Atlantic coast

The Atlantic coast is central to the argument that a general Union would make national revenue more secure and less expensive to collect. Rather than requiring each state to guard its own borders against neighboring states’ trade, one government could concentrate much of its customs enforcement along the seaboard, using a modest maritime presence and coordinated measures across the Union.

A natural boundary for customs enforcement

The argument begins with the geography of the states: rivers, bays, easy inland communication, and familiar habits of exchange would make illicit trade between separate jurisdictions difficult to prevent. If the states maintained distinct customs systems, mutual jealousy would encourage them to keep duties low rather than risk losing commerce to neighbors. The Atlantic coast offers a more practicable perimeter. Under one government, the principal part of commerce would have “but ONE SIDE to guard”—the coast itself.

That advantage is not simply a matter of drawing a shorter border. Ships arriving directly from abroad with valuable cargoes would have little reason to risk unloading before reaching port, where exposure to coastal dangers and detection would threaten them both before and after arrival. The essay therefore argues that ordinary vigilance could prevent material violations of revenue law, while a few armed vessels, carefully stationed at port entrances, could serve as sentinels at comparatively small expense.

The contrast between direct and circuitous trade

The coast’s value becomes clearer in contrast with the routes available under disunion. The United States’ great distance from Europe and other major foreign trading partners would make rapid, direct smuggling across the ocean harder than the short passages between neighboring European shores. But separate states would create another path: goods could enter one state and then move inland, in small parcels and at opportune times, into another whose duties were higher. Inland communication would make this circuitous contraband both easy and safe.

A single national government could coordinate enforcement across states because it would have the same interest in preventing violations everywhere. By contrast, separate governments would face incentives to undercut one another’s duties, while attempting to seal every land and water approach would demand rigorous controls the essay regards as intolerable in a free country. It invokes France’s more than twenty thousand fiscal patrols to illustrate the expense and coercive powers required to impede contraband even where authorities devote substantial resources to it. The contrast makes the coastline a practical advantage only when joined to national jurisdiction: Union turns the Atlantic boundary into a common line of defense, while disunion opens inland routes between competing customs regimes.

Revenue and the scale of the Union

This geography supports a broader fiscal claim. The essay argues that direct taxation had repeatedly disappointed public expectations: multiplying tax laws and trying new collection methods had not filled state treasuries. Given scarce money and sluggish trade, duties on consumption and imports appeared more promising. A general Union, by encouraging commerce and simplifying the collection of duties, could make a given rate more productive and permit rates to rise without harming trade.

The proposed scale of the Union is also defended by reference to its dimensions. The essay describes the country as extending from the Atlantic to the Mississippi and calculates a mean north–south distance of about 868¾ miles, with an east–west mean of about 750 miles. Those measurements reinforce the claim that a shared political system can operate across a broad territory; the coast, as the longest side of the Union, is both a geographic limit and a strategically useful point of contact with foreign commerce.

Significance in the argument for Union

The Atlantic coast thus connects geography to institutional design. A shared government can guard the external approaches to trade while avoiding the multiplication of internal barriers, patrols, and opportunities for evasion. The essay’s case is not that the coast eliminates smuggling, but that a national customs system can concentrate enforcement where it is most manageable and coordinate it throughout the states. In this account, preserving Union protects a natural advantage that separation would squander.