USA > Massachusetts > The maritime history of Massachusetts, 1783-1860 > Part 3
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2I
MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS
lution was an Irish movement. These are the pet lapdogs of modern race snobbery. The seventeenth- century stock completely absorbed its eighteenth- century accretions, both English and non-English. To outsiders, as late as 1824, the population of seaboard Massachusetts seemed, and was, racially homogene- ous as that of Brittany. But the race was not Anglo- Saxon, or Irish. It was Yankee, a new Nordic amalgam on an English Puritan base; already in 1750 as differ- ent in its character and its dialect from the English as the Australians are to-day. A tough but nervous, tena- cious but restless race; materially ambitious, yet prone to introspection, and subject to waves of religious emotion. Conservative in its ideas of property and religion, yet (in the eighteenth century) radical in business and government. A people with few social graces, yet capable of deep friendships and abiding loyalties; law-abiding yet, individualistic, and im- patient of restraint by government or regulation in business; ever attempting to repress certain traits of human nature, but finding an outlet in broad, crude humor and deep-sea voyages. A race whose typical member is eternally torn between a passion for right- eousness and a desire to get on in the world. Religion and climate, soil and sea, here brewed of mixed stock a new people.
From 1740 to the Revolution, Boston declined slightly in population - owing probably to frequent epidemics, high taxes, and high cost of fuel - but the smaller seaports came up. A glance at the Georgian mansions of Michael Dalton and Jonathan Jackson at Newburyport; of John Heard at Ipswich; of Win- throp Sargent at Gloucester; of George Cabot at Beverly; of Richard Derby and Nathaniel Ropes at Salem; of Jeremiah Lee and 'King' Hooper at Mar-
22
THE COLONIAL BACKGROUND
blehead, and the latter's country seat in Danvers, will convince the most skeptical that wealth and good taste came out of the sea, into these little towns; mere villages they would be called to-day. Marblehead in 1744 had ninety vessels in active service, two hundred acres covered with fish-flakes, and an annual catch worth £34,000 sterling. In 1765, with just under five thousand inhabitants it was the sixth town in the thir- teen colonies; behind Newport, but ahead of Salem, Baltimore, and Albany.
Why was maritime Massachusetts so prominent in the American Revolution? Because she was so demo- cratic! answers the bright scholar. Here is another fallacy I would puncture in passing. American democ- racy was not born in the cabin of the Mayflower or in Boston town meeting, but on the farming, fighting frontier of all the colonies, New England included. Seaboard Massachusetts has never known such a thing as a social democracy; and in seaboard Massachusetts, as elsewhere, inequalities of wealth have made political democracy a sham. Few town meetings have been held near tidewater where the voice of shipowner, merchant, or master mariner did not carry more weight than that of fisherman, counting-room clerk, or common seaman. Society in seaboard New England was carefully stratified, and the Revolution brought little change save in personnel. The 'quality' dressed differently from the poor and middle classes, lived in finer houses, expected and received deference, and 'ran' their communities because they controlled the working capital of ships and goods. The only differ- ence from old-world society lay in the facility in passing from one class to another.
Marblehead has always had a reputation for de- mocracy, especially after the departure of 'King'
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MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS
Hooper. But Bentley, apropos the death of Colonel Glover in 1805, remarked, "The leading men had power nowhere else known in N. England." Visiting Andover, the same keen observer noted the young people assembling to dance, "in classes according to their ages, not with any regard to their condition, as in the Seaport Towns." Manchester, a poor fishing village, voted as the Boston merchant who handled its catch dictated. Even in Cape Cod, there was a great gulf between squire and fisherman. "Was Cape Cod democratic?" I asked an aged gentleman from Barn- stable, who had gone west before the Civil War. "Why, yes; it was n't like Boston - everybody spoke to everybody else." - "But was it democratic like Wisconsin?" - "No! by no means!"
The sea is no wet-nurse to democracy. Authority and privilege are her twin foster-children. Instant and unquestioning obedience to the master is the rule of the sea; and your typical sea-captain would make it the rule of the land if he could.
Since the merchants ruled society and politics in Massachusetts almost from the beginning to 1825, when they were forced to divide with the manufac- turers, it were well to be sure we know what a mer- chant was. Down to the Civil War, the word was un- derstood as Dr. Johnson defines it: "one who trafficks to remote countries." A merchant was no mere shop- keeper, or commission dealer. He bought and sold, at home and abroad, on his own account, and handled private adventures' on the side. He owned or char- tered the vessels that carried his goods. Specializa- tion came only within a generation of 1860. The provincial merchants owned not only merchant ships, but fishing craft, whalers and coasters, sent their ves- sels to the other continental colonies, England, the
24
THE COLONIAL BACKGROUND
Mediterranean, the West Indies, and the Spanish main for all sorts of commodities; sold their return ladings at wholesale, and at retail from their own shops; speculated in wild lands, did a private banking business, and underwrote insurance policies. Many of them were wealthy, for the time. Thomas Boylston, the richest man in Provincial Massachusetts, was sup- posed to be worth about $400,000 just before the Revolution; and Colonel Elisha Doane, who main- tained a country estate and a perpetually sandbound coach at Wellfleet on the Cape, was a good second.
These colonial merchants lived well, with a spacious brick mansion in Boston and a country seat at Milton Hill, Cambridge, or as far afield as Harvard and Hop- kinton, where great house parties were given. They were fond of feasts and pageants, of driving out to country inns for a dinner and dance, of trout-fishing, and pleasure cruises to the Maine coast. They car- ried swords, and drew them if not granted proper defer- ence by inferiors. Their wives and daughters wore the latest London fashions, and were painted by Smibert, Blackburn, and Copley. Their sons went to sea on a parental ship, or, if they cared not for business, to Harvard College. Nor was this 'codfish aristocracy' ashamed of the source of all these blessings. The proudest names in the province appear in "Boston Gazette" or "Post-Boy" offering for sale everything from fish-lines to broadcloth. The Honorable Benja- min Pickman placed a half-model of a codfish on every front stair-end in his new Salem mansion.
The backbone of maritime Massachusetts, however, was its middle class; the captains and mates of vessels, the master builders and shipwrights, the ropemakers, sailmakers, and skilled mechanics of many different trades, without whom the merchants were nothing.
25
MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS
Benjamin Franklin was a typical product of this class, the son of an English-born tallow-chandler, and a Folger of Nantucket. As the broad humor of that island puts it, "Ben's keel was laid in Nantucket, but the old lady went to Boston to launch him." His first childish invention was a cob-wharf in the Boston millpond marsh, as a fishing station for minnows; his first imprints were broadside ballads on Blackbeard, and the shipwreck of Captain Worthilake, which he hawked about the crooked streets. In all his varied career the New England salt never worked out of Franklin's blood. One remembers the Gulf-Stream chart, which he persuaded a Nantucket cousin to sketch, in the vain hope of dissuading British ship- masters from bucking that ocean river. His "Mari- time Suggestions" contain some practical hints that were later followed up by shipbuilders. It was this Yankee middle class of the water-front, keen, ambi- tious, inventive, courageous, that produced the great merchants and shipmasters of later generations; that gave maritime Massachusetts its characteristic flavor.
CHAPTER III REVOLUTION AND RECONSTRUCTION 1760-1788
A DOGGEREL tory poet made no bad analysis of the Patriot party in the northern colonies, as a coalition of 'John Presbyter,' 'Will Democrack,' and 'Nathan Smuggle':
John answer'd, Thou art proud, Brittania, mad and rich,
Will d-d her, with his Crowd, And call'd her, 'Tyrant While Nathan his Effusions bray'd And veaw'd She ruin'd all his Trade.
Boston became the headquarters of the American Revolution largely because the policy of George III threatened her maritime interests. "Massachusetts- Bay is the most prejudicial plantation to this king- dom," wrote Sir Josiah Child. Instead of trading only with the mother country, and producing some staple which she could monopolize, Massachusetts would spite the Acts of Trade and Navigation, would "trye all ports," would trade with England's rivals, and drive English ships from colonial commerce.
Of course she had to do all this in order to live and prosper; and every penny won from free trade (as she called it) or smuggling (as the English called it) was spent in England. Until 1760, Englishmen saw the point and let well enough alone; but the ministers of George III believed it their duty to enforce the stat- utes, and make Massachusetts a colony in fact as in name. Not only their policy, but their method of exe-
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MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS
cuting it was objectionable. Loyalty was chilled, and a fighting spirit aroused, by incidents such as this:
On Friday last a Coaster belonging to Scituate was passing one of the Ships of War in this harbour, when they dous'd their mainsail, but it not being quite to the satisfaction of the commanding officer of the Ship, they sent their boat on board and upon the Officer's stepping upon the Sloop's deck he immediately drew a cutlass with which he struck the master of the Coaster on the cheek, which cut a gash near three inches long, after which he damn'd him for not showing more respect to the King's Ship and then cut the halliards of the mainsail and let the sail run down upon deck.1
The American Revolution in eastern Massachu- setts was financed and in part led by wealthy mer- chants like John Hancock, Josiah Quincy, James Bowdoin, Richard Derby, and Elbridge Gerry.2 When the crisis came in 1775, a minority of the merchants, alarmed at mob violence, preferred law and order to liberty and property; but the majority risked the one to secure the other - and obtained both. They may, too, have been moved by the same high ideals which, spread broadcast by the voice and pen of Adams and Otis, Hawley and Warren, set interior Massachusetts ablaze. But their interests as well were at stake. If American trade were regulated by corrupt incom- petents three thousand miles away, Massachusetts might as well retire from the sea.
In consequence, the Revolution in eastern Massa- chusetts, radical in appearance, was conservative in character. The war closed with little change in the social system of provincial days, although the change in personnel was great. Maritime interests were still supreme. The Constitution of 1780 was a lawyers' and merchants' constitution, directed toward some-
1 Boston Gazette and Country Journal, Sept. 25, 1769. 1
2 The G in this name is hard.
28
VIEW OF THE
WTOWN OF BOSTON
WAR .IN THE?
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PAUL REVERE'S ENGRAVING OF BOSTON, 1774
HARBOUR.
WITH SEVERAL SHIPS
ג
REVOLUTION AND RECONSTRUCTION
thing like quarterdeck efficiency in government, and the protection of property against democratic pirates.
1
The maritime history of Massachusetts during the War of Independence would make a book in itself; it has already lent color to many books. We must pass by the marine Lexington in Machias Bay, the state navy fitted out in 1775, the British attacks on Glouces- ter, Portland, and New Bedford. Just a word, how- ever, on privateering. Her success in this legalized piracy was probably the greatest contribution of sea- board Massachusetts to the common cause. Six hun- dred and twenty-six letters of marque were issued to Massachusetts vessels by the Continental Congress, and some thousand more by the General Court. Priva- teers were of little use in naval operations, as the dis- astrous Penobscot expedition proved; but they were of very greatest service in preying on the enemy's commerce, intercepting his communications with America, carrying terror and destruction into the very chops of the Channel, and supplying the patriot army with munitions, stores and clothing at Johnny Bull's expense.
From an economic and social viewpoint, privateer- ing employed the fishermen, and all those who de- pended on shipping; taught daring seamanship, and strengthened our maritime aptitude and tradition. Privateers required speed; and the Massachusetts builders, observing, it is said, the scientifically de- signed vessels of our French allies, did away with high quarterdecks, eased water-lines, and substituted a nearly U-shaped cross-section for the barrel-shaped bottom and unseemly tumble-home of the old-style ships. Commerce continued with the West Indies, France, and Spain in letter-of-marque ships, armed merchantmen with a license to take prizes on the side.
29
MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS
The letter-of-marque ship General Pickering of Salem, Captain Jonathan Haraden, fourteen guns and forty- five men, but heavily laden with sugar, beat the Brit- ish privateer Achilles of three times her size and arma- ment off Bilbao, in one of the most gallant sea-fights of the Revolution. On the back side of Cape Cod, whalemen with swivel-armed boats kept watch on Nantucket and Vineyard Sounds, the sea-lane to the British base in New York. With an impudent daring that astounded the enemy, they swooped down on his vessels when becalmed, or cut them out of Tarpaulin Cove and Holmes Hole at night-time. On Salem, in particular, the Revolution wrought an entire change in commercial spirit. Before the war Salem was mainly a fishing port. Privateering gave her seamen a broader horizon, and her merchants a splendid ambition.
In the earlier years of the war, large profits were made from privateering by every one connected with it. A favorite speculation for merchants was to buy, in advance of his cruise, half a privateersman's share of his forthcoming prizes. But in the last year or two of the war the British tightened their blockade, cap- tured a large part of our fleet, and drove the rest into port. The insurance rate from Beverly to Hayti and back was forty per cent in 1780. The Derbys of Salem are said to have been the only privateering firm to re- tain a favorable balance, when peace was concluded.
But it was a great war while it lasted!
Then came the worst economic depression Massa- chusetts has ever known. The double readjustment from a war to a peace basis, and from a colonial to an independent basis, caused hardship throughout the colonies. It worked havoc with the delicate adjust- ment of fishing, seafaring, and shipbuilding by which Massachusetts was accustomed to gain her living. By
30
REVOLUTION AND RECONSTRUCTION
1786, the exports of Virginia had more than regained their pre-Revolutionary figures. At the same date the exports of Massachusetts were only one-fourth of what they had been twelve years earlier.
The fisheries had to be reconstructed from the be- ginning. Owing to the diplomacy of John Adams, Massachusetts codfishermen retained access to their old grounds; but they lacked vessels, gear, and capital. It is generally assumed that our fishing fleet had been transformed into privateers, and needed only recon- version to go out and catch cod. But the fishing schooner of that period was a slow, unwieldy craft, of little use in privateering. Such of them as had been converted, for the most part were captured; the rest, high and dry for seven years, needed expensive repairs. The whaling fleet of Nantucket and Dartmouth 1 had been wiped out. Only four or five remained out of two hundred sail; the rest had been lost, burned, or cap- tured.
Independence deprived the Massachusetts cod- fisheries of their greatest market, the British West Indies; and the whale-fisheries of their only foreign market, England. Johnny Bull naturally slammed his colonial doors in Jonathan's face; would receive his ships on no terms, nor even his salt provisions and cod- fish in British vessels. He intended to build up his own fisheries and lumber trade. France and Spain excluded recent allies from their colonial preserves. The Dutch, Danish, and Swedish islands remained; not important markets, but good centers for smuggling. But until the new ropes were learned, the returns to New Eng- land fishermen were meager indeed. After four years of peace, about four-fifths of the Grand Banks fleet
1 Dartmouth until 1787 included New Bedford, Fairhaven, and Westport.
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MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS
was in commission; but the men were not earning enough to see their families through the winter. By 1789, only one-third of the whaling tonnage of 1773 had been restored.1
The coasting trade was under a similar handicap, for Massachusetts had been accustomed to pay for her im- ports of tobacco and Southern produce largely with West India goods. Almost the only thing that could be done was to send small sloops and fishing vessels to peddle out local produce along the shores of Ches- apeake Bay, Albemarle Sound, Pamlico Sound, and Cape Fear River, for corn, tobacco, and naval stores. For example, three fishing schooners cleared from Beverly for Maryland and North Carolina during the first two weeks of December, 1787. The Swallow, forty- five tons, takes bricks, butter, fish, rum, potatoes, and "6 Tons of English Hay here produced." The Wood- bridge, Seward Lee master, takes "5 hhd. salt, 12 q. dry fish, 5 hhd. molasses, 4 bbl. Mackerell, 6 doz. buckets, 9 Setts wooden measures, 3 half-pecks, II buckets with covers, 6 hhd. & 6 bbl. N.E. Rum, 8 boxes chocolate, 3 doz. common cheeses, 2 cases Earthen ware, I doz. axes, 36 bbl. potatoes, I doz. setts Sugar Boxes"; and "all the above are the Growth and Manufacture of this state." With such typical cargoes of "Yankee notions," pathetic in their homely variety, the smaller seaports of Massachusetts were wooing the prosperity which had already returned to the South.
And what of the slave trade? A dark subject, indeed; one which I have endeavored in vain to illuminate. The "Guinea trade" had never been an important line of commerce in Massachusetts. It was forbidden, under heavy penalties, by an act of the General Court
1 See table in Appendix.
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REVOLUTION AND RECONSTRUCTION
in 1788. Yet it did not entirely cease. Felt, in his "Annals of Salem," prints the instructions of an owner to a slaver which left that port in 1785. Dr. Bentley, who had a keen scent for this nefarious traffic, notes in his diary the names of at least eight Salem shipmasters who engaged in it, at one time or another, between 1788 and 1802. A mutiny in the middle passage dis- posed of one; another was killed by a negro in revenge; one, "of a most worthy family," died at Havana, an- other cut his own throat. Only one seems to have been arrested, and he was released for lack of evidence; al- though an extant log of one of his voyages, from Salem to the Guinea coast and the West Indies, bears witness to his guilt. Salem had a regular trade with the West African coast, rum and fish for gold dust, palm oil, and ivory; and it would be surprising if an occasional ship- master did not yield to the temptation to load 'black ivory' as well.
The statistics of slave imports at Charleston, be- tween 1804 and 1808, disclosed by Senator Smith, of South Carolina, in the latter year, state that seventy of the entering vessels belonged to Great Britain, sixty- one to Charleston itself, fifty-nine to Rhode Island, only one to Boston, and none to any other Massachu- setts port. But this does not include the West-Indian slave trade; and an interesting insurance policy, dated June 13, 1803, suggests how it could be carried on with- out breaking either the laws of Massachusetts or of the United States. One of the most eminent and fa- mous firms of China merchants, acting as agents for one Robert Cuming, of St. Croix (Danish West Indies), insures for $33,000 at ten per cent, his ship Hope and cargo from the coast of Africa to Havana, under Danish colors. "The assurers are liable for loss by insurrection, but not by natural mortality. Each slave is valued at
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MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS
two hundred dollars." This policy is underwritten by seven of the most respectable Boston merchants, and negotiated by an eighth.
William Lloyd Garrison exposed a domestic slave- trader of Newburyport in 1829, one who took slaves as freight from Baltimore to New Orleans. Even later the New Bedford whaling masters occasionally engaged in the African trade. Only a thorough examination of our court records, and of the archives of such foreign seaports as Havana, would reveal a measure of the full truth. Yet I believe the statement warranted that the slave trade, as prosecuted from Massachusetts or by Massachusetts capital after the Revolution, was occa- sional and furtive, rather than a recognized under- ground traffic. Certainly it played no prominent part in the commercial prosperity of the community; and the assertion, often disproved but as often repeated, that Massachusetts was "the nursing mother of the horrors of the middle passage," is without any founda- tion in fact.
Shipbuilding came to a standstill shortly after the Revolution. With no British market for our bottoms, and British colonial ports closed to the American flag; with French, Austrians, Germans, Dutch, and Swedes competing for our carrying trade, and no gov- ernment capable of granting protection; the shipping supremacy of Massachusetts seemed forever ended. According to an official report of the French consul at Boston, about one hundred and twenty-five vessels had been launched annually in Massachusetts be- fore the war. In 1784, only forty-five vessels left the ways; and twelve of them, built for the French East- India service, were so poorly constructed that no more outside orders came. Between 1785 and 1787, only fifteen to twenty were built annually. A goodly fleet of
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REVOLUTION AND RECONSTRUCTION
merchantmen, and several new privateers like the Astrea and Grand Turk, constructed during the last year or two of the war, were on hand; but there was little employment for them. Instead of sending her fleet to all Europe, as optimists predicted, Massachu- setts found her own harbors thronged with foreign flags, and her wharves heaped high with foreign goods.
Between May and December, 1783, twenty-eight French vessels, and almost the same number of English merchantmen, brought cargoes, worth almost half a million dollars, into Boston Harbor alone. Consisting largely of luxuries, they were nevertheless snapped up (on credit, of course) by the merchants of this war- stricken town of ten thousand inhabitants. Peace brought a riot of luxury such as Massachusetts never saw again until 1919. The war debt was enormous, the need of production imperative; but privateering, spec- ulation, and the continental currency had so under- mined Yankee thrift and energy that many persons thought the character of the race had completely changed. Travelers commented on the vulgar display of the profiteers, and the reckless spending of farmers and mechanics. We hear of artisans buying silk stockings, and 'jeunes paysannes' coming into Bos- ton market, wearing 'chapeaux Montgolfiers.'
Worst of all, civil conflict was impending. For some years before the Revolution, central and western Massachusetts had been increasing rapidly in popula- tion, and acquiring class consciousness. The farmer no longer blessed the merchant, but cursed him as an exploiter. All classes and sections had allied to resist British imperialism; but the war brought about much friction. Mutual accusations of profiteering and slack- ing were frequent. Berkshire County refused obe- dience to the Boston government until 1780; and few
35
1193875
MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS
debts or taxes were paid in western Massachusetts for seven years.
By 1783 the farmers had acquired a higher standard of living, and a heavy burden of debts. European creditors began to press Boston merchants; who turned to their country storekeeper debtors, who began to distrain on the farmers, who then called upon govern- ment to establish a moratorium for debts, and to issue cheap money. But maritime Massachusetts controlled the government, by the simple device of apportioning the state senate according to taxable wealth. Every effort of the representatives to relieve the farmers died in the upper house.
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