USA > Massachusetts > The maritime history of Massachusetts, 1783-1860 > Part 14
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30
The west coast of South America had already made the acquaintance of Yankee whalers and fur-traders, when the Napoleonic wars opened the east coast as well to Massachusetts vessels. The first North Ameri- can merchantman to enter the River Plate appears to have been the brig Alert of Salem, owned by Dudley L. Pickman and others, and commanded by Captain Robert Gray, of Columbia fame. She was captured by a French privateer and carried into Montevideo late in 1798. The Spanish officials fitted her out as a priva- teer under their own colors, but Captain Gray was released, and returned voluntarily in 1801 in command of the schooner James, after touching at Rio de Janeiro. Between February and July, 1802, eighteen Massa- chusetts vessels, and twenty-six from other North
18I
MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS
American ports, brought mixed cargoes to the River Plate, and took away hides and specie; portending the great hides and lumber traffic of later years between New England, Argentina, and Uruguay. In 1810, William Gray was reexporting "Buenos Ayres Hydes" and Peruvian bark from Boston to Tunis.
Several Massachusetts men entered the service of the new republics. Dr. Franklin Rawson, of Essex County, founded a distinguished Argentinian family. The name of Benjamin Franklin Seaver, of Boston, killed in battle while second in command of the Argen- tine fleet, is commemorated in a street of Buenos Aires; and William P. White, of Pittsfield, who established a mercantile agency there as early as 1804, gave such effective aid to the cause as to be called the "father of the Argentine Navy." A little later, Paul Delano, one of the twenty-one children of Nathan Delano, of Fair- haven, commanded the Chilean frigate Independencia, and applied his Yankee ingenuity to the construction of port works in open roadsteads. William Delano, of the same maritime family, served on the staff of Gen- eral San Martin. Both remained in Chile, where their descendants are prominent citizens to-day.
Japan first saw the American flag in 1791, when the famous Boston sloop Lady Washington, Captain Ken- drick, accompanied by the Grace of New York, Cap- tain Douglas, entered a southern Japanese harbor in the hope of selling sea-otter. But the natives knew not the use of fur, and no business was done. It was the foreign policy of the French Committee of Public Safety that gained American commerce its first ex- change with the forbidden kingdom. For almost two centuries the Dutch East India Company had enjoyed the exclusive right of sending one ship a year from Batavia to trade at Nagasaki, when, in 1795, French
182
FEDERALISM AND NEUTRAL TRADE
arms and propaganda transformed the Netherlands into the Batavian Republic, an ally and vassal to France. Fearing capture of its vessels by British war- ships, the Dutch East India Company for four succes- sive years chartered American vessels for the annual cruise. The first, apparently, to have this honor was the ship Eliza of New York, of which there is a con- temporary Japanese painting, showing her being light- ered off a rock in Nagasaki Harbor, in 1798, by several dozen small boats. In 1799 the Perkins's ship Frank- lin of Boston, James Devereux master, was the lucky vessel; and of her voyage from Batavia to Japan and back we have a full account, from Captain Dever- eux's clerk, George Cleveland. On entering Japanese waters she hoisted the Dutch ensign, fired prescribed salutes of seven to thirteen guns each on passing seven different points, and another on anchoring in Nagasaki Harbor. The Yankee officers had to bend almost dou- ble when Japanese officials came on board, and to com- ply with minute and rigorous harbor regulations dur- ing their four months' stay. But they were allowed, carefully guarded, to visit the town, and to bring back private adventures of cabinets, tea-trays, and carved screens which are still treasured in Salem homes. In 1800 the ship Massachusetts of Boston received the annual charter for the colossal sum of $100,000, it was rumored; and in 1801 the ship Margaret of Salem pulled off the prize. She was apparently the last American vessel to be received in a Japanese harbor until Com- modore Perry broke the isolation of Nippon.
In 1801, with the election of Jefferson to the presi- dency, the national government fell into the hands of
183
MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS
a combination partial to France, and professedly un- friendly to maritime commerce. But Jefferson's mod- eration agreeably disappointed maritime Massachu- setts. The Hamiltonian system of fishing bounties, drawbacks, discriminating tonnage duties, and friend- ship with England continued unimpaired. Barbary corsairs were forced to respect the American flag. Jefferson chose his Attorney-General and his Secretary of War in Massachusetts, and but for the illness of Jacob Crowninshield, whose family had been consist- ently Republican, he would have had a Secretary of the Navy from the same state.
Early in 1802 Napoleon made peace with England, and the European trade slackened somewhat; but, of course, Massachusetts could not blame this on Jeffer- son. And in 1804, despite the raving of Federalist poli- ticians, the commonwealth cast its electoral vote for the great Virginian. No doubt the maritime interests would have become reconciled to his administration had not a renewal of the war revived the passions and the difficulties of the previous decade.
England and Napoleon, by a series of Orders in Council and Imperial Decrees, began attempting to drive neutral shipping from each other's ports. As British sea-power tightened, and Napoleon extended his control over continental Europe, it became no longer easy for American shipping to play both sides. Hitherto, the British prohibition of neutral trading between her enemies and their colonies had been evaded by the "broken voyage" - bringing French colonial produce to Boston or Salem, paying duty, re- loading it even on the same vessel, receiving the draw- back, and proceeding to France. But in 1805 Sir Wil- liam Scott made an example of the ship Essex of Salem,1
1 The same vessel which met a tragic fate in the Red Sea, in 1806.
184
FEDERALISM AND NEUTRAL TRADE
in a decision which remains a landmark in interna- tional law, so-called. Her voyage from Barcelona to Havana via Derby Wharf was declared one continuous voyage, and the cargo confiscated.
The merchants of Boston and Salem loudly pro- tested. But before long they discovered that the bark of the Essex decision was worse than its bite. An old drawback book in the Plymouth custom-house records shows what indirect trade was going on in 1806 and 1807. The brig Eliza Hardy of Plymouth enters her home port from Bordeaux, on May 20, 1806, with a cargo of claret wine. Part of it is immediately reëx- ported to Martinique in the schooner Pilgrim, which also carries a consignment of brandy that came from Alicante in the brig Commerce, and another of gin that came from Rotterdam in the barque Hannah of Ply- mouth. The rest of the Eliza Hardy's claret is taken to Philadelphia by coasters, and thence reexported in seven different vessels to Havana, Santiago de Cuba, St. Thomas, and Batavia. The brig Rufus King, about the same time, brought into Plymouth a cargo of coffee from St. Thomas. It is transferred to Boston, and thence reexported to Rotterdam and Amsterdam in four differ- ent vessels. The barque Hannah also brought wine and brandy from Tarragona, which is reexported from Bos- ton to Havana and Madeira. The schooner Honest Tom left Plymouth for Bordeaux on December 21, 1806, with sugar and coffee that another vessel had brought from the West Indies. She returned to Plymouth on May 18, 1807, with wine and brandy which flowed from Boston to Demerara in the ship Jason, to the East In- dies in the ship Jenny, and to San Domingo in the brig Eunice. Thus interposing a coastal voyage between the two ends of an essentially unneutral traffic evidently confused or satisfied the British admiralty.
185
MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS
President Jefferson stood up for neutral rights, and his representatives at London did their best to have the Essex decision rescinded. But before anything could be done, new and more stringent orders and decrees were issued by England and Napoleon ; and in 1807 the country was stirred by an impressment outrage on the U.S.S. Chesapeake. Had Jefferson then called for a declaration of war, Massachusetts would have ac- cepted war with good grace. Instead, he chose a policy which, without coercing the belligerent nations, sacrificed the commercial profits of Massachusetts and her political good-will. December 22, 1807, the date that Jefferson's embargo went into effect, begins a new period in American maritime history.
CHAPTER XIII EMBARGO AND WAR 1807-1815
Our ships all in motion once whitened the ocean, They sailed and returned with a cargo; Now doomed to decay, they have fallen a prey To Jefferson - worms - and embargo.
THUS jingled a newspaper poet at Newburyport in 1808. It was bad enough trying to feel out a channel between orders in council and imperial decrees: but to have one's fleet scuttled by act of Congress, on the pretense of protecting it, seemed outrageous and hypo- critical.
The Embargo Act, which remained in force from December 22, 1807, to March 15, 1809, forbade any American vessel to clear from an American harbor for a foreign port, and placed coasting and fishing vessels under heavy bonds not to land their cargoes outside the United States. Another act, which went into effect at the same time, forbade the importation of many British goods. Nothing prevented American vessels then abroad from entering a home port, but once there, they could not legally depart for a foreign voyage.
There were many leaks in the embargo. For a time, by special dispensation of the President, merchants were allowed to send abroad for property they had already purchased. An immense smuggling trade went on over the Canadian and Florida borders. Vessels al- ready abroad did not return until the embargo was repealed, if they could help it. The coast was more heavily guarded by federal officials and soldiers than
187
MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS
during the War of 1812, but nevertheless a number of vessels managed to slip out. Captain Charles C. Doten, of Plymouth, performed two notable feats of this sort. One dark night, in a southeast rainstorm that drove the water-front guards to cover, he re- rigged the schooner Hannah, which had been 'stripped to a girtline' by the collector of the port, with the sails and rigging of another vessel, and piloted her safely out of Plymouth Bay. Later he took the brig Hope out of Provincetown in a northeast gale, hotly pursued and fired upon by the revenue cutter; sold vessel and cargo of fish at St. Lucia for twenty-five thousand dollars, and brought it home in the form of Spanish doubloons, sewed into his clothing. The em- bargo did not kill Massachusetts commerce, then; but suspended at least half of it, and rendered the rest more furtive, difficult, and hazardous than it ever would have been under mere orders in council and imperial decrees.
At the time the embargo was laid, Massachusetts1 was the principal shipowning commonwealth in America. Her total tonnage per capita was more than twice that of any other state. Her registered tonnage in foreign trade in 1807, 310,310 tons, was thirty- seven per cent of the total for the United States, and more than twice that of her nearest competitor, New York. In coasting trade she was also first, although her proportion was slightly less. Her fishing fleet, 62,214 tons, was eighty-eight per cent of the total; and although there was nothing in the embargo acts to prevent fishing, loss of the foreign market put the
1 See statistics in Appendix. The figures here quoted for the state include Maine; those quoted for ports include minor ports in the custom district of that name. Whaling vessels are apparently included in the foreign tonnage.
188
Ship Hercules of Salem Cap Edward West passing the Mole Head of Naples, coming to anetncar 13 Sept.189.
SHIP HERCULES, OF SALEM, ENTERING NAPLES, 1809
EMBARGO AND WAR
greater part of the fleet out of commission. The same applied to the whaling. In all these branches of ship- ping the gains during the profitable years of neutral trade had been tremendous. Boston had passed Phila- delphia, and become second only to New York for amount of tonnage owned. Following Baltimore and Charleston; Portland, Salem, and Newburyport were respectively the sixth, seventh, and ninth shipowning communities in the United States. The minor ports of Massachusetts, tempted by the rich freights and turnovers of neutral commerce, had increased their fleet considerably in the last few years.1 Adopting Adam Seybert's estimate, that the American merchant marine in 1801 was earning at least fifty dollars per ton annually, the Massachusetts fleet of 1807 was bringing home about fifteen and a half million dollars a year in freight money alone, an amount far greater than the capital value of the fleet that earned it. Congress ordered the shipowners to forego this colossal income - equal to the entire federal revenue in 1806 - as well as the greater gains made by buying cheap and selling dear, in order to save their vessels from capture. Could the gain balance the loss?
This was a burning question in 1808, and continues to divide historians to this day. There were many in Massachusetts who agreed with Jefferson, but more who did not. John Bromfield, supercargo by profes- sion and a Federalist in politics, wrote from London in
1 Plymouth tonnage, for instance, had just doubled since 1800. In 1804 Plymouth had eleven entries from Portugal, one from Spain, one from Cape Verde Islands, two from Russia, ten from Martinique, and ten from smaller West Indian Islands - all schooners. In 1805 she exported almost half a million pounds of sugar to Holland. New Bedford had increased fifty per cent, to over 25,000 tons. Of her ninety to one hundred square-rigged vessels, only twelve were whalers. See chapters X and XI for the neutral trade of Marblehead and Newburyport.
189
.
MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS
1808, "It was certainly a very well-timed restriction upon our commerce, and has undoubtedly saved his political opponents from the loss of property to an immense amount." The Republican Crowninshields defended the embargo, and William Gray, a Federal- ist, and the largest individual shipowner in the United States, rallied to it as a necessary measure of self- protection. His Federalist neighbors retorted by accus- ing him of profiteering from his stock on hand. This charge he denied: and any statement from a man with the simple honesty and independence of William Gray carries weight. He sacrificed personal comfort and social position by his stand. Yet even Mr. Gray did not see fit to order home one of his vessels, the ship Wells, which left Salem eighteen days before the em- bargo was laid, and remained abroad making money for her owner while it endured. Marblehead remained faithful to embargo and Republicanism, despite her growing commerce. As Salem was Federalist, Marble- head was naturally the contrary;1 but it seems that Marblehead was somewhat favored during the em- bargo. The local collector continued to issue San Domingo bonds, an indication that he was allowing vessels to clear for the West Indies.2
In general, the verdict of maritime Massachusetts was thumbs down on Jefferson and his "terrapin"
1 Frequently, throughout the Federalist period, small seaports that were rivals to a near-by prosperous and Federalist center of commerce, voted Republican; Dorchester, Weymouth, Fairhaven, and Dighton, for example.
2 Custom-house records, searched for me by Miss E. R. Trefry. The act of Feb. 28, 1806, required vessels clearing for certain parts of the West Indies to be bonded against trading with the Haytian rebels against Napoleon. But Marblehead had only twelve foreign entries dur- ing the embargo period, paying $35,000 duties, as compared with seventy for the year 1807, paying $156,000. The figures given in Dwight's Travels in New England are incorrect.
190
EMBARGO AND WAR
policy. The new British orders required some adjust- ment of trade routes, but as George Cabot said, profits were such that if only one out of three vessels escaped capture, her owner could make a handsome profit on the lot. It was still possible to ply neutral trade under British convoy, inspection, and license; a system de- grading perhaps to national honor, but very similar to that which all neutrals, including the United States, permitted during the World War. Insurance rates were not prohibitive; and after the removal of the embargo Massachusetts shipping arose to a new high level de- spite the orders in council. As a pure business propo- sition, then, Jefferson's plea of protection made little appeal.
The embargo caused greatest hardship in the smaller ports, and among small shipowners and working peo- ple dependent on shipping. Newburyport, Salem, and Plymouth never recovered their former prosperity. Jefferson hastened the inevitable absorption of their commerce by Boston. Shipbuilding, with all its sub- sidiary industries, ceased altogether. Mechanics and master mariners had to resort to the soup kitchens established in the seaport towns, or exhaust their sav- ings, or emigrate to Canada in search of work. The only consolation that Dr. Bentley, the stanch Repub- lican pastor of Salem, could find in the embargo, was the stimulus it gave to pleasure-boating in Salem Bay! But few were so fortunately circumstanced as to seek solace from business depression in yachting life.
In 1807, the Federalist Party was in extremis. It had lost even the state government of Massachusetts. The embargo rescued it from the shadow of death, thrust into its palsied hands the banner of state rights, and sent it forth to rally the seafaring tribe. Politicians like Timothy Pickering hoped the embargo would re-
191
MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS
main in force until the "people recovered their true sight" - and President Jefferson proved most accom- modating. It was not difficult to persuade people of the hypocrisy of his plea of protection, and to prove that his real wish was to coerce England. With such an object the Federalists had no sympathy. Their con- viction that France was the center of disturbance and unrest had deepened, although Napoleon did his best to prove the contrary. Yet the Federalists were right in believing that the restoration of peace and the hope of liberty in Europe depended on the overthrow of Napoleon; that any attempt to clip the British Sam- son's hair was at that time internationally immoral, and without sharp scissors, imprudent.
Not content with these arguments, the Federalists asserted, with some plausibility, that Jefferson's ulti- mate object was to destroy New England's wealth and power. How else could one explain, for instance, his ban on East-India and China commerce? The orders in council permitted our Oriental trade; Napoleonic decrees were powerless in far eastern waters. Keeping Salem's East-Indiamen in port merely helped English shipowners. So abject a failure was the embargo as a measure of coercion that Jefferson's persistent faith in it could be explained only by enmity to American shipping, or by pathological causes.
Fourteen months of embargo enabled the merchants to recover their political supremacy, and to organize a campaign of town-meeting resolutions that had the ring of 1776. Deserted by his northern partisans in Congress, Jefferson finally consented to sign the repeal of the embargo on his last day in office - March 3, 1809. Prosperity promptly returned. But the em- bargo did a moral damage that determined New Eng- land's alignment in the coming war. It enabled the
192
EMBARGO AND WAR
Essex Junto, the most bigoted group of Federalist politicians, to endoctrine maritime New England with a blind hatred for the Republican Party; to regard the administration as a greater enemy than any foreign country. It bred a spirit of narrow self-complacency, a belief in the superior virtue, enterprise, and worth of Yankees as against New Yorkers, Pennsylvanians, : and Southerners, that all but flared up into secession before the cause was removed.
After the embargo was lifted, a non-intercourse act with Great Britain remained in force three months; but this did not prevent the prompt reopening of Oriental, West-Indian, Baltic, South American, and Mediterranean commerce. Fortunes were made by supplying the British army in the Peninsular War. Shipyards awoke. Fayal in the Azores, where John B. Dabney, of Boston, was American consul and leading merchant, became a new St. Eustatius, a go-between for nations forbidden to trade with one another. Russia became almost our best customer, as Napoleon closed the ports of western Europe to our vessels. Almost two hundred United States vessels were now trading with Russia, over half of them, probably, belonging in Massachusetts.1 Yankee shipmasters quickly adapted themselves to the new conditions. Wintering at Riga in 1810-II, they took part in the open-handed social life of the Balt nobility; skating carnivals, sleigh rides at breakneck speed over the flat country, montagnes russes, brilliant balls and Gargantuan dinners. To avoid the Danish privateers which were preying on American vessels, many made the long voyage around Norway to Archangel, whence their imports went a thousand miles overland to Moscow. But the ship-
1 In 1803, fifty-four out of the ninety American arrivals in St. Peters- burg belonged in Massachusetts. See also chapters XI and XII.
193
:
MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS
masters found Archangel rather exhausting, as the Russian merchants, after hibernating, expected their American customers to stay up and drink with them through the bright summer nights. The Baltimore brig Calumet penetrated the Black Sea to Odessa in 1810; shortly followed by a vessel commanded by a Ropes of Salem. Profits in this Russian trade were immense. The ship Catherine of Boston, 281 tons, worth possibly $7000, cleared $115,000 net in one voyage of 1809.
President Madison's policy, at first favorable to commerce, won away from the Federalists a part of their previous gains. In 1810 William Gray was elected lieutenant-governor of Massachusetts. His friend John Quincy Adams, who likewise had been expelled from the Federal Party for supporting the embargo, was appointed minister to Russia, went out in one of the Gray ships, and proved a useful friend at court. William Gray was the principal Russian trader in the United States. He distributed Russian duck, sheetings, cordage, and iron (which sold for $115 a ton in Boston), to Philadelphia, Charleston, and New Or- leans, there loading tobacco, sugar, and "cotton wool" for the Baltic market. Other vessels of his fleet took lumber and coffee to Algiers, and proceeded to Galli- polis to load olive oil for Russia. In addition, he was conducting a Mediterranean-Calcutta trade.
Napoleon considered the American Baltic fleet essen- tially British; and according to the British doctrine of neutral rights he was not far wrong. Certain vessels did a ferrying trade between Copenhagen and London; and all had to conform to British regulations, and accept naval convoy through the Belts. Even William Gray, who was continually protesting his innocence of British connections, used London bankers almost
194
EMBARGO AND WAR
exclusively, and on one occasion chartered a British vessel. Napoleon, to complete his continental block- ade, required the occlusion of neutral shipping from Russia, whose emperor was his nominal ally; and from Sweden, whose ruler was his former marshal. In the summer of 1810 he made the demand. Alexander and Bernadotte equivocated, and then refused. They had no intention of shutting off their subjects' supplies of West- and East-India goods. Then began Napoleon's preparations to invade Russia. Thus the Baltic trade of Massachusetts played an important if unconscious part in the chain of events that led Napoleon to Mos- cow and to St. Helena.
Within a week of the Grand Army's entrance into Russia, the United States declared war on Great Brit- ain. To this War of 1812 maritime Massachusetts was flatly opposed. Her pocket and her heart were equally affected. She deemed the war immoral, be- cause waged against the "world's last hope"; unjust, because Napoleon had done her commerce greater in- jury than had England; and hypocritical, because de- clared in the name of "free trade and sailors' rights" by a sectional combination that had neither com- merce nor shipping. In Congress, a majority of the representatives from New England voted against the declaration of war, which was carried by a new group of representatives from the South and West, who were burning for a fight and anxious to conquer Canada.
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.