“MEN, even of the better class, are apt to become regardless,” William A. Whitehead once cautioned, “of both the outward and the inward elements of true manliness when left to themselves.” To this admonition, Whitehead joined a commendation of what he believed were effective inducements to “true manliness”: “the restraining and modifying influences” exerted by the presence, and denied by the absence, of “educated and refined” females.1
As most of his activities were conducted in commercial, political and learned circles ruled by men, Whitehead would with difficulty have imagined women as themselves capable of rule, except in certain well-defined spheres. But he didn’t cease to advocate for the benefits that their “restraining and modifying” hand could confer in public affairs, and strove more than the average man to advance, by word and deed, their work of benevolence.2
In this regard, no field would have appeared to him more infertile than Key West, when he came ashore one January day in 1831, to take charge of the island’s custom house. The previous year’s census revealed that males here outnumbered females by roughly three to one.3 Without the “varied and healthful means of recreation and amusement” that sufficient numbers of “refined” women could provide, Whitehead found the island’s men turning, in their long, idle hours, to games, “carousals,” and “almost nightly” gatherings in which “the sound of the violin regulated the agile steps of the dancers, in houses both of white and colored residents.”4
His official appointment at Key West allowed time for such entertainments, although he found more fulfillment in reading and conversation. Flute-playing helped to relieve the tedium of long evenings, while afternoon rides on a “little black pony” were his main form of exercise.5 For all that, he had embarked upon a life invested with weighty responsibilities, and found he did not lack, even within the narrow limits of the island and antebellum society, the capacity to do some good.
As collector of the customs, Whitehead entered a well-ordered but complex world of regulations and procedures. From their origins in Alexander Hamilton’s term as the nation’s first Secretary of the Treasury, these had evolved and expanded into an intricate system likely to overwhelm anyone with less of a mind for detail.
Delineated in numerous Acts of Congress, beginning with the First Congress in 1789, the scope of the collector’s job seems immense. Collectors in seaside towns took the oaths of ships’ masters calling those ports of entry home. They registered and licensed their vessels. They kept detailed records of the names, nationalities and numbers of craft entering and leaving their harbors, the value of the cargo that passed through, and the crews and passengers on board.
The collector levied a Marine Hospital tax on sailors’ monthly wages to pay for the care of sick and disabled mariners. Normally serving also as Superintendent of Lights, he attended to the security of shipping in his district by supervising and inspecting lighthouses, lightships and buoys, supplying the light keepers’ necessities and their wages. He guarded against smuggling with the help of armed and swift-sailing revenue cutters, whose boats he kept in repair and whose crews he paid and provisioned. Of course, the collector also managed and compensated his staff on shore: inspectors, surveyors, weighers, measurers, gaugers. The Treasury expected all these functions and expenses to be accounted for, in detailed reports and summaries filed quarterly, monthly, and even weekly.6
Hospital tax was assessed regardless of whether the port city boasted a Marine Hospital. When it did not, the collector contracted a resident physician for medical treatment, and lodged sailors in private homes.7 Whitehead urged more and better provision for ailing seafarers, and partly through his efforts a permanent hospital was built on Key West, though only after his final departure from the island.8 Whitehead advocated for better compensation for his employees, especially at lighthouses whose isolation compounded their hardships. He gave security to the families of deceased light keepers by appointing their widows in their places, at the same rate of pay.9
The collector’s chief role, though, was to enforce federal revenue policy, as defined by Congress and administered by the Treasury Department. This entailed estimating and collecting duty on the carrying capacity of vessels–their tonnage–and on the foreign contents of their holds.
Tonnage duties were significantly reduced or eliminated early in 1831, while Whitehead was still new to the job. But when it was learned that non-Spanish vessels were being taxed for tonnage in Cuban ports, on which so much of Key West’s traffic depended, the Treasury mandated an equivalent charge on Spanish vessels serving Cuba. Whitehead was therefore obliged to keep a Tonnage Book, and charge tonnage duties, until the end of his collectorship.10
Recorded duty amounts didn’t always reflect cash taken in, as established merchants usually enjoyed credit with the collector, and custom house bonds were issued, with interest, for duties not paid on the consignment of their goods. A Cash Book and Bond Book, therefore, were other necessary adjuncts of Whitehead’s business.
Calculating duties on foreign cargoes demanded the most minute attention, for rates differed markedly, depending on the nature of the goods, the nationalities of vessels, officers and crews, and ultimately on the perilous state of the Union. Congressional efforts to protect domestic agriculture and manufactures from competition by raising the cost of imports had resulted in the misbegotten Tariff of 1828, under which Whitehead began his service. That schedule of elevated duties, widely reviled (it was nicknamed the Tariff of Abominations), pitched the country into a sectional crisis only temporarily mitigated with the eventual passage of a “compromise tariff” in 1833.11
Even before the 1828 tariff was replaced, commodities imported to Key West with some regularity saw their rates reduced: chief among these were coffee from Cuba and salt from The Bahamas.12 But whereas Whitehead and his deputy became adept at classifying items coming frequently to port, such as Cuban sugar, molasses, bales of tobacco and boxes of cigars, less common articles required review of the schedule and, sometimes, appeal to a superior. Whitehead himself was unsure whether to count boats brought intact from a foreign vessel wrecked offshore, and sold with its cargo, as “manufactures of wood” or “non-enumerated articles.”13
The Impost Book, called by the first Comptroller of the Treasury “the principal ground-work of the whole business,” became the treasure-house of details about each importation. Its ruled columns accommodated the date of each entry, the marks or numbers on the packages, the names of the consignees, the containers, their contents, quantities, values and estimated duties.14
The number of categories multiplied with the distinction between “specific” merchandise, charged purely by weight or volume, and that subject to duty ad valorem, or based on its monetary value. Many shipments included articles of both types, and one consignment to a Key West merchant in February 1832 involved seven different ad valorem rates, including 15% for “shellwork,” 25% for knives, locks and kettles, 40% for spades and pencils, and 45% for flannels.15 Ships’ manifests that listed values in foreign currency had to have their figures converted to dollars, with a statement of exchange rates filed monthly with the Treasury.16
In the first five of Whitehead’s seven years as collector, vessels of foreign registry accounted for only a fraction of Key West’s total traffic, with their numbers in gradual decline. The diminution in foreign vessels was not, however, among the factors he considered productive of a general fall in revenue. The virtual abolition of tonnage duties at the start of his tenure had played a part.17 So, too, did improvements to the safety of navigation, certainly the result, in some measure, of Whitehead’s care of the Florida Keys’ network of lights and buoys, which reduced the number of wrecks driving foreign cargoes into the custom house. Perhaps of most significance were the sweeping changes in the tariff law which took effect in 1833, causing the reduction or elimination of duties on “almost every article of common importation at this port.”18
The numbers during those five years could not, in fairness, be compared with the preceding ones, difficult as they would be to calculate from what Whitehead insinuated were the disordered records of his predecessors. He was confident, moreover, of a bright commercial future for Key West, the likely “dépôt for the supply of both the Cuban and Mexican Ports,” with a further source of profit in its own salt works then being developed, and a “rapidly increasing” trade with the rest of the United States.19
While the government in Washington paid his living, Whitehead placed his energies at the service of constituents much nearer at hand: specifically, those in the local mercantile community and, through them, Key West society at large. He had not yet completed one year as collector when he headed to Havana to discuss commercial matters with the leading official there and, even before that (it’s worth noting), visited threatened Spanish fishing communities on the Gulf Coast, where live fish not included in the custom house accounts was caught for the Havana market, to the value of thousands of dollars a year.20 The following spring, he was to make the case for Key West more directly, lobbying officials in Washington.
In a memoir composed “for my grandchildren” almost thirty years after his final farewell to the Keys, Whitehead took the recent publication of A Sketch of the History of Key West by Walter C. Maloney, still a resident there, as a stimulus to jot down many of his own recollections. Referring to the Sketch as a source of “considerable information relating to my public life,” he opted rather to memorialize events of a “private and social” character.21
In truth, Maloney’s Sketch affords very little information about Whitehead’s custom house labors. And we find no account, not in Whitehead’s private memoir nor in anonymous columns he wrote in the same period for a Key West newspaper, of his workaday life as a sometime customs officer.
His newspaper columns, for their part, offer a delightful blend of comedy, tragedy, intrigue, even villainy. His memoir highlights a young man’s adaptations to life without the refinements and comforts of female company. Nothing of the collector’s business emerges, however, from either source. It’s possible that the keeping of records, so central to the custom house business, made the thought of revisiting those exertions seem redundant. Whitehead may also have believed, not without cause, that the coming prosperity of Key West would be monument enough to his efforts.
Copyright © 2024-2025 Gregory J. Guderian
[1] W. A. W., Reminiscences of Key West, No. 1, published in Key of the Gulf (Key West, Fla.) 31 March 1877, and in Thelma Peters, ed. “William Adee Whitehead’s Reminiscences of Key West,” Tequesta 1:25 (1965) (3-42) 5. A manuscript, in the form of a letterbook copy in Whitehead’s hand, contains the thirteen columns he wrote under this title for Key of the Gulf; it is part of Manuscript Group 734 at the New Jersey Historical Society. References hereafter to Peters’s text appear in parentheses thus: (Peters 38).
[2] Whitehead saw the all-male Newark Association for Relieving and Improving the Condition of the Poor, formed after New York’s example in January 1849, as complementary to the work of the Newark Female Charitable Society, founded 45 years earlier: “Men’s rugged natures,” he wrote, “cannot always fully appreciate the circumstances which beset many afflicted families, or may fail to discern the most fitting mode of affording efficient relief; and Women cannot always assist where they would, however desirous, from interposing obstacles with which their sex cannot cope.” G. P., “The winter’s campaign for the poor,” Newark (N.J.) daily advertiser 25 September 1849 2:2.
[3] Fifth Decennial Census of the United States, 1830. Record Group 29, Records of the Bureau of the Census, National Archives and Records Administration (Microfilm Publication M19), sheets 107-111.
[4] Reminiscences of Key West, No. 1 (Peters 5).
[5] Typewritten transcription of an unpublished memoir, under the title “Childhood and youth of W. A. Whitehead 1810-1830” (hereafter “Childhood and youth”), of which copies are held by the Florida Keys History Center, Monroe County Public Library, Key West, and the P. K. Yonge Library of Florida, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida. Page 35 contains the reference.
[6] Collectors’ responsibilities varied from decade to decade and port to port, but some idea of Treasury officials’ modifications and efforts to regulate their work can be gained from a perusal of abstracts and compendia of circular letters, especially those of the Secretary and the Comptroller of the Treasury. For a collection of abstracts see Robert Mayo, A synopsis of the commercial and revenue system of the United States, as developed by instructions and decisions of the Treasury Department for the administration of the revenue laws… (Washington 1847; hereafter “Mayo, Synopsis”).
[7] The Navy during its occupation of Key West had constructed at least one hospital building (a “New Hospital” and “upper Hospital Building” are mentioned), which the government rented out, then turned over to the State Department for use as a courthouse. Not long after, the U.S. marshal brought to the Navy Secretary’s attention the need of a proper hospital for destitute sailors, saying of their plight, “Since my short residence on this Island, I have witnessed more human misery, than I had ever expected to see within the United States.” See Charles Edwin Carter, ed. The territorial papers of the United States. Volume XXIII. The territory of Florida 1824-1828 (Washington 1958) 669-671 and n.43, 932; id., ed. The territorial papers of the United States. Volume XXIV. The territory of Florida 1828-1834 (Washington 1959; hereafter “Territorial papers XXIV”) 93-94, 113, 274-278.
[8] In answer to an 1837 request for information from the Treasury Department, Whitehead maintained that too much suffering and too many deaths resulted from the lack of a hospital and “the present mode of administering but partial relief.” He submitted a plan for a hospital building, with a cost estimate of $15,000-$18,000. W. A. Whitehead, Key West 15 September 1837, to Levi Woodbury, printed in Report from the Secretary of the Treasury, in compliance with a resolution of the Senate of the 20th February, 1837, in relation to the location and cost of marine hospitals on the western waters, and the regulation of the marine hospital fund (12 December 1837), 25th Congress, 2d Session (S. Rep. No. 8, Serial Set 314) 13-14. See also my previous post 068–Tift’s Tower, note 10.
[9] Whitehead named Barbara Mabrity keeper of the Key West light on her husband’s death in 1832; she served until 1864. Rebecca Flaherty was already tending the revolving light on Sand Key under Whitehead’s predecessor, and remained in that position until she remarried in 1834. See my previous posts 061–Numbers to neighbors and 063–Light duties.
[10] Beginning in April 1831, no tonnage duties were collected on U.S. vessels whose officers and two-thirds of the crew were American citizens. U.S. vessels arriving in Cuban ports paid Spanish authorities $1.50 per ton, a dollar less than previously. Collectors in U.S. ports were to levy an equivalent duty on Spanish-owned shipping coming from Cuba. Louis McLane, Circular to Collectors of the Customs, 8 November 1832; see Mayo, Synopsis 134, no. 1066; 146, no. 1164; Key West (Fla.) gazette 7 December 1831 2:4. More discriminating and retaliatory duties followed; see The public statutes at large of the United States of America… 4 (Boston 1846; hereafter “Public statutes 4”) 578-579; “Collector’s office,” Key West (Fla.) enquirer 3 January 1835 3:4; “Commerce with Cuba,” The enquirer (Key West, Fla.) 31 January 1835 3:1. Whitehead criticized a proposed repeal of tonnage duties on Spanish vessels as “most impolitic, unless preceded by some regulations on the part of Cuba giving to our intercourse some degree of reciprocity.” “Trade with Cuba,” Key West (Fla.) inquirer 10 September 1836 2:4. He continued to favor discriminating tonnage duties on Spanish vessels, but the “great disparity” that remained required “the intervention of Congress.” “Letters from Havana. No. XV,” Newark daily advertiser 26 September 1838 2:1-2. A volume of custom house records preserves tonnage amounts during Whitehead’s tenure, beginning in 1836. Records of Entrances and Clearances, 1836-1889, Collection District of Key West, Florida. Records of the U. S. Customs Service, Record Group 36, National Archives and Records Administration.
[11] In May 1832, the editors of the Key West Gazette preferred not to add fuel to “the great political excitement which already unfortunately prevails,” although, “to keep our subscribers informed of the true state of affairs, and to what extent the dissatisfaction of the people has gone,” they “extracted liberally” from papers both pro- and anti-tariff; Key West gazette 2 May 1832 2:4. A month later, the Gazette stood openly against the protectionist tariff and declared, “nothing short of a dissolution of the Union will terminate the matter.” Key West gazette 13 June 1832 2:2-3.
[12] In May 1830, Congress fixed the duty on coffee at two cents per pound and that on imported salt at fifteen cents per bushel, effective 31 December 1830. At the end of 1831 these charges fell to one cent per pound and ten cents per bushel. Public statutes 4:403-404, 409. There was fear at Key West that a complete abolition of the tariff on alum salt (salt produced by solar evaporation) would “materially affect the interests of the works about to go into operation on the island….” “The tariff,” Key West gazette 25 January 1832 2:1-2.
[13] The Comptroller judged that such items should be classified as “manufactures of wood.” W. A. Whitehead, Key West 3 October 1831, to Joseph Anderson, and Joseph Anderson, Comptroller’s Office 2 November 1831, to Wm. A. Whitehead, in Public documents printed by order of the Senate of the United States … December 7, 1831, … in three volumes (Washington 1832) 2:172-173. 22d Congress, 1st Session (S. Rep. 64, Serial Set 213) 172-173.
[14] Nicholas Eveleigh, Circular to the several Collectors, 1 December 1789, repr. in Mayo, Synopsis 252-254. Whitehead’s surviving Impost Book, containing entries from July 1831 through June 1835, is part of Impost Books, 1831-1887, Collection District of Key West, Florida, Entry 1518. Record Group 36, Records of the U. S. Customs Service, Record Group 36, National Archives and Records Administration (hereafter “Key West Impost Book, 1831-1835”).
[15] Cargo of the U.S. Sloop Azelia, consignment to Joseph Cottrell and Co., entry of 4 February 1832, Key West Impost Book, 1831-1835.
[16] S. D. Ingham, Circular to Collectors of the Customs, 14 May 1831, printed in Key West gazette 9 November 1831 (and succeeding issues) 4:3. Cf. Mayo, Synopsis 71, no. 523; 73, no. 534.
[17] “Commerce of Key West,” The inquirer 23 January 1836 2:1. In Whitehead’s copy, this unsigned item has been initialed “WAW.”
[18] Notices of Key West for John Rodman Esq. St. Augustine, written December 1835, manuscript copy in Florida Miscellaneous Manuscripts Collection, P. K. Yonge Library of Florida History, Special Collections, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida (hereafter “Notices of Key West”), 8a, printed in Rember W. Patrick, ed. “William Adee Whitehead’s description of Key West,” Tequesta: the journal of the Historical Association of Southern Florida 1:12 (1952) (61-73) 69. References hereafter to Patrick’s text appear in parentheses thus: (Patrick 68).
[19] Notices of Key West 6b-7a (Patrick 68); cf. “Commerce of Florida,” The enquirer 27 June 1835 3:2-3.
[20] Notices of Key West 7b (Patrick 69). Whitehead made his exploratory visit to the Gulf coast fishing camps between 22 and 29 November 1831. His narrative of the trip is included in the holograph Memorandums of peregrinations by land & water, Volume 2, pages 88-100, held by the Key West Art & Historical Society. An edited version of these recollections became “Charlotte Harbor forty-seven years ago” in the series Reminiscences of Key West, Nos. 11-12, published in Key of the Gulf 16 and 30(?) June 1877 (Peters 33-38). See further my earlier post 039–Fishermen’s friend. At the request of Key West merchants seeking fewer restrictions on trade with Havana, Whitehead sailed for Cuba on 30 November and, “after being there a day or two,” met with the formidable Claudio Martínez de Pinillos, Conde de Villanueva, the chief revenue officer of the island: Reminiscences of Key West, No. 12 (Peters 38). Villanueva’s power was “only equaled by that of the Captain General himself,” and would bring about Miguel Tacón’s removal from that position at the end of 1837. G. P., “Letters from Havana. No. II,” Newark daily advertiser (3 August 1838) 2:1-2.
[21] “Childhood and youth” 32. Walter C. Maloney, A sketch of the history of Key West, Florida … An address delivered at the dedication of the new city hall, July 4, 1876, at the request of the Common Council of the city (Newark 1876).
An attractive presence 