USA > Massachusetts > The maritime history of Massachusetts, 1783-1860 > Part 16
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Falmouth 1 best upheld the honor of the Cape. In January, 1814, the commander of H.M.S. Nimrod demanded that Falmouth surrender the Nantucket packet-sloop, and several pieces of artillery which had been used to good effect. Weston Jenkins, shipmaster and militia captain, replied, "Come on and get them!" The Nimrod then stood close in shore, and after grant- ing two hours' truce to remove non-combatants, bom- barded the houses from noon to nightfall. Eight can- non balls were lodged in one cottage alone; but beyond smashing furniture and breaking salt-vats, little dam- age was done, and no lives lost. The entrenched mili- tia prevented a landing. Later in the year Captain Jen- kins, with a crew of neighbors in a small sloop, cut the British privateer Retaliation out of Tarpaulin Cove.
Disaffection reached a dangerous point in all south- ern New England during the summer and autumn of 1814. In addition to its original grievance against the war, maritime Massachusetts felt abandoned by the federal government. Her volunteers were marched off to the Canadian frontier, and her coast left defenseless; while war taxes increased, and the administration showed no sign of yielding its high pretensions, which postponed the conclusion of peace. Interior Massa- chusetts was in general of like mind; and Connecticut and Rhode Island as well. Secession from the Union was openly propagated by the Federalist press; and
1 The village now known as Wood's Hole.
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there are various indications that secession sentiment had gone far among the people. According to the rec- ords of the Beverly artillery company, it "exercised the Gun as usual and fired a Royal Salute of 5 guns," on July 4, 1814. The Newburyport Sea Fencibles, composed principally of shipmasters and builders, flung a five-starred, five-striped flag to the breeze from Plum Island fort.
At the darkest hour of the war, when one British army was massed on the Lake Champlain front, an- other on its way to New Orleans, and the government of the United States a refugee from the destroyed capi- tal, the General Court of Massachusetts summoned a New England convention at Hartford, to confer not only upon military defense against the enemy, but on political defense against the administration. Although the moderate Federalists conceived the Hartford Convention largely as a safety-valve to the passions they had helped arouse, the Essex Junto had other plans. Timothy Pickering, just reëlected to Congress by an all but unanimous vote, wished the Convention to draft a new constitution, and present it as a loaded pistol at the original thirteen states, with the alternative of an independent New England Con- federacy. John Lowell paved the way, with articles and pamphlets defending the right of secession.
The unpatriotism of this programme needs no com- ment. However justified the Federalist opposition to the war in 1812, the war in 1814 had become a defen- sive struggle against the massed resources of the Brit- ish Empire. Napoleon had been disposed of. The un- wisdom of secession, for communities that depended for their very life on free intercourse with the other United States, is equally obvious. Politicians were perhaps more directly responsible for it than shipmasters; but
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the maritime interests of Massachusetts supported the politicians. And among the members of the Gen- eral Court who voted for a convention at Hartford were merchants like T. H. Perkins, Israel Thorndike, Daniel Sargent, and Captain William Sturgis.
It seems strange that a people whose sails whitened every sea; whose two commercial cities, in many and remote parts of the world, stood for the United States; who talked familiarly of the Far West and Hawaii as The Coast and The Islands; should be so narrow and inflexible in their politics. Yet this attitude was natural and inevitable. Cælum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt. They that do business in great waters have little in common with their land-plodding countrymen. Their native land is but a resting place between voyages; a wharf and shipyard and cottage by the sea. New England was but a broader Nantucket, where aged shipmasters could be found who knew half the coral reefs of the South Sea, but had never set foot in the United States. A sailor's daughter worked the creed of maritime Massachusetts into her sampler :
Amy Kittredge is my name Salem is my dwelling place New England is my nashun And Christ is my Salvation.
The Union ceased to be valuable when fresh-water politicians took bread from the mouths of honest sea- men. Better go it alone, a North American Denmark, than stifle under the rule of scatter-brained dema- gogues.
New England held her breath while the Hartford Convention secretly deliberated. Its report, appearing on January 6, 1815, showed that common sense and moderation had gained control. The administration was severely scolded, and nullification threatened if
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conscription were applied. But secession was calmly considered, and ruled out of practical politics.
Five weeks later, in the midst of a cold February that sealed the war-bound shipping in the idle ports, arrived the news of peace. From Newburyport to Provincetown sped the good news; shouted along the roads by stage-drivers through clouds of frozen breath, blared out by rusty fishhorns, and joyously tolled by meeting-house bells whose sullen silence no battle had broken. For maritime Massachusetts, peace meant the unlocking of prison doors; a return to the wide arms of her ocean mother.
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CHAPTER XIV THE PASSING OF SALEM
1815-1845
THE first few years of world peace were the severest test that maritime Massachusetts had ever met. New conditions, foreign and domestic, required a readjust- ment of her economic system. Europe at peace was re- covering her own carrying trade. Only gradually did England open her colonial ports to Yankee ships, and a generation elapsed before new markets were found in California, Australia, and South Africa. At the same time the westward movement in the United States left Massachusetts more remote from the center of popula- tion; and it was difficult to find artificial means to sur- mount the Berkshire barrier. As places of exchange be- tween the West and Europe, ports like New Orleans, Baltimore, and New York with the Erie Canal, had such obvious advantages over Boston and Salem that it was difficult to see how Massachusetts could survive as a commercial community. The futile, unpatriotic policy of New England Federalism made Massachu- setts the butt and scorn of her sister states, and lost her, for the time being, all influence at Washington. A sullen pessimism was the prevailing attitude on State Street. The decline of Boston to a fourth-rate seaport, and the total extinction of Salem, were confidently predicted.
The younger and more far-sighted men put their money and brains into making Massachusetts a manu- facturing state. Embargo and war had acted as a pro- hibitive tariff on English manufactures; and just be-
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fore the war ended two scions of shipping families, Francis C. Lowell and Patrick T. Jackson, prepared against peace by setting up power looms at Waltham, in the first complete American cotton factory. Against the will of the shipping community, they obtained a protective tariff in 1816; and within a generation the manufacturing cities of Lowell, Lawrence, Chicopee, and Manchester, had been established by capital ac- cumulated through neutral trading. Every country town with a good-sized brook or river set up a textile or paper mill or iron foundry; and a similar expansion in shoemaking altered the economy of fishing villages. The center of interest in Massachusetts shifts from wharf to waterfall; by 1840 she had become predomi- nantly a manufacturing state.
Yet the same grit and enterprise that made this corner of the United States into a great workshop, managed to retain, and even to increase, its maritime activities. The merchants could no longer obtain spe- cial favors for their class. They were unable to main- tain a distinct political party. Federalism, after a placid and powerless Indian summer, melted into dominant Republicanism by 1825. Daniel Webster, the child whom it had raised, seceded to high protec- tion in 1828, and Boston ratified his change by electing Nathan Appleton to Congress against Henry Lee, a leading East-India merchant and brilliant writer on free trade. The mercantile and shipping community then made the best terms it could with the Whig Party. At the price of prohibitive duties on India cottons and cheap English woolens, and a heavy tariff on wool, hemp, and iron, it obtained low schedules for other Oriental goods, fruit and wines, and exotic products that did not compete with "infant indus- tries." Manufacturing stimulated the import of wool
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JOSEPH PEABODY
THE PASSING OF SALEM
from Smyrna and South America, of coal from Phila- delphia, and cotton from the Gulf ports and Charles- ton; it provided a new export medium, domestic cot- tons, which Yankee vessels introduced into the world's markets; and it greatly increased the buying power of New England. Many of the old mercantile families, who became pioneer manufacturers, still remained shipowners, reluctant to lose all touch with the element that raised them from obscurity; and merchant-ship- owners invested their surplus in manufacturing stock. Ships lay idle when looms were still, and the ebb and flow of commercial prosperity passed inland with the east wind.
A surprisingly large tonnage managed to follow with profit the old routes established in Federalist days; proving that superior skill, not merely war conditions, was at the bottom of the earlier prosperity. Boston remained the principal North American emporium for East-Indian, Baltic, and Mediterranean products until the Civil War. And Massachusetts, though mutilated by the separation of Maine in 1820, remained the lead- ing shipowning state until 1843, when passed by New York. Maritime history is punctuated by depressions, when money was "tighter than the skin on a cat's back," by periods of inflation, and by the panics of 1819, 1837, and 1857. But on the whole there was progress, both in technique and in earnings. The usual post-bellum inflation was liquidated in 1819. A toil- some advance in the eighteen-twenties was followed by perceptible speeding-up in the thirties, full-tide pros- perity in the forties, and a glorious culmination in the fifties, with the clipper ship.
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Concentration was the order of the day. In her struggle to keep pace with New York, Boston ab- sorbed the foreign commerce and shipping of every
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other Massachusetts seaport. The capital in twenty years' time recovered the losses from a decade of re- strictions and war. Newburyport, Beverly, Salem, Marblehead, and Plymouth, after a brave effort to pick up, turned to manufacturing. New Bedford and Gloucester, Wellfleet and Provincetown, survived through specialization in whale, mackerel, and cod- fisheries.
"Newburyport has withered under the influence of Boston," wrote Caleb Cushing in 1825. Her popula- tion declined from 7634 in 1810 to 6375 in 1830. The Middlesex Canal, by tapping the Merrimac River at Chelmsford, diverted from Newburyport the lumber and produce of southern New Hampshire. Portland, Boothbay, and Bangor, in the thriving state of Maine, were exporting their lumber and fish direct, undermin- ing her West-India trade. Gloucester absorbed a large part of her fisheries, and those of Ipswich as well. Deep slumber rested upon Newburyport. William Lloyd Garrison, the inspired printer's devil, tried to arouse her with a new journal, the "Free Press." High Street rubbed its eyes and rolled over, mumbling "Jacobin!" Then Garrison followed the white sails to Boston.
Marblehead made a brave, and partially successful, effort to revive her Baltic, South American, and West- Indian trade after the war. In August and September, 1821, she had three entries from St. Petersburg, two from Brazil, and two from Martinique; all of them schooners and brigantines from seventy-five to one hundred tons burthen.1 But by 1840 her most success-
1 One of them, the schooner Sarah, seventy-four tons, was the last command of John Roads Russell, who as a private in Colonel Glover's regiment had rowed the boat that ferried Washington across the Dela- ware.
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ful merchants, such as Robert Chamblett Hooper, had moved to Boston; and the rest put their money into fishing schooners and shoe shops. Lucy Larcom has excited our pity for Hannah at a Window Binding Shoes in Marblehead, awaiting the return of fisherman Ben. Cold statistics, however, place Hannah among eleven hundred Marbleheaders producing annually over a million pairs of shoes, worth twice the average catch of the fishing fleet. Clearly, there were no eco- nomic grounds for Hannah's loneliness!
Salem as a seaport died hard. The merchant-ship- ping firm of Silsbee, Stone & Pickman, formed in the eighteenth century, lasted until 1893, when their (and Salem's) last square-rigger, the Mindoro, left Derby Wharf to become a coal barge. Yet Salem was pros- trated by the war. Her overseas trading fleet declined from 182 sail in 1807 to 57 in 1815, and never again did she attain the tonnage or the entries of pre-embargo days. William Gray's departure to Boston in 1808 be- gan a process that did not stop. The removal of an- other leading family of merchants and shipmasters -
Old Low, old Low's son,
Never saw so many Lows since the world begun -
to Brooklyn about 1825, where they established the merchant-shipping firm of A. A. Low & Brother, was a typical event of the period following 1815. "Nearly half our commerce and capital are employed in other ports," stated a Salem newspaper in 1833.
It became the practice for a Salem East-Indiaman to make two or three round voyages before returning to the home port, in the meantime piling up a balance for the owner at the London banking house of George Peabody. This famous son of Essex County was born of poor parents in 1795, in the part of Danvers after-
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wards given his name. His first fortune was made in a mercantile business at Baltimore, between 1815 and 1837, when he established himself in London as a com- petitor to Baring Brothers. Being a bachelor, George Peabody gave or bequeathed the bulk of his fortune, eight and a half million dollars, to the various funds, libraries, institutes, and museums that now bear his name. His partner and successor, Junius Spencer Morgan, left a son.
Joseph Peabody, a cousin of George, was the wealth- iest merchant-shipowner of Salem between the em- bargo and 1845. He emphatically did not belong to the class described by Hawthorne, whose "ventures go to swell, needlessly and imperceptibly, the mighty flood of commerce at New York and Boston." His brig Le- ander, 223 tons, built at Salem in 1821, made twenty- six voyages to Europe, Asia Minor, Africa, and the Far East in the twenty-three years of her life. His ship George made twenty-one round voyages from Salem to Calcutta between 1815 and 1837, with such regularity that she was called the "Salem Frigate." 1 Salem ves- sels were always manned in part by local boys, but the George was a veritable training ship. No less than twenty-six mates and forty-five captains graduated from the forecastle of this floating bit of Essex County.
"Capt. West is respected & loved by every man on board," writes John Lovett, her Beverly supercargo, from Leghorn in 1818. "And I must say I think there is but few better men in Beverly, than Mr. Endicott [the first officer] is. We have an excellent crew - they are all young & very smart, & noisy enough. It is always 'drive on boys!' Whether to work, or to play, in the heat or cold, wet or dry. On the
1 The ship George was 110 feet, 10 inches by 27 feet by 13 feet, 6 inches, 328 tons, and somewhat of a Baltimore clipper model. Built at Salem for a privateer in 1814, she was purchased by Mr. Peabody for $5250. It is said that she made Salem in forty-one days from the Cape of Good Hope in 1831.
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THE PASSING OF SALEM
passage the Capt. wished us to take care of ourselves, when the weather was bad the Ship was all under water and then he would call every man from the deck & forecastle to sleep in the cabin and then he was obliged to lay with us himself to keep peace that the Super- cargo & mates might sleep. We have discharged the principal part of our Cargo, and taken in some goods for Calcutta."
On arrival there, he writes, "There are now four ships in this port belonging to Mr. Peabody. ... There are a great many Beverly men of my acquaintance in this place."
For several years Joseph Peabody competed in the China trade, and continued the famous pepper trade between Salem and Sumatra. It was in 1830 that his ship Friendship was attacked and captured by natives, off the village of Quallah-Battoo.
Salem had not yet spent her maritime energy. The palm-tree, Parsee, and ship on her new city seal repre- sented something more than a tradition. Salem men and Salem vessels were still seeking the spoil of Ind, usque ad ultimum sinum. They clung to their Oriental specialties, like the Northwest Sumatra pepper trade, as barnacles to a ship's bottom; and taught new black and brown peoples that Salem meant America. One of our most interesting books of American voyages, "The History of a Voyage to the China Sea," by Lieutenant John White, U.S.N., records a Salem adventure in the brig Franklin, which sailed up-river to Saigon in 1819, and opened Cochin-China to American commerce. The Fiji Islands were repeatedly visited, in spite of their danger. Nathaniel L. Rogers's brig Charles Dog- gett, William Driver master, lost five of her crew at Fiji in 1833. In the very same month that Mr. Knight, of Salem, chief mate of the Friendship, was done in by Malays at Quallah-Battoo, his brother Enoch was killed by Penrhyn Island savages on board Joseph
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Peabody's ship Glide. In the interesting sailor's narra- tive of that disaster we find the best description of the Fiji trepang or beech-de-mer trade, which was mo- nopolized by about six Salem vessels until the Civil War. Cannibal chiefs, warriors, women and children, tempted by trinkets and Yankee notions, came from a radius of a hundred miles to gather the delectable sea- cucumber, which the Salem men boiled in 'pot-houses' and cured in 'batter-houses' erected on shore. The re- sultant trepang, to the annual value of thirty thousand dollars, was carried to Manila or Canton, whence it found its way into soup at mandarin banquets. Occa- sionally the proletariat of Fiji would unite, and make Salem stew in the 'pot-houses,' but the Salem men came back, and brought their wives.
Several of these brave ladies of the sea, to our ulti- mate profit, were bitten by the literary microbe so common in New England of their day. Mrs. Captain Wallis, of the barque Zotoff, published an interesting "Life in the Feejees." Miss Lowe, in a delightfully girlish journal, has described life in the foreign settle- ment at Macao; and her friend Mrs. William Cleveland made colored sketches of Macao types and incidents. A brief manuscript journal of her voyage to Timor, Macao, and Rio Janeiro also survives. Sailing from Salem in the ship Zephyr commanded by her husband, on October 29, 1828, they made Timor in the excellent time of eighty-nine days, and touched at various small islands and harbors to obtain sandalwood. At Dilli she sketched the process; the Portuguese governor, clad in a scarlet silk shirt and white nankeen pantaloons, is re- clining in a hammock slung between two palm-trees, watching his subjects loading sandalwood logs on the Zephyr's tender.
"If the natives on the West Coast of Africa have
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THE PASSING OF SALEM
been temperate," remarks a historian of Salem, "they have been so in spite of the efforts of the Salem mer- chants to supply them with the materials for intemper- ance .... Salem has contributed largely to spread a knowledge of the virtue and good qualities of New England rum, of the astounding effects of gunpowder, and of the consoling influences of Virginia tobacco, among the savage tribes of the West Coast."1 There were 558 arrivals at Salem from that part of the world between 1832 and 1864. It was an alongshore bartering business, to obtain ivory, gold dust, palm-oil, peanuts, and camwood. Small brigs and schooners, often com- manded by their owners, made Africa somewhere about Sierra Leone, traded along the Guinea, Libe- rian, Ivory and Gold Coasts, and as far east as Akessa. At the larger places business was transacted through local merchants; but at the smaller trading stations the appearance of a Salem brig was a signal for the Kroomen to launch their long trading canoes through the surf. A sable potentate, dressed perhaps in a cast- off naval jacket, a hussar's helmet, and a loin-cloth, would be received on board and suitably 'dashed' (West Coast for tipped), to obtain his gracious per- mission for shipboard dicker, while the vessel lay at anchor or hove to. At Grand Bassam "we got a little ivory and camphor wood and a plenty of noise and begging," writes the mate of the African trading brig Neptune of Salem. "They always bring empty jugs with them if nothing else and plague a man's soul to death with entreaties to fill them with rum and gin and give them a little tobacco. A person may judge of the
1 To which list they might have added cottons, wooden clocks, brass pans and other 'dicker' for the natives; and furniture, shoes, and pro- visions for the European residents. I have found no instance of Salem vessels engaging in the slave-trade at this period.
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pleasure and satisfaction we have in trading with them by supposing himself on board a vessel and from one to three hundred naked niggers on deck and every one of them howling with the full strength of their lungs to make themselves heard."
This fever-infested coast was dangerous alike for seamen and for vessels. Harbors there were none, and the Salem brigs often needed their best seamanship to claw out of an anchorage that became a lee shore in a sudden change of wind, great rollers booming in at short notice, and breaking in forty feet of water. Yet the West Africa trade afforded a good living to many swapping Yankees, who had insufficient capital for the grand routes of commerce.
It was in the early thirties that the smaller Salem shipowners began trading with Madagascar, and with the neighboring island of Zanzibar. There they ac- quired the friendship of the Sultan, Seyyid Said, and monopolized the export of copal, a basic gum for var- nish. An important local industry grew out of this trade. Jonathan Whipple discovered a new and cheap method of cleaning copal, about 1835, and about a million and a half pounds of the gum passed annually through his shop on the Salem water-front between 1845 and 1861.
Salem's vicinity to the Danvers tanpits and the cob- blers' shops of Essex County, enabled her to hold a place in the South American hide trade, which led to the creation of a new American industry. According to local tradition it was Captain Benjamin Upton who brought from Para, Brazil, in 1824, the first consign- ment of pure gum 'rubbers.' Although heavy and clumsy, stiff as iron in cold, and liable to melt in warm weather, these overshoes proved just the thing for navigating the slushy streets of Salem in winter. The
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DIXCOVE ON THE GOLD COAST, BRIG HERALD, OF SALEM, APPROACHING
THE PASSING OF SALEM
local merchants, sensing a new trade, sent Lynn lasts to Para, and thereby procured a better fit of rubber overshoes than the original native product. The Para customs records show that between 1836 and 1842, that port sent three quarters of a million pairs of pure gum overshoes to Salem, almost as much as to all other places combined. Thus began a new branch of the New England shoe industry, and the first step towards Charles Goodyear's momentous discovery, in 1839, of the vulcanization of rubber.
About 1845 the control of the Para rubber trade passed to New York, which gradually absorbed most of Salem's South American commerce, except a part of the hides needed for local consumption. Direct voyages from Salem to Manila continued until 1858; the ship St. Paul, owned by Stephen C. Phillips, making twelve round voyages in thirteen years. Salem clung desper- ately to her minor specialties, such as the trade with Fiji, Zanzibar, and the West Coast of Africa. But these were poor substitutes for the Calcutta, the China, and the Sumatra voyages, which ended with the death of Joseph Peabody in 1844. Although for fifty years thereafter a dwindling number of Salem firms traded with the Far East, Salem ceased to be an important seaport in 1845.
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