quarrels? But I’ll be even with them. I decree then that the cotton land be sold to pay the other officers of justice the expences of the suit, and that one half of the pine-barren be given to each of the parties.

The judge pockets the deed; the suitors are led away in despair. When another suitor is brought

before the judge, having been imprisoned “on suspicion of doubting the authority of the Pope to

grant pardon for murder,” Don Bertholdo gives him ten years merely for requesting a trial. As

1 James Workman, Liberty in Lousiana; A Comedy, Performed at the Charleston Theatre. The Second Edition, with Additions and Corrections. Charleston: Query and Evans, 1804. Literature Online. ProQuest Information and Learning Company, 2003. See also Charles S. Watson, “A Denunciation on the Stage of Spanish Rule: James Workman’s Liberty in Louisiana” Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association, vol. 11, no. 3 (Summer, 1970), pp. 245-258.


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guards return the blasphemer to his cell, he cries out hopefully that “the American government will

do us justice!”2

Hardly comedic, Liberty in Louisiana was quickly and justly forgotten. But in its almost

cartoonish send-up of the Spanish judiciary in New Orleans, the play captures an important

dimension of the debates surrounding the Louisiana Purchase and its aftermath: the issue of the

colony’s alien legal and political culture. Throughout the United States, from the theaters of

Charleston to the halls of Congress and beyond, people considered what it meant to add not simply

828,800 square miles to the union, but also a diverse population of French, Spanish, African, and

mixed-race peoples with their own cultures, societal structures, and religious practices. US views of

the question of integration ran the gamut from confident assimilationism to a more pessimistic

cultural monism. James Workman, a lawyer and, later, Judge of the territorial County of Orleans,

believed that the long-suffering Louisianans would welcome US values, which were inherently plural.

“The TEMPLE we have reared to FREEDOM,” he wrote in the play’s finale, “is formed on a plan

so wide and capacious, that all members of the most extensive and diversified empire may find

protection beneath its ample dome.”3 For Workman, the political values expressed by Don

Bertholdo de la Plata were a cruel aberration—not a cultural norm.

Workman’s optimism about the political success of the Louisiana Purchase was largely

representative of the nation’s response to the enterprise as a whole. Though some Federalists

worried about the difficulties of governing such a vast territory, Democratic-Republicans countered

that the new lands offered a crucial barrier to the colonial outposts of Spanish, English, and Russian

America, as well as seemingly limitless territory for the expansion of American agriculture and trade.

2 Workman, Liberty in Louisiana, 72-75. 3 Workman, Liberty in Louisiana, 101.


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However, Jefferson’s agents in Paris had not purchased empty land. They had also assumed control

over a large, diverse population whose historical roots in the continent ran just as deep as those of

US Americans. This population was itself made up of former inhabitants of the French and Spanish

Empires (as well as Indian and enslaved populations whose own ties to the union were in question).

The most sanguine champions of the Purchase, like Workman, claimed that the Louisianans had

received the unalloyed “blessings of liberty”;4 that “Despotism and his minions” were “expelled from

this fair American Eden.”5 But did freedom of this sort automatically confer the capacity for proper

republican citizenship? Given their cultures and histories, could the creoles of Louisiana be trusted

to behave rationally and virtuously in a republican political culture? To an extent largely

unacknowledged in the recent historiography of this period, the Congressional debates over the

territorial organization of the Louisiana Purchase turned on precisely this question.6

Let me be clear what I mean by “republican.” As John Adams noted long ago, “there is not a

more unintelligible word in the English language than republicanism,” a complaint borne out by the

term’s diffuse historiographic application over the past four decades.7 Despite this apparent

vagueness, it is possible to identify as “republican” certain basic terms and themes deriving from a

long tradition of English (and, further back, Italian humanist) oppositional thought. These terms and

themes (which the historian J.G.A. Pocock has called a “conceptual language”) provided a crucial

intellectual context for the American Revolution and, to a somewhat lesser extent, for the political

debates of the Early Republic. The key term of republicanism is “virtue,” which refers to 4 National Intelligencer, January 30, 1804. Quoted in Knudson, “Newspaper Reactions,” 203-04. 5 George Brazer, An Address, Pronounced at Worcester, on May 12th, 1804, in Commemoration of the Cession of Louisiana to the United States (Worcester, MA: Sewell Goodridge, 1804), 13. 6 I am thinking of the work of Peter J. Kastor, particularly The Nation’s Crucible: The Louisiana Purchase and the Creation of America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), a study that fails to address sufficiently the dynamics of national and racial representation that informed debates over the purchase, territorial organization, and statehood of Louisiana. 7 Quoted in Daniel T. Rodgers, “Republicanism: The Career of a Concept.” Journal of American History 79 (June 1992): 11-38. Rodgers’ essay is an excellent account of the historiographic uses of term.


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autonomous, engaged participation in civil society. The virtuous citizen was an independent

freeholder or tradesman, unencumbered by debt, unfazed by hierarchical social obligations, and

vigorously committed to the public interest (the “common weal”). Republican “virtue” was also said

to exist at the societal level, with the virtuous society one in which different parties and institutions

were balanced and self-contained and no one interest exercised a preponderating influence over the

others. In republican thought the opposite of “virtue” was “corruption,” a term referring to any

person connected to his fellow men not by bonds of common interest but by ties of dependence.

The “corrupt” society was one in which debt, patronage, and placeholding, as well as powerful

forms of cultural and religious allegiance, governed social and political life. In “corrupt” societies,

largesse and deference—instead of self-reliance and principled self-assertion—greased the wheels of

society.8 When US observers steeped in the language of republicanism looked at Spanish Louisiana,

many saw just such a “corrupt” society.

In this essay, I am interested in the “conceptual language” of republicanism less as a medium

of political speech than as a normative framework for determining the viability of societies like

Louisiana. In republican thought, virtuous government depended on a harmonization of interests in

every dimension of human life. “Virtue” and “vice” were social and cultural as well as political ideals.

Thus, republicanism was a totalizing discourse connecting social, economic, religious, and even

racial and gender behaviors and relations. And because the ‘virtuous” or “corrupt” society was

necessarily so on every level, the etiology of societal health or illness could be derived from a huge

variety of symptoms. For early nineteenth-century Americans steeped in the language of

republicanism, such diagnosis was an important part of political and social engagement. It was also

8 The historical and historiographic literature on republicanism is vast. For this sketch of republican values I have relied principally on J.G.A. Pocock, “Virtue and Commerce in the Eighteenth Century” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Summer, 1972, 119-34; and Daniel T. Rodgers, “Republicanism” in Richard Wrightman Fox and James T. Kloppenberg, eds., A Companion to American Thought (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 584-87.


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an essential tool for interpreting and assessing other societies. Republicanism allowed observers to

discover transhuman truths in local details; as a totalizing mode of vision, it deemed societies like

Louisiana to be “corrupt” based on eclectic and ever-changing evidence.9

Though US republican thinkers usually railed against various domestic social and cultural

failings, this self-critical posture disappeared in descriptions of Louisiana and, indeed, of Spanish and

French America more broadly. In such writings the United States and its people became normative

models and standards, against which creole societies appeared woefully inadequate. The republican

mode of vision was thus not only diagnostic but comparative and evaluative. A determination about

the health of a society was also an assessment of that society’s long-term potential for stable and

virtuous government in the American mold. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, such

determinations appeared to hold the key to the future of the New World and of the place of the

United States in it.

The Louisiana Purchase and the subsequent debates over territorial organization and

statehood constitute an important moment in the American awakening to the problems and

possibilities of the New World. The project of incorporating an alien creole society—a “Gallic”

people of questionable republican attainments—raised doubts about the transferability of republican

mores and political institutions. In this way, it appeared to undermine a fundamental tenet of

Enlightenment political thought. What many in the Revolutionary period had taken to be innate and

inalienable—the basic human desire for the full enjoyment of rights, the basic capacity of all peoples

for self-government—would be deemed to be subject to historical and cultural conditions and

imperatives. 9 On the construction of cultural “otherness” see Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994); Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. 2nd Edition (New York: Routledge, 2008); and Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994).


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I.

When it was purchased by the United States in April 1803, Louisiana already bore the

political and cultural stamp of two empires. Settled by France beginning in 1699, Louisiana was ruled

by Spain for much of the later eighteenth century. At the time of the Louisiana Purchase the

territory was again under the control of the French; it formed a vast, porous marchland between

Spanish America to the south and Anglo America (including the United States and British Canada)

to the north. Louisiana was the cultural nexus of the New World, but empires were not the only

players on this middle ground. Louisiana lay at the crossroads of American Indian civilization,

between woodland Indians in the east and plains Indians in the west. It supported a diverse African

population, including slaves, maroons, and free black creoles—gens de coleur in the local parlance.

Through the growing commercial port of New Orleans, Louisiana linked up with the Francophone

Caribbean, Mexico, and the wider Atlantic World.10 A dizzying patchwork of cultures and histories,

colonial Louisiana was a distinctive polyglot world whose place in the larger Anglo-centric narrative

of nineteenth-century America would be profoundly uncertain—and to some extent has remained

so.11

Louisiana’s nebulous cosmopolitanism unsettled US observers at the turn of the nineteenth

century. Criticism of Louisiana society fixated on a mélange of typically “Gallic” features, including

10 On the concept of the “middle ground” generally see Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Studies of colonial Louisiana that stress contacts between cultures and populations include Bradley G. Bond, ed., French Colonial Louisiana and the Atlantic World (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2005); Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992); and Daniel H. Usner, Jr., Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley Before 1783 (Chapel Hill, NC: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History by the University of North Carolina Press, 1992). 11 See Daniel H. Usner, Jr., “Between Creoles and Yankees: The Discursive Representation of Colonial Louisiana in American History” in Bond, ed., French Colonial Louisiana and the Atlantic World, 1-21.


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Catholicism, political absolutism, economic mercantilism, and various forms of moral laxity. All of

these features were viewed as somehow incompatible with republican virtue. To be sure, many US

Americans identified these alien institutions and mores with the colony’s French legacy—a legacy

that has rightly come to dominate cultural representations of Louisiana. But it is important to note

the role that Louisiana’s perceived “Spanish-ness” played in US Americans’ views of the colony

during the early nineteenth century. In particular, US observers were suspicious of Spanish political

and legal institutions. Following a series of clashes in the 1790s between US settlers and the Spanish

colonial government over access to the Mississippi River and New Orleans, these institutions were

widely perceived as stiflingly bureaucratic and arbitrary.12 This attitude persisted into the period of

the Louisiana Purchase, when, despite the colony’s secret retrocession to France in 1800, Spain

continued to rule in all but name.13 Bertholdo de la Plata, the cartoonish antagonist of Liberty in

Louisiana, embodied a common perception of the moribund colonial bureaucracy in Louisiana and

Spanish America more broadly.

For US observers steeped in the conceptual language of republicanism and its corresponding

analysis of society, Louisiana’s government was deeply problematic. But the orientation of the

government toward the larger society of which it was a part remained an open and vexing question.

How deep and enduring was the stamp of Spanish rule? Would the Louisianans, freed from colonial

domination, adapt quickly and smoothly to the duties of republican citizenship? Turn-of-the century

US visitors to Louisiana were hardly hopeful in their answers to these questions. In the midst of a

12 On the 1790s conflict over the Mississippi watershed see two classic studies: Samuel Flagg Bemis, Pinckney’s Treaty: America’s Advantage from Europe’s Distress. Revised Ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1960); and Arthur P. Whitaker, The Mississippi Question, 1795-1803: A Study in Trade, Politics, and Diplomacy (New York: C. Appleton – Century Co., 1934).

13 In many parts of Louisiana, Spanish officials transferred their posts directly to the US Americans. See Sylvia L. Hilton, “Spanish Perspectives on the Louisiana Purchase: Imperial Responsibility and Diplomatic Realism” in Hoffman, ed., The Louisiana Purchase and its Peoples, 20.


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society that appeared to lack the social and moral ballast of republican societies like the United

States, the government of Spanish Louisiana encouraged moral lassitude and economic lethargy—in

a word, “mediocrity.” James Pitot, a French-born, naturalized US citizen living in New Orleans,

explained the role of the Spanish colonial government in this way:

The errors of the Spanish government in Louisiana are those that perpetuate the mediocrity of a country, but which individually do not bother its citizens. Such an administration restrains commerce, restricts population, and does not encourage agriculture; and, by this unchanging policy, as well as the mingling of Spanish families with French ones, it has hardened an indifference in the colony that scarcely suspects the possibility of a better existence.14

Pitot represents Louisiana as languishing under a government more infantilizing than despotic. That

the inhabitants of the colony are “peaceful and perhaps content” is actually of greater concern to

him than if they were ruthlessly oppressed; it demonstrates passive acceptance and internalization of

an arbitrary, irrational fate.15

For Pitot, a merchant trying to capitalize on the opportunities of a vast and fertile colony,

such an attitude was anathema. But the problem was bigger than that. One of the hallmarks of the

proper republican society was a heightened, almost paranoid sense of vigilance. Republics were seen

as extremely fragile entities, prone to decay from within as well as from without. As Drew McCoy

notes, the maintenance of a republic required the eternal watchfulness of “an extraordinary society 14 James Pitot, Observations on the Colony of Louisiana from 1796 to 1802. Translated from the French, with an Introduction, by Henry C. Pitot (Baton Rouge: Published for the Historic New Orleans Collection by the Louisiana State University Press, 1979), 7-8. Pitot’s account poses two problems that I would like to address here. First, though he was a US citizen, Pitot wrote his Observations for a French audience—particularly, as an inducement to French commercial development of Louisiana (from which Pitot, a merchant, stood to profit handsomely). Second, Pitot’s Observations were never published, though they do appear to have been circulated in manuscript in France. I justify inclusion of this document because of Pitot’s subsequent important role in the early territorial history of Louisiana as a city commissioner, Mayor of New Orleans, and judge, as well as because of the significant role which anti-Spanish feeling among French creoles played in the shaping of US attitudes in the region. On French anti-Spanish attitudes, see Peter J. Kastor, “‘They Are All Frenchmen’: Background and Nation in an Age of Transformation” in Peter J. Kastor and Fracois Weil, eds., Empires of the Imagination: Transatlantic Histories of the Louisiana Purchase (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2009), 161-62. 15 Ibid., 8.


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of distinctively moral people.”16 Secular virtues like work ethic, civic engagement, and autonomy

were thus matters of societal life and death to many in the early nineteenth-century United States.

US visitors to Louisiana at that time discovered a lethargic people, economically lax and politically

disengaged. Like Pitot, Amos Stoddard, a US Army officer who visited Louisiana in 1804, witnessed

an entrenched indifference among the Louisianans. “The inhabitants of the Spanish provinces,” he

wrote, “are extremely poor, though planted in fruitful soil, and in a world of precious metals.”17 For

Pitot and Stoddard, the constant legal and economic indignities of life under the Spanish had

engendered a crippling lack of initiative in the people of Louisiana.

Based on such criticism, one might assume that Spanish Louisiana was an economic

backwater. In fact, as one historian notes, “Louisiana flourished under Spain as it never had under

France.” In roughly four decades as a Spanish colony, the population of Louisiana more than

quadrupled, from 12,000 to around 50,000. In roughly the same period, the value of the colony’s

annual exports increased almost nine-fold, from 500,000 to 7,800,000 livres.18 The extent to which

the Spanish government was directly responsible for this growth is debatable; but, in any case, the

“errors” that Pitot so bitterly decries seem negligible. What regulatory measures the Spanish did

adopt—including orders in 1768 and 1778 that all shipping be routed through Spanish ports—were

widely flaunted and ultimately abandoned.19

In aggregate terms, Spanish Louisiana was a prosperous colony. Why, then, did Stoddard and

Pitot (who claimed that Spanish Louisiana had “stagnate[d] in mediocrity”) believe and argue

16 Drew McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (Chapel Hill, NC: Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture by the University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 5. 17 Amos Stoddard, Sketches, Historical and Descriptive, of Louisiana (Philadelphia: Mathew Carey, 1812), 12. 18 Arthur P. Whitaker, “The Commerce of Louisiana and the Floridas at the End of the Eighteenth Century” Hispanic American Historical Review, 8 (1928), 196-197. 19 Ibid., 191.


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otherwise?20 Personal grievances with the Spanish administration and a hopeful view of French

takeover certainly color Pitot’s account. But Stoddard’s and Pitot’s, criticism was also grounded in a

powerful set of assumptions about the necessary social and cultural conditions of commerce. Simply

put, the people of Louisiana did not look prosperous. For one thing, they were too lazy and fond of

entertaining to be good farmers and tradesmen. Stoddard noted that while the newly-arrived

“English Americans” were hard at work, the Louisianans would be “seated in their houses, or under

some cooling shade, amusing themselves with their pipes and tobacco.” Stoddard added that the

Louisianans were “not deficient in exertion” when pressed, but that they preferred not to strive.

“They enjoy what they have, and are perfectly contented with it.” 21 This quaint lack of

acquisitiveness, as well as alien notions of work ethic and leisure, convinced Stoddard and Pitot that

Spanish Louisiana was impoverished—whatever the colonial balance sheets said. In the eighteenth

and early nineteenth centuries, economics was as much a moral philosophy as an empirical science.

Thus, when Pitot visited the bustling harbor of New Orleans, which held over 100 ships at a time by

1800, all he could find to remark on was that “the pilots, all Spaniards by birth, and I venture to say

by character, are as slow as they are careless in performing their duties.”22

Pitot’s and Stoddard’s descriptions of creole indolence refer specifically to economic activity.

However, this fixation on indolence also had a political dimension. As McCoy has shown, US

Americans in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were deeply attuned to “the moral

dimension of economic life.” Proper republican government necessitated “an economic and social

order that would encourage the shaping of a virtuous citizenry.”23 For many US Americans, small-

scale agriculture was the bedrock of a properly republican economy and, thus, a republican society.

20 Pitot, Observations, 37. 21 Stoddard, Sketches, 310. 22 Whitaker, “The Commerce of Louisiana,” 197; Pitot, Observations, 99. 23 McCoy, The Elusive Republic, 7.


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But in Spanish Louisiana, Stoddard noted that the lack of an “agricultural spirit” among the people

had resulted in a low “energy of character.”24 The restriction of commerce had a similar moral effect

on the creoles. In describing Pensacola in West Florida, Pitot noted that the colony, once a

flourishing British post, had become “a hovel” under Spanish rule. “Why,” Pitot asked, “if

everything prospers under the control of an Englishman, does it all disintegrate under that of the

Spaniards?” The answer was that greater economic freedom under the English had created a climate

of civic engagement. For Pitot, “the slowness and indifference” that the Spanish brought to the

upkeep of Pensacola’s harbor and fortifications proved that “they never undertake [such tasks] for

the glory and welfare of the state.”25 In snuffing out self-interest in their colonies, the Spanish had,

at the same time, dampened important feelings of civic responsibility.

As US observers conceived it, the problem of indolence in Spanish Louisiana was existential.

Originating in the officious attitude of the government toward its people, it had spread throughout

the body politic, sapping activity at every level of society. For the novelist and journalist Charles

Brockden Brown, it was clear that such widespread “torpor and desolation” rendered Louisiana

indefensible, an “empty house, of which the [United States], whenever it is perfectly convenient,

may take possession.” The colony was especially susceptible to the predations of “hardy warriors of

the uppercountry” (American settlers in the Trans-Appalachian west) who might “fall down upon

her like lightning” and capture “her feeble garrisons, unsupported by her subjects.” For Brown, it

seemed only a matter of time before a more energetic and virtuous people swept aside the moribund

24 Stoddard, Sketches, 130. 25 Pitot, Observations, 91-92.


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creole society and government of Lousiana, deposing once and for all the “crazy old lord” of

Spanish rule.26

A weak society like Spanish Louisiana faced just as many dangers from within as from

without. Along with indolence, the Spanish had instilled in the Louisianans an unhealthy posture of

deference toward political and religious authority. Amos Stoddard noted warily that the Louisianans

showed “extreme deference…to men in power, particularly to those of the military profession,” and

that they “yield without a murmur to the official dictates of their superiors.” Stoddard even

understood Louisiana’s ever-present corruption as driven less by “obsequious motives, or the

expectation of a pecuniary reward” than by “habitual respect.”27 (James Pitot, who also noted the

colony’s corruption, was less charitable).28 Louisiana’s culture of deference allowed not only the

government, but also the Catholic Church to dominate society. “It is hardly necessary to add,”

Stoddard wrote in a description of the creoles, “that [they] are obstinately attached to the Roman

catholic religion.”29 The Spanish government even encouraged this devotion in order to minimize

the number of competing interests within society. “They were of the opinion,” Stoddard wrote,

“that a legalized religion…was of more political advantage to the state, than the numerous divisions

in society, occasioned by as many modes of faith.”30 This collusion of church and state ensured the

continuing dominance of each and the persistence of autocracy—instead of the plural, balanced

societal model that republicans advocated. The result was a people bound together by docility and

26 Charles Brockden Brown, An Address to the Government of the United States on the Cession of Louisiana to the French; and of the Late Breach of Treaty by the Spaniards (Philadelphia: John Conrad & Co., 1803), 18. 27 Stoddard, Sketches, 327. 28 Pitot, Observations, 10. 29 Stoddard, Sketches, 330. 30 Ibid., 308.


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coercion. “The manners of all the Creoles sufficiently indicate,” Stoddard wrote, “that they have

been accustomed to a government very different from our own.”31

Perhaps no aspect of Louisiana society was seen as more definitively “Spanish” than the laws

and norms governing race relations. Many US Americans viewed Louisiana (and Spanish America

more broadly) as possessing a lax racial regime, one that sheltered US runaways, granted rights to

slaves and free gens de couleur, and tolerated indecent relationships between whites and blacks.32 Amos

Stoddard observed that in Louisiana “the Spaniards carry their impure connexions to a much greater

extent than any other description of inhabitants,” displaying a particular preference for the “fat black

wench.” “It is not easy to account for this depravity of taste,” Stoddard noted with a shudder.33

Interracial sex was a recurring, compulsively reiterated feature of eighteenth and nineteenth-century

accounts of Spanish and French America—including Louisiana. Whatever sexual anxieties this

fixation on “impure connexions” signals, the phenomenon also encapsulates—at its most lurid and

sensational—a deeper uncertainty about the fluidity of creole societies. This fluidity greatly unnerved

Pitot, who lamented the “hundreds of licensed taverns” in New Orleans that catered to both whites

and blacks and the weekly “public ball” where gens de couleur mingled openly with slaves.

Disturbingly, “the government is aware of and permits all of that.”34

For Pitot, a lax racial regime in which blacks were “less subject to authority and more able to

move around without supervision” encouraged slaves to become more autonomous and thus more

difficult to master. Unrestricted mixing with whites and free people of color enabled slaves “to learn

the ways of a corruption which they impart to one another by degrees.” Pitot’s fear—the fear of

31 Ibid., 327. 32 On Spanish colonial law concerning blacks see Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana, 304 .For a sense of the US view of race relations in Spanish America see Jedidiah Morse, The American Universal Geography or A View of the Present State of All the Kingdoms, States, and Colonies. 6th ed. (Boston: Published by Thomas and Andrews, 1812). 33 Stoddard, Sketches, 328. 34 Pitot, Observations, 29-30.


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many in the wake of the Haitian Revolution of the 1790s—was that such unrestricted movement

and intellectual “corruption” would give slaves a sense of collective identity and purpose, making

them a potent force in Louisiana society. The achievement of a stable republican society necessitated

that non-white people be totally excluded from the arenas of formal and informal power. As long as

the Spanish government allotted some rights to free people of color and cast a blind eye on the

delinquencies of the bondsmen, “the anxious owner lives in a state of war with his slaves.”35

II.

To US observers steeped in republican principles, Spanish Louisiana looked like a failed

society on nearly every front. As the initial excitement of the Purchase settled and legislators began

to debate a course of action for bringing the new territory into the union, uncertainty about the

possibility of republican government in Louisiana prevailed. Key to this concern was a passage of

Article III of the Louisiana Purchase Treaty stipulating that “inhabitants of the ceded territory” be

“admitted as soon as possible, according to the principles of the federal constitution, to the

enjoyment of all the rights, advantages, and immunities of citizens of the United States.” 36

Federalists and Republicans alike questioned the wisdom of suddenly granting citizenship and

representation to the “inhabitants” (a dangerously broad category) of the territory. Federalist

Timothy Pickering of Massachusetts contended that the people of Louisiana were “incapable of

performing the duties or enjoying the blessings of a free government” and, moreover, “too ignorant

35 Ibid. The disfranchisement of the gens de couleur was among the first acts of the new US territorial government in Louisiana. See Kastor, The Nation’s Crucible, 82. In one of his footnotes to a translation of C.-F. Volney’s A View of the Soil and Climate of the United States of America (Philadelphia: J. Conrad & Co., 1804), Charles Brockden Brown pointedly remarks that “the Spanish code is more lenient and benignant towards the negroes, than the colonial system of any other nation” but that this leniency “did not prevent an insurrection in Lower Louisiana in 1791” (343). 36 Kastor, The Nation’s Crucible, 43.


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to elect suitable men.”37 Eustis House, also of Massachusetts, considered the Louisianans “totally

unqualified” for republican citizenship. “I am one of those who believe that the principles of civil

liberty cannot suddenly be engrafted on a people,” he intoned, adding that he considered Louisiana

as in “nearly the same relation to us as if they were a conquered territory”—and thus without any

rights at all.38 Even Republican John Lucas of Pennsylvania—like James Pitot, a French-born,

naturalized US citizen—doubted whether “a people thus inured to despotism were prepared on a

sudden to receive the principles of our Government.”39

The Louisiana Purchase forced American thinkers to contemplate the viability of

republicanism in societies where the very rudiments of “free government” and “civil liberty” seemed

lacking. In the wake of the Purchase, Louisiana’s colonial government was gradually dismantled,

along with much (though certainly not all) of the French and Spanish legal codes. However, as many

politicians argued, this act alone was insufficient to turn the people of Louisiana into good

republicans. The problem, as John Lucas identified it, was that the Louisianans had become “inured

to despotism.” Raised for several generations under the arbitrary and coercive rule of the French and

Spanish, the people of Louisiana were unlikely to lose their resulting lethargy and deference

overnight. The absolute pessimism of Federalists like Timothy Pickering perhaps signaled deeper

concerns about the Louisianans. Not only custom, but deep-seated culture, might be to blame for

the creoles’ anti-republican tendencies. The racially-tinged language of Romantic nationalism was as

yet unknown in the United States, but inchoate forms of cultural essentialism suggested that “free

37 Ibid., 48. 38 Everett Somerville Brown, The Constitutional History of the Louisiana Purchase. University of California Publications in History, Vol. X. (Berkeley, CA: 1920), 136. 39 Kastor, The Nation’s Crucible, 46. Privately, James Madison admitted similar doubts to one of the negotiators of the Louisiana Purchase Treaty, Robert Livingston. See Brown, Constitutional History, 100.


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government” and “civil liberty” were unique English endowments.40 Conversely, social hierarchy

and political autocracy were sometimes thought to be fundamental features of French and Spanish

culture.41 Bestowing a republican government on a people who did not have—and might never

acquire—the necessary qualities of vigilance and autonomy seemed to many American thinkers like a

fool’s errand.

Congressmen worried not only about Louisianans’ amenability to republican rule, but also

about the reciprocal effect their incorporation might have on the national political culture. As early

as 1787, Thomas Jefferson had identified the changing demographic makeup of the United States as

a potential source of political instability. In reference to future immigration from Europe, Jefferson

noted that “they will bring with them the principles of the governments they leave, imbibed in their

early youth” and consequently “warp and bias” the direction of US politics. The result would be a

“heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass.”42 The Louisiana Purchase framed this demographic

problem in a different, but no less critical way. The Louisianans would enter the union not as

dispersed immigrants, but en masse, with cultures and communities tenaciously intact. It was not

simply the prospect of assimilating a different political culture that worried US Americans; rather,

Louisiana posed the trickier problem of assimilating an organic cultural whole, each facet of which

seemed to affirm anti-republican political tendencies.43

40 See Colin Kidd, British Identities Before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World 1600-1800 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 75-122. 41 On US views of Spanish culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries see Harry Bernstein, Origins of Inter-American Interest, 1700-1812 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1945); and Richard L. Kagan, ed., Spain in America: The Origins of Hispanism in the United States (Urbana: The University of Illinois Press, 2002). 42 Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, in Franklin, ed., The Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 83. 43 Peter J. Kastor’s article “An Identity by Any Other Name: Attachments in an Age of Expansion,” in Paul E. Hoffman, ed., The Louisiana Purchase and its Peoples: Perspectives from the New Orleans Conference (Lafayette, LA: Louisiana Historical Association and Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, 2004) identifies the “difference” which troubled many, but asserts that differences in “political culture” mattered more to US Americans than differences in language, religion, etc. I think it is evident that all of these differences are


17

The republican vision was holistic, taking into account not simply politics but “political

economy” in the most capacious sense of the term. Economic life, social and religious custom,

language: anything that bore on questions of power and allegiance was germane. Indeed, Jefferson

recognized that political life was inextricable from a wider socio-cultural context. In a letter to

Horatio Gates he observed that the introduction of US laws to Louisiana “cannot be done but by

amalgamating the people with such a body of Americans as may take the lead in legislation &

government.”44 US Americans would direct the transition to republican society while also providing

a ready example of republican mores. As if by osmosis, Louisiana’s distinctiveness would be

mitigated, and a people forged who were not only alike in a political sense, but also socially and

culturally. John Quincy Adams expressed this vision of organic unity in an early figuration of

“manifest destiny”: “The whole continent of North America appears to be destined by Divine

Providence to be peopled by one nation, speaking one language, professing one system of religious

and political principles, and accustomed to one general tenor of social usages and customs.”45

Neither the interests of current US Americans nor those of the Louisianans would be served

by a simple change in government. Creole culture would need to be replaced, root and branch.

Representative Samuel Mitchill of New York provided the best encapsulation of this project of

comprehensive “Americanization” in Louisiana. In his view, the Louisianans would be made to

serve “an apprenticeship to liberty,” passing from “the childhood of republicanism through the

improving period of youth, and arrive at the mature experience of manhood.”46 Mitchill’s

educational conceit is telling; it was expected that Louisianans would be socialized into

republicanism at the same time that they were naturalized into US citizenship. The latter process was inextricably linked—that language and religion, by inculcating and encouraging political habits, form an essential part of “political culture.” 44 Jefferson to Horatio Gates, July 11, 1803 in Franklin, ed., The Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 299. 45 Brown, Constitutional History, 42. 46 Ibid., 72.


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initiated with the passage of a comprehensive governance bill in March, 1804. The bill split

Louisiana into upper and lower territories: the District of Louisiana (Upper Louisiana) came under

the authority of the Governor of the Indiana Territory, while the Territory of Orleans (Lower

Louisiana) was to be overseen by a governor, legislative council, and judiciary—all to be appointed

by the President.47 The bill marked an obvious concession to the argument that the Louisianans

were incapable of responsibly governing themselves.

William C.C. Claiborne, who had directed the transfer of power in Louisiana as governor of

the Mississippi Territory, was named governor of the new Territory of Orleans. Alongside legal

naturalization, Claiborne pursued with gusto a process of cultural education that he explained in his

very first speech to the people of Louisiana:

Among your first duties you should cultivate with assiduity among yourselves the advancement of Political information; you should guide the rising generation in the paths of republican economy and virtue; you should encourage Literature, for without the advantages of education, your descendants will be unable sufficiently to appreciate the intrinsic worth of the Government transmitted to them.48

Publically, Claiborne encouraged his new constituents to educate themselves in the ways of

republican citizenship. Privately, Claiborne almost immediately conceded the woeful and perhaps

intractable state of the Louisianan people. “The principles of popular government are utterly beyond

their comprehension,” he wrote to Secretary of State Madison.49 “Until therefore the progress of

information shall in some degree remove that mental darkness which at present unhappily

47 Kastor, The Nation’s Crucible, 51. 48 William C.C. Claiborne, “Address, December 20, 1803” in Dunbar Rowland, ed., Official Letter Books of W.C.C. Claiborne, 1801-1806. 6 vols. (Jackson, MI: State Department of Archives and History, 1917), I, 310. 49 Claiborne to James Madison, January 2, 1804 in Rowland, ed., Official Letter Books, I, 328.


19

prevails…I do fear that a representative Government in Louisiana, would be a dangerous

experiment.”50

The irony of the new Louisiana territorial bill—that it established the same kind of distant,

autocratic government that the French and Spanish had used—did not go unremarked. John Quincy

Adams, an unapologetic advocate of US expansion, was nevertheless unnerved by the precedent set

in the Louisiana governance bill. “This is a colonial system of government,” he noted. Colonialism

was not only a departure from the practice outlined in legislation like the Northwest Ordinance

(1787); it was potentially a break with the very foundations of American federalism. “To pass this

bill is an encroachment on their rights—it’s a commencement of assured power.”51 In Adams’ view,

to deny Louisianans the right to enact their own laws and select their own politicians was to

perpetuate their anti-republican failings, consigning them indefinitely to political “childhood.”

Colonial government in Louisiana threatened to embed a separate, intractable population in the

heart of a growing country, compromising his vision of a socially and culturally unified American

empire.

Obviously, the governance bill also impacted the people of Louisiana themselves. Adams’

concerns were echoed and extended in the testimony of a Louisiana delegation that traveled to

Washington D.C. in December, 1804 to protest the governance bill. The Louisianans pointedly cast

their appeal in the language of the American Revolution:

Taxation without representation, an obligation to obey laws without any voice in their formation, the undue influence of the executive…[these] formed, we believe, very important articles in the list of grievances complained by the United States, at the commencement of their glorious contest for freedom.52

50 Claiborne to James Madison, January 10, 1804 in Rowland, ed., Official Letter Books, I, 329. 51 Brown, Constitutional History, 130-31. 52 Ibid., 157-58.


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The Louisianans further noted that, during the Revolutionary period, “rights” had been believed to

be “so plain…as to be understood by the weakest understanding.” In a personal appeal to President

Jefferson as the author of the Declaration of Independence, they asserted that their rights (like those

of the rebellious American colonists) were fundamental and congenital—“not capable of alienation.”

The Louisianans’ testimony highlighted an apparent discrepancy in Americans’ concept of rights, a

gulf between the rhetoric of universal freedom and the reality of narrow, ascriptive enjoyment. “Do

political axioms on the Atlantic,” they asked, “become problems when transferred to the shores of

the Mississippi?”53 For a colony that included many slaves and free blacks who had enjoyed some

rights under French and Spanish rule, it is only fitting that the Louisianans had quickly discovered

the oldest and most painful of America’s many historical contradictions.54

III.

In the first years of the nineteenth century, Louisiana tested the limits of republicanism. US

visitors to Louisiana, fluent in the republican conceptual language of virtue and vice, of autonomy

and dependence, were led to consider the social and cultural contours of these ideas in an alien

environment. Following the 1803 Purchase, American politicians familiar with republican judgments

of Louisianan weighed the viability of free government in a society so evidently unsuited to sustain

it. With the passage of a governance bill, some pondered the meaning of an American foray into

“colonial” government, and what this heralded for the future of an “empire of liberty” premised on

53 Ibid. 54 The classic study of the contradiction between American political ideals and the practice of slavery is Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (W.W. Norton & Company, 1975). For an illuminating revision, see Francois Furstenberg, “Beyond Freedom and Slavery: Autonomy, Virtue, and Resistance in Early American Political Discourse” The Journal of American History Vol. 89 (2003): 1295-1330.


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cultural homogeneity. The Louisianans themselves faced up to the reality that the blessings of

republicanism could be championed and curtailed in almost the same breath.

But the problem of Louisiana faded with time. Orleans Territory was admitted to the union

as the state of Louisiana in 1812 with little of the debate that had marked the territorial organization

eight years before. The Battle of New Orleans in 1815 demonstrated that the Louisiana creoles

(including a substantial number of gens de couleur and enslaved Africans) were willing to fight for the

United States and its system of government.55 Commentators on Louisiana continued to point to its

marked social and cultural difference, but this difference had largely ceased to be an object of

republican anxiety. None other than Governor William C.C. Claiborne, who had feared that

“representative government” in Louisiana would be a “dangerous experiment,” ultimately embraced

Louisiana and its people by marrying a creole woman and conducting government business in

French. Upon his death in 1817, Claiborne was buried in a Catholic cemetery.56 In practice,

republican government and creole culture proved to be more reconcilable than many Americans had

feared.

If Louisiana had ceased to be a problem, this does not mean that the language of

republicanism disappeared from the discourses of cultural and national difference that Americans

employed in the early nineteenth century. Indeed, as the United States continued to assume an

expansive role on the North American continent and in the Western Hemisphere more broadly,

republicanism and its corresponding analysis of society continued to shape American attitudes and

policies. To take only one example, US diplomats writing of Spanish America in the 1810s and

55 On the Battle of New Orleans see Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 8-17. 56 Surprisingly little has been written about the bicultural life of William C.C. Claiborne. See Joseph T. Hatfield, William Claiborne: Jeffersonian Centurion in the American Southwest (Lafayette: University of Southwest Louisiana Press, 1976).


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1820s echoed many of the same observations and concerns about colonial society that had circulated

with the Louisiana Purchase. They wrote of a people deeply marked by “hebetating political and

ecclesiastical institutions,”57 without “any prospect [of] establishing free or liberal institutions of

government.”58 Others saw cause for optimism. “It is often said: those People are not fit for a

Government like that of the United States….Yet a very large majority, are certainly fit for a pure

republican government.”59 Taking a wider cultural sample, we find nineteenth-century American

fiction, historiography, and travel writing about creole societies shot through with republican ideas

and topoi—and punctuated by republican judgments.60 More work needs to be done to show how

some major nineteenth-century hemispheric developments—from the formulation of the Monroe

Doctrine, to the recognition of independent nations in Spanish American, to the US-Mexican War—

were framed in cultural terms by the language of republicanism.

57 Theodorick Bland to John Quincy Adams, November 2, 1818 in Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States Concerning the Independence of the Latin-American Nations, ed. William R. Manning. 3 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1925-26), I, 415. 58 John Quincy Adams to Henry Clay, 1821 in Samuel Flagg Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Foundations of American Foreign Policy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949), 354. 59 W.G.D. Worthington to John Quincy Adams, July 4, 1818 in Diplomatic Correspondence, I, 935. 60 One possible direction for further study is the relation between the republican ethic of agricultural individualism and initiative and emerging discourses of “development.” See Mary Louise Pratt’s discussion of the discourse of “neglect” in British writings on Spanish America in Imperial Eyes, 144-49; and Barbara Weinstein, “Presidential Address: Developing Inequality” The American Historical Review 113 (2008), 1-18.


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Causes And Conditions Of Famine Leading Up To 1984

Sarah Frostenson

From Ethiopia’s earliest written history, famine has played an active part in Ethiopia’s

landscape. Historian Richard Pankhurst dates the earliest recorded famine in Ethiopia back to the

eighth century in the Masha Senkesar, a religious chronicle on the lives of saints.61 The Masha Senkesar

describes the origins of the famine in terms of divine retribution that resulted from men having gone

astray in their religious faith: “Because of this, great tribulation hath come upon our land and all our

men are dying of the plague, and our beasts and cattle have perished, and God hath restrained the

heavens so that they cannot rain upon our land.”62 This kind of deterministic, religious acceptance of

famine, however, has shaped the Ethiopian consciousness and acceptance of famine for generations.

The most devastating famine in Ethiopia’s history prior to the famine of ’84 was the “Great

Ethiopian Famine,” which lasted from 1888-1892 and was referred to as Kefu Qan, or Evil Days, in

Amharic. The “Great Ethiopian Famine” resulted from an outbreak of rinderpest triggered by

Italian importation of infected cattle through the port of Massawa,63 but the true origins of the

famine lay deeper in the social and political fabric of the country. Intermittent wars of conquest and

internal colonization in the past century had reduced the peasantry to the very edge of subsistence.

The “Great Ethiopian Famine” affected nearly every corner of the empire and was afterwards used

as a metric to gauge the severity of famines and droughts in Ethiopia.

However, Ethiopia has not always been a place of famine. Famines on the scale of the

“Great Famine” were rare and did not occur frequently. In fact, during World War II, Ethiopia

61 Richard Pankhurst, The History of Famine and Epidemics in Ethiopia (Addis Ababa, Ethiopia: Relief and Rehabilitation Commission, 1985), 9. 62 Ibid, 11. 63 Bahru Zewde, A History of Modern Ethiopia: 1855-1974 (Addis Ababa, Ethiopia: Addis Ababa UP, 1992), 71-72.


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considered itself the breadbasket of the Middle East, as Ethiopia exported food to the Middle East

at a time when the Middle East faced severe drought. This garnered Ethiopia international

recognition and earned Ethiopia an invitation to the International Conference of Food and

Agriculture convened by President Roosevelt at Hot Springs, Virginia, in May 1943. This period

marked an optimistic time in Ethiopia’s agricultural development, as Ethiopia was yet to experience

the effects of famine that would later result from its unjust land tenure policies.

Between 1943 and 1958, Haile Selassie invested heavily in the development of modern

agriculture in Ethiopia with the support of U.S. developmental aid through the establishment of

agricultural colleges, crop research stations and high-performing seed varietals, but Ethiopia’s

reputation as a country of agricultural surplus did not last long. Between the 1956 Suez Crisis, which

prevented Ethiopia from exporting to its overseas markets in the Middle East, and the 1959

Ethiopian famine, which further strained national tensions amidst mismanaged relief efforts in the

politically charged regions of the Ogaden, Tigray and Eritrea, Ethiopia lost its status as a player in

the global food market. Instead, Ethiopia became a recipient of food aid, and is today the world’s

largest recipient of food aid with ninety-seven percent of its government’s budget attributed to

foreign aid.64

The nature of famine in Ethiopia has evolved over the years from isolated instances of acute

hunger to extended periods of chronic hunger that vary in severity with time. Famine, once a

catastrophic event in Ethiopia, has become increasingly commonplace to the point that the word

“famine” is no longer useful in describing Ethiopia’s food shortages, but rather, misleading. From

the Imperial government policies of Haile Selassie to the land reforms of the Derg in 1975 and the

64 Abebe Gellaw, “Ethiopia, where food aid sustains hunger.” Ethiomedia.com 23 July 2010. <http://www.ethiomedia.com/absolute/3541.html> and Dambisa Moyo, Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and How There is a Better Way for Africa (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), 72.

http://www.ethiomedia.com/absolute/3541.html


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Red Terror and rebel movements in the Ogaden, Tigray and Eritrea, this chapter tells the story of

how famine in Ethiopia has led to chronic food insecurity in a span of just fifty years.

The Fall of the Last Emperor of Ethiopia and the Hidden Famine

Haile Selassie, born Tafari Makonnen, acted as Ethiopia’s regent from 1916 to 1930 and

Emperor of Ethiopia from 1930 to 1974. Haile Selassie was the last Emperor of Ethiopia, an iconic

ruler whose cultural and political significance raised Ethiopia’s own prominence in the eyes of the

world. In his lifetime, Haile Selassie witnessed the emergence of the modern Ethiopian state in the

1940s at a time when Ethiopia was highly respected by the international community in the boom of

the post-WWII era. But Ethiopia’s acclaim in the international community proved short-lived.

Recurring famine in 1965 and 1966 coupled with feudalistic land tenure policies seriously inhibited

agricultural production and growth and led to worsening conditions in Ethiopia, despite Haile

Selassie’s strident push for the development of modern agriculture. Unable to satisfactorily address

the underlying problems of agricultural development, Haile Selassie watched Ethiopia gradually lose

its standing in the international community until he was overthrown by the Derg in 1974. The aim

of Haile Selassie’s reign had been to modernize and develop Ethiopia through a strengthened

agricultural economy, but Haile Selassie’s vision of modernization for Ethiopia was never seen to

completion.

Haile Selassie first began to prioritize agricultural development in Ethiopia when famine

struck areas of the Middle East in 1940. At the time, Ethiopia was in a position to provide food

surpluses to the Middle East. Thus, Ethiopia worked with the Allied powers of WWII and the

Middle East Supply Center (MESC) to become an area of major food production for the Middle


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East and an integral player in the growing global food economy.65 Aware of Ethiopia’s potential to

corner the Middle Eastern market and act as its main supplier of food, Haile Selassie began to

approach his larger goals of modernization and development for Ethiopia by pushing for investment

in Ethiopia’s agricultural development.

Establishing the Ethiopian National Corporation (ENC) in 1943 to consolidate Ethiopia’s

growing market for food exports, Haile Selassie effectively centralized all agricultural production in

Ethiopia under the ENC, which enabled Ethiopia to have greater leverage as a competitor in the

global food market. In addition, the successful management and operation of the ENC earned Haile

Selassie and Ethiopia international recognition for their efforts in alleviating the food crisis in the

Middle East.66 This period of agricultural production marked a pivotal moment in Ethiopia’s history,

as it not only gave Haile Selassie direction in his development goals for Ethiopia, but secured

increased developmental support from the United States and Great Britain as well.

In 1943, President Roosevelt invited Ethiopia to participate in the International Conference

of Food and Agriculture held in Hot Springs, Virginia, as he was impressed by Ethiopia’s agricultural

commitment to the Middle East. Deeply honored by Roosevelt’s notice of Ethiopia’s involvement,

Haile Selassie regarded the conference as an opportunity to request increased financial support from

the U.S. in order to expedite agricultural development in Ethiopia. Therefore, Emperor Selassie sent

one of his most trusted representatives to the conference, Vice Minister Yilma Deressa, instructing

him to ask for an increased commitment from the U.S. Deressa asked the United States to send an

agricultural mission to train Ethiopians in the use of agricultural machinery as there were “more than

eight hundred tractors and other associated agricultural machines” that had been left behind by the

Italians, and if put to good use, he was sure could increase Ethiopia’s “productive capacity at least

65 Getnet Bekele, “Food Matters,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 42.1 (2009), 33-34. 66 Ibid, 34-35.


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ten fold.”67 Roosevelt received Yilma’s requests positively, endorsing Haile Selassie’s vision of

development in Ethiopia through increased agricultural development.68 The International

Conference of Food and Agriculture cemented a working relationship between Ethiopia and the

U.S., though the dynamics of that relationship would soon change as a result of Cold War politics.

The highest point in Roosevelt and Haile Selassie’s relationship was at Bitter Lake, Egypt in

1945, when the two leaders met in person to discuss a plan for Ethiopia’s development. To Haile

Selassie the trip symbolized Ethiopia’s potential to have an active role in the global food

marketplace, but unfortunately, Roosevelt died two months later and, with his passing, Haile Selassie

lost one of his greatest allies in sustaining a U.S. commitment to agricultural development in

Ethiopia. Haile Selassie, however, remained hopeful that Roosevelt’s legacies of international

development would continue despite his death, and at first it seemed possible.

Haile Selassie secured the support of the Food Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the

United Nations in 1947, established the Agricultural Bank in 1945, the Ministry of Agriculture in

1949, and the Imperial Ethiopian College of Agriculture and Mechanical Arts in 1954.69 By building

up Ethiopia’s internal institutions and government agencies, Haile Selassie had tried to increase

Ethiopia’s agricultural productivity by approaching agricultural development from an infrastructural

level. However, in doing this, Haile Selassie failed to address the larger issue of agrarian land reform

in Ethiopia, which in turn, led to popular uprisings against the Emperor in the 1960s, and ultimately

his dethronement in 1974.

Land tenure in Ethiopia under Haile Selassie was concentrated under the government, and

operated on the basis of political allegiance to the crown in exchange for land. This, in turn,

produced a wealthy, landed elite with a deep-seated interest in maintaining traditional land tenure

67 Ibid, 36. 68 Ibid, 36-37. 69 Ibid, 38-41.


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practices. At the same time, this essentially feudal system of land tenure produced significant

inequalities. Land tenure in Ethiopia created a deeply impoverished peasantry limited to subsistence

cultivation practices because of unequal access to land.70 These systematized injustices made Haile

Selassie’s policies of modernized agriculture impossible, as real agricultural development could not

take place in a system that disadvantaged so many people. Despite the cost of improved agricultural

practices that could have led to modernization and development in Ethiopia as Haile Selassie had

envisioned, real reform of the land tenure system did not take place.

Haile Selassie benefitted too greatly from the land tenure system to change its structure, and

as Dr. John Cohen, who served as a legal adviser to the Ethiopian government from 1964 to 1966

noted, there seemed to be little incentive for any new position of leadership in Ethiopia to want to

change the current land tenure system:

…because of the extensive amount of land held by the government and the current policy of the crown to grant this land to military and bureaucratic personnel, a very complex set of vested interested in traditional land tenure and agrarian systems has developed, which leads toward a strong tendency on the part of any future leadership to avoid formulation of any land tenure policies or reforms that would undermine these vested interests.71

Thus, even after the fall of Haile Selassie in 1974 and the Derg’s Land Reform Proclamation of

1975, real change to the land tenure system in Ethiopia did not take place, and still has not taken

place, now more than thirty-five years after 1975. The continuation of poor land tenure policies in

Ethiopia has led to increasingly marginalized land, environmental degradation and widespread

chronic food insecurity within Ethiopia.

After the Suez Crisis in 1956, which suddenly cut Ethiopia off from its food export market

in the Middle East, Ethiopia never regained its place in the international food market nor its 70 For more on the structure of land tenure in Ethiopia, see Allan Hoben Land Tenure Among the Amhara of Ethiopia: the dynamics of cognatic descent (Chicago and London, 1973) and John Markakis, Ethiopia: Anatomy of a traditional polity (Oxford, 1974). 71 John Cohen, “Ethiopia After Haile Selassie: The Government Land Factor,” African Affairs 72.289 (October 1973), 366.


29

reputation as the “bread basket of the Middle East.” The famine of 1958 in Ethiopia—the first of its

kind in the postwar period—further deteriorated Ethiopia’s role in the global food economy and

signaled an increasing recurrence of famine in Ethiopia with two more famines striking Wollo in

1965 and 1966.72 This period of Haile Selassie’s reign marked a critical juncture in Ethiopia’s history,

as two schools of thought emerged on the issue of how Ethiopia should address agricultural

development.

The first school of thought comprised modernist intellectuals and bureaucrats who

advocated for the institutional development of agriculture in Ethiopia. This was the school of

thought to which Haile Selassie subscribed. This school of thought, however, marginalized small-

scale agriculture and farmers in Ethiopia by refusing to substantially reform land tenure policies,

despite the frequency with which new reform policies were introduced. In a span of less than twenty

years, Haile Selassie developed three separate five-year development plans to address agricultural

development and reform in Ethiopia, announcing his first development plan in 1956.

The first of Haile Selassie’s five-year plans emphasized agricultural development, but only

from the perspective of technological improvements and the organization of an agricultural

extension service. The question of land reform received minimal attention. The second of Haile

Selassie’s five-year plans also proved unsuccessful in addressing the question of land reform, and by

the time Haile Selassie had announced his third five-year plan in 1968, he had abandoned any

attempt at improving land tenure policy, advocating instead for agrarian development through large-

scale commercial farm sand export-driven crops.73 From 1953 to 1961, Ethiopia had received $84.4

million in U.S. economic assistance, yet Haile Selassie’s inability to adequately address the issue of

land reform in his development plans led to growing discontent in the Ethiopian populace and a

72 De Waal, Evil Days, 56-58. 73 Harrison Dunning, “Land Reform in Ethiopia: a case study in non-development,” U.C.L.A. Law Review, 2 (1970), 278-285.


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new school of thought that approached agricultural development and reform from a Marxist

perspective.74

In 1960, Haile Selassie’s Imperial Guard staged an unsuccessful coup as mounting

opposition from Ethiopia’s disillusioned youth and young intelligentsia grew, and by 1965, the

revolutionary doctrine of “Land to the Tiller” had been adopted as their slogan in their push for

agrarian land reform. It was university students, disillusioned with Western imperialism and Haile

Selassie’s brand of agricultural development, that were at the forefront of the agrarian land reform

movement. The song, Ethiopia Tikdem, or “Ethiopia First,” a popular rallying song and slogan of the

Ethiopian Revolution, extols the achievements of 60,000 student campaigners for land reform in its

lines: “In districts, sub-districts and villages,/The students have said ‘Halt!’ to ignorance!/The

student campaigners, the soldier our defender,”75 as it was university students, more than anyone

else, who led the charge for land reform in Ethiopia.

Through the Development Through Cooperation Campaign, in Amharic, zemecha, 60,000

students from the university and high schools were sent out into the rural areas to “educate the

peasants and explain the benefits of the Revolution.”76 The success of the student movement,

however, would soon experience dramatic disillusion under the brutal centralization of the Derg’s

power in ’76, which silenced student movements of opposition through state-organized mass

murder as part of the Red Terror campaign.

The student movement both inside Ethiopia and abroad was tightly organized and incredibly

vocal. More than just creating catchy slogans, students actively opposed Western imperialism,

74 Paul Henze, The United States and the Horn of Africa: History and Current Challenge, prepared for a conference organized by the International Institute of Strategic Studies (London) and Center for Political Research and Studies of the University of Cairo. (Cairo, May of 1990). Institute of Ethiopian Studies, Addis Ababa, 9; Getnet Bekele, “Food Matters,” 41-45. 75 Aleme Eskete, Songs of the Ethiopian Revolution (Addis Ababa, Ethiopia: Ministry of Culture, 1979), 38. 76 Dawit Giorgis’s first assignment with the new government was to organize the zemecha campaign, see Red Tears, 17.


31

demanded land reform, called for an end to feudalism, insisted on safeguarding democratic rights,

and advocated the overthrow of the Emperor. In an interview I conducted with Dr. Kebede Asrat,

the former Minister of the Ministry of Agriculture during the famine of ’84, he said that he, too, was

initially a student activist in support of the movement because “the proclamation signaled a new

beginning for farmers.” 77 However, Dr. Asrat quickly grew disillusioned with the Derg, as he found

their socialist policies actually curbed the productivity of farmers. Nevertheless, Dr. Asrat got his

position as Minister of the Ministry of Agriculture through an appointment from the Derg.

Dr. Asrat had studied agriculture in college, but ultimately, he had no choice in deciding his

profession. The Derg decided for him. Dr. Asrat was quick to assure me in our interview, however,

that he had not been a member of the Derg. Rather, the Derg deciding what kind of job a recently

graduated university student had was standard protocol at the time.78 The Derg’s quest for control

was pervasive and far-reaching, particularly in regards to matters of land reform and agrarian

development, as with the Land Reform Proclamation of 1975, the Derg set out to radically redefine

how landownership worked in Ethiopia.

Dawit Giorgis, a former military officer of the Imperial Ethiopian army, eleven-year member

of the Derg, and Head Commissioner of the Relief and Rehabilitation Commission (RRC) during

the ’84 famine, recounted his own experience with the student led movements in his memoir, Red

Tears, “I learned a lot from the movement, and my ideas about reform began to change. When I

graduated with a law degree, my final thesis on land reform reflected the radicalism I had absorbed

from the university climate: in it I called for an end to feudalism and total nationalization of land.”79

Even though Dawit did not personally participate in the student movements, as his background in

the Imperial Army prevented him from taking part, he provides a good indication of the effect

77 Dr. Kebede Asrat, interview by Sarah Frostenson, August 31, 2010, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. 78 Ibid. 79 Dawit Giorgis, Red Tears, 9.


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student movements had in pushing agrarian reform in Ethiopia. Sold on the tenets of Marxism,

students embraced Marxism and class struggle as an end to feudalism and a means of progressive

land reform.

By 1974 the imperial government of Haile Selassie had outlived its time. In the last decade of

imperial rule, two-thirds of Ethiopia’s capital expenditure was financed by foreign sources and the

majority of Ethiopia’s rural population lived as subsistent farmers mired in a land tenure policy that

stymied agricultural growth. Faced with a rural economy unable to support an increase in agricultural

exports and an urban uprising in Addis Ababa led by disillusioned University students and a

disgruntled labor force, Haile Selassie failed in making his dream of modernity a reality for Ethiopia.

Instead, Ethiopia lay on the verge of a revolution that renounced the Western and capitalist

tendencies of the old regime, uniting itself with the socialist and communist leanings of the Soviet

Union in an atmosphere fraught with Cold War tensions. It was the revelation of “The Hidden

Famine,” however, that proved the downfall of Haile Selassie.

The day before Emperor Haile Selassie’s deposition, a group of junior military officers, now

infamously known as the Derg, stormed the palace and forced the eighty-two year old Emperor to

watch a film on famine in Ethiopia. It was “The Unknown Famine,” BBC reporter Jonathan

Dimbleby’s documentary on the Ethiopian famine of 1972-73. Aired on Ethiopian television by the

Derg, who had doctored the film to include footage of Emperor Selassie feeding meat to his dogs

and refusing to bring his personal fortune back to Ethiopia, “The Unknown Famine” was used by

the Derg to rally growing dissent amongst the Ethiopian public. Nearly 200,000 had died from the

’72-’73 famine, but the government had done little to alleviate the suffering caused by the famine.

Teferri Wossen, who served as the head of Public Relations at the Ministry of Information

during the ’72-’73 famine and later as the Head of Public Relations and Information for the RRC in

the ’84 famine, recounted for me his experience about how he learned of the ’72-’73 famine


33

Jonathan Dimbleby came in a day I was out of the office to gain access to film in Wollo, but we were not aware of the famine at all. So Dimbleby arrives in Dessie and the governor of Wollo calls the Minister asking him if he were crazy. ‘People were on the streets dying,’ he said, ‘And you send a TV film crew to film it?’ But I ask: How did the Minister of Information not know famine existed?80

At this point in the interview, Teferri turned to me and said, “In the third world, just because

someone is a minister doesn’t mean he has information.” Teferri laughed, commenting on how the

lack of communication in between ministries and within ministries can often be frustrating, and as in

the case of Dimbleby being granted access to film in Wollo, led to unintended results. For as hard as

it is to believe that a famine that had cost the lives of nearly 200,000 people could go completely

unnoticed by the larger population of Ethiopia, that had been, in fact, the intention of the Ethiopian

government. The Ethiopian government had never intended to have an international journalist film

an exposé on the famine.

Dr. Tessefe, an upper-level Minister and friend of the Emperor, later sent Teferri to London

to try and persuade Dimbleby to not blame the government for the famine. Teferri was supposed to

argue that the government had done all it could do, that friendly countries were aware of the famine

and that the necessary international organizations had been informed. But Teferri said that when he

saw the film

I was totally amazed. There was nothing to negotiate. I think I was shocked more than foreigners because Ethiopia had been the breadbasket of Africa. It never occurred to me that Ethiopians could have died of food shortage. Ethiopia has provided food for many countries post-WWII. But then we realized.81

The concealed nature of the famine and its terrible unveiling had unsettled a large proportion of

Ethiopia, truly damaging the national psyche, as overnight, Ethiopia had gone from the breadbasket

of Africa to the poster child for handouts.

80 Teferri Wossen, interview by Sarah Frostenson, July 23, 2010, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. 81 Ibid.


34

In a report published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, journalist Jack

Shepherd indicted Haile Selassie and the Ethiopian government for trying to downplay the severity

of the famine, blaming international organizations and governments that were aware of the famine

as well.82 The hope of the Ethiopian government had been if it ignored the famine, the rest of the

world would not notice either. But, in what was to become the anthem of Ethiopia in ’84, the rest of

the world did notice, only too late.

On September 12, 1974, the Derg deposed Haile Selassie, who was last seen in the back of a

Volkswagen Beetle on his way to prison. Three days later, on September 15, the Derg assumed

complete leadership of the government. The Revolution had begun. A year later Haile Selassie was

dead.

“Land to the Tiller”: Peasant Land Rights and the Derg

Prior to 1974, the agrarian economy in Ethiopia was essentially feudal. Rights to land tenure

in Ethiopia were consolidated around political allegiance to the Emperor. The Emperor owned all of

the land in the Empire, which he in turn granted to various royal, noble, administrative and religious

elites or institutions in return for various kinds of services and tribute. By 1974, this system of land

grants had produced a semi-autonomous, landed gentry class whose vested interests in maintaining

traditional land tenure systems had discouraged any real, substantive land tenure reform. As a result,

landownership in Ethiopia was extremely inequitable. In 1973, approximately ninety-five percent of

the registered land grants were in the name of members of the civil service, military and police, and

82 see Jack Shepherd, The Politics of Starvation (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1975) for a full account of the ’72-’73 famine.


35

national or provincial elites.83 Only five percent of registered land grants, and twenty-five percent of

unregistered land grants, were under the names of the landless84 and peasantry.85

The question of land reform had first entered the Ethiopian national discourse in 1944 when

Haile Selassie was under growing pressure from Ethiopian peasants to improve the collection of

agricultural land taxes. Passing the Land Tax Proclamation of 1944, which simplified Ethiopia’s

agrarian tax structure and reduced the costs of tax collection, Haile Selassie embarked on a series of

agrarian land reforms that promised to make land tenure in Ethiopia more equitable. Notably, Haile

Selassie introduced the Civil Code in 1960 under Proclamation No. 165, which attempted to regulate

agricultural communities, nomadic tenures and agrarian tenancies, and the Agricultural Income Tax

Proclamation of 1967, which was designed to tax income from agricultural activities more

equitably. 86 Nevertheless, Haile Selassie’s reforms made few substantial changes and were largely

ignored by the elites. However, discontented Ethiopian peasants revolted in Gojjam in 1968 and

challenged the elites by successfully resisting government efforts to tax their lands. 87

With progressive land reform measures blocked by a powerful Ethiopian Parliament

comprised primarily of large landowners advocating for the protection of traditional land tenure

practices, Haile Selassie could not push forward any real land reform legislation. For instance, a

Proclamation drafted in 1968 would have regulated how tenancies were established, reducing

83 John Cohen, “Ethiopia After Haile Selassie,” 379. 84 Comprising the most deprived sector of the rural population with no land to cultivate or livestock, the landless eked out a marginal existence. See Dessalegn Rahmato for more on agrarian social classes prior the ’74 Revolution, Agrarian Reform in Ethiopia (Trenton, NJ: Red Sea Press, 1985). 85 John Cohen, “Ethiopia After Haile Selassie,” 379. 86 Paul Brietzke, “Land Reform in Revolutionary Ethiopia,” The Journal of Modern African Studies 14.4 (December 1976), 643-44. 87 Bahru Zewde, A History of Modern Ethiopia 1855-1974 (Addis Ababa, Ethiopia: Addis Ababa UP, 1992), 216.


36

absentee landlord ownership and corruption, but Parliament refused to approve its passage into

law.88

Haile Selassie, however, greatly benefitted from a land tenure system based on political

rather than developmental needs, as it allowed him to reward those loyal to the Crown with land

while simultaneously building a solid base of political support.89 Thus, traditional land tenure

remained largely unaffected by laws passed between 1944 and 1974. As Paul Brietzke wrote in his

article on land reform in revolutionary Ethiopia:

Government investments in land reform, in terms of monetary and legal resources, were minimal, and legal manoeuvres, far from promoting rural change, seemed to solidify further peasant suspicions of the Government’s intentions. Any law which contained a semblance of genuine reform was either watered down, never promulgated, or not communicated to those affected.90

Unable to satisfactorily address the question of land reform in Ethiopia, Haile Selassie and

the imperial government faced an increasing number of rebellions in the Ethiopian countryside;

which, when coupled with widespread starvation in Wollo during the 1972-73 famine, led to the

Derg’s overthrow of the imperial government on September 12, 1974. Initially supported by the

popular uprisings against the imperial government, the Derg was at first welcomed by the general

Ethiopian populace. With their slogan of Ethiopia Tikdem, or “Ethiopia First,” the Derg rode in on a

wave of optimism that conditions in Ethiopia would soon change the life of the peasant for the

better, and on March 4, 1975, the Derg announced its own land reform program with the Land

Reform Proclamation of 1975.

The Land Reform Proclamation of 1975 signified a drastic departure from previous land

reform policies in Ethiopia. Nationalizing all rural lands and abolishing the practice of tenancy, the

88 Paul Brietzke, “Land Reform in Revolutionary Ethiopia,” 644. 89 John Cohen, “Ethiopia After Haile Selassie,” 375. 90 Paul Brietzke, “Land Reform in Revolutionary Ethiopia,” 645.


37

Land Reform Proclamation of 1975 held the promise of a new agrarian order for Ethiopia, one in

which inequalities of wealth and power associated with the old land tenure system could be rectified

and the small-scale farmer could at last prosper. Article 3 of the Proclamation officially prohibited

private ownership, ruling “all rural lands shall be the collective property of the Ethiopian people,”

though, as Ethiopian land reform specialist Dessalegn Rahmato noted in his study on agrarian

reform in Ethiopia, what is meant by “public ownership of rural lands” is never clearly defined.91

What “public ownership of rural lands” came to mean in practice, however, was that the

government owned all of the land and reserved the right to have final jurisdiction over the

disposition of rural land.92

Article 4 of the Proclamation contained its most important elements, as it prohibited the

private ownership of land by individuals or organizations in addition to outlawing the transfer of

land by sale, lease or mortgage. Furthermore, Article 4 established the “use right,” or usufructuary

possession that a cultivator had over his landholding, stating that any person willing to cultivate land

would be given a plot of land with a maximum size of ten hectares.93 Landholdings in excess of ten

hectares, in addition to large-scale mechanized farms, were expropriated without compensation,

except for “moveable properties and permanent works on the land.” Despite this caveat, Rahmato

noted that the Derg never compensated the landlords for any property they lost. 94

Most mechanized farms were organized into state farms or cooperatives or divided up and

distributed to peasants. In order to oversee this distribution of land to peasants, the Proclamation

established Peasant Associations, or PAs. Each PA was to manage an 800-hectare area, and

membership was primarily to consist of previous tenants, landless laborers and landowners with less

91 Rahmato argues in Agrarian Reform in Ethiopia, that the nearest attempt at a definition is in Article 3, which stated “all rural lands shall be the collective property of the Ethiopian people.” 92 Dessalegn Rahmato, Agrarian Reform, 37. 93 Ibid, 37-38. 94 Ibid, 38.


38

than ten hectares of land. PAs were invested with a wide range of responsibilities, including the task

of administering public property, establishing service co-operatives, building schools and clinics, and

later, undertaking villagization programs.95 Initially, however, their major charge was to oversee the

implementation of the 1975 land reform.

By abolishing private property and tenancy, the Land Reform Proclamation of 1975 brought

the peasantry into direct conflict with the state. No longer having rent and tribute available as

methods of exploitation, the state as the new landowner began to devise its own methods of

extraction. By 1985, had implemented three identifiable modes of its own extraction, namely, direct

taxation of peasant agriculture, control of pricing and marketing of agricultural products, and the

expansion of the state farm sector.96 Instead of establishing a new agrarian order in Ethiopia

abolishing inequalities associated with the old land tenure system, the Land Reform Proclamation of

1975 established its own set of regional inequalities.

Abolishing landlordism had the consequence of abolishing established modes of surplus

extraction, which had produced a sharp decline in agricultural output in Ethiopia after the initial

decree of the Land Reform Proclamation in 1975. Besides levying taxes on the peasant agriculture,

the state’s primary response had been to expand the state farm sector very rapidly between 1979 and

1981. However, by 1982, state farms still comprised less than four percent of the total area under

agricultural production, whereas peasant landholdings comprised as much as ninety-five percent. Yet

the state farms with just under four percent of the total cultivated area had received seventy-six

percent of the available chemical fertilizers and ninety-five percent of the improved seeds in 1981-

82, in spite of the fact that yields had declined quite sharply in state farm production between 1975

95 Ibid, 38. 96 Ajit Ghose, “Transforming Feudal Agriculture: Agrarian Change in Ethiopia since 1974,” Journal of Development Studies 22.1 (1985), 138.


39

and 1983.97 Despite the poor performance of state farms, the Derg continued to invest heavily, as

their vision of state collectivized agriculture included a strong foundation of large cooperatives, not

small, peasant land-holdings.

It was not as the Land Reform Proclamation of 1975 had promised, where inequalities

associated with land tenure would be non-existent and the small-scale farmer could participate freely

as a key player in Ethiopia’s agricultural production. Rather, the Land Reform Proclamation of 1975

ushered in a new form of land tenure characterized by government-led extraction. The government’s

intention was to transform the entire peasant sector into a cooperative sector in order to provide

labor for state run-farms; by 1985, state investment in agriculture in Ethiopia had become almost

exclusively devoted to the state farm sector, despite its low proportion of beneficiaries and even

lower output of yields.

The nationalization of Ethiopia’s lands has done little in terms of Ethiopia’s agricultural

development, and, in the case of the famine of 1984, the nationalization of Ethiopia’s lands and the

government’s subsequent preoccupation with the development of state farms not only undermined

Ethiopia’s agricultural productivity, but also contributed to the widespread effects of famine. Instead

of allocating resources to the peasant sector, resources were devoted to the development of state

farms, so that by the time the rains failed in ’84, the peasant sector in Ethiopia was marginalized and

vulnerable.

The Red Terror and Rebellion: the Scourge of Man-Made Famine

In the two years following the revolution of ’74, the Derg faced two ongoing wars with

Eritrea and the Somali-populated regions of the Ogaden in the east, in addition to rebellions in the

97 Ibid, 134.


40

north in Tigray and in the Oromo-dominated regions in the southeast. The political scene in

Ethiopia since the revolution had become increasingly violent, and by February 1977, the “Red

Terror” 97F

98 had officially begun. One of the most violent, systematic mass murders ever witnessed in

Africa, the full number who died in the Red Terror (1976-1978) is unknown, although the death toll

is certainly in excess of 10,000.98F

99

Student-led movements were largely responsible for encouraging the overthrow of Haile

Selassie in ’74, but their zeal for reform soon fell out of favor with the Derg, and by September

98 Name officially used by the Ethiopian government to denote the government’s campaign of mass murder waged in response to rebellion in the main cities of Ethiopia, notably Addis Ababa, between 1976 and 1978. See Rene LeFort, Ethiopia: An Heretical Revolution? (London, 1983) and Marina and David Ottaway, Ethiopia: Empire in Revolution (New York: Africana, 1978) for further accounts of the Red Terror. 99 De Waal, Evil Days, 101.


41

Figure 1.1 Political Map of Ethiopia and Eritrea, 1990. Prior to Eritrea’s independence in 1991. The three separate offensives under taken by the Derg in the late ‘70s are circled in red: Tigray and Eritrea in the north, the Ogaden in the southeast. Source: CIA. Perry- Castañeda

Libraries. Library Map Collection, University of Texas

of 1976, the Derg actively worked to eliminate members from the opposition, namely, The

Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party (EPRP). An active voice of dissent criticizing the continued

military control of the government and advocating for the immediate transition to a civilian-led

government, the EPRP earned the enmity of the Derg in its refusal to work with the Military

Council, whereas, the All-Ethiopia Socialist Movement, another formerly student-led movement

more commonly referred to by its Amharic acronym, MEISON, offered to work with the Military

Council alongside Mengistu, providing him with a key political support base. Though both the

EPRP and MEISON were ideologically similar in their embracement of Marxism as the political

platform for Ethiopia, what resulted from their differences in allegiance to the Derg was a war of

untold terror.100

In September of 1976, the Derg began to execute and arrest EPRP militants in response to

the EPRP’s failed coup attempt in July and their first of nine official assassination attempts on

Mengistu on September 23. Twenty-one suspected members of EPRP were executed on October

21, and another seventeen pronounced dead on November 18. In retaliation, the EPRP assassinated

Fikre Merid, a member of the Political Bureau and MEISON on October 2, killing in total ten senior

100 Dawit Giorgis, Red Tears, 26-28.


42

government officials and fifteen members of the secret service in the next two months.101 Public

assassinations of this nature continued into 1977 with several hundred people killed.

In the final days of 1976, the Military Council reorganized its structure in an attempt to curb

Mengistu’s growing power and ambition. However, on February 3, 1977, the contestation for power

of the Derg was resolved once and for all after a regular meeting of the Steering Committee of the

Council. Mengistu executed eight of his top Derg officers, including seven of his chief opponents,

one being, Teferi Benti, the former Chairman of the Military Council.102 It was this final coup that

solidified Mengistu’s power as Chairman of the Military Council and ruler of Ethiopia. The Red

Terror had officially begun.

In a speech on February 5, immediately following the mass in-house cleaning of the Derg,

Mengistu declared his intention to take the Revolution “from the defensive to the offensive,”

disposing of anyone who threatened his reign. Mengistu was soon calling for the death of

counterrevolutionaries and the EPRP in his speeches. In a speech Mengistu delivered on April 17,

he labeled the sporadic violence of the EPRP as the “White Terror,” smashing two bottles of blood

(actually colored water) to show what the Revolution would do to its enemies, saying, “We shall beat

back White Terror with Red Terror!”103 Any form of rebellion in Ethiopia soon became subject to

brutal repression under the reign of Red Terror as Mengistu continued to tighten his control over all

of Ethiopia through military conquest and oppression.

Leading a three-pronged military offensive in the Ogaden, Eritrea and Tigray, in addition to

squelching rebellions in the southeastern Oromo territories during the late 1970s and early 1980s,

the Derg was engaged in a constant state of warfare under the reign of Mengistu. By the time the

101 Alex de Waal, Evil Days, 102. 102 Marina and David Ottaway, Ethiopia: Empire in Revolution,143. 103 Dawit Giorgis, Red Tears, 31.


43

rains failed and severe drought threatened Ethiopia in ’84, conditions of famine were already present

as a direct result of constant warfare in the region. It was not a failure of rains that caused the

severity or the extent of the ’84 famine; rather, it was the scorched-earth policies of war.

In the southeastern part of Ethiopia there were two separate insurgencies during the 1960s

and 1970s. One insurgency was in the Ogaden, where the Western Somali Liberation Front (WSLF),

supported by the Somali government, led a series of offensive attacks against Ethiopia to reclaim the

territory of the Ogaden. The on-going dispute over control of the Ogaden culminated in the Ogaden

War (1977-1978) in which Ethiopia emerged the victor due to increased military assistance from the

Soviet Union. The second insurgency in the southeast was an Oromo separatist movement led by

the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF), which resulted in a series of attacks and counter attacks

throughout the 1980s and the implementation of a harsh villagization scheme, discussed in greater

detail in chapter three.

The defeat of the Somali army by Ethiopian armed forces in 1978, however, did not bring

stability to the region, but instead led to six more years of continued warfare between the Ethiopian

government and the combined forces of the WSLF and OLF. Traditional tactics of warfare,

however, proved largely unsuccessful in combating insurgency movements in the Ogaden, which

was also true of insurgency movements in Tigray and Eritrea. Thus, the Ethiopian government

adopted an approach of total warfare in the Ogaden that included: the forced displacement of much

of the population into shelters and refugee camps; military offensives that directed indiscriminate

violence towards civilians through the destruction of livestock, livelihoods as well as food sources;


44

the arming of rebel factions against the WSLF and the OLF; and attempts to forcibly repatriate

refugees and monitor settlement through villagization schemes.104

Conflict in the Ogaden largely continued in secret from 1978-1984 and involved the mass

displacement and resettlement of people in the Ogaden. At the end of 1978, the RRC estimated the

war had left 600,000 people displaced and as refugees at the time of the RRC’s official conclusion in

March of 1978.105 Three years after the official end of the war, however, the affected population of

displaced people and refugees had grown by more than five times the 1978 levels of 600,000. By

1981, the number of affected people who had been relocated in villages totaled 880,000 in Bale

alone, including an additional 750,000 in the northern part of the province, where the Somali army

had never even launched a counter-attack. A further 1.5 million were estimated to live in relief

shelters.106

Chronic famine existed in full-force in much of the southeast during the entire period of

1979 to 1984, long before the failure of rains in ’84 marked widespread famine in Ethiopia. It was

the government’s own military strategy that was instrumental in the creation of chronic famine in

the southeast, as its tactics of total warfare not only impoverished the people of the Ogaden, but

also restricted their mobility and economic activities as well, in addition to degrading land available

for agricultural and pastoral activities. Villages were burned to the ground, herds of camels and cattle

slaughtered, entire livelihoods ruined. 107 The Derg took no prisoners in the Ogaden; it was total war.

104 De Waal, Evil Days, 83-84. 105 The Relief and Rehabilitation Commission (RRC), The Challenges of Drought: Ethiopia’s Decade of Struggle in Relief and Rehabilitation (The RRC: Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 1985), 135-137. 106 Alex De Waal, Evil Days, 84. 107 Ibid, 83-87.


45

The RRC estimated to have provided three million Ethiopians with emergency relief during this

period, marking the period of 1979 to 1984 as one of the most traumatic in the Ogaden’s history.108

Meanwhile, in the northern regions of Ethiopia, where the famine of ’84 was the most

severe, Eritrea and Tigray were leading their own rebellions against the government. In December of

1977, the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) launched an attack, storming the port of

Massawa. However, repulsed by heavy causalities, it marked the turning point of the war in the

1970s with the reentry of Ethiopia into the battlefield.109 With the Ogaden war ostensibly won in’78,

the Ethiopian government was soon able to renew its offensive in Eritrea with vigor, so that the

exhausted Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF) fell into disarray and the EPLF was forced to retreat.

However, the EPLF remained capable of carrying on the Eritrean rebellion despite weakened forces

and increased hostility from the Ethiopian government.

Starting in May 1978, the Ethiopian air force began a campaign of aerial bombardment of

key ELF and EPLF strongholds and conventional military operations that involved mass infantry

and armored columns attacking EPLF hideouts. However, this type of warfare proved costly, as

over 20,000 Ethiopian soldiers were killed in 1978-1979 alone.110 Therefore, the Ethiopian army

spent two years developing the large-scale “Red Star” Campaign as the final military offensive that

would solve the Eritrean problem.111

In 1982, the Red Star Campaign was launched with a renewed campaign of saturation

bombing. The Red Star offensive involved the largest number of troops ever deployed in Eritrea.

More than 120,000 troops were involved in the attacks on the EPLF base areas. The sheer influx of

108 RRC, The Challenges of Drought, 138. 109 Alex De Waal, Evil Days, 113 110 Ibid, 115-116. 111 Dawit Giorgis, Red Tears, 105-106.


46

soldiers placed an unexpected strain on food resources in Eritrea, forcing the Ethiopian government

to airlift food into Asmara for the army.112 Through the Red Star Campaign, Eritrea saw a return to

the “scorched earth” policy of 1978-79, but on a much larger scale.

The enormous levels of sustained aerial bombardment and ground attacks destroyed large

swaths of northern and western Eritrea, creating conditions of famine. However, famine in Eritrea

was not as widespread as in neighboring Tigray. Despite the wide scale destruction of the Red Star

Campaign, the campaign was also responsible for creating employment opportunities in Eritrea’s

urban centers, whereas in the Ogaden and Tigray, centers of trade had been treated as military

targets by the government, and were destroyed.113 With less pervasive guerilla warfare and less severe

conditions of drought, famine in Eritrea was not as acute as in Tigray, although war cost Eritrea

between 65,000 and 95,000 metric tons of food production per year, accounting for half of Eritrea’s

food deficit.114

The nature of the counter-insurgency strategy followed in Tigray in the early 1980s differed

from the insurgencies pursued in the southeast and in Eritrea. With the thrust of the offensive

starting in August of 1980, the counter-insurgency in Tigray involved a greater level of violence

directed toward civilian populations, and unlike in Eritrea or even in the Ogaden, there was no

attempt by the Ethiopian government to provide even the minimal level of assistance to stricken

populations. Thus, when the level of brutality and destruction increased in Tigray in early 1983,

famine developed immediately.115

112 Alex De Waal, Evil Days, 118. 113 Ibid, 130-131. 114 Ibid, 126. 115 Ibid, 133.


47

Through large-scale military offensives aimed at surplus-plus producing regions in Tigray,

aerial bombardment of markets, and tight controls on movements of migrants and traders, the

Ethiopian government used counter-insurgency strategies in Tigray that directly contributed to

famine. The government’s tactics not only upset the agricultural production of food, but also

destroyed the processes of food redistribution normally used to respond to food deficits, discussed

more in chapters two and three. A 1985 emergency relief assessment report issued by the Relief

Society of Tigray (REST) indicated that 1.5 million people were affected by famine in 1983-84 and

by 1984-85, two million people.116

The military policies of the Ethiopian government enacted prior to 1984 deeply

impoverished the peoples of the Ogaden, Eritrea and Tigray, creating conditions of famine long

before the failure of the rains in ’84. As early as 1983, signs of widespread famine were imminent.

However, the Ethiopian government consistently tried to downplay the significance of the

insurgency movements as rogue rebel attacks, when in reality the Ethiopian government was

engaged in a ten-year civil war that had brought the country to the brink of famine. By ’84, the

Ethiopian government had fought thirteen major offensives in Eritrea, ten in Tigray and at least a

dozen others in the Ogaden and southeast, making the late ’70s and early ’80s the most intense

period of conflict and counter-insurgency under the Derg.117 It is impossible to know the number of

people the Derg killed over the decades through its military offensives, but a Human Rights Watch

report estimates that the number exceeds 150,000, and this does not even take into account the

116 Relief Society of Tigray (REST), “Emergency Relief Program Needs Assessment: January-June 1985,” 16 Oct. 1984. Stanford University, Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Archives. Lamar Henderson Collection, Box No. 1 Accession No. 2009C51-16.62.

117 Alex De Waal, Evil Days, 9-11.


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hundreds of thousands more who died because of famine and Derg’s the resettlement and

villagization programs.118

The causes and conditions of famine in 1984 resulted from poor agricultural development

policies, a lack of substantial land reform, and internal conflict and political unrest—not drought.

Famine in ’84 stemmed from the socio-economic breakdown of society, not the failure of rains, and

it was this breakdown in the governance and society of Ethiopia that has led to the development of

widespread chronic food insecurity within Ethiopia.

From Haile Selassie’s ineffectual agricultural development policies of the ’40s and ’50s to his

repeated failure to adequately address the issue of land reform, wide-scale food insecurity became a

serious problem for the first time in Ethiopia. Whereas famine in Ethiopia had previously been

attributed to drought and pestilence, there now existed infrastructural barriers to achieving food

security in Ethiopia, of which traditional land tenure practices were the most prohibitive. Although

the Derg’s 1975 Land Reform Proclamation nationalized all landholdings, promising to bring about

substantial change in land reform, the Proclamation instead served to cement the state as the owner

of all land, and encouraged the development of large-scale state farms and peasant cooperatives that

channeled resources away from the very small-scale farmers in Ethiopia whom the Proclamation

supposedly benefitted. Furthermore, the Derg’s military policies in the Ogaden, Eritrea and Tigray

during the ’70s and ’80s led to conditions of widespread famine and chronic food insecurity in

Ethiopia.

These causes and conditions of famine prior to the ’84 famine signaled a change in the

nature of famine in Ethiopia, as widespread, chronic food insecurity increased in prevalence. Food

shortages in Ethiopia could no longer be attributed to just drought. The collapse of order and 118 Ibid, 3.


49

infrastructure in Ethiopia led to famine in ’84, and as chapter two demonstrates, the delayed

response of humanitarian aid failed to adequately address issues of acute and chronic food insecurity

within Ethiopia.

As early as January of 1984, the Relief and Rehabilitation Commission (RRC) had published

a synoptic report of the previous meher119 harvest, which predicted Ethiopia’s food needs for ’84

based on ’83 harvests. The report forecast critical food shortages in Wello, Tigray, Eritrea and

Eastern Gonder, indicating that this season’s crop failure was even more serious than last. As many

as 1.8 million people faced food shortages in Wello, 1.3 million people in Tigray, 500,000 in Eritrea

and 325,000 people in Gonder.120 In addition to the almost four million people at risk in northern

Ethiopia, the report also cited serious food shortages in the southern regions of Harerghe, Gojjan

and Bale, with over 350,000 people in need of immediate assistance, as well as in the regions of

Shewa, Arssi, and Gamo Gofa, where as many as 325,000 people faced food shortages.121 In total,

the RRC anticipated almost five million people of Ethiopia’s 34.5 million would face food shortages

in Ethiopia in ’84 as early as January of 1984, yet that number would grow to as many eight million

before the international community took action.122

119 There are two important crop cycles in Ethiopia used to predict annual food assistance needs. The meher, or summer harvest, which is the larger and more important harvest, and the belg, or spring harvest, which is the smaller, secondary harvest, often vital for supplementing food requirements in Ethiopia until the following meher harvest. In March of any year a full assessment of the previous year’s main crops is possible and indications of whether the small, belg, rains will be sufficient are typically evident as well. For more information see Kurt Jansson, Michael Harris and Angela Penrose, The Ethiopian Famine (London: Zed Books, 1987) pp.139-142 and De Waal, Evil Days, pp.30-31. 120 Early Warning System, Relief and Rehabilitation Commission, Meher Synoptic Report 1975/76 E.C. (1983) Crop Season (Addis Ababa: Ethiopia, January 1984), i. 121 Ibid, i-ii. 122 Central Statistical Authority (CSA), The 1984 Population and Housing Census of Ethiopia: Analytical Report at National Level (Addis Ababa: December, 1991), 2. Population figure of 34.5 million only accounts for 81 percent of the population of Ethiopia. The census did not cover the southern nomadic regions in the Ogaden, nor did it cover the more rural and remote areas of Tigray or Eritrea because of continued warfare in the regions between the government and rebel factions.


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Figure 2.1 Map of Projected Food Shortages for Ethiopia for 1984. The regions expected to suffer the worst food shortages are primarily concentrated in the north in Wello, Tigray and Eastern Gonder. However, large portions of both Tigray and Eritrea went unreported in the RRC’s assessment (where there is no shading) because of continued conflict in the region. As a result, estimates of affected populations in Tigray and Eritrea should have been much higher than what was actually reported. Source: Early Warning System, Relief and Rehabilitation Commission, Meher Synoptic Report 1975/76 E.C. (1983) Crop Season (Addis Ababa: Ethiopia, January 1984) in the Institute for Ethiopian Studies, Addis Ababa.

On March 30, 1984, Dawit Giorgis, the Chief Commissioner of the RRC, made his first

appeal to international donors in Addis Ababa, giving all donors present the document, “Assistance


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Requirements 1984,” which the RRC had prepared in early March on behalf of Ethiopia’s formal

requests for food assistance from the international community. Estimating that one-fifth of

Ethiopia’s population would require relief assistance in ’84, the report concluded by saying, “If those

affected do not receive relief assistance the consequences will be frightening.”123 The RRC could not

have been more explicit in their warnings, nor more proactive. But the international community still

failed to take action until far too late.

The severity of the famine of ’84 resulted from an inadequate and delayed humanitarian

response from international donors, who in turn prolonged the duration of the famine through the

direct mismanagement and diversion of aid. This had serious repercussions for the state of chronic

food insecurity in Ethiopia, as the emergency-based relief model established the precedent for how

aid would operate in Ethiopia for the next twenty-five years. By focusing on the strained relations

between Ethiopia and the international community and the on-going conflict between the Ethiopian

government and the rebel forces in Tigray and Eritrea, I demonstrate that the nature of

humanitarian relief—from its delivery to its distribution—has contributed to widespread, chronic

food insecurity in Ethiopia.

First, highlighting the disconnect between the RRC’s Early Warning System and its appeals

for help, and the international community’s own underwhelming response, I demonstrate that if the

international community had not let Cold War dynamics prevent them from providing humanitarian

assistance to Ethiopia sooner, the severity and prolonged duration of the ’84 famine could have

been avoided. The RRC launched appeals for humanitarian assistance as early as March of ’84, as by

the fall of ’83, signs of catastrophic food shortages and famine were already evident. However, the

international community did not respond until international media coverage of the famine exposed

123 Kurt Jansson, Michael Harris and Angela Penrose, The Ethiopian Famine, 140.


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the widespread atrocities of the famine in late October, at which point preventative measures were

far too late.

Second, detailing the massive humanitarian relief operation of ’84, I examine to what extent

it relieved the suffering associated with the famine and to what extent it actually contributed to the

lasting, duration of the famine. Focusing on the disruption of the delivery of aid and the use of

humanitarian relief as a tactic of war, I demonstrate that the government was not only responsible

for producing the conditions of drought, but for prolonging the effects of famine as well, by which

the international community silently abetted.

The RRC and the Early Warning System: Making an International Appeal

In a speech given by Dawit Giorgis, Chief Commissioner of the RRC, at a donor’s meeting

in October of ’84, he contended: “In March we reported that over 5 million people were expected to

be facing food shortages in 13 administrative regions in Ethiopia. In the six months that have

transpired since, that figure has escalated to more than 7 million.”124 Dawit125 continued, noting that

the pledges made by the international community after his March appeal were nowhere near the

RRC’s March appeal of 450,000 metric tons (MT). Furthermore, food aid pledges had only started

arriving in Ethiopia five months after the appeal. As a result, the RRC had had to purchase 60,000

tons of grain from the Ethiopian Agricultural Marketing Corporation (AMC), which in turn, had

contributed to a serious shortage of grain in the Ethiopian market.126

124 Dawit Giorgis, Relief and Rehabilitation Commission, Introductory Statement (Addis Ababa, Ethiopia: October 1984), 2. from the personal papers of Teferri Wossen, (Addis Ababa: Ethiopia). 125 In Ethiopia people are usually referred to by their first names only. The second name is their father’s name. 126 Ibid, 4.


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In his October speech, Dawit cited Ethiopia’s food requirement for the upcoming twelve

months as roughly 1.127 million metric tons (MT) of grain, 94,000 MT of supplementary food and

27,000 MT of oil. However, taking into consideration his past experience with unmet requests and

appeals, Dawit reduced his appeal by half, asking for only 563, 650 MT of grain, 46,990 MT of

supplementary food and 13,670 MT of oil.127 Dawit, however, was so uncertain of the international

community’s willingness to deliver aid that he took his appeal even one step farther.

Proceeding to subtract 11,847 MT of grain already in distribution and secured pledges of

80,740 MT of grain, 8,088 MT of supplementary food and 20,207 MT of oil from his second appeal,

which had already asked for only half of Ethiopia’s anticipated food needs in the upcoming year,

Dawit presented the donors with the absolute bare minimum Ethiopia needed for basic survival:

475,763 MT of grain, 33,605 MT of supplementary food and 12,060 MT of edible/butter oil.128 By

October of ’84, Dawit had so little faith in the international community that he asked for survival

rations of food. Reflecting upon the lack of response from the donor community, Dawit said in his

October speech

It was not the lack of sympathy or understanding amongst the public. It was not the lack of information. It was neither the lack of food and funds because we realize that even in Europe and North America the public is swimming in abundance. It could never be anything else except sheer apathy or politicization of humanitarian aid.129

Interested in exploring the so-called apathy of the Western world to donate, Angela Penrose, a

researcher and lecturer at Haile Selassie I University investigated the reasons it took the international

community as long as it did to respond to the initial pleas put forth by Dawit and the RRC.130

Determining that delayed response from the international community stemmed from too many 127 Ibid, 13. 128 Ibid, 14. 129 Ibid, 4. 130 Working with Kurt Jansson, former Head of the UN Relief Operation in Ethiopia during the ’84 famine, Penrose and Jansson wrote a detailed account on the ’84 relief operation with the help of researcher and Overseas Operation Director of Oxfam, Michael Harris. See The Ethiopian Famine.


54

countries in Africa affected by famine, negative perceptions surrounding the Ethiopian government

because of its Soviet ties, and a lack of faith in the ability of the RRC to administer aid, Penrose

concluded that had political agendas been pushed aside and more credibility been given to the RRC’s

requests for assistance, things might have turned out very differently in Ethiopia.131

Through the Global Information and Early Warning System of the Food and Agriculture

Organization (FAO) established in 1975, twenty-two countries in Africa were determined to be at

risk of drought in 1983 with some 150 million people potentially affected. Penrose argued,

however,that “whether, in fact, the selection of countries on the list owed as much to diplomacy in

Rome as to actual scarcity in Africa, it blunted the impact of the appeals made to the donor

community. Ethiopia was not sufficiently highlighted until after the media had taken up the

cause.”132 Similarly, a 1985 report issued by the UN Office for Emergency Operations in Africa

estimated that between thirty and thirty-five million people in twenty countries were at risk of

famine in 1984-85.133 Although thirty-five million people at risk was clearly less dire than the FAO’s

initial prediction of 150 million people at risk in ’83, the world was clearly preoccupied with famine

in all parts of Africa, not just in Ethiopia. This is part of the reason why the international donor

community did not then take action on appeals specific to Ethiopia.

In addition to the over twenty countries in Sub-Saharan Africa at risk of famine in the early

’80s, Cold War politics severely restricted to which countries the international community readily

offered humanitarian assistance. The fact that Ethiopia’s appeals for assistance did not receive a

greater response from the international community in ’84 resulted, as Dawit correctly assessed in his

131 Kurt Jansson, Michael Harris and Angela Penrose, The Ethiopian Famine, 139-150. 132 Ibid, 142-43. The FAO headquarters are in Rome, Italy. 133 UN Office for Emergency Operations in Africa, Special Report on the Emergency Situation in Africa: Review of 1985 and 1986 Emergency Needs (New York: 1985), 1.


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October speech, from the “politicization of humanitarian aid.”134 As early as 1974, when Mengistu

first came to power, the U.S. began to move away from development aid in favor of providing only

emergency relief assistance. The Carter administration specifically opposed giving development aid

to a Marxist-Communist regime thought, and subsequently confirmed, to have committed grave

human rights abuses.135 The Reagan administration operated under the same set of precedents in the

‘80s, only providing minimal aid to Ethiopia.136 However, when at last confronted with the stark

realities of the ’84 famine through media coverage in October of ’84, Reagan famously declared, “A

Hungry Child Knows No Politics,”137 as justification for his decision to send emergency food aid to

Ethiopia despite Ethiopia’s Communist dictatorship, which at the time, was not in good political

standing with the U.S.

In determining the role the United States played in providing—or not providing—food aid

relief to Ethiopia during the ’84 famine, two sides emerged in the debate. One side argued that anti-

Communist and anti-Marxist rhetoric in the ’70s and ’80s strongly shaped American foreign policy

and accounted for the United States’s delayed response in delivering food aid assistance to Ethiopia.

The rationale was that as Ethiopia was a Soviet satellite state, assistance to Ethiopia should first

come from the Soviet Union, not the United States.138 However, the Soviet Union was only

interested in assisting Ethiopia militarily. Soviet contribution to famine relief was negligible during

134 Dawit Giorgis, Introductory Statement, 4. However, the fact that the Derg insisted on spending lavish amounts of government money in celebration of the Revolution’s Tenth Year Anniversary (September 12,1984), while in the middle of a “supposed” famine, did not help Dawit’s pleas for international assistance. It also proved ironic, as ten years earlier, the Derg had overthrown Haile Selassie because of his neglect to take notice of the ’72-’73 famine (see Dawit Giorgis, Red Tears (pp. 170-174). 135 Edward Kissi. “Beneath International Famine Relief in Ethiopia,” 118-120. 136 Ibid, 120-22. 137 Ibid, 123. 138 Proponents of this camp include British news reporter Peter Gill, and UN Assistant Secretary General for Emergency Operations in Ethiopia, Kurt Jansson. People who were on the ground involved in the relief effort in Ethiopia, whether reporting like Gill or in charge of the distribution of food like Jansson, typically fall on this side of the debate.


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’84, but arms deliveries totaled $2.4 million between 1984 and 1986.139 Ethiopia received eighty-five

percent of all arms imports into the Horn, all of which were almost exclusively from the USSR.140

The other side of the debate argued that Ethiopia’s revolutionary government’s hostile

attitude towards Western countries discouraged the United States, and others, from providing

Ethiopia with assistance until emergency assistance was needed on a massive scale in ’84.141 While

both sides had their points—for instance, many donors found the RRC unreliable and Dawit

Giorgis off-putting and abrasive with his anti-imperialism, anti-Western rhetoric—the United States

could not deny it was not made aware of the severity of the ’84 famine before the media frenzy in

October of ’84.

In 1985, a U.S. General Accounting Office Report investigating the U.S. response to the

Ethiopian famine found that as early as 1982 the United States was aware that a potentially serious

food shortage situation existed in the northern provinces of Ethiopia. By early spring of 1983, the

U.S. government knew that over three million people in the northern four provinces of Ethiopia,

Eritrea, Tigray, Gondar, and Wello, were suffering from large shortfalls of food, yet because of Cold

War politics, the U.S. government did not act.142

On April 4, 1984, four days after Dawit and the RRC issued their first appeal for

humanitarian assistance, the U.S. Embassy in Addis Ababa sent Washington a cable that “a very

139 USAID, Final Disaster Report: Ethiopia Drought/Famine, FY 1984-86, (Addis Ababa, Ethiopia), May 1987, 36. Institute of Ethiopian Studies, Miscellaneous 1. 140 Ibid 141 Proponents of this side typically include those who were interested in examining Ethiopian human rights violations at the time. Less centered on the international politics of ’84, human rights watchdogs like Jason Clay and Bonnie Holcomb of Cultural Survival turned a critical gaze inwards on Ethiopia and placed much of the blame for the famine on Ethiopia rather than the international community. However, it could be argued that had the United States and other Western countries acted earlier (or provided development aid instead of just emergency aid), much of ’84 could have been prevented. 142 US General Accounting Office (GAO), Report to the Honorable Byron L. Dorgan House of Representatives: The United States’ Response to the Ethiopian Food Crisis (April 8, 1985) GAO/NSIAD-85-65, 1-2.


57

serious situation could develop in Ethiopia this year and we will be remiss if we are not adequately

informed and prepared,” this echoing the very same sentiments expressed at the end of the RRC’s

own report, “Assistance Requirements 1984.”143 Requesting that USAID immediately conduct a

survey to assess the food supply and drought and famine situation in Ethiopia, the Embassy was

only to learn a month later that no additional food would be offered to the Ethiopian government at

this time, though USAID did promise to closely monitor the situation.144

However, by December of 1984, when news of the famine had reached the international

community, and inaction was no longer an option, the U.S. donated $103.2 million to famine relief

in Ethiopia, which accounted for fifty-two percent of the international community’s total $200

million contribution. This meant by the time of the GAO report’s publication in 1985, the United

States had provided more relief assistance to Ethiopia than any other government or international

organization.145 Thus, the GAO report did not hold the U.S. accountable for not acting sooner in

Ethiopia, even though the U.S. had known of a potentially serious food shortage in northern

Ethiopia as early as ’82. The report ruled that due to strained governmental tensions between

Ethiopia and the U.S., the U.S. had acted as best it could under the circumstances. Nevertheless,

300,000 Ethiopians had still died by January of 1985.146

The Emergency Relief Operation of ’84: An Inside Perspective

Following the wave of media publicity generated by news of the famine in ’84, overall

assistance to Ethiopia rose from $361 million in 1983 to $417 million in 1984 and by 1985, was at

143 Ibid, 4 and Kurt Jansson, Michael Harris and Angela Penrose, The Ethiopian Famine, 140. 144 US General Accounting Office (GAO), Report to the Honorable Byron, 4. 145 Ibid, 11. 146 Ibid, 1.


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$784 million.147 Furthermore, from December 1984 until May 1985 food was distributed at a rate of

45,000 tons per month, which was more than four times what the UN had previously judged to be

possible.148 However, with this sudden, overwhelming influx of aid came its own set of frustrations.

In my interview with Mulatu Tafesse, who had acted as the Impact Area Manager in

Northern Shoa for Save the Children, he expressed his frustration with the transportation problem

in Ethiopia saying,

In the beginning, we had no vehicles to deliver the food. There were no trucks. No fuel. I had to take a jerry can with diesel and beg passing cars for gas. So even when there was food, we had no way to transport it. People were rushing the roadside to get whatever they could get.149

Mulatu was so desperate to get food to those who needed it, he struck a deal with the RRC to use

their fleet of vehicles to get food to disaster victims, however, the drivers were only willing to

complete one food delivery trip a day as they only received payment on a per diem basis. To get

around this, Mulatu devised a scheme where he would pay the drivers their per diem payment of 15

birr for each additional trip they drove. “At one point I had them going on so many trips that the

government accused me of killing their cars,” Mulatu said.150 And although Mulatu could laugh now,

telling me the story twenty-five years later, at the time, transportation difficulties associated with the

delivery of aid were highly problematic. Not only were Ethiopia’s road networks hazardous and

impossible to navigate, but international donors were also incredibly resistant to the idea of donating

vehicles for transportation, as the fear was they would be appropriated by rebels or the Ethiopian

military to fight the on-going war in the north.

147 Alex De Waal, Evil Days, 178. 148 Kurt Jansson, Michael Harris and Angela Penrose, Ethiopian Famine, 155. 149 Mulatu Tafesse, interview by Sarah Frostenson, August 27, 2010, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. 150 Ibid.


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In my interview with Yigezu Tamrat of Catholic Relief Services (CRS), he talked about his

experience having worked as a food distribution monitor in ’84. At first overwhelmed by the size of

the relief operation, Yigezu expressed how difficult it was in the early days to account for all the

food, saying, “We were helping so many people in those days that the camps and relief centers

would be over capacity and we would be feeding people less than the ration rates specified for

distribution so that everyone could have at least something.”151 However, when I asked Yigezu, if he

thought there had been a serious amount of diversion of aid during the famine, he looked at me and

said, that in order to understand how the emergency operation had worked, I needed to understand

that

Every place had multiple NGOs working there. Some distributing food like CRS. Some transporting food like WFP152 Some NGOS gave food to the government to distribute in the places where they were working. It all depended really. So when you look at it that way, all the aid was diverted.153

The nature of diversion that Yigezu spoke of, however, was far different than the armed military

diversion of aid witnessed in Tigray. While the relief operations Yigezu had been involved in were

chaotic and did not always follow the exact ration rates, they were different than the Derg’s, as they

had not intentionally tried to deprive people of much needed humanitarian assistance.

Cross-Border Relief and the Armed Diversion of Aid

In January of 1985, in Tigray and Eritrea, nearly four million people were severely affected

by famine. An Oxfam report stated that the daily death toll in Tigray exceeded 1,500 and that in

Eritrea, more than six hundred people died in just one village according to the Eritrean Relief

151 Yigezu Tamrat, interview by Sarah Frostenson, August 02, 2010, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. 152 World Food Programme, food distribution wing of UN

153 Yigezu Tamrat, interview by Sarah Frostenson, August 02, 2010, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.


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Association (ERA).154 However, between November of 1984 and October of 1985, the Ethiopian

government received 975,000 tons of food, which was more than enough food to feed the famine-

affected populations in the north in Wollo, Tigray and Eritrea.155 However, a February 25, 1985

Times of London newspaper article found through a confidential Ethiopian government report that

more than three-fourths of the people in Tigray were not receiving food aid.156 Furthermore, Oxfam

reported that without more trucks for delivery, only 1,200 to 1,300 tons of food per month could be

distributed in Tigray, which was only enough to feed about 90,000 people, just three percent of those

in need.157

Starting in 1980, the Ethiopian government had led a series of punitive military expeditions

into several areas of central and northern Tigray, as part of its military operative to suppress the

Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF). Ransacking villages, burning crops and pastures and

destroying stores of grain, the Derg was engaged in a full-on war with Tigray by 1984. Kirsty Wright,

a REST aid worker stated in her eyewitness account that in 1980 alone the Derg had destroyed over

2,000 houses and displaced as many as 80,000 farmers.158 However, even more destructive than the

Derg’s on-the-ground offensives was the Derg’s aerial bombardment of Tigray that started in mid-

1980 and lasted in full-force until the Derg’s overthrow in 1991. Decimating the Tigrayan

countryside with what Alex de Waal described as “chronic-day-in-day-out” bombing, the suffering in

154 Oxfam America News, “OA in Ethiopia: fighting the famine,” Oxfam Newsletter, Winter 1985. Stanford University, Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Archives. The Ethiopian Subject Box Collection, Box 1/ Accession No. XX781-60.01/Folder, Drought and Famine, General (1983-1986), 4.

155 Barbara Hendrie, “Relief Aid Behind the Lines: The Cross Border Operation in Tigray” in Joanna Macrae and Anthony Zwi, eds. War and Hunger: Rethinking International Responses to Complex Emergencies. London: Zed Books, 1994, 133.

156 Times of London 25 Feb, 1985. (Ethiopia: Addis Ababa,) Institute of Ethiopian Studies.

157 Oxfam America News, “OA in Ethiopia: fighting the famine,” Oxfam Newsletter, Winter 1985, 4. 158 Kirsty Wright, “Famine in Tigray: An Eyewitness Account,” London, REST Support Committee, 1983, 7.


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Tigray due to continued warfare was most acute by ’84 with over two million people affected by

famine.159

However, from 1983 until 1990, the Ethiopian government refused to consider proposals of

“safe passage” for humanitarian organizations into Tigray, as in the eyes of the Derg, this would

have legitimized the TPLF and their control of Tigray, contradicting the Derg’s own assertion that

the Ethiopian government could provide for all famine victims in the north through government

channels alone.160 In reality though, by 1985, the TPLF controlled as much as eighty-five percent of

Tigray, which left the Ethiopian government powerless to facilitate any sort of humanitarian relief

effort. In spite of this, a 1984 REST report stated that the RRC had still continued to solicit

assistance on behalf of Tigray, despite the fact that the RRC’s only emergency projects were

established in Tigray’s urban centers, while the majority of those in need resided in the

countryside.161

Despite the Derg’s refusal to grant humanitarian organizations “safe passage” into Tigray, a

large cross-border relief operation developed in order to deliver much needed aid to Tigray. Based in

Khartoum, Sudan, The Emergency Relief Desk (ERD) channeled assistance into rebel-held

territories in neighboring Eritrea and Tigray from 1985 to 1991, doing so without the permission of

the Ethiopian authorities.162 Identities of the NGOs that managed the cross-border relief operation

were forced to remain confidential throughout the entire operation, as they did not want to

jeopardize their other relief efforts within the government-held areas of Ethiopia. In an article titled

159 Relief Society of Tigray (REST), “Emergency Relief Program Needs Assessment: January-June 1985,” 16 Oct. 1984. Stanford University, Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Archives. Lamar Henderson Collection, Box No. 1 Accession No. 2009C51-16.62. 160 Barbara Hendrie, “Relief Aid Behind the Lines,” 126-127. 161 Relief Society of Tigray (REST), “Emergency Relief Program Needs Assessment: January-June 1985,” 2-3. 162 Barbara Hendrie, “Relief Aid Behind the Lines,” 132.


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“US Has Been Sneaking Tons of Food to Starving Ethiopians” published in the San Francisco

Chronicle on December 20, 1984, it noted that in the past year

The United States has been secretly funneling food aid into Ethiopia’s rebellious northern provinces because the central government refuses to provide famine relief, U.S. officials said yesterday. During the last year, they said, 50,000 tons of food, or about one-fourth of the 210,000 tons dispatched to Ethiopia, were sent to the northern provinces, which are among the hardest hit by drought.163

However, had the Ethiopian government passed the “safe passage” proposals sooner than 1990, it

would have enabled the desperately needed transmission of relief supplies into some of Tigray’s

worst affected regions without any of the secrecy, and perhaps, would have prevented mass refugee

populations of 200,00 and more from fleeing to Sudan.

The international community’s delayed humanitarian response to widespread famine in

Ethiopia resulted in the unfolding of a chaotic emergency relief operation in ’84 that was not only

ineffective in reaching those who needed relief the most, but also established a precedent for how

future humanitarian efforts would work in Ethiopia. Humanitarian efforts in Ethiopia would largely

fund emergency response operations without ever really tackling matters of sustained development.

By focusing on the ineffective delivery of aid and the use of humanitarian relief as a tactic of war,

this chapter has demonstrated that the prolonged severity of the famine in ’84 resulted from both an

inadequate and delayed humanitarian response as well as the use of humanitarian aid as a tactic of

war. Both factors were equally damaging for the future of widespread chronic food insecurity in

Ethiopia, only in different ways.

163 “US Has Been Sneaking Tons of Food to Starving Ethiopians,” San Francisco Chronicle, 20 Dec. 1984. Stanford University, Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Archives. The Ethiopian Subject Box Collection, Box 1/Accession No. XX781-60.01/Folder, Drought and Famine, General (1983-1986).


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An Evil Institution, a Nefarious Practice: British Governmental and Public Responses to Smuggling in the Napoleonic Era, 1800-1815

Harper Pack

Most scholarship of the Napoleonic Period focuses on Napoleon Bonaparte himself, the

myriad wars he waged across Europe, or on the ramifications of the European upheaval he effected.

This is not without merit: Napoleonic France was often the cause of much of the period’s wars and

other conflicts. The actions of many European counties during this time were conducted in

response to some French stimulus, or in anticipation of one. Much of this ground, however, has

already been covered in the centuries since the Napoleonic Era.

This paper treads a relatively fresh trail— that of the phenomenon affected by, but not

caused or incited by, Napoleon and his armies. Specifically, this paper focuses on smuggling in and

around the British Isles from 1800-1815. Smuggling both predated and outlasted the Napoleonic

Era, but the exceptional nature of the period nonetheless influenced the nature of the practice and

the responses to it. For example, the Continental System presented smugglers, honest traders and

national governments with an economic reality they had never before encountered. This paper

focuses on the reaction to the smuggling occurring during this period, and seeks to juxtapose the

government response with a more public response, as provided by The Times of London. The

Times is as close to a newspaper of record as a paper could be during this period; furthermore, its

archives date back to 1785. It was therefore the best option from which to glean a public response

to compare and contrast with that of the government.

As noted above, the smuggling question has been left largely untouched by historians. In the

twentieth century both Neville Williams and E. K. Chatterton penned histories of the practice in

Britain. While useful, these are both generalized works, discussing illicit trade over the course of

many decades, and thus not of particular relevance to this paper. In the late 2000’s, the historian


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Gavin Daly wrote a series of articles discussing British smuggling in the Napoleonic Period, covering

the issue from both a French and British perspective. This represents the first scholarship on

contraband in this period, and his research both inspired and made possible this paper. His piece on

British smuggling, however, provides only an overview of the practice, rather than an in-depth

examination of one of its myriad facets. Thus this paper relies heavily on primary sources,

specifically William Cobbett and T. C. Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, the House of Commons

Sessions Papers, and numerous articles from The Times. As such, it offers a unique contribution to

the current scholarship by providing a detailed examination of governmental and public reaction to

smuggling during the Napoleonic Wars.

This paper begins with a brief synopsis of smuggling in the centuries leading up to the

Napoleonic Period of 1800-1815. Then it progresses into a discussion of the anti-smuggling bills

Parliament produced from 1805-1807, noting how these bills were a deviation from past smuggling

prevention measures. It next outlines the debates surrounding these laws in both the Commons and

the Lords. The paper then moves to a discussion of The Times’ reaction to the black market, and

charts how its response evolved from unconcerned to anguished. Finally, the paper concludes with

a comparison of the public and governmental response, noting that Parliament was concerned with

smuggling from a national finance perspective, while The Times focused more on its effects on the

economy.

Smuggling existed in the British Isles for centuries prior to the Napoleonic Era. Indeed, for

as long as British monarchs have sought to raise revenue through customs, duties and tariffs, there

have been those who seek to profit by avoiding them. Naval historian Neville Williams notes that

"cheating the Crown of its revenues has almost been a [British] pastime" and traces its origins to the

thirteenth century—in response to the customs system then created by King Edward I.i The


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relationship between customs and smuggling is fundamental to the institution of illicit trade.

Without duties, there would be no profit to be gained by smuggling. Yet such taxes endured, thanks

to the immense boon they provided to the Crown's coffers. Accordingly, smuggling persisted as

well, though the specifics of the contraband and its means of conveyance have varied through the

centuries.

As the English government became increasingly centralized over the fifteenth, sixteenth and

seventeenth centuries, its demands for revenue increased. As there was no system of property taxes

yet in place, much of this demand was met through new and increased customs duties. While these

developments bolstered government finances, they also "brought a vast amount of business to the

smugglers."ii This business proved so profitable that it supported "exceedingly numerous" people,

including those who had only an ancillary connection to the profession; indeed, many coastal

communities in southern Britain came to depend on the trade.iii

The eighteenth century emerged as the heyday of British smugglers. High duties on tea,

tobacco, spirits, and silk, among other commodities, fostered a flourishing black market of

contraband goods where "fraudulent prices dominated."iv By the late eighteenth century, smuggled

tea accounted for about 70% of all tea consumed domestically.v This remains a staggering figure.

In response to this overwhelming flood of contraband, the British government took steps to

prevent and disincentivize smuggling. First, it sought to close a loophole in its customs system by

purchasing the feudal rights to the Isle of Man through the Isle of Man Purchase Act of 1765. The

Dukes of Atholl controlled the island as Lords of Man for some centuries, and they levied no

customs or tariffs on imported or exported goods. This had fashioned the Isle into a perfect layover


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for smugglers en route to Britain from the Continent.vi The Purchase Act ended this practice on the

island, providing the Crwn with the right to enforce its customs therein.

The government next took measures to disincentivize smuggling by rendering the trade in

contraband less lucrative. Throughout the 1780's, William Pitt attacked the profits of tea smugglers

by lowering the tariffs on tea, which were much higher than those on the Continent.vii He dealt his

most significant blow to smugglers with the Commutation Act of 1784, which reduced the tax on

tea from 119% to 12.5%. This served to remove smugglers’ raison d’être, and the once blistering

illicit trade thereafter cooled.viii

The specific focus of this paper however, is the trade in contraband that occurred several

decades later, during the Napoleonic Period. Smuggling between 1800 and 1815 was something of

an anomaly compared to the illicit trade of the previous centuries. European historian Gavin Daly

notes that the Napoleonic Era served both to incite and discourage smuggling. On the one hand,

frequent war meant higher duties and fewer naval ships policing the seas; on the other, however,

conflict meant the disruption of trade routes, economic downturn, and an increase in coastal defense

fortifications in anticipation of a potential French invasion.ix Smuggling had typically ground to a

halt during the wars of the eighteenth century, as the cessation of formal trade denied smugglers

access to desired goods.x Yet in the case of the Napoleonic Wars fought on and off from 1800-

1815, smuggling thrived to an “alarming extent,” from the perspective of Parliament.xi

What was perhaps most notable about this era’s illicit trade was the sudden scrutiny directed

against it. The institution of smuggling constantly weighed on the minds of Members of Parliament

(MPs), and became a ubiquitous topic in the press. Though these were age-old concerns, debate

regarding them became revitalized during this period: smuggling was discussed in Parliament more


67

often in the year 1805 alone than it had been in the entire decade prior.xii Similarly, the number of

articles relating to the contraband trade in The Times of London more than doubled from 1790 to

1810.

This renewed focus on the black market manifested itself in the form of new Parliamentary

anti-contraband measures. Yet much as wartime smuggling was atypical, so too were the strategies

adopted to oppose it. While William Pitt's 1784 Commutation Act targeted the profits of illicit

trade, Parliaments during the Napoleonic Period targeted the individuals engaged in it. The laws,

titled "A Bill for the More Effectual Prevention of Smuggling" (1805) and "A Bill to Make More

Effectual Provision for the Prevention of Smuggling" (1807), were in fact punitive measures

designed to halt the trade through intimidation.

The 1805 bill established specific guidelines for dealing with illegal shipping. Any ship

within one hundred leagues (about 345 miles) of the British coast was liable for seizure if it carried

any of the following: casks of foreign spirits of less than sixty gallons in volume each, tea cargo

weighing more than six pounds, or tobacco and snuff cargo weighing less than four hundred and

fifty pounds. To a modern reader, these numbers seem arbitrary; one has to assume these were the

quantities of goods most conducive to smuggling. The bill further stated that in addition to the ship,

its "guns, furniture, ammunition, tackle, and apparel thereof" were also to be forfeit. Essentially

everything was to be taken if officials found anything illegal on board.xiii

The individuals manning the ship were to be seized as well, as were those found assisting

smuggling operations in any way. Those arrested "shall forfeit . . . either treble the value of the

goods that shall be found or taken from such person or persons, or the sum of one hundred

pounds" simply by virtue of their arrest. Afterwards, they would be brought to the nearest Justice of


68

the Peace to be tried. If found guilty, they were subject to yet another fine: "[Justices should] hold

such person to bail, with two good and sufficient sureties, in the sum of one hundred pounds each .

. . ." If these fines could not be paid, the individuals concerned were to be incarcerated.xiv

There was, however, an out—if the smugglers consented to impressments, they would be

free of any and all fines. Doing so required acquiescing to not being "on any account . . . discharged

from His Majesty's Service during the term of five years, and from thence until the conclusion of

any war in which His Majesty may be engaged at the period of the expiration of such five years . . . ."

Considering the frequent and enduring nature of war in this era, this clause could easily keep men in

service far beyond five years. If one was maimed or otherwise injured during the course of these

military tours, he could be released from the contract. Leaving the service prior to the

aforementioned termination dates for any reason other than injury, however, would result in the

reinstatement of the smuggling fines as assessed at the point of arrest.xv

The bill also imposed harsh penalties upon anyone who did "assault, resist, oppose, molest,

obstruct, or hinder any Officer of His Majesty's Army, Navy, or Marines, or any Officer in the

Service of the Customs or Excise, or any person or persons aiding or assisting in the due execution

of the powers and authorities by this act . . . ." This cast a wide net, ensnaring all those who do not

happily cooperate with the authorities. Individuals who failed to comply were sentenced to seven

years of prison and three years of harsh labor. That is, unless during their resistance they

"maliciously shot at, maim[ed], or dangerously wound[ed]" any officer or anyone assisting an officer

in upholding the authority of the law. Such action warranted the immediate application of death

penalty upon conviction by a Justice of the Peace; no clergy would be provided for end-of-life rites

in these cases.xvi


69

Officers of the Navy, Army, Marines, Customs or Excise were responsible for enforcing the

above provisions, and thus also possessed the authority to search any suspicious ship for

contraband. Upon the seizure thereof, officers were to bring the goods to specified collection ports

(most often London), where they would "be properly secured in warehouses belonging to His

Majesty's Revenues of Customs or Excise, and . . . drawn off and put into large and substantial

casks, and . . . gauged and taken account of, and the strength of each quantity ascertained by the

proper Officer . . . ." Thereafter these stores would be administered by the Commissioners of His

Majesty's Treasury, who were charged with maintaining them in a manner "most conducive to the

protection of the revenue," be that simply keeping the contraband in storage, sending it to the

Commissioners in charge of supplying His Majesty's Navy, or destroying it.xvii

Those responsible for enforcing the above provisions of the "Bill for the Effectual

Prevention of Smuggling"—namely the Officers of the Navy, Marines, Customs, etc.—were to be

rewarded for performing their duties. For each arrest, officers earned "one half of every such

penalty [either] of treble value [of the captured contraband], or of one hundred pounds," depending

on the fines a particular smuggler incurred. This reward was to be split amongst the officers and

those assisting them, representing a significant incentive to men of all ranks. Such rewards were

doled out even if the accosted smugglers chose impressment over jail, with the capturing party

earning a portion of the estimated penalty or forfeiture.

The above strictures were set forth by the Bill for the More Effectual Prevention of

Smuggling, and applied to the whole of Great Britain and the seas up to one hundred leagues from

her coasts. The Channel Islands, however, merited special consideration. Jersey, Guernsey,

Alderney, and Sark existed in a state of ambiguous governmental jurisdiction, much as the Isle of

Man had in the mid-eighteenth century. Unsurprisingly, this facilitated a healthy trade in illicit


70

goods, and the islands became renowned as smuggling havens. The 1805 anti-smuggling bill

therefore sought to extend British customs jurisdiction to the region: "no foreign [spirits] . . . shall be

imported into or exported from the Islands of Guernsey, Jersey, Alderney, or Sark . . . , or removed

from any one to any other said islands . . . ." The same rules applied to tobacco, snuff and tea.xviii

Wine alone could be brought into or out of these islands, and only if the ship carrying them

had been registered for such duty with an Officer of the Customs. The ship could thereby obtain

the necessary "certificate [that] specif[ied] the number of [wine] packages, and the quantity of wine

contained in each . . . ." Even with the required certificate, ships still had to pay a deposit on the

goods they carried to and from the islands, which was to be recorded on their certificate. Upon

reaching their destination port, if the weight of the goods listed on the certificate matched the

weight of goods on board the ship, the deposit (known as the 'clearance') would be returned to the

ship. It would otherwise be forfeit.xix

The bill was thus designed to discourage smuggling through intimidation. The sheer size of

the fines likely left most captured smugglers to choose between prison and naval service, both highly

undesirable options. The dismissal of these fines for those opting for impressment, however,

provided a strong incentive to do so. This is a tactic evident throughout the bill: co-opting

smugglers and their resources for the Crown's ends. If that proved impossible, the goods were to be

disposed of. Men who could or would not serve in the navy were imprisoned, or wrung dry of their

money. Impounded ships unsuitable for incorporation into the Royal Navy were demolished.

Seized contraband could be repurposed to supply seamen, or if not it might be kept in a storehouse

or destroyed. Parliament hoped to further enforce this system by incentivizing its officers to arrest

smugglers, by offering them a portion of a capture's spoils.


71

Interestingly, the Parliamentary debates on the Bill for the More Effectual Prevention of

Smuggling did not revolve around the potential efficacy of these measures. Both Houses instead

focused on the question of whether Great Britain could legislate for the Channel Islands. The

debate commenced in the Commons with words from one Mr. Plomer, a counsel representing

Jersey, Guernsey and Alderney. He argued that these islands had "been under the dominion of the

dukes of Normandy, before the conquest of England, by William I . . . [and as such] they had as

good, if not a better right, originally to legislate for Great Britain then, than Great Britain had for

them." One MP spoke in agreement, conceding that while smuggling "was a very great evil,"

Parliament must first resolve "whether this bill could be fairly considered as a constitutional

infringement upon the alleged independence of those islands . . . ."xx

Several other members raised similar concerns, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer

responded by noting the historical precedent of British jurisdiction over the islands. Another MP,

Dr. Laurence, further discredited any opposition to the bill by explaining that "Robert, Duke of

Normandy, quarreled with his brother Henry the First; they went to war; Robert was conquered; and

his dominions, by right of this new conquest, annexed to the British crown: so that there was an end

to any claim of independence on that ground." This at last put the issue to rest, and the bill then

passed. Though a few MPs raised additional concerns—such as the proposed bill's impact on

neutral shipping, and how it would curb established smuggling operations outside the Channel

Islands—these merited no real discussion.xxi

The Lords responded to the bill in a similar manner. Lord Holland raised the identical

question of "whether the Parliament had a right to legislate for those islands," objecting further that

the legislation was "replete with inconveniences . . . ." The Duke of Clarence concurred, and

expressed disapproval of the bill being introduced so late in session. Much as in the Commons,


72

however, these concerns ultimately did not hinder the bill’s ratification, and the debates were largely

immaterial. Lord Hawkesbury reminded the Lords that these matters had been previously debated

in the other house, and that smuggling currently thrived to "an amazing extent." The bill passed.xxii

Surprisingly, while there were dissatisfied murmurs regarding the bill's potential efficacy,

neither House saw fit to discuss the issue at length. It was not until after the measure passed that

members began to voice concerns perhaps because the bill's inadequacy only became clear once it

was put into practice. In February of 1807, an MP expressed doubt that "the regulations for the

prevention of smuggling would be as effectual as expected." Lord Henry Petty further critiqued the

current paradigm as one which provided insufficient incentives to enforcement officials. He

envisioned "an improved system of reward, making [revenue officers] participate in the benefit of

seizure . . . ." It is important to note that these comments did not represent a microcosm of some

larger smuggling debate; indeed, discussions concerning illicit trade tended to be relatively brief.

However, whenever the topic was raised dissatisfaction would emerge with respect to existing

prevention mechanisms.xxiii

Those discontented with the 1805 bill found corroboration in an 1807 report from the

Treasury which stated that "spirits and other items were [still] clandestinely introduced into this

Kingdom, the duties upon which would have amounted to a sum not less than 500,000 pounds

sterling."xxiv This did not go unnoticed by the Customs Board, which reported that smuggling still

occurred to an "alarming extent."xxv The apparent inadequacy of the "Bill for the More Effectual

Prevention of Smuggling" gave rise to the "Bill to Make More Effectual Provision for the

Prevention of Smuggling" in 1807. This new bill contained much of the same provisions as its

predecessor. Its most significant deviation consisted of new measures regarding rewards for

smuggling seizures, and the impoundment criteria for illegal ships and cargo.


73

With respect to the former, the 1807 bill established new regulations offering greater rewards

to officers, and those assisting them, who succeeded in capturing smugglers. Those who seized

contraband and arrested at least one of the men in any way involved with the smuggling operation

were to receive "one moiety (half) of the value [of] such spirits, tobacco, or snuff . . . [as determined]

by the Lords Commissioners of His Majesty's Treasury." Capturing illicit goods and their means of

conveyance—be it a ship at sea, or a carriage on land—but without apprehending anyone, reduced

the bonus to one third of the value of items seized. If officers recovered only the contraband, their

bonus decreased further to one fourth of the bounty's value. Commissioners of the Customs could

further reward men for their effort and energy even if they recovered no contraband. These rewards

were to be distributed amongst all men responsible for a seizure.xxvi

The 1807 law also established new strictures for legal shipping. First, all ship owners had to

carve their vessel’s name and length on the sides of the ship. A bevy of ship types, ship tonnages

and ship lengths were now made illegal, unless the ship in question "should have been licensed in

that respect by the Commissioners of His Majesty . . . ." Licenses could be obtained free of charge

from the Commissioners of the Admiralty. Once licensed, vessels were required to display their

respective license number on the ship’s side, along with the word 'LICENSED.'xxvii

Nevertheless, possessing a license did not always protect a vessel from impoundment.

Carrying any goods deemed illegal by the customs laws of Britain—such as those specified as

contraband in the 1805 bill—rendered a ship, its crew, apparel, furniture, etc. subject to forfeiture.

New to the 1807 bill was a provision that extended the same consequences to a ship possessing "any

articles, implements or materials" for use in smuggling, even if no contraband existed onboard. This

clause was fairly far-reaching. 'Materials' could consist of objects as innocuous as spare rope, which

could be used to tie tobacco into smaller packages, for example. The same penalties were meted out


74

to vessels found to have an illegal proportion of men to the ship’s weight, or to those vessels

carrying goods from countries at war with Britain.xxviii

The 1807 bill included a few other stipulations, but the above represents its most significant

elements. While issued as a separate piece of legislation, the bill was in effect an amendment of the

1805 law, and it was consistent with the government's response to smuggling during this period.

The paradigm remained the same: harsh punishments for smugglers and generous rewards to those

who caught them. The 1807 bill merely expanded on this framework. It heightened the incentives

for officers to accost and arrest smugglers, and while it did not increase the already severe penalties

for the latter, it did serve to broaden the scope under which the term ‘smuggling’ could be applied;

this in turn subjected more contraband traders, who may have been unaffected by the prior anti-

contraband laws, to governmental penalties.

The British government's response to smuggling during the Napoleonic Era was markedly

different from the popular reaction to the practice, an indication of which is captured within the

pages of The Times of London. Before progressing further, it is important to note that The Times

cannot be considered a 'populist' paper. Nor can it be construed as one expressing 'typical' British

sentiments on smuggling, for such a perspective did not exist. Individuals from Devon viewed black

market trading differently than Londoners did, for example, and the inhabitants of Derbyshire likely

possessed yet another contrasting opinion. The Times is nevertheless useful in providing a picture

of the public’s reaction to smuggling—so long as one keeps in mind that it does not provide 'the'

popular view towards the practice.

The Times initially treated smuggling simply as fodder for stories, reporting not so much on

the nature of the trade but upon the confrontations between enforcement officials and contraband


75

traders. For example, in December of 1799, The Times reported that "the Viper cutter, in the

service of the Excise, captured on the Suffolk Coast, a few days ago, a Smuggling Cutter, with a

cargo of spirits, consisting of upwards of 600 casks . . . ."xxix The next mention of smuggling in the

paper occurred two years later, when it detailed that "last Friday, a great number of tubs (supposed

to have been thrown overboard by some smuggling cutter under chase) floated on shore with the

tide at Newhaven."xxx Such stories were commonplace in The Times during the early nineteenth

century, and initially represented the only perspective towards smuggling afforded by the paper.

This practice of reducing the smuggling issue to little more than swashbuckling stories

continued through the first half of the decade. In September of 1803, the paper detailed how

"Captain Harris, of the Fox Revenue lugger . . . fell in with upwards of twenty sail of smugglers, all

laden from Guernsey and Alderney, with contraband goods."

xxxii

xxxiii

xxxiv

xxxi Two months later it reported that

"the Active cutter, of Falmouth, has captured, and sent into Falmouth, the Fly smuggling sloop, of

Dartmouth, having 450 casks of foreign spirits on board." In December of that year The Times

published a long exposé about "Matthew Miller, John Pugh, Thomas Selwood, and Paul Salsbury . . .

[who were] charged with having stolen wine and liquors, to a considerable amount." The paper

further detailed how these men "used to dress like Gentlemen in the evening, and gained admittance

to clubs and societies, where they gave it out that they had a smuggling cutter in constant employ,

and could furnish public-houses with wines, of the best quality, at a very reduced price." A

similar piece ran the following year, describing the daring escape of a smuggler from prison.

The above was more than a tactic intended to reduce smuggling issues into entertaining

news stories. First, it provided a tacit approval of government anti-smuggling efforts, and secondly

implied that smuggling was not a significant problem. The two are interrelated: if smuggling was not

a major concern, then the government's enforcement efforts were effective. A September 1803


76

article spelled this out, noting that the success of the anti-smuggling efforts were attributable to the

efforts of "the admiralty."xxxv This was often left unsaid, but nonetheless implied, in most other

articles. The stories The Times ran did not mention the smuggling ships that eluded the Crown's

reach (how could they?) Rather, they described His Majesty's ships seizing contraband and arresting

smugglers. Nearly every mention of smuggling throughout the first half of the decade was in the

context of such successful endeavors. Thus, it seemed as if the illegal trade was under control, and

by extension, that the government was doing its job.

Though all of these articles make it clear that smuggling was a nefarious practice, they do not

depict it as having a deleterious effect on the nation. In essence, prior to 1806, The Times trivialized

the practice of smuggling. There was the occasional article deviating from this trend, such as one

written in December 1804 that made note of the ease with which government documents could be

forged, enabling contraband to flow unfettered into Britain. Yet such comments were few and far

between in the first half of the decade. In the years after 1806, however, such negative depictions of

smuggling became more commonplace. The type of story seen earlier, which simplified illicit trade

into a cat and mouse game between smugglers and government officials, all but ceased to exist.

The paper began to depict smuggling more explicitly as a negative practice, and oftentimes as

an outright damaging one. Notably, despite re-characterizing smuggling as a problem, it never

criticized the government, a fact likely indicating that The Times depended on government

patronage. In 1807 The Times published Parliamentary debates germane to smuggling in full, an

action it had not previously taken.xxxvi

xxxvii

Significantly, these debates notably detailed the damages

afforded by smuggling, specifically in terms of the negative impact on the national revenue. An

article on Dutch relations in 1810 lamented the damage smuggling caused on account of "a few

covetous individuals" and the fact that there were not more soldiers and seamen available to police


77

smugglers.xxxviii

xxxix

It further drew a distinction in "the class of commercial inhabitants [between] the

disgraceful smuggler [and] the respectable fair dealer," and decried how the latter were victimized by

the former.

The intensity of this narrative increased as the Napoleonic Period progressed. Perhaps the

most vitriolic anti-smuggling piece appeared in 1811, railing against the "drinkers of champagne and

claret."

xliii

xl It blamed Britain's economic downturn on the smuggling of French spirits encouraged by

the "thoughtless luxury of our rich people, the shameless avarice of traders, and the general want of

public spirit" which "conspire[d] to enrich our enemies, and to produce the heavy balance of trade

against us . . . ."xli This article most explicitly links smuggling to "cruel and distressing" results.xlii

Several articles followed suit over the next several years, though they were less vigorous in their

denouncements. One in 1813 declared smuggling to have been the cause of "the ruin of the [East

India] Company's trade," a significant accusation. A letter to the editor written just a few weeks

later linked the presence of smuggling to the "great deterioration of the revenue [of the nation]," a

deleterious effect rendered all the more serious during wartime.xliv

There was still the occasional tale of swashbuckling seamen stamping out the smuggling

scourge, but these stories took on a far darker tone, reflective of the negative ramifications of the

contraband trade. Of the handful published after 1806, the vast majority involved cases of violence.

For instance, an 1808 article described a fierce sea chase, but rather than ending with seizure of the

ship and its contraband, "[the officers] were fired upon by a party from the shore . . . [two men]

were killed on the spot, and a third [was] so badly wounded as to lie without hopes of recovery."xlv

Another violent encounter occurred several years later, when a government revenue cutter happened

upon "a French smuggling lugger, loaded with brandy . . . a desperate engagement took place, in

which eight of his Majesty's crew were killed and wounded, and above 20 of the smugglers, before


78

they were subdued."xlvi It is difficult to say whether this was an editorial decision on behalf of The

Times' editors, or truly reflective of a change in the nature of government-smuggler interactions.

Regardless, it represented a marked departure from the tone of such articles seen earlier in the

decade.

The Times' response to the trade in contraband evolved over the course of the Napoleonic

Wars. Initially, smuggling appeared as an evil practice, albeit one firmly under control by

governmental authorities. It provided diverting yarns for The Times' columns, stories that ended

predictably with the smugglers captured and brought to justice. This kept smuggling, as a practice,

confined to discrete, manageable incidents whose consequences never extended beyond the pages of

the paper. All this changed, however, as the first decade of the nineteenth century progressed. The

Times' conception of smuggling evolved to the point where it was fully recognized as an issue of

import, and not merely as an entertaining side story. Despite this shift, however, the government

continued to be as revered as before. Simultaneously, the act of smuggling transformed from a

benign evil to an active threat to the nation's welfare. Smugglers no longer submitted easily to

revenue officers—rather, they attacked them. The illicit trade actively damaged the nation's

commerce, revenue, and citizens.

This represented a notable divergence from the government's reaction to smuggling.

Granted, the comparison is not a perfect one. The interest of a newspaper is to sell papers, while

the concerns of government are myriad: national defense, the economy, the Crown's coffers, etc.

Yet nonetheless both institutions perceived the existence of smuggling as an “evil.” Many members

of Parliament in the early nineteenth century were of the opinion that the trade in contraband was

"so dangerous an evil" that it demanded immediate attention.xlvii These concerns motivated the

creation of a committee on the subject, which eventually produced the 1805 "Bill for the More


79

Effectual Prevention of Smuggling." During the readings of this legislation, MPs once again labeled

smuggling “a very great evil, which required the greatest vigilance and exertion for its

prevention.”xlviii Similarly, The Times likened carriers of contraband to "rogues and vagabonds," and

declared the trade a "disgraceful" practice antithetical to "virtue and good morals."xlix

Though their opinions toward smuggling were similar, the nature of their responses differed.

This has been detailed above. The Times initially covered the trade in contraband on a superficial

level, only later transitioning to focus on its negative effects. Parliament, in contrast, always

considered illicit trade dangerous. Yet it is the nature of this focus that elucidates the difference

between The Times' and the government's response to smuggling. Parliament was primarily

interested in national revenue; this dictated its approach to, and discussions of, the smuggling

problem. The Times, on the other hand, appears to have been mostly concerned with the national

economy, with the latter’s decline triggering a shift in the tone and content of the newspaper’s

articles regarding illicit trade.

To see that Parliament's primary interest was national revenue, one need look no further

than the content of the anti-smuggling bills. MPs freely acknowledged that high customs duties

“have a direct tendency to encourage smuggling.”l Accordingly, during the late eighteenth century,

when tea smuggling was at its zenith, the government responded by significantly cutting duties, a

policy that had "probably contributed to a general decline in smuggling."li However, when

confronted by a similar crisis just twenty years later, Parliament's response was drastically altered.

While tariffs were likely less egregious than they had been in eras past, measures to lower them were

not even considered. Instead, Parliament sought to undermine illicit trade by intimidating would-be

smugglers through harsh punishments and steep fines. The difference between the early nineteenth

century and the late eighteenth century were the Napoleonic Wars, which made government revenue


80

a prime concern. In 1805, the Chancellor of the Exchequer confirmed this: "it would not be denied,

that revenue was a matter of most material consideration to [Britain] in the midst of a war."lii That

Parliament discussed smuggling most intently during national finance debates only further

underlines this point.liii

When discussing smuggling, the primary concern cited by MPs was the "enormous extent to

which the revenues of [Britain] were injured by smuggling." The myriad other consequences were

largely ignored. The government's policies reflected this. Cutting duties, while perhaps being the

most effective tactic for suppressing smuggling, might have the concomitant effect of drastically

reducing revenues. Steep penalties, however, were inexpensive to implement, especially when the

government collected fines from offenders. It is unclear whether captured smugglers were ever able

to pay the high fines imposed on them, but these penalties and the re-appropriation of seized

contraband enabled the government to regain revenue lost from the contraband trade. Further

evidence of this comes from the nature of the government's enforcement efforts. Instead of

increasing the number of customs and revenue boats patrolling coastal waters, the government

sought to achieve the same effect by simply offering heightened incentives to officials to apprehend

smugglers, while further extending powers of search and seizure to officers of the army, navy, and

marines.

Smuggling posed a serious threat to government revenue from the beginning of the

Napoleonic Period, and as such Parliament responded fairly early in the first decade of the

nineteenth century. The Times, in contrast, did not register much of a reaction to illicit trade until

later. While the newspaper had always covered smuggling, the first five years of the century were

marked by repetitive, superficial articles that belied the complexity of the trade. After 1806, as noted

above, the paper began to offer greater commentary on the issue, particularly focusing on its


81

manifold consequences, for instance noting the damage it does to the "respectable fair dealer."liv

Coinciding with this change was a decline in the British economy, which the historian Gavin Daly

noted as sliding into recession as the decade progressed. Although causation can neither be drawn

nor proved, the change in the tone of The Times' articles was undeniable as the decade progressed.

The key change in the nation during this time was the economic decline. Further, it is important to

note that while The Times presumably catered to an upper middle class readership (as they were the

ones possessing both literacy and the leisure to read), even as a relatively privileged class they were

likely less insulated from the effects of an economic downturn than those extraordinarily privileged

individuals in government.

Smuggling had long posed a threat to the government’s revenue, centuries before Napoleon

burst onto the European stage. The cat and mouse game of revenue cutters and smuggling luggers

was as old as customs laws themselves. This paper details a peculiar chronicle in the history of

British smuggling: smuggling in the context of the Napoleonic Wars. While war had previously been

a bane to smuggling, the particular circumstances of this period led to a flourishing of the practice in

Britain, particularly with respect to the Channel Islands. This wartime smuggling was somewhat

unprecedented, and thus so too were the responses to it.

The British government, desperately strapped for money, saw smuggling as a serious threat

to national revenue. Parliament sought to combat this evil in as cost-effective a manner as possible,

by wringing steep fines from captured smugglers or putting them to work as seamen, while offering

incentives to government officials for seizures, rather than taking the more expensive step of

employing more officers. These means were calculated to maximize revenue while minimizing the

cost of protecting it. The Times likewise viewed the contraband trade as an evil, yet characterized it

as benign up through the year 1807. As the economy worsened, however, The Times began to


82

perceive smuggling as a cause of the downturn. Accordingly, the paper altered its coverage of the

topic, rebranding illicit trade as a threatening, deleterious practice that was bringing Britain and her

citizens serious fiscal, and in some cases physical, harm.

Smuggling, of course, did not vanish with the cessation of hostilities after Waterloo. But,

with the Napoleonic threat gone, it is likely that governmental and public attitudes towards the

practice underwent a shift. This, however, is best left for future scholarship to determine, research

that will hopefully expand on the relatively unexplored subject that is the contraband trade of the

early nineteenth century.

i Neville Williams, Contraband cargoes: Seven centuries of smuggling, 1st US ed. (n.p.: Shoestring Press;, 1961), xi. ii Ibid., 63 iii Ibid., 63 E. K. Chatterton, King's Cutters and Smugglers, (London: George Allen & Company, Ltd., 1912), 40. iv Williams, Contraband Cargoes, 63 v Gavin Daly, “English Smugglers, the Channel, and the Napoleonic Wars, 1800–1814,” Journal of British Studies 46, no. 1 (January 2007): 33, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/508397 (accessed May 25, 2011). vi Chatterton, King's Cutters and Smugglers, 43 vii Daly, “English Smugglers, the Channel, and the Napoleonic Wars,” 33 viii Ibid., 33 ix Ibid., 34 x Ibid., 34 xi Chatterton, King's Cutters and Smugglers, 184 xii William Cobbett and T. C. Hansard, The Parliamentary History of England (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown [etc.], 1812-1819), 28-34:page nr. T. C. Hansard, The Parliamentary Debates, (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown [etc.], 1812), 3:page nr. xiii House of Commons, “Bill for more effectual Prevention of Smuggling (as amended on Re- commitment),” Sessional Papers, 1805, 19th Century House of Commons Sessional Papers, May 30, 1805, vol. 1, par. 1.135, p. 1-2 xiv Ibid., 5-6 xv Ibid., 6 xvi Ibid., 7 xvii Ibid., 8-9 xviii Ibid., 2 xix Ibid., 3-4 xx Hansard, vol. 5, col. 628-629 xxi Ibid., col. 648 xxii Ibid., col. 802-804 xxiii Hansard, vol. 3, col. 851, 813-814 xxiv Daly, “English Smugglers, the Channel, and the Napoleonic Wars,” 38 xxv Chatteron, King's Cutters and Smugglers, 184

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xxvi House of Commons, “A bill [as amended on re-commitment] to make more effectual provision for the prevention of smuggling” Sessional Papers, 1807, 19th Century House of Commons Sessional Papers, July 24, 1807, vol. 1, par. 1.39, p. 11-13 xxvii Ibid., 1-3 xxviii Ibid., 4-5, 8 xxix Ship News, The Times (London), December 17, 1799 xxx News in Brief, The Times (London), December 10, 1801 xxxi Ship News, The Times (London), September 21, 1803 xxxii News, The Times (London), November 7, 1803 xxxiii Police, The Times (London), December 24, 1803 xxxiv Ibid. xxxv Ship News, The Times (London), September 21, 1803 xxxvi House of Commons, The Times (London), February 17, 1807 Parliamentary Intelligence, The Times (London), February 19, 1807 xxxvii Ibid. xxxviii Dutch Papers, The Times (London), February 21, 1810 xxxix Ibid. xl To Drinkers Of Champagne And Claret, The Times (London), November 26, 1811 xli Ibid. xlii Ibid. xliii East-India House, The Times (London), January 29, 1813 xliv Scotus, letter to the editor, The Times (London), February 3, 1813 xlv News, The Times (London), July 26, 1808 xlvi News, September 20, 1811 xlvii Hansard, vol. 3, col. 224 xlviii Ibid., col. 630 xlix House of Commons, The Times (London), June 17, 1802 Dutch Papers, The Times (London), February 21, 1810 l Hansard, vol. 2 col. 887 li Daly, “English Smugglers, the Channel, and the Napoleonic Wars,” 33 lii Hansard, vol. 5. col. 631 liii Ibid., vol. 3 col. 814 liv Dutch Papers, The Times (London), February 21, 1810

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