The Black Snake Affair
Burlington, Chittenden County, Vermont
Marker Inscription
In August, 1808, the Black Snake was in the Winooski River to load potash for Canada. The Revenue Cutter Fly seized the Black Snake and, in the confrontation, the Black Snake crew killed three men. The smugglers were tried for murder and three men were se… transcription continues on the marker
This transcription may be incomplete
Our source stores marker text in a field capped at 255 characters, and this inscription appears to have been cut off. We won’t guess at the missing words — the inscription is the primary source, and inventing it would be worse than leaving it short.
Have you stood in front of this marker? Send us the full text or a photo of the sign and we’ll complete the record.
The Story
In August 1808, amid Thomas Jefferson's unpopular trade embargo, the smuggling boat Black Snake lay in the Winooski River loading potash bound illegally for Canada. When the revenue cutter Fly moved to seize her, the confrontation turned deadly and three men were killed. The captured smugglers were tried for murder in one of Vermont's most notorious early criminal cases.
Why it matters
The Black Snake Affair reveals how deeply the Embargo of 1807 strained the Vermont-Canada border, where trade, law, and violence collided in the young republic.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In 1808 the United States was caught in the grip of an experiment gone sour. To keep the young nation out of the wars raging in Europe, President Thomas Jefferson had championed the Embargo of 1807, which sharply restricted American trade with foreign ports. The intent was to pressure Britain and France by withholding American goods; the effect, in much of the country, was economic pain and simmering resentment.
Nowhere was that resentment sharper than along the northern border. Vermont's Lake Champlain valley and the rivers that fed it looked naturally toward Canada, and Montreal was the obvious market for the region's produce. When the embargo made that trade illegal, it did not end it — it drove it underground, turning ordinary commerce into smuggling and honest farmers' neighbors into lawbreakers.
The Winooski River, running toward Lake Champlain and the Canadian trade beyond, sat squarely on this fault line between federal law and local livelihood. It was the kind of place where an unpopular policy in distant Washington collided with the daily needs of people on the frontier.
People & events
In August 1808, as the marker records, a smuggling boat known as the Black Snake lay in the Winooski River loading potash bound illegally for Canada. Potash — valuable and easily sold across the border — was exactly the sort of cargo the embargo was meant to keep home, and exactly the sort that made illicit trade so tempting.
The revenue cutter Fly, tasked with enforcing the law, moved to seize the Black Snake. The confrontation turned violent, and in the clash three men were killed. What had begun as a smuggling run became one of the young state's most notorious criminal episodes.
The captured smugglers were then tried for murder, and the marker notes that three men were sentenced. It was a grim resolution to a violent affair, and it made plain that the stakes of border smuggling in these years could rise from confiscated goods to the gallows.
Its place in the American story
The Black Snake Affair is a vivid window onto how national policy is felt on the ground. The Embargo of 1807 was debated in the halls of government as a question of diplomacy and neutrality; on the Winooski River it became a matter of contraband, gunfire, and lives lost.
The episode also captures the peculiar tension of a borderland. Vermont's economic ties to Canada did not vanish because Washington willed them away; they simply went outside the law. When a government asks people to sever the trade their prosperity depends on, enforcement can turn neighbors into smugglers and rivers into battlegrounds.
As one of the deadliest incidents of embargo-era enforcement, the affair remains a striking early example of the friction between federal authority and local self-interest — a recurring theme in the American story, here written in a single violent August.
If you visit
Stand near the Winooski and let the ordinary calm of the river work against the story. It's hard to imagine gunfire and a murder trial in such a setting, and that contrast is exactly what makes the marker worth pausing over.
Think about geography as you look around. This corner of Vermont naturally faced north toward Canada, and that simple fact — market and border so close together — is what turned a national embargo into a local crisis. The river was a highway to a forbidden market.
The stop fits well into a Lake Champlain valley history route, where the long, complicated relationship between Vermont and Canada surfaces again and again. Read the inscription, watch the water move toward the lake, and remember that these quiet currents once carried contraband, and a confrontation that ended in death and a courtroom.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related events
- · Black Snake Affair
- · Embargo of 1807
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
King's Highway
Lebanon, NH
The King's Highway was one of colonial New England's important overland routes, and this stretch was laid out in 1764, on the eve of the American Revolution, as settlers pushed up the Connecticut River valley into the New Hampshire Grants. The Daughters of the American Revolution erected this marker in West Lebanon in 1917 to keep the memory of that early road alive.
Cannon Mountain Aerial Tramway Cabin
Lincoln, NH
This tramcar once climbed Cannon Mountain in New Hampshire's Franconia Notch as part of the first passenger-carrying aerial tramway in North America, opened in 1938. Loaded, it lifted more than two dozen riders to the summit in about nine minutes, opening the high country to sightseers and skiers in a way no road or trail could. This car did the work for more than four decades before being retired and preserved.
Former Salmond Covered Bridge Site
Weathersfield, VT
This spot in Weathersfield marks where a 54-foot single-span covered bridge once stood, a multiple-kingpost design built in the 1870s and attributed to James Tasker, one of the Connecticut River valley's prolific self-taught bridge wrights. The structure was relocated in 1959, a common fate for aging wooden bridges as automobile traffic outgrew them. Vermont's covered bridges were as much practical engineering as folk craft, their roofs built to protect the timber trusses from rot.
Schoolcraft House
Town of Guilderland, NY
The Schoolcraft House stands in Guilderland, a town west of Albany that grew along the old turnpike roads carrying travelers toward the New York frontier. Substantial early homes like this one belonged to the families who anchored such communities in the young republic. It survives as a link to the Albany region's early-nineteenth-century life.