USA > Massachusetts > The maritime history of Massachusetts, 1783-1860 > Part 10
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To take care of this expanding commerce and popu- lation, Boston began the process, which still continues, of making new land by filling in various coves that gave her so jagged a shore-line. A corporation began shoveling the crest of Beacon Hill into the Mill Pond, near the present North Station, about 1807; and another laid out Broad Street, somewhat straight- ening the harbor front. Other companies financed new wooden bridges to Charlestown, Cambridge, and South Boston, which opened up sections of the town never before utilized; and before the end of the War of 1812 work started on the Mill Dam, a continuation of Beacon Street across the Back Bay. Still, not very much was done before 1825 to take away the pictur- esque stabs that salt water made into old Boston. One tongue of the harbor came up to Liberty Square; and
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CHARLES BULFINCH
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MERCHANTS AND MANSIONS
another to Dock Square, which was the market and retail center of the town. A few yards away was State Street, rapidly becoming lined with the new banks and insurance offices that commercial expansion required. Near by was completed, in 1808, the new Exchange Coffee-House, whose seven stories proclaimed Boston a town, merely because she was too proud to become a mere city! A Boston Loyalist who returned for a visit in 1808, wrote, "The great number of new and elegant buildings which have been erected in this Town, within the last ten years, strike the eye with astonishment, and prove the rapid manner in which the people have been acquiring wealth." Boston was practically re- built between 1790 and 1815, in a distinctive style of Federal architecture which the public persists in lumping with everything else built before 1840 as 'colonial.'
Like the merchants of Renaissance Italy, those of Federalist Boston wished to perpetuate their names and glorify their city by mansions, churches, and public buildings of a new style and magnificence. Luckily, among their number was a young man who had the training and the genius to guide this impulse into fruit- ful and worthy channels. Charles Bulfinch, in con- trast to McIntire, had every advantage of birth, wealth, and education. The son and grandson of prom- inent physicians, he graduated at Harvard in 1781, and was sent to France and England for five years' study of architecture. On his return, in 1786, he found Boston more concerned in preserving its existing property from Dan Shays, than ambitious to build. With un- erring instinct, he helped to launch the very voyage whose consequences made his career. The Columbia's great adventure was planned at his father's house, and Charles Bulfinch himself was one of her owners.
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The merchants were soon ready for new houses, and the cramped condition of Boston compelled them to economize space. Only in "West Boston" (Cambridge Street) and Beacon Hill ("out of town") was it still possible to erect detached mansions. Hence the first important commission that came to young Bulfinch was to design the first solid block of residences in New England, the Tontine Crescent on Franklin Place. 1
Crescents are common enough in English cities; but none had yet been built when Bulfinch sailed for Boston. He may have seen a design for one by the Adam brothers, who taught him his sense of propor- tion, as they inspired McIntire's detail. Whatever the source, Bulfinch's handling of the problem was mas- terly. Sixteen three-story brick houses were built ac- cording to a plan that showed uniformity without tire- some repetition. The entrances were grouped by twos, the end groups advanced six feet beyond the others, and adorned by pilasters. Instead of breaking the crescent in its center, where another street entered Franklin Place, Bulfinch arched it over with a library, whose classic columns, Venetian window, and attic story pleasantly broke the uniform line of roofs. The middle of the oval in front was occupied by a grass plot and trees, with a classic urn in memory of Frank- lin; the opposite side was filled with another harmoni- ous group of dwellings, and the approaches were given distinction by Boston's first theater, and first Catholic cathedral church, which the young master designed. The general effect of Franklin Place, as of all the Bul- finch school, suggests London of the Regency; but loyal Bostonians prefer to compare London to Boston - and the chronology bears them out!
Bulfinch also designed a new form of detached man-
1 On the site of the curved portion of Franklin Street.
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MERCHANTS AND MANSIONS
sion for the wide, elm-shaded spaces on Summer Street, and for Beacon Hill, where residences were springing up on the sunny slope of Copley's pasture. Bulfinch relieved the square mass of Georgian tradi- tion by a bow in the center of side or rear, making place on the ground story for an elliptical dining-room. The best example, still extant, is the Governor Gore mansion at Waltham. His later city houses gained light and distinction by a double bow or swell front, accentuated by pilasters reaching to the cornice.
As architect of public buildings, from the capital at Augusta to that of Washington, no American save Stanford White has ever surpassed Bulfinch. The Boston State House (1795), with its gilded dome, is his most famous early work; one should visit the old Representatives', and present Senate Chamber, to appreciate the full measure of his genius at the age of thirty-two. In his later work, like the New South Meeting-House (1814), and University Hall at Harvard (1815), he found in hammered granite a fit medium for his chaste lines, as a gray dress for a Puritan maiden. Most interesting of his public works, from our view- point, was the brick block of thirty-two stores, with counting-rooms or warehouses overhead, which he designed for the new India Wharf in 1805, giving the water-front an air of solidity and permanence more common to European than American ports.1 It was the boldest bit of harbor development yet undertaken in the United States. Sixty years later, Atlantic Avenue ploughed its way through the middle of India Wharf, disrupting the graceful archway with attic story that broke the long slate roof. The remaining portion, its red brick mellowed by the east wind, still
1 A part of India Wharf may be seen at the right of the photograph of shipping in chapter XXII.
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maintains a frigate-like dignity amid motor trucks and excursion steamers.
In repairing and enlarging old buildings, like Christ Church and Faneuil Hall, Bulfinch showed a reverence for the old forms, of which his own work seemed a natural development. He and his school gave Boston architecture a stamp of distinction that even the imita- tors of Romanesque, Gothic, and French Renaissance have been unable wholly to efface. One is tempted to ascribe his pure taste and perfect proportion to an ocean origin; but, curiously enough, land architecture grew steadily worse in Massachusetts as naval archi- tecture reached perfection in the clipper ships.
Boston society differed from that of Salem, as the graceful curves of Bulfinch's dining-rooms and spiral staircases differ from the straight lines of McIntire's interiors. Boston society was less simple, both in its manners and its composition ; and quite as aristocratic as that of Philadelphia or London. "The better people are all aristocrats," wrote John Singleton Copley, Jr., from Boston in 1796. "My father is too rank a Jacobin to live among them." Well-to-do professional men like Harrison Gray Otis, Federalist politicians like Josiah Quincy, retired capitalists like Christopher Gore, and wealthy shopkeepers like Samuel Eliot and David Sears, formed as conspicuous a portion of the social upper crust as merchant-shipowners; and few names were included which had risen to prominence since the Revolution. Social life was formal and brilliant, with private balls and cotillion parties, and immense din- ners. Several merchants maintained country seats in the neighborhood, like their colonial forbears; but most of them found Boston a good enough summer resort. Few traces of Puritanism were left among the gentry. It was a period of religious tolerance, before Protestant
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and Catholic had renewed, or Orthodox and Unitarian begun their quarrels. But political feeling was ex- ceedingly bitter, and any deviation from Federalist orthodoxy was punished by social ostracism. East- India voyages seemed to mellow manners, and Madeira wine; but to sharpen political prejudices.
The merchants themselves did not form a social unit, as in smaller towns. Their portraits by Gilbert Stuart have a sort of family likeness, a complacent air and ruddy face suggesting a seafaring youth, with a plenty of "choice old London particular," that had passed the equator four times before its final ripening under the eaves. Those who inherited wealth, or had begun business before the Revolution, were more highly regarded than the self-made man who had traced new trade-routes; but certain families combined both dis- tinctions. There was a distinct class of merchant princes, who lived in magnificent style, surrounded by suggestions of Oriental opulence. The Honorable Thomas Russell was a sort of marshal of this mer- cantile nobility, and passed on his baton to Thomas Handasyd Perkins. On a social pinnacle of their own making were the mercantile émigrés from Essex County - the Lowells, the Higginsons, and the Jack- sons, who (according to Colonel Henry Lee) "came up from Newburyport to Boston, social and kindly people, inclined to make acquaintances and mingle with the world pleasantly. But they got some Cabot wives, who shut them up." Another distinct group was composed of plain, hard-working men, toilsomely accumulating a fortune and a name; men like Nathan- iel Goddard, of a poor farmer's family of Brookline, who made his first capital by tending a lonely trad- ing post on Passamaquoddy Bay; Josiah Marshall, a farmer's boy from Billerica, who attained Franklin
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Place via Coast and Islands; Josiah Bradlee, the most extensive advertiser in the Federal press, spending in his entire lifetime, from 1778 to 1860, but one night outside Boston, and that at Nahant; a merchant of whom it was said that if he sent a shingle afloat on the ebb tide bearing a pebble, it would return on the flood, freighted with a silver dollar!
The merchant princes clung to the ways and fashions of colonial days, or of 1790 at the latest, unwilling to admit even by the cut of a waistcoat that Robespierre could change their world. At eight or eight-thirty the well-to-do Boston merchant appeared among his fam- ily in China silk dressing-gown and cap, as Copley had painted his father. Short family prayers, and a hearty breakfast by a blazing hickory fire. Then the mysteries of the toilet, performed by body servant or, preferably, by a neighborhood Figaro, a San Domingo refugee who discreetly gossips while he performs the rite of shav- ing. Hair is dressed, tied in a queue, and powdered; unless there is a white wig to be nicely adjusted. A fresh white cravat with long lapels, is folded and skill- fully tied. Then for the nether limbs. Linen drawers are tied down, silk stockings pulled up smooth, and gar- tered against all chance of ungentlemanly wrinkling; buff nankeen breeches arranged neatly over them and silver buckle drawn tight. Low-hung waistcoat and broad-skirted coat of light-colored broadcloth come next. After a few parting suggestions to his lady, Master takes a stout gold-headed Malacca-joint cane, three-cornered hat, scarlet cloak if chilly, and sallies forth on foot, followed by Cicero, the colored butler, with huge market-basket. For it is the simple custom of the day, on one's way to business, to choose the materials for one's dinner, in the neighborhood of Faneuil Hall.
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Suppose one of those sharp, bright winter days, fol- lowing a fresh snowfall that has etched the outlines of new brick shops and black old gabled houses with high lights. Huge "pungs " (ox- or horse-drawn sledges), the connecting links between ocean commerce and New England farms, are drawn up in Dock Square three deep and piled high with butter, cheeses, fresh and salt meat, game, winter vegetables, wooden ware, and barrels of cider and perry, from some of which small boys are sucking through a straw until the owner shouts - "Hey, you've had your penny-worth!" Through this cheerful activity strolls our merchant, and having chosen his joint and poultry and game and fixings, sends his servant home, and continues to his counting-room on India Wharf, or near by.
If it is winter, there is not much to do; for the larger vessels are away; but there are always accounts to be made up, tea and silks to be withdrawn from bond, and plans for next season discussed with master builders. At eleven, Henry the chief clerk mixes a stiff jorum of Jamaica rum, to get himself and master through the morning. At half-after twelve or one, the business day ends, save for the genial institution of 'Change. This is a meeting of all the merchants, on the sidewalk of State Street if weather permits, otherwise in tavern or insurance office, to talk shop, ships, and politics for a half-hour or so.
By two o'clock the merchant is at home again, and at two-thirty comes dinner. Perhaps it is a formal feast, in the oval dining-room, with some fellow-mer- chants, a state senator or two, a judge, and their re- spective ladies; begun by a hot punch handed to the gentlemen in a China loving-cup; continued through several substantial courses, washed down with sherry, madeira, and (rarely) champagne; prolonged into can-
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dlelight after the ladies retire and the cloth is removed, by port, brandy, political gossip, and damning the Jacobins. If an ordinary family dinner, it is followed by a sleigh-ride, or, in long summer days, a family drive in coach or high English phaëton, behind fat bays, to take tea and fruit at some country seat - with Harry Otis at Oakley, or Kitty Gore at Waltham, or John Lowell at Roxbury, or Ben Bussey at Jamaica Plain. A ball or evening supper party, perhaps; other- wise a cold supper and glass of madeira at home, 'and so to bed.'
Federalist Boston was full of small gentlemen's clubs, which met at each others' houses or at taverns, for evening talk and cheer. Several of them were fire societies, each member maintaining a pair of leathern buckets, a canvas bag for saving valuables, and a bed key; which articles had to be solemnly inspected every so often, as an excuse for a party. In addition, there were large public dinners, followed by formal toasts, accompanied by music, and (on the Fourth) discharges of artillery - such as the annual feast of shells on Forefathers' Day, the festivities of election week, and the annual dinner of the Boston Marine Society. The meetings of this society were common ground where all Bostonians interested in seaborne commerce met. The secretary describes it in 1811 as "composed of upwards of one hundred former shipmasters who have retired from sea with adequate fortunes, many of whom are largely interested in the insurance offices and as under- writers, and about fifty of the most respectable mer- chants and shipowners and gentlemen of the highest stations in the commonwealth. The rest of the Soci- ety is composed of the more active and younger mari- ners who still follow the seas as a professional business." These last were the men who made the name of Bos-
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ton famous from Archangel to Smyrna, and east by west to the River Plate and Calcutta. Too busy, as yet, to care for social life or Bulfinch mansions, the next generation was their harvest season.
CHAPTER X THE SACRED CODFISH 1784-1812
ON March 17, 1784, Mr. John Rowe, of Boston, mer- chant, arose from his seat in the Representatives' Hall of the Old State House, and offered a motion, "That leave might be given to hang up the representation of a Codfish in the room where the House sit, as a memorial of the importance of the Cod-Fishery to the welfare of this Commonwealth, as had been usual formerly." Leave was accordingly granted; and the same wooden emblem presented by genial Johnny Rowe, having followed the Great and General Court to Beacon Hill, still faces the Speaker's desk.
Massachusetts still retains her supremacy in the American codfisheries; but in 1790 this industry was in the parlous state that the war had left it. Relief came quickly from the federal government. On July 4, 1789, Congress granted a bounty of five cents on every quintal of dried fish or barrel of pickled fish exported. Elbridge Gerry, of Marblehead, and Benjamin Good- hue, of Salem, had a good deal to do with obtaining this favor; but there was no opposition from other parts of the country. Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, of South Carolina, in the debates of the ratifying convention in his state, had generously urged the distress of the New England fisheries as a reason for closer union. In 1791, the General Court of Massachusetts begged additional protection. Thomas Jefferson, Secretary of State, issued a friendly but rather non-committal report; but Senator George Cabot, formerly the owner
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THE SACRED CODFISH
of Beverly fishermen, framed and put through the act of February 9, 1792, granting a bounty of one dollar to two dollars and a half per ton (depending on the size) to vessels engaged in the codfishery four months in the year; three-eighths of the bounty to go to the owner, the rest to be divided among the crew.
Under the influence of federal bounties, and the general expansion of commerce in the late eighteenth century, the Massachusetts codfishery began to look up again. The tonnage of her fishing fleet (including that of Maine) gradually increased from about 10,000 in 1790 to 62,000 in 1807, when Jefferson's embargo brought another check.
The Grand Banks of Newfoundland fisheries were renewed in what was left of the pre-Revolutionary fleet - old-fashioned barrel-bottomed schooners of not over seventy tons, called "heel-tappers" on ac- count of their low waists and high quarterdecks.1 Fishermen, the most conservative of seafarers, seem to have made no improvement in their models until after 1815. Methods were unchanged. Bankers made two or three fishing trips a year. The spring fare was either brought home in time for election day (the last Wednesday in May), or dried on "any of the unsettled bays, harbors and creeks of Nova Scotia, Magdalen Islands and Labrador," as Article III of the Treaty of Peace (thanks to John Adams) permitted, but most of the curing was done on the sands or ledges of the home port.
The only innovation of the Federalist period was a wider range. The "Bay" (of Chaleur) and Labrador shore fisheries, secured in the same treaty, were first
1 One of these tubby schooners is depicted in the foreground of the Salem Marine Society Certificate, in chapter VII. The old fireboard op- posite shows two of them at anchor in Marblehead Harbor.
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MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS
visited shortly after the war, and immediately became popular. Almost a thousand sail passed through the Strait of Canso in 1807, outward bound -
Where Anticosti lies Like a fell spider in its web of fog, .. . And frost-rimmed bays and trading stations seem Familiar as Great Neck and Kettle Cove,
Nubble and Boon, the common names of home.
On Sundays, the New England fishermen "swarmed like flies" on the shore of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, said a British observer, whose reports were largely responsi- ble for his government's efforts to restrict these grounds in the negotiations at Ghent. By 1808, three-quarters of the dried fish exported from Massachusetts came from the Bay and Labrador coast; less than one-quar- ter from the Grand Banks, which required larger ves- sels and more expensive outfits. The Bank fishermen, however, were able to export their own fares, when cured, to France, Spain, Portugal, or the West Indies in the winter season.
Encouragement of the New England fisheries was often justified on the ground that they contributed both men and vessels to the navy and merchant ma- rine. In time of war, when unarmed Bankers would fall certain prey to the enemy, their crews perforce enlisted in the navy or on a privateer. But on the merchant marine their influence was slight, except in so far as their produce furnished freight and a medium for trade. The more ambitious youths of fishing towns entered the merchant marine - Captain Cressy, for instance, of the Flying Cloud clipper, was a Marblehead boy. But notwithstanding popular belief and congressional oratory, ex-fishermen were seldom found among the crews of deep-sea merchantmen, at any period of our
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THE SACRED CODFISH
history.1 "They make troublesome merchantmen," writes Bentley of the Marblehead fishermen in 1816. "But no men are equal to them in the things they know how to do from habit."
Fishing was a specialized form of maritime enter- prise. The small amount of capital required, the short voyages (enabling a man to live at home with his family at least half the year), and the share system of rewarding crews, appealed to a class of men who could not afford the expense of mercantile ventures, and would not submit to the wage system, the discipline, and the lengthy voyages of merchant vessels. The Yankee liked fishing 'on his own hook' - the phrase originated here, before the Revolution, to describe a system in which each member of the crew supplied his own gear, bedding, and food. Fishermen had their own customs and costumes,2 types and traditions which were handed down from generation to generation.
A fisherman's son was predestined to the sea. As soon as he could walk, he swarmed over every Banker or Chebacco boat that came into port, began 'hand- lining' for cunners off wharves and ledges, and begging older boys to teach him to row. At six he was already some aid in curing the catch, and he helped his mother with the household work, in order to qualify as sea- cook. Boys of nine to twelve years did the cooking in Marblehead and Gloucester fishermen at this period,
1 R. B. Forbes is most emphatic on this point. Captain Arthur H. Clark backs him up. The author of The Mate and his Duties (Liver- pool, 1855), p. 24, states, "It is in general much easier to make a good sailor out of a landsman than a fisherman." Fishermen were not used to discipline or to quick movements, and were apt to shy at laying out on yardarms.
2 The New England fisherman's costume, until about 1830, when oilskins were adopted, was a sheep- or goat-skin jacket, and 'barvel' (leather apron), baggy calfskin trousers, yellow cowhide "churn boots," and tarred canvas hat, shaped like the modern sou'wester.
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and on Cape-Codders even later. After a voyage or two he handed over his cooking utensils - a single iron pot and long spoon - to a younger brother or cousin, became an apprentice, learned the secrets of luring codfish to hook, and the art of heading, splitting, and salting with quick precision. A strong boy of fifteen or sixteen might be as accomplished a fisherman as any; a 'high-liner' of the fleet. To save enough to acquire a fishing vessel, and live ashore on her earnings, was his highest ambition. Otherwise he grew gray in the service of the sea. When rheumatic arms could no longer haul on sheet or cable, and eyes grew dim from straining through night, fog, and easterlies, he retired from deep waters, and puttered about with lobstering, shore fishing, or clam-digging.
Marblehead, a scant three miles from Salem, was as different in its appearance, its commerce, and the character of its people, as if it lay overseas. Built on ground so hilly and boulder-strewn that there seemed hardly place for the weather-beaten houses; peopled by descendants of the peculiar old stock; the harbor open to northeast gales, which sent in great wicked rollers that tore up the stoutest ground tackle; Marblehead yet remained the premier fishing port of Massachu- setts.
Few seaport towns in America had lost more by the Revolution. Before the war, Marblehead had rivaled Salem in population and foreign commerce. But 'King' Hooper and Benjamin Marston had be- come tories, and the elder Ornes, Lees, Pedricks, and Gerrys had died or removed to more prosperous cen- ters. Their sons remained (for this being Marblehead the ordinary laws of emigration did not hold) ; but they had no capital to renew the foreign trade; and indeed it would have been useless to compete with Salem.
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MARBLEHEAD FIREBOARD, REPRESENTING TWO 'HEEL-TAPPER FISHING SCHOONERS COMING TO ANCHOR INSIDE THE NECK, ABOUT 1800
THE SCHOONER R.WENAMARBLEREAL AMBROS B. MARTIN MASTER
A TOPSAIL SCHOONER OF MARBLEHEAD IN FOREIGN TRADE, 1796
THE SACRED CODFISH
There was nothing left but the fisheries, and even they were at the lowest ebb. Average gross earnings per vessel had fallen from $483 in 1787 to $273 in 1789. There were 459 widows and 865 orphans, mostly de- pendent for support on the taxpayers, in this town of 5500 people. Houses and fish sheds were tumbling to pieces, and the sea threatened to make a clean breach through the Neck and ruin the harbor.
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