USA > Massachusetts > The maritime history of Massachusetts, 1783-1860 > Part 12
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Federalist architecture has here left perhaps her finest permanent trace. High street, winding along a ridge commanding the Merrimac, rivals Chestnut Street of Salem, despite hideous interpolations of the late nineteenth century. The gambrel-roofed type lasted into the seventeen-nineties, when the Newbury- port merchants began to build square, three-storied, hip-roofed houses of brick, surrounded with ample grounds, gardens, and 'housins.' The ship carpen- ters who (if tradition is correct) designed and built these houses, adopted neither the graceful porches nor the applied Adam detail of McIntire; but their tooled mouldings on panel, cornice, and chimneypiece have a graceful and original vigor. They also invented, or perhaps acquired from provincial Portsmouth, an ingenious form of stairway, branching, Y-shaped, to serve front and rear. Although inferior to Boston and Salem in public buildings, "the steeple of the First Church lately built" in Newburyport, asserts the criti- cal and much-traveled Dr. Bentley, "rivals anything in New England." It certainly does, to-day.
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Timothy Dwight, who visited Newburyport about 1800, wrote: "The houses, taken collectively, make a better appearance than those of any other town in New-England. Many of them are particularly hand- some. Their appendages, also, are unusually neat. Indeed, an air of wealth, taste and elegance, is spread over this beautiful spot with the cheerfulness and bril- liancy, to which I know no rival. ... Upon the whole, few places, probably, in the world, furnish more means of a delightful residence than Newburyport."
When 'Lord' Timothy Dexter, Newburyport's fa- mous eccentric, sent his consignment of warming- pans and woolen mittens to the West Indies, he knew what he was about. The warming-pans, as every one knows, were sold for syrup ladles; and the mitts made a suitable speculation for some Massachusetts vessel that was leaving for Russia.
This Russian trade was an innovation of the Federal- ist period. Massachusetts began it, and until the Civil War retained over half of it, through her facilities for handling the West-India goods of which Russia stood in need. George Cabot of Beverly opened this com- merce in May, 1784, by sending his ships Bucanier and Commerce to the Baltic and to St. Petersburg. In 1788 the Astrea was disposing of tea, Bourbon coffee, New England rum, Virginia flour and tobacco at Gothenburg. They brought back canvas, duck, hemp, Russian and Swedish iron, which, with household linen, were the staples of the Baltic trade for the next fifty years. These articles were used in the New England shipbuilding industry, and also entered largely into cargoes exported to the Far East. No in-
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considerable part of the goods exchanged by St. Peters- burg and Riga with India and China went in Massa- chusetts vessels, via Salem and Boston. And it will doubtless surprise many people to learn that Salem was importing candles and soap from Archangel in 1798.
Dipping casually into the old custom-house records of Newburyport, I find on top of a neat bundle of coastwise manifests for 1810, that the locally owned ship Nancy, Moses Brown master, paid $3279.25 in duties on eighty-eight boxes of sugar from Pernam- buco. It was shipped to Boston in the sloop Mary, and exported thence to St. Petersburg in the brig Industry. The next document traces a parcel of Russia linen sheetings. Imported from Cronstadt into Newbury- port by the ship Merrimack, William Bartlett master, it was shipped in the sloop Blue Bird 1 to Boston, and re- exported thence in the brig Betsey to Havana. There, it was doubtless exchanged for sugar, the most valu- able medium for our Baltic trade. Not only did this tri- angular commerce give quick turnover and large prof- its; it supplied maritime New England with the iron, hemp, and linen duck, which, until replaced by the products of Pennsylvania, Manila, and Lowell, were indispensable to her shipbuilding, fisheries, and naviga- tion.
The first white settlers of Nantucket, in the seven- teenth century, were Quakers and harborers of Quakers who fled from persecution at Old Newbury. With Whittier as guide, let us follow Goodman Macy's little shallop across the harbor bar, by the golden sands of
1 This small coasting packet, when wrecked in 1805, had a cargo aboard worth $90,000. She was refloated, but the cargo lost.
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Plum Island, and watch the sun drop behind the rounded Ipswich hills. The garrison's watch-fire guides us around Cape Ann; keeping the North Star over our port quarter brings us to Cape Cod. After a pause in Provincetown Harbor for a good chance, an offshore breeze takes us around the Cape, through the danger- ous shoals and rips which deflected the Mayflower from her course; and to Nantucket.
Before 1775, the descendants of the Macys and Coffins and Folgers and Husseys had spread the fame of this island by their boldness and enterprise as whalemen. Then came the war. Nantucket lost one hundred and fifty vessels by capture and shipwreck, leaving only two or three old hulks out of her entire fleet. The whaling village of Bedford, her young main- land rival, was equally depressed. The British had burned its warehouses and thirty-four sail in the har- bor; and only two or three survived of its whaling fleet of forty or fifty.
The English government, hoping to force the Is- landers to remove to Nova Scotia, placed a prohibitive duty on whale and sperm oil, cutting off their principal market; and in 1785 the French government invited them to settle at Dunkirk. Beggars were crying for bread in the streets of Nantucket; but only nine fami- lies accepted this invitation, and even less went to Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. But over two hundred of the men, either during or after the Revolution, were forced to accept commands of British or French whalers. Others turned to codfishing, founding picturesque but profitless settlements on the south shore of the island, at Siasconset, Sasacacha, and Weweeder. One group attempted an East-India voyage, with disastrous re- sults. For the most part the people waited for better times, "taking in each others' washing" for a living,
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according to the classic jest-and it was something more than a jest in the Nantucket of 1790, with no less than one hundred and eighty-five widows unable to support themselves.
The commonwealth, out of its poverty, granted a bounty on whaling products; England gave up trying to sink Nantucket; and the old whaling masters began to fit out old vessels, and to have apple-bowed, square- sterned ships of two to three hundred tons burthen built for them on the North River.1 By 1789, Nan- tucket had eighteen vessels engaged in the northern right-whale fishery, and an equal number pursuing the more valuable sperm whale off the coast of Brazil; Dartmouth (including New Bedford and Westport) and Cape Cod had fifty-seven small right-whalers of sixty tons, and nine sperm-whalers.
It was a British whaler manned by exiled Nantuck- eters that first pursued the sperm whale into the Pa- cific Ocean. Four years later, in 1791, six Nantucket whalers, and one from New Bedford, took the same course. They found good hunting along the Chilian coast, and returned in time to profit by a good market in France.
From that time on, smoky glare of whalers' try- works was never absent from the vast spaces of the Pacific. Before the end of the eighteenth century, the whalemen began that exploration of the South Sea which is still recorded by islands named for Starbucks, Coffins, Bakers, Folgers, Husseys, and Howlands of Nantucket and New Bedford.
1 The Maria, 202 tons, built at Pembroke for William Rotch, in 1782, was still whaling in 1872. Oil acted on the timbers as a preservative. The ship Rousseau was in commission ninety-seven years, the barque Triton, seventy-nine; and in the summer of 1920 the barque Charles W. Morgan, built in 1841, was fitting out for another whaling voyage at Fairhaven.
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On the Island of Santa Maria in the Galapagos group, was the 'whalers' post-office'; a box on a tree where letters and two-year-old newspapers were ex- changed. Even Australasia lay within their scope. By 1804, our whalemen and sealskinners had made them- selves so comfortable along the north coast of Tasmania that the governor of Australia issued a proclamation against their building vessels on his shores.
Whaling crews at this period were recruited entirely from Nantucket and the Old Colony. Gay Head In- dians were preferred as harpooners, and many local negroes were shipped as green hands; but a whaling skipper generally knew the record if not the pedigree of every man who sailed under his command. Wages were not paid to whalemen. The old share or 'lay' system of the seventeenth century continued; and for the first time was recorded in written contracts. The workers' share was far more generous than in the so- called golden age of whaling, a generation later. The usual 'lay' for a three-boat ship of twenty-one men, about 1804, was three-fifths of the catch to the owners, one-eighteenth to the master, one-forty-eighth to the "ends men," one-seventy-fifth to each able seaman, one-eightieth or ninetieth to each negro hand, and a one-hundred-and-twentieth to the cabin boy.
Prices of whale products ruled fairly high during the Federalist period, and a good export trade was built up; England being our best customer for sperm oil, and France and Spain for whale oil. But the ground lost in the Revolutionary War was not entirely recov- ered.1 Americans had become so used to tallow can- dles during the war, that they had to be educated to appreciate the excellent spermaceti article turned out by Nantucket. The European war, with its spoliations
1 See table in Appendix.
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NEWBURYPORT AND NANTUCKET
and embargoes, greatly hampered whaling, while it gave inflated profits to the merchant marine. The harbor, with only seven and a half feet on the bar at low tide, was a serious handicap as the size of whal- ers increased, and eventually proved Nantucket's un- doing.
Nantucket, however, by handling and marketing her own products, prevented 'off-islanders' from reap- ing the fruits of her industry. By 1811, when a Phila- delphia traveler made the accompanying sketch, the town had every earmark of thrift and prosperity. It had doubled its pre-Revolutionary population, and acquired some fifteen thousand tons of shipping, most of which was absent on the Pacific Ocean when the sketch was made. Several sail of whalers, however, are lying at the wharves, and the Falmouth packet- sloop has just passed in between Brant Point Light and Coatue.
Even before the famous foundation of her distin- guished exile, Admiral Sir Isaac Coffin, Nantucket had better schools than many mainland seaports. She had fifteen to twenty candle-works and refineries, ten rope-walks, a bank, a museum, an insurance office, and a Free Masons' hall "with Ionick pilasters in front." The Lisbon bell, whose sweet tones to-day greet off- island visitors, was already hung in the stumpy tower of the old North Church. Tidy clapboarded houses, painted white or green, with 'captains' walks' atop, were beginning to replace the shingled dwellings of colonial days. Almost the entire male population of Nantucket followed the sea; and the rest were de- pendent on it. Even the cows, apparently, came down to the harbor's edge to browse, and take in the scene of marine activity!
CHAPTER XII FEDERALISM AND NEUTRAL TRADE 1789-1807
FEDERALISM has opposite connotations in Europe and America, and a very special meaning east of the Hud- son. New England Federalism was at once a political system, and a point of view. Sired by Neptune out of Puritanism, the teacher of its youth was Edmund Burke. Washington, Hamilton, and Fisher Ames formed the trinity of its worship. Timothy Pickering was the kept politician of New England Federalism, Harrison Gray Otis its spellbinder, Boston its political and Hartford its intellectual capital, Harvard and Yale the seminaries of its priesthood. New England Federalism believed that the main object of govern- ment was to protect property, especially commercial and shipping property; and it supported nationalism or states' rights according as the federal government protected or neglected these interests of maritime New England. It aimed to create and maintain in power a governing class, of educated, well-to-do men. Re- garding Jeffersonian democracy a mere misbegotten brat of the French Revolution, New England Federal- ism directed its main efforts toward choking the par- ent, hoping thereby either to starve the progeny, or to wean it from an evil heritage.
1
Federalism did not attain the rigidity of a system until the early nineteenth century; but the economic block that formed its basis was already formed in 1790, All the maritime interests of New England were in reality one interest, that must stand or fall together.
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No one of her sea-borne industries was self-sufficient, and many of the greater merchants were directly con- cerned in all of them. By 1790, Boston and Salem were no mere market towns for salt fish and country produce, but entrepôts of world commerce. The out- ward cargoes to the East Indies were first obtained through trading with the West Indies, the Mediter- ranean, and northern Europe; and the success of Yankee vessels in these markets depended as much on their skillful handling of Southern produce, as on the ancient Massachusetts staples of fish, lumber, whale- oil, and rum. Although the use of tea, coffee, spices, and imported sugar became general among all classes of the New England population at this period, the bulk of the Oriental cargoes brought into Salem and Boston was reexported. No section of the edifice could be touched without disturbing the rest. Yet every block was composed of white oak, the raw ma- terial of New England shipping. In final analysis, the power of Massachusetts as a commercial state lay in her ships, and the men who built, owned, and sailed them.
All matters of shipping and navigation fell within the scope of the federal government's protecting arm. Massachusetts promptly ceded her seven lighthouses1 to the United States, which assumed the burden of maintaining them, and of building new ones. For these few, dim whale-oil lights did not satisfy com-
1 Portland Head (Maine), Plum Island Lights near Newburyport, Cape Ann Lights on Thatcher's Island, Boston Light, Plymouth Lights on the Gurnet, Brant Point and Great Point Lights on Nantucket. There were only eight more in the whole United States.
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mercial interests. Vessels from the South, the West Indies, and the Far East approached Massachusetts Bay by way of Vineyard Sound, Nantucket Sound, and the back side of the Cape. On a fair westerly day in the seventeen-nineties, fifty or sixty sail could be seen from any point on this great ocean fairway. But imagine sailing this course at night, as the most lei- surely of merchantmen might wish to do if the wind were fair, rather than risk a week's stay at Holmes's Hole. Leaving Great Point astern, one entered a dark chasm into which Cape Cod stretched its tentacles of death.
Petitions from the Boston Marine Society and other influential bodies induced the Government in 1797 to erect on the Clay Pounds, Truro, the Highland or Cape Cod Light. His powerful glare, varied by a com- forting wink every sixty seconds, took vessels in charge before Great Point dipped under the horizon, and saw them safely around the Cape to within the scope of Boston Light or Thatcher's. Within a few years Gay Head Light was established at the entrance to this highway, the twins of Chatham Bar gave the line to a safe shelter, and Boon and Seguin were set up to guard the coast of Maine.
The approach to Salem Harbor is particularly diffi- cult in thick weather or at night, on account of the many islands and submerged rocks in the bay. After a fatal storm in January, 1796, the federal govern- ment established a safe guide to the best channel, the Baker's Island Lights:
Two pale sisters, all alone On an island bleak and bare, Listening to the breakers moan, Shivering in the chilly air.
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Four buoys at the mouth of the Merrimac were ap- parently the only such aids to navigation in Massa- chusetts waters until 1797, when Congress appro- priated sixteen hundred dollars for sixteen buoys, "to be placed in and near the harbor of Boston." They were made of five-foot wooden staves bound by iron hoops, in the form of a truncated cone, and moored by the smaller end. Nantucket Harbor, so difficult of access as to require twice the pilotage rates of Bos- ton, was buoyed before 1809. But the present efficient marking of ledges and channels developed very slowly.1 Not until 1843 did the federal government begin a sys- tematic coast survey.
Private enterprise supplemented the Government's efforts. The Boston Marine Society passed critical judgment on published charts, and examined candi- dates for Boston pilots. Nathaniel Bowditch brought out an excellent chart and sailing directions to Salem bay, based on surveys and soundings made by Captain John Gibaut and his pastor, Dr. Bentley. Before 1800 there was established a 'Telegraphe' system, which, by semaphores at Edgartown, Wood's Hole, Sand- wich, Plymouth, Marshfield, Scituate, and Hull, noti- fied Boston and Salem shipmasters of the arrival of their vessels at Vineyard Haven. The Humane So- ciety of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the Merrimack Humane Society erected huts of refuge on dangerous and deserted stretches of the coast; a
1 The method of establishing new buoys is shown by the following let- ter from H. A. S. Dearborn, collector of the port of Boston, to the col- lector at Barnstable, May 22, 1813: "Sir, I am directed by the Secretary of the Treasury to have a Buoy placed at the entrance of Barnstable Harbour, provided the expense does not exceed one Hundred Dollars. You are hereby authorized to have a Buoy made, & placed where it is most wanted. ... Mr. J. L. Green has recommended Captain Prince Howe as a suitable person to do the work."
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boon to shipwrecked mariners who often passed safely through the breakers only to perish of exposure and hunger on the sandy wastes of Cape Cod or Plum Island.
Shipwrecks on the New England coast still remained the principal form of casualty in the Massachusetts merchant marine. Peaked Hill Bar on Cape Cod took a heavy toll, even after Highland Light was estab- lished; for no light could penetrate the fog, rain, and snowstorms that inflict our coast. Four vessels were lost within sight of Salem, in a southeast rainstorm of February, 1807. The reefs off Cohasset were "annu- ally the scene of the most heart-rending disasters," forty vessels being wrecked in one space of nine years, until the present lighthouse on Minot's Ledge, a site more difficult even than the famous Eddystone, was completed in 1860.1 Nantucket Shoals lightship was not established until 1854. But the lighthouses erected and maintained by the United States, under the watchful care of Hamilton, saved many valuable lives and ships, and created a new bond of obligation between maritime Massachusetts and the administra- tion.
Maritime Massachusetts expected something more from the federal government than 'lights, buoys and daymarks,' and she sent the right men to the capital to get it. Her senior senatorship was first conferred upon Caleb Strong, of Northampton, to conciliate the western counties. But when it came to choosing the junior senator, "the merchants made the Constitu- tion," said James Sullivan, "and they should name the candidate." Tristram Dalton was accordingly chosen, and proceeded to New York in Newburyport style, in
1 The first Minot's Ledge Lighthouse, completed in 1850, was demol- ished by a gale the following year.
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his own four-horse coach, emblazoned with the Dalton arms, and attended by servants in the Dalton livery. "Everything that can affect shipbuilding I shall watch with a jealous eye," he wrote a constituent, when the first tariff debate began. Other jealous eyes were on the rum industry, and Vice-President Adams's casting vote once broke a Senate deadlock in favor of a low duty on molasses. Dalton was succeeded in the Senate by George Cabot, who had left Harvard before the Revolution to go to sea, and conducted a mercantile business at Beverly and Boston, beside taking an ac- tive part in the state government. Until 1816 the United States Senate contained a merchant of Boston or of Essex County, except for a period of five years, when Timothy Pickering upheld the same interest.
The merchants had worked for a more perfect union to obtain protection; nor were they disappointed. No section or interest in the United States was so fa- vored by Washington's and Adams's administrations, as maritime Massachusetts. The fishing bounties, we have already mentioned. The first tariff acts (1789 and 1790) caused much grumbling, because of duties on iron, hemp, and molasses (2} cents a gallon!); but no subsequent tariff proved of such benefit to Massa- chusetts shipping and commerce. The drawback sys- tem (refunding of tariff duties) was adopted for goods reexported within a year; and Massachusetts became the greatest state for this branch of commerce. For- eign vessels had to pay ten per cent additional duty on ordinary goods, and about fifty per cent on teas. 1
1 Bohea tea, the cheapest grade, paid 10 cents a pound duty if im- ported in an American vessel from beyond the Cape of Good Hope; 12 cents if imported in an American vessel from Europe; 15 cents if other- wise imported. For Hyson tea the figures were 32, 40, and 50 cents. American registry at this period was confined to vessels owned wholly by American citizens and built in the United States; or foreign-built
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Elias Hasket Derby petitioned, and Hamilton recom- mended a bonded warehouse system, which was adopted for teas in 1791. Customs duties could be paid as the teas were sold, at any time within two years of their importation. A similar privilege for shorter pe- riods was extended in 1795 to importers of West-India and European goods.
Most important in their consequences were the ton- nage duties, which were levied on vessels entering from foreign ports. American vessels paid six cents per ton burthen under the act of 1790; foreign vessels, fifty cents per ton. In the coasting trade an American ves- sel need pay this fee but once a year, but a foreign ves- sel had to pay it at every port.
The direct result of these discriminating duties was to drive English and other foreign vessels from American ports, in favor of those built and owned in the United States. Massachusetts shipbuilding was quick to bene- fit from the change. Her tonnage in 1792 was triple that of 1789, and amounted to a little over one-third the total American fleet. This extraordinary increase came before the Anglo-French war gave additional stimulus.
Most of these protective measures had been pushed through by Alexander Hamilton. His conscious policy was to favor the merchant-shipowner class, both to gain their powerful influence for strong government, and for the impost and tonnage duties, which accounted for ninety-two per cent of the revenues of the United States in 1791. His funding of the domestic debt, and assumption of the state debts, put money in the pockets of the merchants, who held large quantities
vessels already owned by Americans in 1789. Other vessels - such as condemned French prizes - owned by Americans were allowed to sail under authority of a sea-letter, but had to pay the same dues as foreign vessels, except light-money.
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of depreciated government securities. Consequently Hamilton's financial policy, which from the latitude of Charlottesville, Virginia, appeared unwarranted, unconstitutional, and anti-republican, seemed natural, necessary, and statesmanlike in Essex County, Massa- chusetts. It was just what maritime Massachusetts had ratified the Constitution to obtain! To the leaders of Bay State Federalism, Thomas Jefferson seemed a mutinous officer on the ship of state, and his demo- cratic, loose-construction principles, the Jolly Roger of a piratical craft.
From 1789 to 1799 Hamilton dictated the financial and the foreign policies of the Washington and Adams administrations; and his privy council was the Essex Junto. This remarkable group of men, which guided the destinies of New England Federalism from its birth to its dissolution, was composed of practical and highly intelligent merchants and lawyers of Essex origin, who had migrated to Boston in search of greater opportu- nities. George Cabot was the Junto oracle, Stephen Higginson, of Salem, its practical merchant, Jonathan Jackson and John Lowell, Jr., of Newburyport, its elder statesman and pamphleteer, and Chief Justice Parsons, brother of two prominent merchants from Gloucester, its fount of legal learning. Timothy Pick- ering and Fisher Ames were admitted to full intimacy, Christopher Gore and James Lloyd hovered on the out- skirts. Most of their families were intermarried, and their opinions, or rather prejudices, were the standard of 'right thinking' in eastern Massachusetts. Life and politics they regarded as from the quarterdeck of an East-Indiaman. Harrison Gray Otis and Josiah Quincy were little more than their political chantey- men, and all Massachusetts scurried to furl topsails when the Essex Junto roared the command.
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