USA > Massachusetts > Essex County > Salem > Sketches about Salem people > Part 17
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In 1718, the old court-house, where the witches had been tried, was replaced by a new one on Essex Street, next to and west of the First Church.12 School was kept in the first story of the old court-house, which stood in the middle of what is now Washington Street, near the head of the north end of the tunnel. After the new court-house was built, the old building was devoted entirely to school purposes, and undoubtedly young Derby went there. The boys, inspired by the judicial setting, once amused themselves reenacting the witchcraft trials on one unfortunate playmate, when the teacher unex- pectedly appeared and laid about him right and left, exclaim- ing, "I'll teach you how to try witches once for all."
10 Felt, Annals of Salem, I, 440.
11 See Bentley, Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, 1st Series, I, 240.
12 Felt, Annals of Salem, I, 391.
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BY JAMES DUNCAN PHILLIPS
SALEM IN RICHARD DERBY'S YOUTH
The town that young Derby grew up in was a very different place from what it is now, or even what it was in 1800. Just wander down to the back of the Charter Street Burying Ground, or "Burial Point" as it then was. Imagine a little pebbly beach at your feet, with a ten-foot way running parallel with the shore, and some shops and warehouses straggling along it. Then look across to where the land rises on Lafayette Street. All between is water, deep enough in the center for vessels of twelve or fourteen feet draft to lie at anchor; then follow the shore line to your right along to the mouth of the present tunnel. The shore draws back imme- diately to the line of the present Front Street, which was literally the water-front, with little wharves reaching out to the channel. The Brownes and the Corwins had interests along here, and their boats lay at anchor just about where the flagman stands to-day to flag the trains. Farther along to- ward where Norman Street ran down to the water was a wharf on which Roger Derby, the original emigrant, probably kept his shop from 1689 till toward the end of his life in 1698. At any rate, George Corwin sold him half the two-story build- ing and wharf on July 13, 1689, and he is recorded as a shop- keeper. Other little wharves lined the edges of the creek, which reached back up Creek Street. There was a wharf about where now is the Doyle house garden and others along the shore beyond the creek around to where the road down Mill Hill now crosses the railroad track. At that point a mill dam had been built in 1664, with the condition that the owner maintain a way across the dam. From there the shore of the south fields extended along the line of New Derby Street to the site of the Naumkeag Mills, and then beyond about as now. It is well to note what a nice basin this made for small ships and for shipbuilding. In fact, the expression "Knock- er's Hole," which still hangs around the vicinity of High Street, originated in the pounding of the caulkers' mallets in the old shipyards.
The old town rambled all over the peninsula between the two rivers, narrow streets taking off on either side of the Main Street, now Essex Street, and running down to the water
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THE LIFE AND TIMES OF RICHARD DERBY
at irregular intervals. The more thickly settled part was be- tween Essex Street and Derby Street below Central Street. The churches and public buildings were around Washington Street, to be sure, but houses were thickest nearer the wharves. The Roger Williams house was a farm on the outskirts, as was the Pickering house on Broad Street. There was a beacon on the hill where the Broad Street Burying Ground now is. Any one of a dozen little villages out on a peninsula along the Maine coast with a row of old houses on the main street, and smaller houses on the lanes leading down to the old wharves, will give a good idea of Salem as it was in 1720.
If from the original point at the Charter Street Burying Ground, you had looked eastward, you would have seen the wharves of the Higginsons and the Gardners, near the foot of Elm Street, and one belonging to William Bowditch on which he had built a brewery before he sold it to Peter Osgood in 1721. There was, perhaps, a cart track, but no continuous permanent public way along the water-front nearer than Essex Street, nor many lanes leading down till you got to Turner Street. Near the foot of Becket Street, Abraham Purchase owned the wharf in about 1728. He was a blacksmith, and, as his property adjoined that where Becket had his wharf and shipyard, he probably turned out the iron fastenings for Becket. At the foot of English Street was the Hollingsworth Wharf. William Hollingsworth was one of Salem's earliest merchants, and his daughter Mary married Philip English, who carried on the mercantile tradition. The wharf was con- veyed to her in February, 1684-5, and it was from there that Philip English undoubtedly sent out his ships. Richard Derby bought it in 1748 and used it; later it became succes- sively Crowninshield's Wharf and Phillips's Wharf.
In 1700, there seem to have been two business centers; one around the basin where the railroad station now stands, and another around the foot of Becket and English Streets. No doubt there were little homes scattered along between, but there was quite a group of houses along English and Becket Streets, including English's"Great House," with the overhang- ing eaves and many gables. On the northerly side of Essex Street, there was a row of houses between the creek which drained the swamp, which is now the Common, and Essex
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BY JAMES DUNCAN PHILLIPS
Street. The best of these was the Babbidge house, part of which still stands, which was bought by Richard Derby in 1757 and left by him to his daughter Mary Crowninshield in 1783.
The Common had been set aside in 1713 as a training field forever, but it had not then been drained or leveled. In fact, it was a swamp with several small ponds and a creek running down to Collins Cove. Across Essex Street, where the Haw- thorne Monument now stands, there was a shipyard which launched its vessels into a little creek that made in from South River. Beyond the Common a road ran down on an irregular line to the landing near where Beverly Bridge now stands, from which the ferry to the Beverly shore left. Some- where on the point at the foot of March Street, a windmill for grinding grain waved its ungainly arms in the air, no doubt closely resembling those you still see in England, such as that at Headcorn or Tenterden in Kent.
The Neck had a palisade across it, and there was a fort, called then "Fort Anne" or "Queen's Fort," where Fort Pickering stands, over the maintenance of which town and colony constantly quarreled. Winter Island had been set aside wholly for the use of fishermen in 1713, and so continued for many years. There were some wharves on the North River and Pickman's fish flakes were located along that side of the town. They no doubt lent a fragrance to the atmosphere which is perpetuated by the North River of to-day.
Between 1700 and 1714 there were registered in Salem four ships, three barques, nine brigs, twenty-four sloops, and nine- teen ketches, which ranged from fifteen to ninety tons burden, fifty-nine in all, of which forty were built in Salem. Ships were also built here for other merchants, notably the Unity, of two hundred and seventy tons, for Boston and London people.13
We should not take away any idea that even by 1736, when Richard Derby arrived at manhood, the town was a luxurious place with wide paved streets and carriages dashing about. In 1737, when the first carriage tax was assessed in the provinces, out of six coaches, eighteen chariots, three hundred 13 Felt, Annals of Salem, II, 252.
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THE LIFE AND TIMES OF RICHARD DERBY
and thirty-nine chaises, and nine hundred and ninety-two chairs and calashes in all Massachusetts, Salem had but ten chaises and forty chairs, or only fifty vehicles of all sorts for passengers for a population of perhaps one thousand families. There was no regular conveyance to Boston till 1761, when a stage from Portsmouth began to run via Salem once a week, and a special stage to Boston did not run till 1766. A post-rider who carried mail from Boston eastward through Salem had probably been established before 1700, but even as late as 1773, mail came from Boston only once a week, arriving Tuesday by rider en route to Portsmouth, and returning Friday.14
Persons could not vote unless they paid a poll tax and owned at least twenty pounds in the town where they voted. It was a sensible provision to require that a man should have some stake in the town which he was helping to govern, and twenty pounds was surely not an excessive sum even for those days.
There were no constables or police in Salem of the early eighteenth century. A bellman walked the town from ten o'clock at night till break of day, armed with a spear and hook, and "did his endeavor to prevent fire or mischief any other way, and to prevent any disorder in ye town." There was a watch-house in the schoolhouse lane surmounted by a figure of the bellman, which was repainted in 1725. The old bell- man, John Meacham, received the princely salary of thirty pounds per annum, probably in depreciated currency, and cried the weather and the hour throughout the night.
In 1720, most of the larger houses in Salem were still of the many-gabled variety, such as the Pickering house, and the Deliverance Parkman house, now no longer standing, but well known from its pictures. These were characterized by overhanging stories, small leaded-glass casements, clustered chimneys, and many gables. The so-called gambrel roofs came in twenty years later. The Benjamin Pickman house, erected in 1743, still standing just west of the East India Marine Hall, was an early example of the new type. Few three-story houses were erected before the Revolution. The earliest brick house in Salem was built on the corner of Essex 14 Dow, Two Centuries of Travel in Essex County, Massachusetts, 77.
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BY JAMES DUNCAN PHILLIPS
and Crombie Streets in 1707, and there could not have been many by 1725, as there were only thirty-nine in 1825.15
With this cursory view of the town of Salem as Richard Derby knew it as a boy, let us turn back to his career once more.
EARLY MANHOOD
Richard rapidly grew to manhood, and no doubt like all the young men he sailed a boat, joined in fishing excursions, and perhaps went off on deep-sea fishing trips, which brought a knowledge of ships and of sailing, and the sturdy self-reliance he was to need so greatly in years to come. We do not know when he first went to sea in a deep-sea ship, nor do we know when or where exactly he got his experience, but he became independent as a very young man. On February 3, 1734-5, he was well enough along, though only twenty-two years old, to take unto himself a wife, and he married Mary Hodges, the granddaughter of George Hodges, a mariner who came to Salem before 1663, and lived there all the rest of his life. Mary was the oldest daughter of his son Gamaliel, and was born in 1713, just a year after her husband. These Hodgeses were noted for their great height, and the story is told that when the shortest of six brothers was captured by a British frigate and his size remarked upon (he was six feet six), he replied that he was the shortest of six brothers. The record does not say how tall Mary was, but she and Richard were cheerful young adventurers of twenty-one and twenty-two to embark on the sea of matrimony together, and their first child Richard was born in 1736.
On September 18, 1735, just a few months after his mar- riage, Richard Derby purchased from Deacon James Lindall "sixty poles of land containing a dwelling house, bake house, shop, barn and outhouses bounded southerly by the river to low water mark, westerly on a lane, northerly by land of Pick- man, and easterly by land of Hasket." 16 It is well to note the abutting land of Pickman and of Hasket, and to remember that Richard's mother was a Hasket. In 1739, Richard bought twenty-two and six tenths poles from Benjamin
" Felt, Annals of Salem, I, 415.
16 Registry of Deeds.
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THE LIFE AND TIMES OF RICHARD DERBY
Pickman, being some part, and perhaps the whole of the land to the north, and in 1741, he bought of Samuel and Nathaniel Swasey about half an acre more near his dwelling house. This may have been the lot granted to John Swasey in 1652.17 In 1742, Derby began to buy up the individual in- terests in the Hasket estate, and by 1748 had nearly all of it. In 1748, he also bought the Philip English property of one and a half acres on English Street, which included a dwelling house, warehouse, and wharf, and ran to the harbor. But his main block of land lay east of Union Street and ran to the water, and contained perhaps two acres. As the so-called Richard Derby house was not built till 1761, he certainly lived about twenty-five years in some other house on the property, and most probably in the James Lindall house.
In 1736, at the age of twenty-four, Richard was sailing as master of the sloop Ranger on a voyage to Cadiz. It is very unlikely that he made this trip before going on at least one deep-sea voyage as mate, and perhaps on several fishing voyages as a seaman, so his nautical experience doubtless began at the age of sixteen at least.
The Ranger was loaded with fish and manned by four men and a mate besides her youthful skipper. She arrived safely in Spain, exchanged the fish for fruit, oil, and miscellaneous goods, and got back to Salem early in May. She made a similar round trip in the autumn to the same ports, and no doubt with equal success.
The very year that saw the entrance of Derby into com- merce saw also the end of the career of Philip English, who was probably the richest man in New England at the close of the seventeenth century. In 1692, English had twenty-one vessels trading with Bilboa, Barbados, St. Christopher, the Isle of Jersey, and the ports of France.18 He was a man of brains, ability, and energy. As late as 1722, he was shipping goods to Barbados by his sloop Sarah, John Touzel, master, and no doubt continued down to Derby's voyage, the year of his death.
It must be remembered that the twenty-seven years of peace which had begun with the Peace of Utrecht were just
17 See Perley, History of Salem, I, 314.
18 Paine, The Ships and Sailors of Old Salem, 24.
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BY JAMES DUNCAN PHILLIPS
drawing to a close at this time with the outbreak of the War of the Austrian Succession, which lasted from 1740 to 1748, but for these first few years of Derby's maritime life, the seas were still peaceful, though these voyages were entirely con- trary to the technical laws of trade. The Ranger was small, however, and her hailing port was very far away from the Lords of Trade, and fish were not specially wanted in Eng- land. His Majesty's Government was not especially looking for trouble, as the London merchants regarded the trade of the colonials then as too insignificant to matter much, but let us take a brief review of what the real rules of the game were.
BRITISH LAWS OF TRADE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
The general theory of trade with colonies has so entirely changed since our Revolution that it is well to see just what kind of economics our forefathers were laboring under. In 1668, Sir Joshua Child, Chairman of the British East India Company, made a statement which gives the attitude of mind perhaps as clearly as any. Adam Smith 19 and John Stuart Mill had not yet shed the light of reason on the subject of foreign trade, nor had the amateur economists of the twenti- eth century begun to shade facts with sentimental nonsense; but Child had a point of view of his own which was intended to represent pure selfishness, and failed as pure selfishness usually does. The only way to prosper is to make men around you prosperous, and not to make them poor. Child's statement was this:
Of all the American plantations His Majesty has none so apt for the building of ships as New England, nor none comparably so quali- fied for the breeding of seamen, not only by reason of the natural industry of the people, but principally by reason of their cod and mackerel fisheries, and in my opinion there is nothing more preju- dicial and, in prospect, more dangerous to any mother kingdom than the increase of shipping in her colonies, plantations or provinces.20
It might have been expected that some narrow-minded men should hold such ideas, but the misfortune was that they were held by Parliament and written into the laws of the nation. By the Act of 1660, goods from Asia, Africa, and America
19 Wealth of Nations, Book IV, Chapter 1.
20 Paine, The Ships and Sailors of Old Salem, 29.
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THE LIFE AND TIMES OF RICHARD DERBY
could be brought to England only by English or colonial vessels and must come directly. No foreign vessels could take their own goods to the colonies, and certain products of the colonies, like sugar, tobacco, cotton, ginger, indigo, and dye woods, could be taken only to England or English colonies, regardless of whether the prices to be obtained there were the best or not. Apart from this final restriction, this first Navigation Act of 1660 was not particularly injurious to the colonies, but the second Act of 1663 was more particularly planned to help the English manufacturers. No European goods could be brought to the colonies unless they were first landed in England, except salt, wine from the Azores, servants, horses, and victuals from Scotland and Ireland. The pream- ble distinctly outlines the reason, which, while well enough from the English point of view, could hardly have pleased the colonies, namely:
For the maintaining of a greater correspondence and kindness between them and keeping them in a firmer dependence upon it [i.e., the mother country] and rendering them yet more beneficiall and advantageous unto it in the farther Imployement and Encrease of English Shipping and Seamen, Vent of English Woolen and other Manufactures and Commodities - and making this Kingdom a Staple not onely of the Commodities of those Plantations but alsoe of the Commodities of other Countryes and Places.
It will be seen that this Act tied all trade of the colonies to England, as all importations must be transhipped there, and Richard Derby's two trips to Spain were in direct violation of it so far as most of the homeward cargo was concerned.
The third Navigation Act of 1672 prevented trade between the colonies on enumerated articles except on payment of the same duties as were exacted when goods went to England. The surplus of fish in New England was at the root of the trouble with this Act. Refuse and pickled fish brought a good price in the West Indies - it was not so valuable in England - but this Act prevented the acquiring of a return cargo of salable merchandise, except perhaps molasses.
The colonists, it is true, could send their fish or anything else, except the articles enumerated in the first Act, to Spain or other foreign countries, but the return cargo must go to England for reshipment. America was a long way off, how-
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BY JAMES DUNCAN PHILLIPS
ever, and the royal arm was weak from stretching, so little or no attention was paid to the regulations. But Act followed Act pretty frequently after 1672, tightening up the enforce- ment. Royal governors and naval officers were held to greater responsibility in the enforcement of them, and all the time the restrictions were increased. Rice and molasses were placed on the enumerated list of articles which could be exported only to England, so the colonists took to trading with the Dutch and French West India colonists instead, till the Molasses Act of 1733 was passed to stop them at the re- quest of the West India planters.21
This trade was vital to the colonists because it supplied a market for the refuse codfish, and the success of the fisheries depended on the sale of refuse fish as well as on the sale of first-class fish, which could be disposed of in Europe, for both were products of the same trips. The fish for which they had no market was exchanged for molasses, an equally waste pro- duct of the West Indies,22 but one which the colonists of New England made of value by distilling it into rum. The penalty for violating the Molasses Act was confiscation of the vessel, but the trade went on without effective interference for thirty years. 23
In 1741, Massachusetts had about three or four hundred ships in the fisheries which brought in about two hundred and thirty thousand quintals of seven hundred thousand dollars' value.24 Three or four thousand men earned their livelihood in this way, and the surplus by-product was a real reason for pushing the molasses trade.
It was very difficult to enforce these laws on the open sea. The Eighteenth Amendment is by no means the first law which has found the open ocean a pitfall. Who was to know if a Gloucester fisherman acquired a cargo of French goods on the Grand Banks instead of fish? And little French or Dutch traders among the leafy islands of the Caribbean, hobnobbing with New England vessels which had discharged their fish
11 Robinson, Development of the British Empire, 123.
" Especially of the French West Indies, which were forbidden by their laws to send it to France. McClellan, Smuggling in the American Colonies, 38. 23 Lorenzo Sabine, Report on the Principal Fisheries of the American Seas, 135.
24 Ibid., 131.
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THE LIFE AND TIMES OF RICHARD DERBY
at Barbados and were ostensibly coming home in ballast, were not easily detected.
The increase of manufacturing in the colonies, however, was always watched with jealous eyes in England. In 1708, one of the crown officers wrote to the Board of Trade that one hundred and fifty-five dozen wool cards and many wool combs had entered New England as wrought iron, and the importation of woolen goods had fallen off, "which must pro- ceed from this trade of making their own cloth ... and if not prevented will increase." "Not one in forty but wears his own carding, spinning, etc. If the growing trade of woollens be no way prevented in its growth, England must lose the woollen export to all this part of America."
In 1742, a petition was laid before the Board of Trade by sixteen master shipbuilders of London against the encourage- ment of shipbuilding in America, because their journeymen were drawn away to New England and there would not be enough ships for the Royal Navy in case of need.
It was William of Orange who made the first real move to enforce the Navigation Acts. Though passed under the Stuarts, their government was so weak that few results were secured, but under William was organized the Board of Com- missioners for Trade and Plantations, commonly known and hated by the colonists as "The Board of Trade," though it accomplished really very little, while the Privy Council, the Secretaries of State, and the Treasury Department, with its auditor-general of the plantation revenues and commissioners of customs, all had a hand. The Treasury ultimately made rather more trouble for the colonists than any of the others. It was the deadly tightening-up of the system that led to the trouble rather than an increase in the severity of the laws themselves. The laws of 1700 were severe enough to make As we all trouble, but nobody paid any attention to them.
know, the Volstead Act is the same, but it is getting more expensive to get a drink, or, in other words, harder. That is what is causing the outcry now. The more the law is enforced, the louder the cry that it can't be.
The row over Writs of Assistance or search warrants issued to help the collectors find contraband goods was the result of new efforts in 1761 to enforce the laws of trade. A new ele-
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BY JAMES DUNCAN PHILLIPS
ment at about the same time was interjected by the attempt, not only to regulate trade to benefit the mother country, but to extract revenue to help pay for the expensive wars of the middle of the century, and the Sugar Act of 1764 not only continued the odious but largely obsolete Molasses Act of 1733, but was planned to make it yield a revenue. The Townshend Acts of 1766, which included the Tea Act, were also passed primarily to add to the revenue.
This is a general sketch merely of the quarrel over the laws of trade and should not be confused with the entirely separate quarrel over taxation without representation and personal rights, which involved the constitutional rights of Englishmen, whether at home or abroad, and was brought on by the Stamp Act and the Quartering Act. It is true that the laws of trade, and particularly the Townshend Acts which initiated the "Tea Party," were soon involved in the taxation quarrel, but the dissatisfaction over the trade laws did not have its origin in the dislike of taxation by Parliament, but rather in a wrong use of that power to help the home merchants and the planters of the British West Indies.
Massachusetts and even Salem had their own particular quarrels with the mother country during the eighteenth cen- tury, two of the most amusing of which were the attempt of the colony itself to do a little legislating on trade, and the resistance to the Greenwich Hospital Tax. In 1718, the General Court calmly laid a duty on English goods and a tax on English-built ships, which caused the Lords Justices "to express their great displeasure." Governor Shute hoped that it would be repealed at the next session, and it was. It was probably never enforced, but it was certainly an exhibition of most unexampled "nerve." Equally stupid was the attempt to levy the sixpenny Greenwich Hospital Tax on the coastwise fishermen in 1733. No doubt the wording of the Act did make it apply to all British seamen, and there might be a vague excuse to demand it of seamen sailing to London, but to demand it of Salem, Gloucester, and Marblehead fisher- men, who would never by any chance use the hospital - in fact, would probably die long before they reached its shelter - was silly enough to penetrate even the phlegmatic British mind, and no further attempt to collect it was made till after 1760.
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