Conceived in Liberty (48 page)

Almost immediately, the debtors turned to the government for aid and special privilege. Obediently, the Massachusetts General Court passed, in October 1640, the first of a series of debtors-relief legislation that was to plague America in every subsequent crisis and depression. A minimum-appraisal law compelled the appraisal of insolvent debtors’ property at an artificially inflated price and a legal-tender provision compelled creditors
to accept all future payments of debts in an arbitrarily inflated and fixed rate in corn, cattle, or fish. Additional privileges to debtors were passed in 1642 and 1644; in the latter, for instance, a law was passed permitting a debtor to escape foreclosure by simply leaving the colony. Most drastic was a law passed by the upper chamber of magistrates, but defeated by the deputies, which would have gone to the amazing length of having the Massachusetts government assume all private debts that could not be paid!

The fact that this general debt-assumption bill was passed by the council of magistrates, the organ par excellence of the ruling oligarchy, and rejected by the substantially more democratic chamber of deputies, indicates the need for drastic revision of the common historical stereotype that debtors are
ipso facto
the poor. For here we find the debtors’ interest represented especially by the ruling oligarchy and not by the more democratic body.

Further debtors-relief legislation—again at the behest of merchants—was passed in 1646, compelling creditors to accept barter payments for money debts, and in 1650, compelling outright moratoriums on debt payment.

With fur production declining badly, the Massachusetts government turned desperately to artificial attempts to create industry by state action. The motives were a blend of the mercantilist error of attempting self-sufficiency and cuts in imports and the shrewd granting of privileges to favorite businessmen.

Hence, the colony decided to turn to the subsidization of iron manufactures. Early iron mines in America were small and located in coastal swamps (“bog iron”), and the primary manufactured or wrought iron was produced cheaply in local “bloomeries” at an open hearth. The Massachusetts government, however, wanted to force the use of the more imposing— and far more expensive—indirect process of wrought-iron manufacture, a process that required the erection of a blast furnace and a forge. Such an operation required a far larger plant and much more skilled labor.

In 1641, John Winthrop, Jr. found bog-iron ore at Braintree. He decided to embark on the ambitious construction of a furnace and forge—the first in the colonies. The Massachusetts General Court had offered any discoverer of an iron mine the right to work it for twenty-one years; yet it insisted that within ten years an iron furnace and forge be erected at each bog mine—thus repressing the cheaper open-hearth process. The court also insisted that the Winthrop Company—soon organized as the Company of Undertakers for an Iron Works in New England, with English capital— transport iron to churches, and keep a minimum of its production at home rather than export the iron. In 1645 the company was granted a twenty-one year monopoly of all iron manufacturing in Massachusetts as well as subsidies of timberland, provided that within a few years the company would supply the colonists with iron at a price of no more than twenty pounds a ton.

However, even with these privileges, plus large grants of timberland that Winthrop managed to wangle from the towns of Boston and Dorchester, the venture at Braintree was too expensive and failed almost immediately. Ousting Winthrop, the company moved its operation northward to Lynn, where it managed to build a furnace and forge and to produce some quantities of bar iron. Here again, economics caught up with the venture, and costs rose faster than revenues. In addition, the company owners wanted to sell the iron for cash but the Massachusetts court insisted that the company accept barter for its iron, thus “keeping the iron in the colony”; otherwise, the court argued, the iron would redound to the benefit of foreign buyers and the cash profits would be siphoned off to the owners in England. The wages paid at the ironworks were apparently not enough of a benefit for the court. In its unsuccessful petition to the General Court, the company pointed to the benefits to the colony of its payment of wages and purchase of supplies, and argued that it had a right to export as it chose and to obtain cash in return. What in the world would it do with crops paid in barter? With this sort of harassment added to its other troubles, the company finally went bankrupt in 1653, and the ironworks itself closed down less than a decade later.

This was not the last of younger Winthrop’s ventures into subsidized, uneconomic, and failing enterprises. In 1655 he discovered a bog-iron deposit at Stony River in New Haven Colony. The New Haven authorities, finding their colony increasingly a sleepy backwater rather than the expected commercial success, eagerly welcomed the chance to subsidize an ironworks. Raising the capital locally to avoid colonial harassment from foreign owners, Winthrop was granted a host of special privileges by colony and town governments including land grants, payment of all costs of building the furnace, a dam on the river, and the transport of fuel. One of the owners was the deputy governor of New Haven, Stephen Goodyear, who was thus able to use the power of the government to grant himself substantial privileges. Yet this ironworks quickly began to lose money and little iron was ever produced at Stony River. The works was abandoned altogether in the 1660s.

The sorry record of forced iron production was matched by that of compulsion in textiles. The New England governments, heedless of the fact that the growth of hemp was largely uneconomic, decided that not enough hemp was being grown by private farmers and that something had to be done about it. Connecticut went to the length of compelling every family to plant a minimum of hemp or flax, but soon had to abandon the attempt. Massachusetts decided, in 1641, to grant a subsidy of twenty-five percent for all linens, cottons, and woolens spun or woven in the colony. It also decreed that all servants and children must spend
all
their leisure time on hemp and flax. So speedily did all this spur the growth of hemp that only one year later, Massachusetts rescinded its subsidy and felt it had to legislate against the “hoarding” of stocks of hemp.

Massachusetts also felt that not enough warmer woolen clothes were being produced at home. In 1645 it ordered the production of more sheep, and in 1654 prohibited all further exports of sheep. Finally, in 1656 Massachusetts brought its fullest coercive powers into play: all idle hands, especially those of “women, girls, and boys,” were ordered to spin thread. The selectmen of each town were to appoint from each family at least one “spinner” and each spinner was ordered to spin linen, wool, or cotton, at least half the year, at a rate of three pounds of thread per week. For every pound short of the decree, the family responsible was to pay a fine of twelve pence to the state. Still, all these stringent mercantilist attempts to coerce self-sufficiency were a failure; economic law prevailed once more over statute law. By 1660 the attempts to found a textile industry in Massachusetts were abandoned. From then on, rural western Massachusetts made its clothes at home (“homespun” household manufacturers), while the urban citizens were content to import their clothing from England.

John Winthrop, Jr. also tried to found a saltworks in Massachusetts, again subsidized by a government eager to promote self-sufficiency in salt. These subsidies continued intermittently over a twenty-year period. In the 1630s free wood for fuel was donated to Winthrop’s salthouse; in the 1640s Massachusetts agreed to buy 100 tons of salt from Winthrop; in the mid-16505 the General Court granted him a twenty-one-year patent. But Winthrop never succeeded in producing any salt.

Attempts of the government to subsidize the beginning of fisheries also proved fruitless. During the 1630s, fish were either imported or came from Englishmen fishing off Newfoundland and the Maine coast. But the civil war of the 1640s crippled the English fishing fleet. New England fishermen, without need of government coercion, expanded their activities to fill the gap. There sprang up along the New England coast communities of fishermen-farmers, who fished and farmed in alternate seasons. These settlements, in such towns as Marblehead, Nantucket, and the Isles of Shoals, were conspicuously
non
-Puritan. In 1644, for example,
not one
resident of Marblehead qualified as a freeman; in short, not one was a church member. In 1647, in fact, so solicitous was the General Court of the morals of the Isles of Shoals that no women were allowed to live in the town.

The growth of the fisheries greatly expanded the opportunities for trade, and merchants came in to market the catch and equip the cargoes. Indeed, the Navigation Act of 1651, extending to fish the ban against foreign vessels carrying colonial products, was put through by the London merchants to seize the lucrative carrying trade from Dutch and French vessels. The New England merchants purchased the catch from the fishermen and shipped it to London importers. These importers were the major entrepreneurs of the trade; they owned, planned, and financed the shipment from the beginning. Similarly, London exporters of manufactured goods to New England financed the retained ownership of the shipments until sold in the colony. So important were close ties to London, that those New England merchants who had family or friendship connections with London
merchants were the ones who flourished in the trade. New England merchants themselves financed fish exports to the Southern colonies.

By 1660 New England was the fish leader of the colonies, and fish production was flourishing. From the fisheries, the newly burgeoning body of Massachusetts merchants expanded the carrying trade to many other products. The merchants shipped New England agricultural products, including horses, cattle, and timber, abroad. They imported wine from Spain and east Atlantic islands, and sugar from the West Indies. They carried English manufactured goods to Virginia and North Carolina, buying in turn the tobacco of the South and exporting it. A particular feature of New England shipping was the “triangular trade”: exporting timber and agricultural products to the Canaries, transporting slaves from there to the West Indies, and then importing sugar from those islands.

During the 1640s and 1650s, the impact of the English civil war on New England trade was a shifting one. In 1645 the merchants drove a free-trade bill through the Massachusetts General Court, allowing trade with ships of all countries. This was accomplished over the protests of many of the leading magistrates of the colony, who were interested more in the Puritan cause than in freedom of trade. Later, however, the Navigation Acts forced Massachusetts to prohibit trade with France and Holland. And over merchants’ protests, Massachusetts obeyed Parliament by outlawing trade with those colonies that remained royalist: specifically, Virginia and the West Indies. Returning the favor, Parliament in 1644 exempted New England trade from all English import and export duties.

One of the most important economic consequences of the Puritan Revolution for New England was its impact upon the timber industry. The expansion of New England shipping had given rise to a flourishing shipbuilding industry. It had also spurred the growth of one of the most important New England industries: timber, especially
mast trees
for ships, which flourished particularly on the Piscataqua, a region of Massachusetts now in New Hampshire. But the biggest single impetus to the growth of the mast tree industry was not so much the natural growth of shipbuilding as the huge war contracts suddenly begun in 1655. In that year, Oliver Cromwell launched the expedition that captured Jamaica from Spain. Fearful that the Baltic trade—the largest source of timber and mast trees for England—would be cut off by the war, Cromwell gave orders for the stockpiling of timber in New England.

But more than excessive caution lay at the root of this stockpiling program; the appropriation of special privilege was even more in evidence. For, during the Commonwealth era, many Puritan merchants of New England returned home to England and rose to leading positions in the government. Several were even involved with the awarding of contracts for the Jamaica expedition. These merchants, still deeply connected with New England trade, took care to grant themselves and their associates enormous and lucrative timber contracts. Thus, the head of the Jamaica
expedition was Maj. Gen. Robert Sedgwick, one of New England’s biggest merchants. The commissioner of the English navy was Edward Hopkins, another leading Massachusetts merchant. Commissioner of trade was Rear Admiral Nehemiah Bourne, a leading Massachusetts shipwright. Another commissioner of the navy was the Massachusetts shipwright Francis Willoughby. And treasurer of the navy and direct awarder of the naval contracts was Richard Hutchinson, London merchant and brother-in-law of the martyred Anne.

By 1660 all the general patterns of New England trade and production were set for more than the next hundred years. These included not only the trade and production outlined above, but also the emergence of Boston as the overwhelmingly dominant trading center, for Massachusetts and for all of New England. The produce—of agriculture, fish, and forest—from the rest of New England was sent to Boston, whence it was shipped abroad. The other towns became secondary and subsidiary centers, feeding the main metropolis from the produce gathered from their outlying areas. Similarly, almost all imports into New England came to Boston; from here they were shipped to the rest of the colony. Of the 20,000 residents of Massachusetts, fully 3,000 lived in Boston. To a lesser extent Charlestown and Salem were also leading trade centers. In these three towns, being a merchant was a full-time occupation, whereas in the smaller urban areas trade was a part-time calling.

As early as the mid-1640s, the expanding and influential merchants tended to be restive about the theocracy and its persecution of heresy. Trade and fanatical intolerance do not mix well. The trader tends to want peace, wider markets, and freedom of movement. Anything else, any blocking of these channels, is bad for business, bad for trade. In Massachusetts, the merchants saw that persecution blocked immigration—therefore, the expansion of trade—and injured Massachusetts’ reputation in England regarding credit and connections. In 1645, it was a group of eminent merchants, headed by Sedgwick, Bourne, and Emmanuel Downing, who led a petition for repeal of the virtual ban against strangers unacceptable to the government, and against the expulsion of the Baptists. But the church elders thundered against leniency and prevailed.