From Dependency to Independence: Economic Revolution in Colonial New England 9781501700279

Table of contents :
Contents
Illustrations and Maps
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Problem of Economic Development in Colonial New England
Part I. Political Economy, Culture, and Development in the Seventeenth Century
Chapter 1. "A Second England": English Background and Plans for Settlement
Chapter 2. Regulation in the Wilderness
Chapter 3. The Promotional State
Chapter 4. Emulation of Empire
Chapter 5. Producers and Consumers
Part II. Economy and Ideology in Provincial New England
Chapter 6. The Idea of Money in Seventeenth-Century England and America
Chapter 7. Paper Money and Public Policy, 1690-1714
Chapter 8. "A Poor Dependent State": The Argument for Retrenchment
Chapter 9. The Virtues of the Internal Economy
Chapter 10. The Political Culture of Paper Money
Chapter 11. From the Land Bank to the Currency Act
Part III. The Political Economy of Revolution
Chapter 12. Development at Mid-Century
Chapter 13. The Imperial Crisis
Chapter 14. The Consequences of Independence
Epilogue: The Meaning of Development in New England
Index

Citation preview

F R O M DEPEN D E N C Y T O I N D E PE N D E N CE

FROM DEPENDENCY TO INDEPENDENCE Economic Revolution in Colonial New England

MARGARET ELLEN NEWELL

C OR N E LL U N I V E R S I TY

ITHACA AND LONDON

PRE S S

Copyright © 1998 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 1998 by Cornell University Press First printing, Cornell Paperbacks, 2015

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Newell, Margaret Ellen, 1962-

From dependency to independence: economic revolution in colonial New England

/

Margaret Ellen Newell.

p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 978-0-8014-3405-1 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-5017-0013-2 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. New England-Economic conditions.

2. New England-History­

Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775. I. Title. HC107.AllN46 1997 97-50566

330.974'09'032-dc21

Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible sup­ pliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-Vex: inks and acid­ free papers that are also either recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at www.comellpress.cornell.edu. Cloth printing

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Paperback printing

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

CONTENT S

Illustrations and Maps Acknowledgments

/

/ vii ix

Introduction: The Problem of Economic Development in Colonial New England Part 1. Political Economy, Culture, and Development in the Seventeenth Century Chapter 1.

/

Regulation in the Wilderness

Chapter 3.

The Promotional State

Chapter

4.

Part II.

13

" A Second England": English Ba ckground and Plans for Settlement / 17

Chapter 2.

Chapter 5.

Emulation of Empire

/

/

Producers and Consumers

/

36

51 72

/

84

/

Economy and Ideology in Provincial New England

Chapter 6.

107

The Idea of Money in Seventeenth-Century England and America

/

111

Chapter 7.

Paper Money and Public Policy, 16'»-1714

Chapter 8.

"A Poor Dependent State": The A rgument for Retrenchment

Chapter 9.

/

/

The Virtues of the Internal Econom y

/

127

143

/

156

/

Chapter 10.

The Political Culture of Paper Money

Chapter 11.

From the Land Bank to the Currency Act

181

/

214

t

vi

Contents

Part III.

/

The Political Economy of Revolution

I

Chapter 12.

Development at Mid-Century

Chapter 13.

The Imperial Crisis

Chapter 14.

The Consequences of Independence

I

237

241

266

I

299

Epilogue: The Meaning of Development in New England Index

I

321

I

317

I LL U S T R A T I O N S

AND

MA P S

ILLUSTRATIONS

Governor John Wmthrop / 30 A colonial sawmill / 88

New England's first paper money / 128

John Colman / 136

The title page of John WlSe'S A

Country /

Word of Comfort to a Melancholy

159

Bills of New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Connecticut / 185 Sea-Captains Carousing in Surinam, 1758 / 188

Peter Faneuil / 201 Jonathan and Faith Robinson Trumbull; Trumbull's general store / 204

Picture on a receipt from Smith & Parker, Boston importers, 1802 / 243 A high chest of drawers, Connecticut, 1769 / 250

A late eighteenth-century trading card for New England-made

coaches / 252 A remnant of a blast furnace at the Salisbury Furnace, Connecticut / 255 A label for boxes of spermaceti candles, 1760s / 258

Newspaper advertisements for New England-made goods / 292

A Boston broadside, 1769 / 295

MAPS

New England, c. 1670 / 16 Boston, 1733

/

176

New England, c. 1770 / 268 Rhode Island, 1795 / 318

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

lowe an enormous debt to the many individuals and institutions whose support enabled me to write this book, and I am pleased to have the oppor­ tunity to thank them. I had to travel sou th to discover the fascination of New England; it was in classes and conversations with Stephen Innes at the University of Virginia that I first became acquainted wi th the Puritans and with many of the questions I have tried to grapple wi th here. Dorothy Ross and Peter Onuf also provided scholarly guidance and useful criticism of the dissertation on which this b ook is based. I benefited as well from the amaz­ ing generosity of o ther scholars in the field of early America, who took the time to discuss their work wi th me and to read and comment on parts of the b ook or papers that became the basis of chapters, includ ing Joyce Appleby, John Brooke, Drew Cayton, Robert Dalzell, Stephen Foster, Christine Heyr­ man, Karen Kupperman, Cathy Matson, Ed Perkins, Alan Taylor, Daniel Vickers, and Gordon Wood. A careful reading-and trenchant comments­ from John McCusker saved me from embarrassing errors. Thorough reports from two anonymous readers at Cornell University Press gave me excellent ideas for revisions. Here in Columbus, participants in the Ohio Seminar for Early American History and Culture, especially Carla Pestana, Randy Roth, Saul Cornell, and Les Benedict, suggested improvements. Mitch Golden heroically read each draft of the manuscript in progress, and Geoff Plank read and proofed the final version. Lisa Florman's sharp eye helped me make some necessary cuts, and Trisha Craig and Tom Klubock solved some knotty problems with the Introduction. Brad Campbell offered shrewd advice in the homestretch. My research assistant, Kei th McCanless, helped wi th the tedious task of

x

Acknowledgments

checking footnotes, and Margaret Popovich drew the two new maps. Thanks are also due to my wonderful colleagues in History at Ohio State, especially Ken Andrien, Michael Berkowitz, Steve Conn: Mark Grimsley, Birgitte Soland, and Katie Swett. Many institutions have supported my research and writing, beginning with the Thomas Jefferson Foundation and the University of Virginia. The American Historical Association, the Brown University History Department's John Lax Fund, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Virginia Society of the Cincinnati provided crucial financial assis­ tance. In addition, fellowships from the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, the Ameri­ can Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts, and the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston enabled me not only to use their fine collections but also to participate in the rich intellectual life that each institution fosters. Although the staffs at all these libraries were uniformly helpful, Norman Fiering of the John Carter Brown Library and Conrad Wright and Peter Drummey of the Massachussetts Historical Society deserve special thanks; they have supported this project since I was a very green graduate student, and their advice and encouragement have meant a great deal. Many thanks also to the chair of the History Department at Ohio State, Michael Hogan, and to the College of Humanities for its generous program of travel grants and research leave. Aside from these institutional debts, I am pleased to acknowledge many personal debts. H. D. and Martha Maxwell, Laura Maxwell, Tracy Vietze, Jim and Gilda Newell, Sam and Judy Merra, and Ed and Judy Perkins all housed me on various research trips. Susan Danforth at the John Carter Brown Library, Chris Steele, Kate Viens, and Anne Bentley of the Massachu­ setts Historical Society, and Daniel Truckey and Steve Rice at the Connecti­ cut Historical Society helped me select and process the illustrations. Peter Agree, my editor at Cornell, offered extraordinary support throughout; his patience and confidence helped turn a difficult process into a pleasure. Finally, I offer special tribute to my family, to whom this book is dedi­ cated. My parents, Jim and Peg, instilled a love of history and learning in all of their children; their financial support made my education possible, and their love and interest kept my spirits up at every stage. My brothers, Jim, John, and Pete, fielded countless late-night phone calls about late papers and writer's block, read my rough drafts, and were always my most enthu­ siastic audience.

MARGARET ELLEN NEWELL

Columbus, Ohio

FR O M D E P E N D E NCY T O I N D E P E N D E NC E

IN TRODU CT ION

THE PROBLEM OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT IN COLONIAL NEW ENGLAND

For much of this century the United States has represented the global arche­ type of successful economic development. America's prosperity appears all the more striking in comparison with the struggles of so-called developing nations to diversify their economies, industrialize, and secure greater eco­ nomic autonomy. The challenges that countries such as India, Nigeria, and Brazil face in reducing their neocolonial dependence on shifting First World markets and meeting domestic demand for consumer goods without incur­ ring crippling trade deficits or hyperinflation seem foreign to America's ex­ perience. In much of the Third World, politicians and entrepreneurs face the difficult task of establishing new industries in the context of a competitive global economy in which more developed nations have a head start. They know that foreign investment capital often comes at a high price-the sacri­ fice of some local sovereignty. And even those nations that most eagerly em­ brace the market must cope with the mobility, diversity, and other challenges to traditional social order and ethics that often accompany capi­ talism. In advising such client nations, the World Bank and other interna­ tional aid organizations treat America's trajectory as the normative path to membership in the First World. Yet for nearly two centuries mainland British America was an underde­ veloped, dependent outpost of one of the most powerful commercial em­ pires in Europe. England had a head start on commercial and industrial development, and it made the most of this advantage in its relationship with the colonies-a relationship predicated on colonial economic and polit­ ical dependence. In the seventeenth century, most English men and women viewed the colonies (when they thought of them at all) as objects of ex-

2

Introduction

ploitation. America was seen as a staging ground for economic experiments; a source of cheap land, raw materials, and staple crops, not to mention pa­ tronage positions; and an outlet for such "surplus" members of the popu­ lace as younger sons, underemployed workers, religious dissidents, and criminals. By the eighteenth century, the North American colonies had as­ sumed prominence in a global British mercantile system that cast the south­ ern colonies in the role of staple producers, the northern settlements in the role of provisioner to more valuable but less self-sufficient colonies in New­ foundland and the Caribbean, and both regions as markets for British man­ ufactures. Many economic actors in the colonies prospered from these arrangements. Still, even this more reciprocal vision of colonial­ metropolitan relations presumed the subordination of colonial interests to the superior claims of the mother country. English regulatory policy be­ tween 1660 and 1774 explicitly aimed to limit colonial economic develop­ ment in order to secure for the metropolis a monopoly of key industries, trades, and financial services. Aside from this external imperial framework, English colonial societies grappled with other pressures familiar to modem developing societies. Even had the metropolis not attempted to restrict colonial manufacturing, would-be entrepreneurs faced almost insuperable obstacles, including low population density and correspondingly high prices for labor, lack of capi­ tal, lack of infrastructure, and lack of managerial know-how. The high mate­ rial expectations of settlers who emigrated from the industrializing society of seventeenth-century England to a colonial periphery created another set of problems familiar to the Third World today. Consumer demand could be satisfied only by imports; yet as New England in particular discovered, the need to pay for foreign goods strained a nascent economy's ability to pro­ duce sufficient output for exchange. Moreover, many colonists were com­ mitted to social and religious ideologies that led them to view some of the consequences of economic change�uch as class and geographic mobility, competition, and the open pursuit of self-interest-as subversive of moral, political, and social order. Embedded as we are in capitalism's twentieth­ century incarnation, we have difficulty remembering that most people in the early modem world were not automatically hardworking, rational, util­ ity maximizers.! Certainly the majority of Anglo-American religious, intel­ lectual, and political leaders before 1750 did not think so; in fact, most thought the reverse was true. Thinking about colonial America as an underdeveloped nation restores an appropriate sense of contingency to the story of its postindependence

1. Joyce Appleby makes this point in several works. See her Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century Englllnd (Princeton, 1978), 13; and "Value and Society," in Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole, eds., Colonial British America (Baltimore, 1984).

Introduction

3

economic success, especially in respect to New England. There was nothing inevitable about the course of the region's economic development. During the first decades of settlement, the English inhabitants of New England struggled to construct a viable economy. They depended on imports from England and Europe to supply their most basic necessities and on Indian trade and the specie carried by new arrivals to pay for their foreign ex­ change. Once the stream of immigration slowed around 1640, the region plunged into economic depression. New England lacked a readily mar­ ketable export crop to fill the role that sugar and tobacco played in the Chesapeake and Barbados; and its agricultural lands were inferior to those of the middle colonies. As a result, the four New England plantations had little to recommend them in the eyes of Restoration-era imperial planners. Indeed, William Petty suggested in 1691 that New England settlers be re­ moved from their "unprofitable" plantations and relocated to more promis­ ing colonies in the Caribbean or Ireland.2 By the late seventeenth century, however, New Englanders had discov­ ered that a comparative advantage might be found in trade. The colonists willingly entered the market as producers to secure the consumer items they needed and wanted. They shipped, processed, and marketed the sta­ ples of their fellow North American and Caribbean colonists, supplied them with provisions, and participated in a complex transatlantic exchange net­ work, becoming simultaneously both key customers and competitors of English merchants and producers. Ironically, since English policy focused on monopolizing the trade in plantation products such as tobacco and sugar, imperial economic regulation during this period largely helped rather than hindered the activities of New Englanders. They could trade most of the goods they produced-fish, timber, farm produ�rectly with customers in the West Indies and Europe free from onerous duties or prohibitions, even as English restrictions on foreign shipping helped New England captains enter the colonial carrying trade. Despite the pressure of rapid endogenous population growth and the (apparent) trade deficits and currency shortages that characterized this import-export economy, it deliv­ ered a high material standard of living to most inhabitants by English stan­ dards, periodic downturns in the eighteenth century notwithstanding. Per capita wealth in New England lagged behind the levels achieved in the Chesapeake and the Caribbean, but the distribution of wealth was far more equitable than in those slavery-based economies. Although participation in the Atlantic trade powered much of this trans­ formation, well before the Revolution New England merchants were ex­ ploiting a regional internal market as well. Enhanced distribution networks

2. William Petty. Political Arithmetic (London, 1691), 75-84, 94; Charles M Andrews, The Colonial Period ofAmerican History, 4 vols. (1934-38; New Haven, 1964), 4:338-39.

Introduction

4

of peddlers and storekeepers carried an ever-widening range of consumer goods farther into the countryside and tied producers to customers at home and abroad, particularly in the three decades before 1776. Under pressure from population increases and shrinking fanns, individuals, towns, and even entire regions specialized in certain agricultural commodities. These changes augmented productivity but forced the inhabitants to rely on re­ gional networks of exchange to. supply a diverse array of necessities. More­ over, provincial New England's domestic economy consisted of much more than the exchange of agricultural commodities and resources for foreign fin­ ished goods. Along with consumer products, New England imported far more capital goods-the tools of manufacturing-from Europe than did the rest of British America. Following patterns set in England a century earlier, a wide range of processing industries, household manufactures, and even a few large-scale manufacturing projects emerged before

1770 to supply local

and other colonial markets. Overseeing and in some cases facilitating these various activities were New England's town and provincial governments. Small and resource-poor, local political institutions still tried to create an environment conducive to economic activity on several fronts. Tax incentives, land grants, and monop­ olies aided petty industry; the construction of roads and bridges enabled farmers to transport their goods longer distances; inspection services bene­ fited exporting merchants. Perhaps the most ambitious policy initiative took place in the realm of currency: beginning with Massachusetts in 1690, the New England colonies embarked on a six-decade experiment with fiat money, public loans, and even a short-lived private bank, all of which pumped enormous sums of cash and credit into the domestic economy. T he inhabitants pursued these integrated strategies so effectively that by 1750 lobbyists for British industries, merchants, and the bureaucrats at the Board of Trade who oversaw colonial administration openly expressed the fear that the direction and intensity of New England's economic develop­ ment put the region on a collision course with imperial interests. "So far from being a present Advantage to Britain," concluded one writer, "[New England] is already the Rival and Supplantress of her Mother." Unless En­ gland intervened, "the Independency of New England ... must be the Con­ sequence: a fatal Consequence to this Kingdom!" 3 Parliament took action to ensure that the metropolis retained the benefits of empire. Between 1730 and

1751, scattered legislation restricted certain American industries-iron­

and hatmaking-and radically curtailed the New England colonies' ability to issue currency. Beginning in

1763, a new round of imperial regulations

3. Anonymous, A Comporison between the British Sugar Colonies and New England (London, 1732), 8-9, 7, 3-4.

Introduction

5

and tax levies affected New England's European and coastal trade in un­ precedented and, in the colonists' eyes, damaging ways. The dissonance between the New England economy in 1640 and what it became over the succeeding two centuries makes the region a particularly interesting case study in economic development. Accounts of colonial eco­ nomic change too often portray the mere "growth" of a system that had been established by the 1650s. "Development," with its associations of in­ creased productivity, intensive improvement of land and resources, physical expansion, and diversification into manufactures and financial services, more accurately captures the material changes that New Englanders wrought between 1660 and 1770.4 The developmental patterns that emerged during the colonial period surely help explain why New England served as a staging ground for the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century. T hey also point to a possible link between economic issues and the other most significant revolution in American history: the war for political inde­ pendence in 1776. How and why did this transformation occur? One reason for New England's unique trajectory of development was the specific physical environment the New England settlers encountered, which closed off some options, opened others, and forced the inhabitants to adopt innovative solutions to the problem presented by the paucity of obvious ex­ ports. But the colonists' material circumstances were only one factor in this equation. We take for granted the fact that Third World nations' political, educational, and legal institutions, as well as popular attitudes toward pro­ duction and consumption, affect their economic performance-sometimes even more profoundly than the presence or absence of natural resources. Development consists of more than a physical process; it is also, in Thomas Doenflinger's words, "a cultural expression and a social process, a distinc­ tive manifestation of the values of a people."s The emergence of market­ oriented behavior and institutions cannot be assumed; both must be treated as contingencies to be explained. Capitalism is as much a cultural, political, and ideological system as it is an economic one, and as such it is the product of particular historical forces. Trade has been part of the human experience for millennia, but as Max Weber noted in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, the emergence of a market economy required qualitative social and psychological changes; specifically, it depended on many independent 4. The colonists themselves rarely used the term "development" to describe the process of economic change; the word entered contemporary discourse toward the end of the colo­ nial period more in the context of social p�e evolution of entire societies through progressive stages. Yet even this early modem concept of development had a strong ec0nomic component. See Michael Uenesch, New Order of the Ages: Time, the Constitution, and the MIlking ofModern Amerialn Politictd Thought (Princeton, 1988), 82-84. 5. Thomas M. Doerflinger, A Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise: Merchants and Economic Develop­ ment in Revolutionary Philadelphi/l (New York, 1986), 4.

6

Introduction

decisions on the part of individual men and women to participate in the market.6 Thus an analysis of economic development in New England must include an assessment of the relationship between culture and economy. A full description of the inhabitants' complex worldview in all its intricacies is beyond the scope of this book; here I focus on those aspects of culture in New England-beliefs, behaviors, decisions, social relations, and institu­ tions-that framed the colonists' economic activities and in tum were trans­ formed by the century and a half of economic change that resulted. Approaching the problem of New England's economic development from the perspective of culture offers an alternative to increasingly arid debates over whether early American economic relations and political culture were essentially liberal and capitalist or precapitalist.7 The gap between these p0sitions is partly semantic. The contending sides employ distinct definitions of capitalism (is it price convergence between local and international mar­ kets or the alienation of labor from the means of production?), and their in­ quiries vary widely in scope. Clearly, elements of nineteenth-century capitalism as Karl Marx defined it, such as a large pool of alienated labor, a class system based on the proletarianization of producers, and extensive in­ dustrialization, were absent or embryonic in seventeenth- and eighteenth­ century New England. The household largely remained the unit of production well into the nineteenth century. The timing of economic change and the degree of the inhabitants' embeddedness in the market varied throughout the region. Despite these caveats, however, New England demonstrated many qualities associated with a market-oriented economic order by the mid-eighteenth century, which Edwin Perkins summarizes as "private ownership, the use of markets to allocate goods and investments," "a legal tradition to enforce contracts," the use of sophisticated credit instru­ ments and accounting, a pro-development public policy, and a preference for investment in capital improvements.8 In this book I explore the development of an underdeveloped economy by examining the New England colonists' changing economic attitudes-as reflected in their disco�in the context of their actions. In the century and a half between settlement and independence, the inhabitants' economic thinking and behavior reflected a broad range of sources and influences. One of the most important in the seventeenth century was Puritanism. Nu­ merous historians have explored Calvinism's role in promoting the disci6. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit ofCRpitalism (New York, 1958),55,60. 7. For a summary of this debate, including a review of the literature, see Allan Kulikoff, "The Transition to Capitalism in Rural America," WilliRm and Mary QuRrlerly 46 (1989): 120-44. 8. See

Edwin Perkins, "The Entrepreneurial Spirit in Colonial America: The Foundations of Modem Business History," Business History Review 63 (1989): 160-86, assesis ng Winifred Rothenberg's definition of capitalism in "The Market and Massachusetts Farmers, 1750-1855," Journal of Economic History 41 (1981); 283-314.

Introduction

7

plined work and investment habits characteristic of capitalism.9 The notion of work as a calling endowed labor with moral, social, and religious mean­ ing beyond its economic value; the doctrines of stewardship and frugality encouraged reinvestment of surpluses in capital improvements; covenant theology reinforced the contractual nature of New England's legal system, which facilitated development on many fronts, from the allocation of land to provisions for rights-of-way.lo The commitment to the common good, a doctrine that led New England governments to enact checks on economic individualism, also justified a variety of public and private ventures and in­ vestments. Well into the eighteenth century (indeed, through the Revolu­ tion) Puritanism supplied one language of economic disco�terms such as "industry," "frugality," and "commonwealth"-that the inhabitants could draw on in conducting their public discussion of economic life. Still, Puritanism alone fails to explain New England's economic develop­ ment through the colonial era. After all, many contemporary societies in Eu­ rope and the Americas, regardless of religious affiliation, included hardworking entrepreneurs attuned to new markets and commercial change.ll Other influences, especially the shared Anglo-American experi­ ence, also framed the colonists' discussions and behavior. Many of the emi­ grants who arrived in the seventeenth century had participated in England's own dramatic economic transformation. Once in America, they applied lessons learned from the commercialization of agriculture, the ex­ pansion of overseas trading companies, new industrial ventures, and exper­ iments with private and public finance. The English navigation system provided yet another context for New Englanders' economic activities, be­ cause imperial policy encouraged some trades while inhibiting others. Moreover, however formative Puritanism was, the colonists also had ac­ cess to secular modes of analyzing economic life. By the eighteenth century, public discussion of economic affairs in New England had shifted from the realm of sin and salvation to that of political economy. In 1620, English poli­ cymakers and pamphleteers commenced a debate on the nature of trade, 9. See, for example, Michael Walzer, "Puritanism as a Revolutionary Ideology," in Francis Bremer and Alden Vaughan. eds., Puribln New England (New York, 1977); Owles Cohen, God's Cmss: The Psychology ofPuritlm Religious Erpmmce (New York, 1986); Perry Miller, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (1953; Cambridge, Mass., 1983); and Simon Schama. The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (New York, 1987). 10. Stephen Innes, Creating the Commonwealth: The Economic Culture of Puritan New En­ gland (New York, 1995), 9. 11. For example, Peter Bakewell, in Silver and Entrepreneurship (Albuquerque, 1987), 176, has proposed the existence of a "Catholic capitalist ethic" among the miners of colonial Peru. For a comparative perspective on economic culture in Europe and the Americas, see Mar­ garet E. Newell, "Merchants and Miners: Economic Culture in Seventeenth Century Massa­ chusetts and Peru," Revista de Indias 54 (1994): 299-311.

8

Introduction

markets, human economic behavior, and the role of government in com­ merce that lasted for over a century and a half. New Englanders appropri­ ated two models in particular from this discourse and applied them to the colonial context: the balance of trade, which emphasized the importance of a positive balance of international payments as a measure of national eco­ nomic health, and mercantilism, a loose group of policies that aimed to in­ crease the nation's exports and to replace imports with the produce of domestic industry. The particularity of New England's developmental trajectory lay in the relationship between ideology and institutions. What distinguished New England from Spanish America and even other regions in British America, and what made its economic discourse so lively, was the inhabitants' ability to translate their developmental ideas into public policy at the local and provincial levels. Indeed, most of the public discourse about the economy took place within the political realm of legislation, assembly debates, town meetings, petitions, instructions to representatives, and election contests. Capitalist development required new political arrangements, and the New England colonies boasted such arrangements in the form of relatively au­ tonomous town and provincial institutions of representative government. Like England, the New England colonies responded to economic change and, indeed, tried to shape economic change through an ongoing det>ate on political economy. Although the term "political economy " formally entered the Anglo­ American lexicon in 1767 with the publication of Sir James Steuart's Princi­ ples of Political Oeconomy, the concept had its roots in the previous century. Contemporaries generally used the word "economy" to signify household management; in a sense, the concept of political economy extended the prin­ ciples of prudence, productivity, and oversight that worked in the house­ hold context to the state's administration of the entire community's resources.Adam Smith defined it in his Wealth of Nations as both a theoreti­ cal science and a form of statecraft with "two distinct objects ": "to provide a plentiful revenue or subsistence for the people ...and to supply the state ...with a revenue sufficient for public service." 12 The purview of political economy extended beyond material considerations to incorporate issues of general moral and social well-being. Government policies not only had to enhance the people's prosperity; they had to do so in a manner conducive to equity, social amity, and order. Regardless of their ideological differences, New Englanders carried out economic discussions in the context of a shared assumption that government indeed had an important role to play in eco­ nomic life; their conceptualization of their economic goals and the policies

12. Adam Smith. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1976), 1:428.

Introduction

9

best designed to implement those goals, however, changed dramatically over the colonial period. Although all the inhabitants participated in the creation of this discourse, I necessarily focus on the ideas of the people who generated most of the recorded public (and private) discussion of economic issues: elite and mid­ dling officials, Atlantic merchants, inland traders, farmers, and ministers. Yet, by drawing on statutory law, private correspondence, account books, government proceedings, sermons, newspapers, and pamphlets, I show how both the character of the debate and its participants changed over time. Initially quite exclusive, the circle of New Englanders who argued about the economy and made policy expanded after 1710 as changes in political cul­ ture and the growing output of the region's printing presses brought in­ creasing numbers of inhabitants into the public sphere. Even those New Englanders who left few written records of their thoughts influenced the de­ bate in countless ways: as producers and consumers of goods; as petitioners or protesters; as participants in town meetings that made or implemented economic policy; and as voters whom elites espousing different visions of the region's economic future actively courted in speeches and published writings. This book charts key turning points in the evolution of the colonists' polit­ ical economy while providing a narrative of how economic development oc­ curred.Part I explores the synergy between the emigrants' Puritanism, their contact with commercial change in England, and the realities of the New England environment-all forces that shaped their economic expectations. In addition to creating a viable economy, the leaders of the Great Migration expected to regulate the economy in accordance with their distinctive social vision.In the wake of a depression in 1640, however, the pressures of estab­ lishing a functional economy forced authorities to discard some of these plans, particularly wage and price controls. Instead of restrictions, colonial governments adopted promotional legislation aimed at stimulating domes­ tic manufacture of import substitutes and encouraging new export trades. Although the industrial program largely proved a failure, the drive to enter the Atlantic trade succeeded dramatically.By 1700 New England mer­ chants managed networks of exchange that linked producers of agricultural goods and would-be consumers of finished goods to European markets.At the local level, men and women in farm households combined reciprocal, neighborly exchanges with market-oriented behavior that ranged from the sale of labor and commodities to household industry conducted in partner­ ship with local traders. These activities paid for a widening array of con­ sumer goods-clothing, specialty foods, household fUrnishings-available through the offices of port merchants. This developmental trend, however, created a new set of social and political challenges. Consumption and mo­ bility violated the economic wisdom of the balance of trade as well as early

10

Introduction

modem notions of social order, and New England's commercial emulation of the mother country began to attract unwanted attention in England. These issues framed the debates over currency which dominated dis­ course on political economy between 1660 and 1750, the subject of Part n. Although initially a temporary expedient to cover wartime expenditures, paper money quickly became the cornerstone of economic policy in all the New England colonies. By the 1720s provincial governments emitted two forms of paper currency-short-term treasury notes and public loans ad­ ministered through the towns; both were legal tender and neither was backed by specie. Paper served as a much-needed medium of exchange, es­ pecially in the chronically coin-short interior; and public loans promised liq­ uidity and credit to aspiring entrepreneurs. By stimulating the domestic sector of the economy, each emission of paper money tended to increase support for the policy among inland farmers, traders, and consumers. Paper currency was not without its detractors. Some officials, merchants, and ministers attacked the policy of issuing paper money for purposes other than wartime finance on the grounds of both political economy and moral­ ity . Paper money, they contended, encouraged people to consume imports and borrow irresponsibly, to the detriment of New England's balance of trade and social order. Supporters of paper money rejected traditional bal­ ance-of-trade thinking and formulated a liberal political economy premised on the importance of internal development. Instead of resigning themselves to the role of commodity-producing outpost in England's commercial em­ pire, pro-currency writers articulated a compelling vision of New England's future that included a place for a diversified domestic economy wedded to a strong foreign sector. The currency debates did more than usher in new economic ideologies; they also transformed political culture in New England. Paper money issues dominated the business of colonial government more than any other single policy problem during the provincial period. As both sides printed pam­ phlets and newspaper articles defining their positions, a contest within the assemblies and urban merchant communities quickly broadened into a pub­ lic discussion. Nor did all the impetus for mobilization and politicization trickle down from the top. Once town meetings assumed responsibility for managing public loans, people in the towns began to act more aggressively to shape economic policy at the local and provincial levels by petitioning the assemblies, investing profits in local projects, instructing their representa­ tives, and pressing for new emissions of paper. Thus paper money precipi­ tated the emergence of a more popular, partisan style of politics in New England. The Currency Act of 1751 offered a graphic reminder that the colonists did not have complete control over economic policy; the empire still func­ tioned as an unavoidable framework for colonial development. But British

Introduction

11

regulations, although they put a temporary end to th e New England colonies' experiments with paper money, failed to retire the pro-paper faction's liberal economic ideas along with their currency. Moreover, some predictions about the positive impact of paper on colonial development were borne out in the following two decades. Imports increased, but so did import-substitution industries and agricultural productivity; and the out­ bound cargoes from New England ports destined for other colonial markets included an ever-larger proportion of goods manufactured or processed in the region. Both the political economy of paper money and the political culture it helped create influenced New Englanders' response to the tightening of British economic regulations during the imperial crisis, the subject of Part

III. After 1750, Parliament's reformed regulatory policies clashed repeatedly with the ideas about free trade, internal growth, and economic diversifica­ tion articulated during the currency debates. In pamphlets, newspapers, and resolutions between 1763 and 1770, opponents of English taxation iden­ tified a conflict of interest between the metropolis and the colonies and charged that New England's dependence on the mother country threatened

to undermine the colonies' future development. As transatlantic tensions es­ calated , anti-English agitators turned to economic weapons-particularly the nonimportation boycotts-to express their displeasure. Nonimportation of English goods was more than an effort to restore lost virtue through ma­ terial self-denial; rather, advocates saw the boycott as an opportunity to stimulate domestic manufactures. By the 1770s, New Englanders involved in resistance had forged an ideology that reinforced constitutional griev­ ances against England with ideas of development; continued prosperity, they claimed, was contingent on independence. Thus they laid the ground­ work not only for revolution but for a vital postindependence economy.

PA RT

I

Political Economy, Culture, and Development in the Seventeenth Century

Numerous scholars have characterized the first decades of settlement in New England as a "working-out " period during which the colonists de­ bated the proper structure of their religious, social, and political institutions. Economic life was no exception; like other aspects of New England culture, the Puritans' political economy-their conceptualization of their economic goals and of the policies best designed to implement them-underwent key changes that set patterns for the next two centuries of the region's develop­ ment. As Edward Wmslow noted in his 1624 promotional tract, Good News from New England, the merchants, ministers, and gentry who planned the settlement of New England appreciated the necessity of economic enter­ prise, "hoping that where religion and profit jump together, which is rare .. . it will encourage every honest man, either in person or purse, to set for­ ward the same.! Whether New Englanders sought to escape religiOUS perse­ cution and find pure ordinances, to establish a model Bible commonwealth for the reformation of England, to secure personal economic advancement, or all three, such goals required that they establish "outward means "-an economy sufficiently promising to attract settlers and to maintain them in a way that at least approximated the material conditions they had enjoyed in England. John Wmthrop, Theophilus Eaton, and other leaders explicitly stated their desire to emulate and even improve on the diverse ventures then transforming the economy of the mother country. They brought with them from England secular assumptions concerning trade, manufactures,

1. Edward Winslow, Good News from New Engu/nd; or, A True Rellltion of Things Very Remarlalble at the Plantation of Plymouth in New England (London, 1624).

14

From Dependency to Independence

and the proper role of government in economic affairs that their Puritan convictions regarding labor and productivity only reinforced. The physical realities of the New England environment and the con­ straints of their colonial status quickly forced the settlers to reject some as­ pects of their English commercial experience and ideology, however, and to recast others. One of the most important adjustments occurred in the area of public policy and regulation. By the late 16405, the colonists all but aban­ doned most traditional forms of socioeconomic regulation that circum­ scribed market behavior in favor of policies that facilitated it. First in response to a serious economic depression, but then as a matter of course, provincial and local governments assumed the responsibility for promoting economic development and diversification and aiding entrepreneurial projects, joining private entrepreneurs in "mixed enterprise." Yet those New Englanders who favored these policies were careful to subsume this politi­ cal economy within a Puritan discourse of commonweal; they justified an activist state on the grounds that commercial expansion enhanced the com­ mon good by ensuring collective prosperity. The second crucial transformation initiated during the seventeenth cen­ tury was material. By the 16505, most New England leaders realized that their grandiose initial plans for development were impractical in the short term; aside from food and shelter, the inhabitants depended on imports for their basic material needs. Farmers and merchants eventually found way s to compensate for the region's lack of a staple crop and constructed a viable economy based on the exportation of provisions, fish, and commercial ser­ vices to a variety of markets in return for English manufactures. The general contours of this diverse economy persisted throughout the colonial period, and indeed, some historians end the story here with the statement that the New England economy merely grew along the same lines rather than developing.2 But in fact, these patterns of import-export com­ merce wrought crucial structural and ideological changes in New England society.Merchants turned inward as well as outward in search of commodi­ ties for export, and their efforts stimulated processing industries and inte­ grated a growing number of inhabitants into the larger international economy as both producers and consumers. Participation in the Atlantic trade invited closer political and economic contacts with the mother country

2. Bernard Bailyn, for example, has oommented that "despite acts of navigation, large in­ in population, and changes in both the quantity and types of supply and demand, the character of the eoonomic system as it emerged . . . remained essentially the same until just before the American Revolution": The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century 1955; (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), 45. See also John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, The Economy of British America, 1607-1789 (Chapel Hill, 1985), 32. Two exceptions are James Hen­ retta, The Evolution of American Society, 1 700-1815 (Lexington, Mass., 1973), and Stephen Innes, Creating the Commonwealth: The Economic Culture of Puritan New England (New York, 1995). creases

Political Economy, Culture, and Development

15

but simultaneously put pressure on colonial credit and currency systems as well as on their ideals of autonomy . Although many of these changes could be contained within existing social and cultural patterns, they did force New Englanders to rethink their pejorative views of some of the shifts that accompanied commercial expansion: usury, social mobility, consumption, and diversity. In addition, New England's very success at emulating�ven competing with-the mother country forced observers on both sides of the Atlantic to reexamine aspects of their political economy and set the stage for the transformation of New England economic thought and policy in the eighteenth century.

NEW ENGLAND c. 1 6 70 �

Lancast ... r

o

50

_0:=_-==_

Mil�,

MMP, 1 996

CHAPTER ONE "A SECOND ENGLAND " : ENGLIS H BAC KGROUND AND PLAN S FOR SET TLEMENT

Any assessment of New England's early economic development must begin by acknowledging the enormous importance of the first immigrants' ideas and experiences. The exploration and colonization of North America oc­ curred against a backdrop of dramatic social, political, and economic change that transformed the face of England over the course of the seven­ teenth century. This market revolution, its opportunities, and its concomi­ tant dislocations influenced the colonists' plans for settlement and the institutions they adopted in the New World. Indeed, the English model con­ tinued to affect the course of development in New England throughout the colonial period, just as the colonies had an enormous impact on economic ideas and infrastructure in the mother country.

England's Market Revolution Perhaps the most important precipitant of England's commercial transfor­ mation was intense demographic expansion: England's population more than doubled between 1520 and 1696. This unprecedented growth tem­ porarily upended the balance between population and resources and placed extreme pressure on England's capacity to house, employ, and sustain its citizens.! The resulting increased demand for land, food, and other necessi­ ties drove up rents and prices. In the short term this inflation threatened al1. D. C. Coleman, The Economy o/England, 1450-1750 (Oxford, 1977), 12-29; Keith Wright­ son, English Society, 1580-1680 (New Brunswick, N.J., 1982),121-25.

18

From Dependency to Independence

ready marginal inhabitants in two ways: it made subsistence a challenge, and it encouraged landlords to enclose common pasturage and estates and to take over expired leases so they could exploit newly lucrative agricultural markets. The enclosure of commons, woodlands, and fens by ambitious landlords displaced cottagers and laborers, further aggravating already en­ demic problems of vagrancy.2 Added to the effects of periodic depression in the English cloth industry, these woes produced widespread misery-and generated concern among elites-in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Yet the changes in population and land tenure that swelled the ranks of England's "masterless" men and women also hastened the transition from manor to marketplace. Responding to market incentives, landowners de­ ployed their estates in entrepreneurial ways, introducing new crops and methods of cultivation and posting gains in productivity.3 Yeomen and gen­ try profitably exploited growing urban and rural markets in England, even exporting food by the latter half of the seventeenth century.· Gains in agri­ cultural productivity assuaged fears of famine in the face of population growth and also freed more of the labor force for nonagricultural work. Many of the gains in productivity came as a result of specialization. As spe­ cialization increased and household production of necessaries declined, a growing number of English citizens of all classes and occupations came to depend on the market to satisfy their basic needs.!! As a result of the activities of improving landlords and yeomen, agricul­ tural productivity increased so dramatically between 1540 and 1640 that despite the population boom, the price of grain began to fall in relation to other commodities by the mid-seventeenth century. Many enterprising gentlemen then invested in other sectors of the economy-particularly industries that processed agricultural products such as hemp and flax and small manufacturing enterprises such as makers of pins and starch­ that were well placed to take advantage of the cheap labor of displaced agricultural workers and the growing domestic market.6 By the late seven­ teenth century, the English had joined the Dutch as leading suppliers of in­ expensive, mass-produced consumer goods, including linen, metalware, stockings, pins, and ribbons, all marketed through expanding networks of domestic and international trade. These projects had a dramatic effect on

2. See Sir Thomas Wilson, "The State of England, 1600, " in Joan Think and J. P. Cooper, eds., Seventeenth-Century Economic Documents (London, 1972), 752. 3. Coleman, Economy of England, 1�76. 4. Wrightson, English Society, 121-22, 125-26, 129, 133. 5. Robert Brenner estimates that 45% of the English labor force was engaged in nonagri­ cultural pursuits by 1700. See Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, PolitiCQI Conflict, and London's Overseas Traders, 1550-1653 (Princeton, 1993), 41; Carole Shammas, The Pre-Industrial Consumer in England and AmeriCQ (Oxford, 1990), 1-2. 6. Joan Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects: The Development of a Consumer Society in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1978), Prologue.

"A Second England"

19

labor organization and standards of living. By employing former agricul­ tural workers of both sexes and by pricing their goods within the limited means of lower- and middle-class buyers, the new industries set the stage for a consumer revolution.7 Would-be entrepreneurs found other attractive investments aside from land and manufactures. Financial innovations such as the joint-stock com­ pany permitted the accumulation of capital under government charter and opened up entirely new realms of extensive overseas mercantile activity to investors-including the planting of colonies. The Levant Company, the Muscovy Company, and the East India Company joined established mer­ chant monopolies such as the Merchant Adventurers in the aggressive pur­ suit of markets and commodities abroad The appearance of new products such as silks, cottons, spices, and currants stimulated tremendous consumer demand, which in tum attracted new commercial players.8 Elizabethan and Stuart administrators responded to these changes with a variety of regulations, some of them contradictory. Increasingly, European nation-states extended their contests for power and wealth beyond the bat­ tlefield to the arena of international trade. As England vied with Spain, the Netherlands, and France over markets and resources, many contemporaries viewed exchange as a zero-sum game in which nations competed for fixed amounts of wealth in the form of specie. A country that exported more than it imported and reduced its dependence on other nations by manufacturing domestic substitutes for foreign goods scored a strategic victory in this con­ test Seeing an opportunity to enhance England's competitive advantage and to enrich the royal treasury through fees and loans, the crown put its imprimatur on commercial expansion, chartering enterprises and occasion­ ally providing entrepreneurs with bounties, monopolies, patents, and other forms of assistance. Although the trade-conscious commonwealthmen who sponsored these . activities set a precedent for government involvement in development, their actions constituted something less than a centralized, farsighted economic plan. As numerous historians have noted, the term "mercantilism" confers a misleading degree of organization, effectiveness, and ideological consis­ tency on a scattered group of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century policies.9 Several social and political factors inhibited the creation of the coherent

7. Ibid., 1-11; Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of II Consumer So­ ciety: The CommercillliZlltion of Eighteenth-Century Englllnll (Bloomington, 1982), 13-15; Mar­ garet Spufford, The Grellt Reclothing of Rurlll Englllnll: Petty Chllpmen and Their WlITes in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1984), chaps. 5-7, esp. 113-18. 8. Brennel;. Merchllnts lind Revolution, �50. 9. D. C. Coleman in particular has questioned the analytical usefulness of the term; he concludes that "mercantilism is one of those non-existent entities that had to be invented in order to prevent the study of history from falling into the abyss of antiquarianism"; "Mer­ cantilism Revisited," HistoriCilI Journill 23 (1980� 791. See also Coleman's Revisions in Mercan­ tilism (London, 1969) and Economy of England, 57-58.

20

From Dependency to Independence

commercial system that Adam Smith had in mind when he first defined mercantilism in The WeJllth of Nations. First, because policymakers focused their attention almost exclusively on international exchange, many of the more innovative and lucrative new domestic trades and industries flour­ ished beyond the reach of either the government's aid or its restrictions. Sec­ ond, all sorts of noneconomic factors shaped policy decisions. Often, official privileges and protections rewarded entrepreneurs not for the efficiency and quality of their proposed enterprises but for their influence or for dy­ nastic and financial services rendered to the crown. Royal grants of exclu­ sive rights and monopolies to groups such as the cloth-trading Merchant Adventurers made on the latter grounds aroused considerable protest-par­ ticularly from Puritans in Parliament-who viewed them as abuses of the prerogative and unfair restraints on trade.1o The political crises of the Ovil War era postponed the development of a full-blown navigation system until mid-century; and even after 1660, considerations of public revenue and mil­ itary strategy (the "sinews of power"}-and not merely the desire to stimu­ late commercial enterprise per se-shaped commercial policy decisions that sometimes ran counter to private economic interests and efficiency.1I In addition, English policymakers sometimes used regulation to respond to social concerns in ways that restricted economic activity. Classical eco­ nomic theory has so penetrated our own culture that we assume the natu­ ralness of economic man: rational, active, striving, improving, best left to his own devices by a limited state. But market-induced "passions" seemed highly unnatural-and sometimes threatening-to many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europeans. In the eyes of some contemporaries, the un­ fettered pursuit of wealth threatened to unleash a cornucopia of sins and dangerous social crimes throughout the social spectrum. England's capital­ ist transformation took well over a century, and its effects-and benefits­ were distributed unevenly. Classical liberalism assumes an infinitely expanding economy; even though the pie is divided unequally, everyone's slices can grow larger over time. But most early modem English men and women conceived of wealth and markets as fixed or even declining entities in the face of increased competition for resources. John Wmthrop worried in 1629 that "the whole land of the kingdome it is reconed is scarce sufficient to give employment to one half of the people." '2 In such a context, greed, avarice, ambition, oppression, and forestalling, the economic sins of the rich, promised to exacerbate social tensions by violating the unwritten social contract between elites and the marginal in which the latter defended their

10. Robert Bliss, Revolution and Empire: English Politics and the American Colonies in the Sev­ enteenth Century (Manchester, 1990), �58. 11. Ibid., 67�; John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1 688-1783 (New York, 1989), esp. chaps. 4, 5, and 7. 12 John Wmthrop to?, (1629), in Winthrop Papers, 6 voIs. to date (Boston, 1929-), 2:123.

"A Second England"

21

customary rights to the means of subsistence. Famine remained a very real threat through the 164Os; the urban poor who encountered rising food prices, tenants who experienced rack rents or displacement by improving landlords, and workers who felt the pinch of falling real wages all had both reason to fear the market and the ritual means to make their displeasure known.13 Even those at the lower end of the social ladder were not immune to moral censure, however; the same husbandmen and workers who rioted against the market in one context partook of its advantages in other times and situations. Elite observers decried the "transcendente heighte of excesse in all intemperance," as people strove to maintain status and "keepe sayle with [their) equalls"; "and wherein who so ever can not doe as other men doe, oh with what scorne and contempte doothe [they) lyve in!" 14 But ef­ forts on the part of lower and middling inhabitants to "keepe sayle" or even surpass their neighbors through consumption were problematic because to do so endangered the existing stable, hierarchical order. Conventional wis­ dom grudgingly allowed for aristocratic prodigality only because "the ex­ cess of the rich may be the employment of the poor" in lUXury industries and because spending by the gentry lubricated the economy with cash.15 Ac­ cording to this logic, however, consumption by the masses or even middling classes, high wages, and domestic exchange in general made no contribu­ tion to the balance of international payments or national prosperity, but rather harmed both. "Whatever Artizans and Farmers get by Consumption in the Kingdom, is no profit to the Nation," wrote Sir Francis Brewster in 1654; "for if we spend all in the Countrey, we shall have no Exports, and consequently no money. " 16 As a result of these many pressures and concerns, the English state fol­ lowed many of the imperatives of the moral economy�pecially in times of want. Along with encouraging some types of commerce and manufactur­ ing, Parliament and the crown attempted to limit wages, prices, and interest rates and took some responsibility for the poor. To help mitigate the social consequences of market involvement and mobility, Parliament restricted consumption, freedom of movement, and choice of occupation. Many of these regulations, such as the Poor Laws of 1601, . the Statute of Artificers of 1562-63, and the 1631 Book of Orders, were obsolete when they were passed

13. For the moral economy and ritualized popular demands for relief see E. P. Thompson, "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century," PIlSt and Present 50 (1971): 7�136; idem, "Patrician Society, Plebeian Culture," Journal of Sodal History 7 (1974); idem, Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the BlacIc Act (New York, 1975), 382�; Robert W. Malcolmson, Ufo and lAbour in England, 1 700-1780 (London. 1981), chap. 5. 14. Robert Ryece to John Wmthrop, [1629], in Winthrop Papers, 2:129. 15. Thomas Mun, England's Treasure by Forraign 'D'ade (London. 1664), 9; Sir Francis Brew­ ster, Essays on Trade and Navigation. In Five Parts (London. 1654/55), 51-52, 55. 16. Brewster, Essays on Trade, 50-51.

22

From Dependency to Independence

and laxly enforced. But the legislation reflected a mentality that put a pre­ mium on order and stability and viewed issues of hierarchy and power as inseparable from economic policy. Such laws also reflected an assumption on the part of English elites that the mass of inhabitants existed outside the realm of economic agency: in Gregory King's famous formulation, over 60 percent of English households in 1688 were decreasing rather than increas­ ing the nation's wealth.17 As late as the 1670s, some policymakers assumed, as Thomas Manley did, that the poor were immune to market incentives and thus the pressure of economic necessity was required to coerce them into working-an unsurprising attitude at a time when underemployment and job sharing were prevalent and people at the edge of subsistence worked four- or five-hour days.1 8 Only toward the end of the century did writers begin to discern a positive role for the poor as a source of labor in the new English economy. Until then, according to Robert Ryece, a Puritan justice of the peace from Suffolk, many gentry dismissed "the poorer sorte, reputed but as the burden of the State." 19 These conflicting impulses and experiences made for an ambiguous, con­ tested discourse on political economy. Beginning in the 16205, merchants and policymakers began a more systematic reassessment of their changing economy and the proper government response. One approach, the balance of trade, came to dominate Anglo-American discourse.2o In its simplest for­ mulation, the goal of the balance of trade was "to sell more to strangers yearly than we consume of theirs in value"; thus when international ac­ counts were settled, England would be the gainer in bullion.21 As articulated by the East India merchant Thomas Mun in a series of pamphlets between 1621 and 1664, however, this political economy went beyond simply main­ taining a positive balance of payments in bilateral exchange. Mun's dy­ namic vision of commercial markets stressed the almost infinite capacity of England's trade for expansion, touted the value of reexports and the carry­ ing trade, and viewed economic growth as a source of national power. The state could play an important role in enhancing the balance of trade by fos­ tering the production of import substitutes, by reducing consumption of im­ ports, and by aiding merchants who aggressively searched out new markets and products for export.22 As the title of Mun's most famous work­ England's Treasure by Forraign Trade (1664)-indicated, however, most bal­ ance-of-trade advocates continued to privilege international commerce as 17. Gregory King, "Natural and Political Observations upon the State and Condition of England " (1 695), in Thirsk and Cooper,Seventeenth Century Economic Documents, 779-81 . 18. Thomas Manley,Usury at Six Per Cent. Examined (London, 1669), 25. 19. Robert Ryece to John Winthrop,(1629), in Winthrop Papers, 2:129. 20. Joyce Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Prince­ ton, 1978), chap. 2, esp. 37-42 21 . Mun, England's Treasure, 125. 22. Thirsk. Economic Policy and Projects, 23-31 .

"A Second England"

23

the key to prosperity. Many commentators who followed Mun stressed bul­ lionism more than he did; they worried about import levels, ignored or downplayed the domestic sector (except as a source of export goods), and remained critical of consumption23 A few writers, notably Edward Misselden. departed from this paradigm and offered an alternative to the balance of trade that stressed reciprocity and unfettered exchange as the best path to national prosperity.24 Whereas Misselden wrote about a specific issue-the bullion trade-other pamphle­ teers and officials used similar arguments to attack various forms of restric­ tive economic regulation and market protections. By the last quarter of the seventeenth century, these commentaries portrayed an international econ­ omy so complex, so multilateral, and so integrated as to challenge the ability of discrete policies to comprehend it.2S Some made the new domestic trades and industries the cornerstones of their political economy; others advocated free trade on the grounds that competition would stimulate more innova­ tive, productive enterprises. Still others, including Dudley North and Nicholas Barbon, questioned whether bullion represented the best measure of wealth and argued instead that internal trade, productivity gains, and im­ proved standards of living augured national prosperity as much as a posi­ tive balance of trade. Thus when John Locke questioned the efficacy of the exercise of certain kinds of political power in his 1Wo Treatises (1691), he echoed a notion some contemporary writers on political economy had implied for decades. In a work that appeared the same year as Locke's, Dudley North defended usury and attacked sumptuary legislation and bullion hoarding on the grounds "that Laws to hamper Trade, whether Forreign, or Domestick . . . are not Ingredients to make a People Rich." In defense of commercial free­ dom North pointed out that the "main spur to . . . Industry and Ingenuity, is the exorbitant appetites of Men." "No People ever yet grew rich by Poli­ cies," he continued; "it is Peace, Industry, and Freedom that brings Trade and Wealth, and nothing else." 26 In North's liberal economic vision, just as in Locke's liberal political realm, laws that violated people's rational, nat­ ural inclinations were at best ineffective and at worst destructive to the com­ mon interest. These salvos formed part of a century-long battle over the definition of wealth, the ideal role of government in the economy, and the value of 23. Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology, 162�; Samuel Forney, England's Interest and Imprr1Vf!11lent (London, 1673), 21-26; Lewes Roberts, The Treasure of Traffike (London, 1641); and Sir Richard Haines, "The Decay of Trade, 1674," in Thirsk and Cooper, Seventeenth­ Century Economic Documents, �90. 24. (Edward Misselden� The Circle of Commerce (London, 1623); Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology, 41-48; Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects, 148-49. 25. Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology, 16S-73; [Nicholas Barbon� A Discourse of Trade (London, 1690); [Dudley North1 Discourses upon Trade (London, 1691), Preface. 26. [North1 Discourses upon Trade, 21-22, 14, 26.

24

From Dependency to Independence

the internal economy; at stake for the parties concerned were very real ma­ terial benefits and influence over state policies. Yet although the more lib­ eral writers failed to dominate seventeenth-century English political economy, they did succeed

in

transforming the terms of discourse. After

mid-century, writers from across the spectrum who participated in this dis­ course shifted the debate away from the social and ethical dangers of mar­ ket involvement to more utilitarian assesm s ents of its advantages

in ways

that gradually undennined the moral economy.27 Although authors such as North, Barbon, Samuel Hartlib, Josiah

Child, and William Petty differed

over how to facilitate English economic growth, they agreed that enclo­ sure, market-attuned agriculture, manufactures, and trade promised to

ameliorate the ills of poverty, famine, and unemployment and to strengthen the nation. 28

The Puritan Impulse These contests over political economy formed the backdrop for the set­ tlement of New England: they influenced both the plans of company organizers and the aspirations of the immigrants themselves. Yet other forces-including Puritanism-also shaped the ideas about develop­ ment that the settlers drew from the English economic legacy. Puritan­ ism's adherents included clothiers, merchants, gentry landholders, and manufacturers who engaged in and benefited from the new forms of commercial enterprise. Many of the original settlers came from East Anglia, the region of England experiencing the most rapid economic change. In the broader English discourse concerning political economy, Puritan gentry in Parliament and their constituents favored specific pol­ icies and causes that reflected both their religious and their socioeconomic interests. Colonization was an extremely popular issue among Puritans, and not only because of the attractive prospect of carrying the holy war against Catholicism to new venues. Weavers and clothiers in a depressed industry wanted a government that aggressively sought out new overseas markets and provided economic relief. Petty merchants, wholesalers, and retailers excluded from the cloth and other trades resented the exclusivity of such corporations as the Merchant Adventurers and the East India Company, which received a variety of concessions

in return for their

contributions to

the royal revenues. These smaller merchants supported colonial expansion

27. Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology, 70-72, 86-a7, 169-73. 28. [Barbon), Discourse of 1T1Ide; [North), Discourse upon 1T1Ide; Samuel Hartlib His Legacie of Huslxmdry (London, 1651); Josiah Child, A New Discourse of 1T1Ide (London, 1804); William Petty, The Political Anatomy of Ireland (London, 1691).

"A Second England"

25

because the legal and financial gateways to the colonial trades remained more open.29 Indeed, a sizable number of powerful English Puritan "projectors," such as Robert Rich, the Earl of Warwick, Humphrey Gilbert, and the Gosnolds, participated in colonial ventures for economic as well as religious reasons. Gentry entrepreneurs in the mother country were eager to plunge into ad­ ventures with new crops, processes, and industries ranging from European

grasses, medicinal plants, hemp and flax, rapeseed (canola), and other oil­

producing plants, to ships' stores, dyes like woad and madder, fruits, and

mines, but acquiring vacant land for such experiments often proved diffi­ cult.30 Plantation settlements, in contrast, offered cheap land unencumbered by customary English practices. Because of its proximity and the military conquest that brought elite Englishmen into contact with its potential, lre­

land was the first target of many of these enterprising gentlemen in the six­ teenth century. But America's eastern seaboard, including New England, soon attracted attention as well; like Ireland, it boasted a climate similar enough to England's to make the transfer of agricultural and manufacturing projects feasible.3) A few promoters, notably Gilbert, actually engaged in projects in both Ireland and America, applying lessons learned in the former to the latter. That these lands were already occupied made it all the more necessary for would-be proprietors desirous of legally justifying expropria­ tion to link colonization with the establishment of an English-style economy, which, alongside Christianization. would help lift indigenous peoples-be they the Irish or Native Americans-into the habits of industry, modem agricultural methods, infrastructure, and improved material living stan­ dards that made for civility.32 The links between Puritanism, economic re­ form, and colonization in Ireland and the Americas persisted well through the Cromwellian era Several notable actors in the early New England econ­ omy-the Wmthrops, Robert Child, Emmanuel Downing, Richard Leader­ had involvements in Ireland, and many influential English economic

29. Brenner, Merc1umts and Revolution, 54-58, 92, 111-12. 114-15; William Hunt, The Puri­ tan Moment: The Coming of Revolution in 411 English County (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), 247-48. 30. For English projectors/ reformers who saw the colonies as a fNitful economic labora­ tory, see Robert Child, "u.rge Letter Concerning the Defects and Remedies of English Hus­ bandry," in Smnuel HRrtlib; Joan Thirsk. The Rural Economy of EngUmd (London, 1984), 300-301 , and "Patterns of Agriculture in Seventeenth-Century New England," in David Hall and David Grayson Allen, eds., 5evtnltenth-Century New Englllnd (Boston. 1984), 39-40, 42, 51-.54; Margaret Newell, "Robert Child and the Entrepreneurial VIsion: Economy and Ideol­ ogy in Early New England:' New Englllnd QJuu1erly 58 (1995): �56. 31. For the cross-fertilization of personnel and project design between Irish and Ameri­ can colonization projects in the sixteenth century, see David Beers Quinn, Englllnd and the Disalvery of AmeriaI, 1481-1620 (New York, 1974); for the seventeenth century, see the items in nn. 26 and 27 above, and Nicholas Canny, Kingdom and Colony: /r'eland in the Atlantic World (Baltimore, 1988), 8, 34. 78-80, 108-11. 32. Canny, Kingdom and Colony, 14-17, 34-35, 46-47.

26

From Dependency to Independence

thinkers of the late seventeenth century, such as WIlliam Petty, were at­ tracted to Ireland early in their careers. Familiarity with new economic developments in the mother country dearly influenced the earliest descriptions of the New England coast. Li­ braries in English mercantile and maritime communities stocked travel accounts and books containing information about "North Virginia" (New England); potential immigrants could have read John Brereton's

1602

account of his voyage to Maine, which (complete with current English market prices) detailed the ready availability of sassafras (a supposed cure for syphilis),

"Whale and Seale oiles, Soape ashes and Soape,

Tarre and Pitch, . . . boords of Cedars, . . . Hempe, Flaxe, Cables and Ropes, Saile-clothes, Grapes, and Raisens and Wines, Come, Rape-seeds & oiles, Hides, Skinnes, Furres, Dies and Colours." 33 Other glowing ac­ counts followed, as promoters and ministers such as John White, Ed­ ward

Wmslow,

Francis

Higginson,

and

William

Wood

cataloged

New England's potential for agriculture and industry, particularly fisheries, shipbuilding, and ironworks. Even the trees excited the entrepreneurial in­ stincts of observers coming from a "world of scarcity," an England under­ going rapid deforestation in efforts to meet the demands of new industries. John Winthrop put "the common scarcitie of woode and tymber" high on his 1624 list of "Common Grievances Groaning for Reformation" in England.34 Issues of labor and productivity, especially the problem of "the poor who run up and down and do not work," formed another important element of Puritan political economy. Local gentry and manufacturers who felt the pinch of rising poor rates and social disorder applauded legislation that suppressed vagabondage, apprenticed women and children, forced the able-bodied to work, and cracked down on alehouse culture. John Wmthrop noted in 1629 that "all our townes complain of the burden of poore people and strive by all menes to ridde any such as they have, and to keepe of[£) such as would come to them." 3S Along with the pressures of their pocket­ books, however, a strong moral and religious component informed Puritan views on employment and poverty. The Calvinist notion of work as a calling endowed labor with religious and social purpose, distinct from any material gains; it required the individual to praise God by altering his or her behav-

33. John Brereton, A Briefo and true Relation of the Discovcrit of the North part of Virginia; being a most pleasant, fruitful and commodious soile . . (London, 16(2), 5, 12, 16-17; David Cressy, Coming Over: Migration and Communication between England and New England in the Seventeenth Century (New York, 1987), 8. 34. See Brereton, Briefo and true Relation, 7; John Smith. "A Description of New England," in Philip Barbom; ed, The Complete Works of Captain John Smith, 3 vols. (Chapel HiD, 1986), 1:336-37; Winthrop Papers, 1:297. 35. Hunt, Puritan Moment, 248-51; John Wmthrop, "General Observations," in Winthrop Papers, 2:123. .

"A Second England"

27

ior and internalizing time consciousness and disciplined habits.36 A duty of stewardship-an injunction to improve, extend, and augment one's holdings for the common good-accompanied the particular calling to work. "God . . . gave [humans) a general Comiss[ion1" recorded Winthrop: "encrease and multiply and replenish the earth and subdue it the ends are natural and double, that man may enjoye the fruit of the earth, and

God may have his due glory from the Creature, which is imperfect

while it Iyes waste." 37 Contemporaries used the word "industry" to cap­ ture these personal and collective qualities of hard work, productivity, and rectitude.

Such attitudes placed Puritans toward the vanguard of contemporary sec­ ular discourse on development, for "industry" was also a favorite term of writers concerned with national prosperity. Indeed, in the hands of a pam­ phleteer such as Robert Child, these disparate elements became a "Puritan economic ethic," a coherent plan for "improving" the commonwealth through opposition to feudal restrictions, royal monopolies, and other ex­ clusive commercial privileges; tax and Poor Law reform; encouragement of imperial expansion and the planting of colonies; public and private support of the new import-substitution industries that both put the poor to work and enhanced the balance of trade; and moral legislation intended to incul­ cate a "culture of discipline" among England's "masterless" men and women.38 Puritanism's focus on work, productivity, and behavior modifica­ tion meshed with many demands of capitalism, and anticipated the labor theory of value as articulated by such later writers as John Locke and Wtlliam Petty.39 Other elements of Puritanism offered additional bridges to liberal economic thought. Decades ago, Perry Miller reminded a generation of scholars that Puritanism had a strong humanistic core.40 Many of Puritanism's gentry adherents embraced the new science of the Enlighten­ ment and expressed faith in their ability to manipulate nature for human benefit. There was room for individualism as well--especially for individu­ als capable of developmental foresight who were "profitable to the

36. Stephen Innes, Creating the Commonwealth: The Economic Culture of Puritan New En­ gland (New York, 1995), 107-59; Charles Cohen, Gotts Caress: The Psychology of Puritan Reli­ gious Experience (New York, 1986), chap. 4. 37. Winthrop Papers, 2:1�24. 38. See Child, "Large Letter"; Bliss, Revolution and Empire, 52-53; Hunt, Puritan Moment, 79-81. 39. William Petty, Political Arithmetick (London, 1690); J. E. Crowley, This SHEBA, Self: The Conceptualization of Economic Lifo in Eighteenth-Century America (Baltimore, 1978), 1-7; Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age (New York, 1983), 27-28; R. H Tawney, Religion lind the Rise ofCapitaIism (New York, 1947), 188, 191-93, 195-204. 40. See Miller's introduction to the first volume of Perry Miller and Thomas H. Johnson, eds., The Puritans: A Sourcebook of Their Writings, 2 vols. (1938; New York, 1963), esp. 1:25-40.

28

From Dependency to Independence

publique, their neighbors, and also to themselves." 41 The Puritan doctrine of productivity validated a range of economic activities previously subject to religious or moral censure: privatization of land, the pursuit of profit, the displacement of native peoples in colonial settlements. Yet Puritanism also posed economic ambiguities. For example, few Puri­ tan commentators were ready to debate policies in a totally secularized lan­ guage of productivity, efficiency, and improvement; the social vision of the commonweal continued to be an important part of Puritan economic dis­ course throughout the seventeenth century.42 Defending the public good re­ quired the instrumental use of state power, whether it be waging war against Spain, planting colonies, or providing poor relief. Although Puritans opposed monopoly, they did not embrace a liberal political economy. In­ stead, they looked to legislation and policy to achieve many of their socio­ economic goals in a way that exceeded the Stuart government's bureaucratic capacity. As John Winthrop informed the Massachusetts Bay settlers on board the Arbella off New England's shore, "the care of the publique must oversway all private respects, by which not only conscience, but . . . Civill pollicy doth binde us; for it is a true rule that perticuler estates cannot subsist in the ruine of the publique." 43 Government had to serve as a "visible hand" to prevent individual abuses of oppression, forestalling, and excessive wages. Thus, far from assuming a laissez-faire position, many early Puritan leaders in New England remained determined to restrict dan­ gerous economic behavior even at the cost of gain. In addition, work and entrepreneurship were supposed to be vehicles for religious expression and contributions to the commonweal, not merely ends in themselves; on this point some historical analyses have exaggerated the link between Puritanism and the "spirit of capitalism." "The end is to im­ prove our lives to doe more service to the Lord," Winthrop instructed the better-off migrants; "the end" was emphatically not the pursuit of personal gain.44 Puritanism called its followers to charity and justice, and adherents admitted that not all problems of poverty could be laid at the door of the poor themselves. Although the Puritan movement drew its strength from the ranks of improving gentry, professionals, merchants, ironmasters, and other artisans who generally benefited from the economic changes sweep­ ing England, representatives of particular trades-the Essex clothiers, for example-experienced severe downturns in the 1620s.45 And even the 41. Child, "Large Letter," 89. 42. Crowley, This SHEBA, Self, 1-7.

43. John Winthrop, "A Modell of Christian Charity," in Miller and Johnson, Puritans, 1:197.

44. John Winthrop, "A Modell of Christian Charity [1630]," in Winthrop Papers, 2:293. 45. See, for example, the 1629 petition of the Essex clothiers to Charles I in Thirsk and Cooper, Seventeenth-Century Economic Documents, 32-33.

29

"A Second England"

wealthy classes had numerous opportunities to observe the plight of the poor at first hand. The relative prosperity that commercialization brought to some made misery all the more dissonant: "Why meet we so many wander­ ing ghostes in shape of men," wondered Wmthrop, "so many spectacles of misery in all our streetes, our houses full of victuals, and our entryes of hunger-starved Christians? our shoppes full of riche wares, and under our stalles lye our owne fleshe in nakednesse. " 46 But if the state had to regulate the rich to prevent abuses, it also had to regulate the poor. The poor represented more than a socioeconomic problem for Puritan legislators. Beyond the objective effects of poor people's idle­ ness-the expense of poor relief, the threat of class war, the waste of human capital-Puritans had to address the moral components of social disorder and poverty. Creating employment through colonization or new manufac­ tures would absorb the poor, but the Puritans who emigrated to New En­ gland also expected. to impose the same cultural-behavioral "reforms" on the laboring populace in America that prevailed in England, as well as addi­ tional laws, such as mandatory apprenticeships and constraints on alehouse culture, which they were unable to push through Parliament at home. The issue of consumption created another important source of tension in Puritan political economy. Petitions, legislation, and pamphlets generally treated industry and frugality as inseparable behaviors. Puritanism en­ joined its adherents to frugality as part of a general call to abjure excess in worldly pleasures; the godly were (ideally) to ask, as John Wmthrop did, "0 Lord, crucifie the world unto me, that though I cannot avoyd to live among the baites and snares of it, . . . I may no otherwise love, use or delight in any the most pleasant, profitable, etc earthly comforts of this life, than I doe the ayre which I continually drawe in." 47 From the perspective of development economics, such a position represented a double-edged sword. The ethic of frugality encouraged reinvestment of surpluses in capital improvements and thus fostered future growth, but taken to excess, it might retard devel­ opment, dampen individuals' incentive to participate in the market, and cause economic stagnation The commitment to frugality limited the appeal of a more liberal political economy, which required some recognition of the role of consumer demand in development, and placed most Puritans firmly in the more mercantilist balance-of-trade camp. Late seventeenth-century commentators might, like Dalby Thomas, praise the desire for luxury and gain as useful qualities, the "true Spurs to Vlrtue, Valour and the Elevation of the mind, as well as the just rewards of industry," but the men who planned the New England set­ tlements shared the view more prevalent in the 1620s and 1630s that pro,

46. John Wmthrop to ? [1629], in Winthrop Papers, 2:122. 47. Quoted in Edmund Morgan, The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop (Boston, 1958), 1 1 .

From

30

Dependency to Independence

Governor John Win throp, engraving by C. W. Sharpe after a portrait by Vandyke. Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston.

ductivity and consumption were antithetical, not mutually reinforcing, goals. They designed policies that favored the former and limited the latter, such as sumptuary laws and monopolies on the distribution of imported goods. Frugality was also a class-sensitive issue; poor and middling English men and women who purchased luxuries in a conscious effort to move up the social ladder came under special censure from Puritan divines and legis­ lators in both Englands. The Puritan emigrants' choice of destination attested to the powerful in­ fluence of industry and frugality in their political economy. Organizers of the last two major efforts to settle Massachusetts in the 1 620s-the Dorchester Company of Salem and the Massachusetts Bay Company-had acquired more

realistic

information

about

the economic

possibilities

of New

England's landscape through the failures of their predecessors. They knew about the disasters that had attended a joint-stock company's effort in 1 607-8 to establish the colony of Sagadahoc in Maine, where disease, a short grow-

"A Second England"

31

ing season, bitterly cold winters, and the settlers' dependence on an Indian trade that fell woefully short of expectation killed most of the inhabitants and drove the remainder back to England within two years. The 1620s offered other evidence that, despite a growing season that approximated England's in parts of southern New England, achieving agricultural subsistence was more difficult than many settlers anticipated; half the inhabitants of Ply­ mouth Plantation had died during the first year. Improving the New En­ gland landscape, some of the more honest promotional tracts admitted, would require unremitting work. '1t is a country," warned Christopher Lev­ ett in 1623, "where none can live except he either labor himself, or be able to keep others to labor for him."" The colonies of the Chesapeake and Caribbean, already booming, promised richer resources and the readily mar­ ketable staples of tobacco and sugar. Other Puritans were attracted to Provi­ dence Island, Barbados, and Guiana. Why, then, settle in New England? In the end, John White of Dorchester and John Wmthrop of Massachusetts consulted religious as well as economic imperatives in selecting New En­ gland over competing sites.49 Both leaders rated plantation goods like to­ bacco and sugar low on the hierarchy of useful commodities and expressed concern over the effects of monocu1ture and social disorder in Virginia and the Caribbean; even before the arrival of the main body of settlers, Massa­ chussetts Bay prohibited the cultivation of tobacco and tried to ban public smoking.50 Primarily, however, both White and Wmthrop preferred New England's more challenging environment because it would force the settlers to work. An easy life posed danger; thus New England offered potential set­ tlers "not so much . . . abundance, as a competencie"-a comfortable living between the extremes of subsistence and luxury.51 "Nothing sorts better with Piety than Competency," wrote White; "if men desire to have a people degenerate speedily . . . let them seeke a rich soile, that brings in much with little labour; but if they desire that Piety and godliness should prosper . . . let them choose a Countrey such as this . . . . which may yeeld sufficiency with hard labor and industry: the truth is, there is more cause to feare wealth then poverty in that soyle." 52 48. Ouistopher Levett, "Levett's Voyage, A.D. 1623," in CoUections of the MaSSllChusetts Historical Society 8 (Boston, 1843), 190. 49. Vuginia Anderson. "Migrants and Motives: Religion and the Settlement of New En­ gland, 1�1640," New England Quarterly 58 (1985): 339-83. SO. [Matthew Cradock to John EndicottL Second General Letter of the Governor and Deputy of the New Eng1and Company . . . , 28 May 1629, in Records of the Governor and Com­ ptmy of the M4sstu:hUSttts Bay in New Englmul, ed. Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, 5 vols. (1854; Boston, 1968), 1:403 (hereafter cited as M4ss. Recs.). 51. William Wood, New England's Prospect (London. 1634; Boston. 1897), 51. For an excel­ lent discussion of this concept, see Daniel Vickers, "Competency and Competition: Ec0nomic Culture in Early America," William and Mary Quarterly 47 (1990): 3-29, esp. 3-4, 7. 52. John White, The Planters Plea (London, 1630), 33.

32

From Dependency to Independence

White's concept of "competency" meant more than a bare, ascetic subsis­ tence. The majority of New England immigrants came from relatively pros­ perous households. 53 They arrived in the New World with a well-defined sense of what constituted a "civilized" society and with rising expectations formed in the crucible of both international trade and an expanding English domestic market. When one sojourner noted that "the summer is hot enough for vines . . . Apples and Cherrys, Peaches, Apricocks, with all sorts of garden ware flourish here," he spoke to an English audience newly inter­ ested in these commodities.54 Middling and upper-class emigrants now de­ fined as "necessaries" a diet that included fruits, sugar, and wine; a wardrobe that supplemented stout English woolens with lighter "new draperies" and imported cottons; and iron and brass utensils, weapons, and buttons.55 The desire to emulate the Dutch, the undisputed economic suc­ cess story of seventeenth-century Europe, also affected the material aspira­ tions of contemporary English men and women. The first settlers' art and artifacts reflected the influence of Dutch Baroque and mannerist styles­ highly worked, decorated, "artificial" forms that departed from their nat­ ural models as far as possible-rather than the plain style often associated with the Puritans. The colonists applied this aesthetic to the organization of living space and the New England landscape. In their fields, homes, and material lives, New Englanders preferred the "wrought," "cultivated," "contrived," "improved," and "ingenious" works of man and sought to achieve this standard quickly in their new environment.56 Competency was also essential to the religious community's survival De­ spite its communitarian emphases, Puritanism had room for self-love. A rich inner life, personal spiritual fulfillment, and self-examination were key goals and methods of Puritan piety.57 This individualism also extended to the material realm. Like country political ideology a century later, Puri­ tanism placed great value on personal independence. An economic compe53. For an analysis of the economic position of emigrants, see Vuginia Anderson, New England's Generation: The Great Migration and the Formation of Society and Culture in the Seven­ teenth Century (New York, 1991), esp. chap. 1 and Appendix. 54. Robert Child to Samuel Hartlib, 24 December 1645, in G. H. Turnbull, "Robert Child," Transactions of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts 38 (Boston, 1959), 51. 55. lhirsk, "Patterns of Agriculture," 27; idem, Agrarian History of England and Wales, vol. 5, 1640-1750 (London, 1984), chap. 19. 56.

For a reference to this transformation of housing and fields, see Edward Johnson,

Johnson'S Wonder-Working Providence, 1628-1651, ed. J. Franklin Jameson (New York, 1910), 210. For Puritan aesthetics and the organization of domestic and outdoor space, see Jonathan

Fairbanks, "Introduction," David Grayson Allen, "Vacuum Domici1ium: The Social and Cul­ tural Landscape of Seventeenth Century New England," and Robert St. George, " 'Set Thine House in Order': The Domestication of the Yeomanry in Seventeenth-Century New En­ gland." all in Fairbanks and Sl George, eds., New England Begins: The Seventeenth Century, 3 vols. (Boston, 1982), l :xvii, 5, and 2:159-61; William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York, 1983). 57. See Charles Hambrick-Stowe, The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines in Seventeenth-Century New England (Chapel Hill, 1982), esp. chap. 6.

"A Second England"

33

tency aided one's ability to pursue pure ordinances and exercise "freedome of Religion." It provided the occasion for the exercise of the self-discipline of the calling and ensured the perpetuation of the family. Among the com­ pelling reasons behind the Pilgrims' decision to abandon their temporary refuge in Leyden for the New World, William Bradford emphasized that "necessitie was a taskmaster over them." Economic want had discouraged the Separatists'-and especially their children's-religious enthusiasm. "But it was thought that if a better, and easier place of living, could be had, it would draw many . . . if they were in a place, where they might have lib­ ertie [of the Gospel] and live comfortably, they would then practice." 58 For English men and women, then, the prospect of personal material improve­ ment and land ownership in the New World offered an incentive to migrate that complemented religious goals. Scholars have devoted considerable effort to determining whether piety or anticipation of material gain was the stronger influence on Puritans' deci­ sions to migrate.59 But contemporaries seldom drew such distinctions, nor did they view these goals as mutually exclusive. Promotional tracts might stress potential riches and land, and disappointed emigrants might caution English friends and relatives that the colonies offered spiritual solace but no easy living; yet the possibility that New England was indeed. that rare place where one could pursue both religious and material goals fired the hopes of many potential settlers. As a result, while they intended to establish a "plantation in religion," leaders of the first permanent settlements in the 1620s-Bradford of Ply­ mouth Company, White of Dorchester, John Endecott of Salem-made pro­ visions for plantations in trade. Indeed, the almost total dependence of new colonies on imports for the "necessaries" of life made economic planning crucial to men and women with a religious errand. Lacking ''kings to coun­ tenance them, staple commodities to provide all manner of merchants to re­ sort unto them, silver, gold, . . . or whatever might entice the eye or incline the motion of man toward them," New Englanders sought to replicate the economic developments transforming England.60 Inspired by the success of "the West Country Merchants of England," who returned "incredible gains yearly from" the fishing banks off New England, the Reverend John White envisioned Gloucester, Massachusetts, as an industrious town peopled with pious fishermen and farmers. White attempted to organize a fishing indus58. William Bradford, "History of Plimoth Plantation," in Miller and Johnson, Puritans, 1:91-92. The literature on country ideology is extensive; a good starting point is J. G. A. Pocock, The MachiaveUian Moment: Florentine Political 11wught and the Atlantic Republican Tra­ dition (Princeton, 1975), and the essays in Three British Revolutions: 1641, 1688, 1 776, ed. Pocock, (Princeton, 1980). 59. Vuginia Anderson reasserts the spiritual component in her "Migrants and Motives," but David Cressy takes issue with her and, indeed, with the notion of separating material and religious motives, in his Coming Over. 60. Johnson, Johnson'S Wonder-Working Pruuidence, 210.

34

From Dependency to Independence

try there in the 1620s under the auspices of the Dorchester Company to relieve English unemployment, to remedy moral evils, and to evangelize the Indians, but also "partly [in] some expectation of gain." 61 Problems of capitalization, freighting, supply, and labor, as well as competition from English and European fishing vessels, discouraged the merchants who had backed Dorchester and White had to abandon his experiment, but the p0tential of the Cape Ann fisheries continued to intrigue potential investors and settlers. Like Dorchester, the Massachusetts Bay Company-the most ambitious of the New England ventures-was ostensibly a commercial jOint-stock company founded on the ruins of the New England Company, which had taken over both personnel and patents from the Dorchester group and established an outpost at Salem, Massachusetts, in 1629. Bay Com­ pany stockholders studied the results of White's and Bradford's ex­ periments and displayed concern for practical issues. Aside from such extractable resources as fish and timber, they envisioned the creation of a di­ verse colonial economy based on farming, manufacturing, and industry­ an economy as developed as that of contemporary England. In addition to shoes, arms, clothing, and common English grains such as wheat, pease, and barley, the company outfitted its earliest vessels for the New World with madder seed, "hoproote," cherry and apple cuttings, and other new market crops. Governor John Winthrop prepared a pro­ motional tract for the Bay Colony that included detailed plans for pro­ cessing industries and agriculture and instructed agents already in New England to seek potential mining sites-exactly the sorts of projects that English reformers were advocating at home.62 The Reverend Francis Higginson, member of a sortie sent to survey the company's land, reported that the tract was "fit for Pasture, or for Plow or Meddow ground" and mentioned several ongoing and potential enterprises: a "Bricke-Kill[n] on work to Make Brickes and lYles," the cutting of cedar shingles, potash mak­ ing, leather tanning, manufacture of ships' stores, and dye making for En­ glish clothiers.63 Reflecting these diverse goals, the emigrants to early New England in­ cluded not only visible saints but workers and servants drawn by the 61. White, Planters Plea; Francis Higginson, "True Relation of the Last Voyage to New England," 24 July 1629, in Publications ofthe Massachusetts Historical Society, 62 (Boston, 1930); Edward Wmslow, Good News, in The Story of the Pilgrim Fathers (London, 1897), 595. For early Gloucester, see Christine Heyrman, Commerce and Culture (New York, 1984). 62. John Winthrop, "Arguments for the Plantation of New England," in Winthrop Papers, 2:138-49. 63. Francis Higginson, "New-Englands Plantation; or, A Short and True Description of the Commodities and Discommodities of that Countrey," and Richard Saltonstall to Emmanuel Downing, 4 February 1631 /32, both in Everett Emerson, ed., Letters from New England: The Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1629-1638 (Amherst, Mass., 1976), 30-32, 91-93.

"A Second England"

35

promise of economic advancement. The Bay Company recruited skilled spe­ cialists in processing industries such as carpenters, tanners, sawyers, smiths, and millwrights. For example, in 1629 Wmthrop secured for the Bay Com­ pany the services of William Malbon, an iron and mineral expert, and Thomas Graves, whose qualifications included "being a man experienced in ironworks, in saltworks, in measuring and surveying of lands, . . . mines, etc." 64 From the first, then, the New England colonies "were societies with enor­ mous potential energy for commercial endeavors and the pursuit of self­ interest." 65 Their political economy drew together many strands of the contemporary English experience into a fairly coherent position that in­ cluded elements of the balance of trade-the drive for diversification, open­ ness to new ventures, and an emphasiS on productivity-and an incipient statism. Each successive wave of settlers brought the most recent ideas and experiences from the mother country, while travel, reemigration, and com­ munication kept the inhabitants well-informed of trends and debates at home.66 The experience of the first decades of settlement, however, revealed tensions and fallacies in the settlers' conceptualization of their economy and their developmental goals. Thus the emigrants were forced to craft a distinct political economy that balanced the exigencies of their frontier underdevel­ opment with Puritan culture.

64. Mllss. Recs., 1:28, 32-33, 109, 2:180. 65. Crowley, This SHEBA, Self, 2 66. David Cressy, Stephen Foster, and Virginia Anderson all attest to the surprisingly ex­

tensive and effective networks of transatlantic communication that the first settlers to New England established and their continued interest in English sociopolitical developments. See Anderson, New England's Generation, 122; Cressy, Coming Over, 213-34; Stephen Foster, The Long Argument: English Puritanism and the Shaping of New England Culture, 1570-1700 (Chapel Hill. 1991). The list of important economic, political, and religious figures who returned to England included Henry Vane, Robert Qilld, William Pynchon, and Hugh Peter. See An­ drew Delbanco, "Looking Homeward, Going Home: The Lure of England for the Founders of New England," New England Quarterly 65 (September 1986): 358-86; and Newell, "Robert Child and the Entrepreneurial Vision," 25�56.

CHAPTER TWO

REGU LATION IN T HE WILDERNES S

In old England, the Puritans were a minority, albeit a vocal one; although they exercised considerable influence on socioeconomic legislation and policy, they could not dominate. The creation of polities in New England of­ fered Puritan leaders an opportunity to institutionalize their ideas about political economy. The New England governments quickly replicated many English economic regulations and added laws to foster industry, frugality, and order. At the same time, town and provincial authorities and individual entrepreneurs aggressively pursued a variety of ambitious ventures in emu­ lation of English projects. Within two decades, however, practical experi­ ence led the settlers to reject some aspects of their English commercial experience and ideology and to recast others. In some cases, they acceler­ ated certain changes then overtaking England's economy such as the priva­ tization of land; in other cases, they abandoned specific developmental plans and policies in the face of failure. One important institutional shift occurred in the area of public policy and regulation. By the late 164Os, the colonists had abandoned many traditional forms of socioeconomic regulation that circumscribed market behavior in favor of policies that facilitated it. First in response to a serious economic de­ pression, but then as a matter of course, provincial and local governments assumed the responsibility for promoting economic development and di­ versification and for aiding private entrepreneurial projects in a form of "mixed enterprise." Puritanism played an important role in all of these changes, and not merely as an impediment to the liberalization of New England's political economy. Rather, the Puritans' emphasis on industry, productivity, and the

Regulation in the Wilderness

37

common good offered a moral and institutional framework for some of the most dramatic commercial changes. Those New Englanders who favored promotional policies were careful to subsume this political economy within a Puritan discourse of commonwealth; they justified an activist state on the grounds that commercial expansion enhanced the common good by ensur­ ing collective prosperity.

Land and Development One of the first areas in which New England settlers showed a willingness to jettison aspects of the English economic legacy�r at least to endorse the most liberal trends then current in the mother country-involved land. Pu­ ritan gentry in England had tended to endorse such measures as the 1631 Book of Orders, which facilitated enclosure, as a positive economic reform. But considerations of the social impact of enclosure-vagrancy, short-term subsistence crises, rural agitation-gave pause to even the most avid sup­ porters of privatization in England. Although their company charters freed the New England colonists from many feudal restrictions and gave their governments wide latitude with regard to land distribution, the same cus­ tomary and ideological restrictions that limited the exercise of property rights and impeded the commodification of land in the mother country af­ fected the colonies. Moreover, some settlers in both Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay came from regions where a common-field system predominated and thus were in­ clined to recreate this form of land organization in towns such as Rowley and Andover in Massachusetts and Milford in Connecticut.! Early inhabi­ tants jealously guarded "howse holder[s']" rights of access to wood, fish, and other resources on unassigned lands, privileges affirmed by the 1641 Massachusetts Body of Uberties.2 The founders' socioreligious ideals fur­ ther reinforced this commitment to communalism; both Wtlliam Bradford and John Wmthrop hoped that shared ownership of property and other re­ sources would reinforce the covenants that bound their respective commu­ nities together and prevent the spatial scattering of the tiny initial settlements, which they viewed as detrimental to church and community 1 See David Grayson Allen. In English Wqs: The Muvement of Societies and the Transferral of English Local Urw and Custom to MJJSS«husetts Bay in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill, 1981), �54, and "Both Englands," in David Hall and Allen. eds., Seventeenth-Century New England (Boston, 1984), 5S-82; Darrett Rutman.. Husbandmen ofPlymouth (Boston, 1967), chap. 1; Philip Greven. Four Ge1Ierations: Population, Land, and Family in Colonial Andover, MAssachu ­ setts (Ithaca. 1970), 42-44. 2. The text of the Body of Uberties is reprinted in Francis C. Gray, "Remarks on the Early Laws of Massachusetts Bay," Collections of the MAssachusetts Historical Society, 3d ser., 8

(Boston, 1843), 191-217, 219.

38

From Dependency to Independence

cohesion. In the case of Plymouth, the lack of supplies and of other settle­ ments to turn to and the need to maintain a defensive posture against poten­ tial French, Dutch, and Spanish incursions, coupled with the hard realities of the settlers' substantial collective debt to company investors in England, further strengthened Bradford's determination to preserve a "common course and condition" among the inhabitants.3 Despite these intentions, two dynamics-the ethic of improvement and the sheer availability of land in New England-ensured that New England quickly moved beyond the mother country in embracing fee simple land tenure. In Plymouth, settlers complained that instead of community the col­ lectivist system bred discontent and laziness and retarded production. The inhabitants wanted to be recompensed for their individual improvements and yields. After two years of food shortages the Pilgrims abandoned their experiment in communal farming and agreed to adopt individual plots; in 1624 and again in 1627, Governor Bradford reluctantly surrendered to the distribution and sale of private lands. Enclosure, he admitted, "had very good success, for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise . . . . [Even) women now went willingly into the fields, and took the little ones with them." 4 The "Essay on the Ordering of Towns," a plan that offered guidelines for land distribution in Massachu­ setts Bay, agreed that one acre of private land produced more than five acres in common strips, privatization being Ita goade in the side of Industrious­ ness." 5 Massachusetts's first legal code of 1641 confirmed the commitment to the principle of private ownership; it defined land as an alienable com­ modity, like any other, and granted proprietors freedom from feudal or other restrictions.6 New Englanders' rapidly evolving ideas about land ownership created a fertile field for entrepreneurship. Through the founding of new towns, which were New England's units of social, religious, and political organiza­ tion, colonial governments rapidly accomplished the transfer of owner­ ship from the chartered company to a few town planters and finally to individual inhabitants? In Massachusetts, the General Court continued to oversee the formal processes of land granting and titling; to ensure that the settlers worked and improved their land grants, the magistrates adopted fencing laws and provisos requiring that owners cultivate and clear 3. Darrett Rutman, Winthrop's Boston: Portrait ofa Puritan Town (Chapel Hill, 1965), chap. 1 and 63-{,5, 68. 4. William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, ed Samuel Eliot Morison (New York, 1979), 120. 5. Winthrop Papers, 6 vols. to date (Boston, 1929-), 3:181. 6. Massachusetts Body of Liberties, provision 10, in Gray, "Early Laws of Massachusetts Bay," 218. 7. William Haller, The Puritan Frontier: Town Planting in New England Colonial Development, 1630-1660 (New York, 1951), 13, 17, 22, 24-28.

Regulation in the Wilderness

39

their lands within a specified period, "that they may . . . improve their labors thereon." By basing the "civil right" of property ownership on the cultivation and improvement of land, "account[ing] nothing their owne, but that which they had appropriated by their own industry," the Puritans em­ braced a concept of private property impossible to replicate in the mother country.8 In England, the social meanings of land-status for the rich, sub­ sistence for the poor-hampered its transformation into a commodity; but in America, many of these social impediments, particularly the latter, did not exist. Town and colony governments consciously sought to preserve class dif­ ferentiation with unequal divisions of land, "each according to his station," a practice that continued through the seventeenth century. Indeed, William Bradford recorded that one reason behind privatization in Plymouth was that some elite settlers resented the equality with "the younger and meaner sort" that communal holdings forced upon "the aged and graver men"; sep­ arate and unequal holdings, it was thought, would restore the vertical ranks so essential to social order.9 Still, most New England adult males in this first generation, even former servants, could become "howse holders" with rela­ tive ease. to Privatization and the laws accompanying it had important social and economic consequences, some of them contradictory. On the one hand, because allotments generally went to heads of households, these mecha­ nisms tended to reinforce patriarchy and to affirm the importance of the family farm as the main productive unit in the New England economy. The possibility of owning land seduced many former artisans, fishermen, and townsmen away from their crafts, thus reversing the contemporary English trend toward specialization and division of labor. The diversion of produc­ tive workers away from construction and manufactures into agriculture (and the resulting labor shortages and high wages that skilled workers commanded) hampered diversification and certain kinds of develop­ ment. On the other hand, New Englanders turned the family farm into a re­ markably productive unit capable of adjusting to a wide variety of condi­ tions and tasks, from agriculture to dairying to piecework under the putting-out system. And the clearing and planting of land represented an 8. Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New Ellgland, ed. Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, 5 vols. (1854; Boston, 1968), 1:99, 114, 281, 364 (hereafter cited as Mass. Recs.); for John Wmthrop's distinction between "civil" and "natural" rights to property, see his "General Observations for the Plantation of New England," in Winthrop Papers, 2:120. 9. Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 121; see also John Frederick Martin, Profits in the Wilderness: Entrepreneurs and the Founding of New England Towns in the Seventeenth Century

(Chapel Hill, 1991), which emphasizes both the entrepreneurial nature of town founders and the resulting inequity of resource distribution. 10. See Greven, Four Generations, 45-47.

40

From Dependency to Independence

important kind of development. Indeed, the creation of farms and specula­ tion in land became key capital-creating activities for inhabitants in the colo­ nial period. 11 Privatization also had serious consequences for the early colonists' rela­ tions with the Indians-indeed, it formed the basis of their ideological jus­ tification for the displacement of native inhabitants. In tract after tract, New England apologists dismissed the Indians' claim to ownership in lan­ guage similar to that which contemporary English writers used to des­ cribe the Irish, as well as England's own vagrant poor. They invoked arguments that could have been lifted from contemporary English debates over the enclosure of commons and the king's forests.J2 For example, William Bradford referred to the Americas as "fruitful and fit for habita­ tion, being devoid of all civil inhabitants, where there are only savage and brutish men which range up and down, little otherwise than the wild beasts of the same." John Winthrop echoed Bradford's words in an effort to preclude criticism regarding the moral underpinnings of the Bay Company's claims on inhabited lands in Massachusetts. "What warrant have we to take the land which is and hath bine soe long tyme possessed by other sonnes of Adam?" he declaimed rhetorically: ''That which is commen to all is proper to none." In his eyes, the Indians' collective use of territory and seasonal migrations to hunt, gather berries, and catch fish to supple­ ment their com and bean diet meant that "these savage people ramble over much land without title or property." The native inhabitants' failure to im­ prove the land through "particular manurance," fencing, and cultivation voided their legal and moral right to possession: "They inclose no ground, neither have they cattell to maintayne it, but remove their dwellings as they have occasion." U Through their labor, physical improvements, and the fruitful, productive results, the Massachusetts Bay colonists would stake a higher claim. This position was disingenuous given the early settlers' economic reliance on Indian trade, hunting, and agriculture and their exploitation of physical resources that the Native Americans had husbanded (albeit in ways distinct from European expectations). In fact, the Indians' previous use of the land and their continued presence actually made the early economic develop­ ment of New England possible. Europeans who came to the Atlantic coast encountered not a virgin land but rather an environment that the Indians 11. John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, The Economy of British America, 1 607-1789 (Chapel Hill, 1985), 84, 141 12. See, for example, "Reasons in Favour of Enclosures at Slimbridge, Gloucestershire, 1629" and "Proposals for the Improvement of Waste Ground, 1653," in Joan Thirsk and J. P. Cooper, eds., Seventeenth-Century Economic Documents (London, 1972), 122-23, 135-41; Josiah Child, A New Discourse on Trade (London 1809), 76-77. 13. Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 25; Winthrop, "GeneraIObservations," 113, 120. .

Regulation in the Wilderness

41

manipulated in a variety of ways, such as creating networks of trails for trade and communication. firing undergrowth both to replenish the soil and to create attractive habitats for large game, or burning timber both for fuel and to clear fields for the planting of corn. squash, and beans.14 Describing Salem in 1629, Francis Higginson noted that "there is much ground cleared by the Indians, and especially about the plantation . . . a man might stand on a little hilly place and see divers thousands of acres of ground as good as need be, and not a tree to the same." In choosing sites for their own settle­ ments and cornfields, Europeans showed a decided preference for these so­ called champion or open lands.ls True, as Bradford charged, the Indians did "range up and down" with few material possessions, pursuing different food sources in different sea­ sons and abandoning exhausted fields after several crops rather than for­ mally fertilizing them. The degree to which distinct groups Qf New England Indians engaged in agriculture, a higher use of land according to European notions of civility, varied significantly throughout the region. The more sedentary Narragansetts and Pequots obtained over half their food supply through planting, while the Abenaki and Pennacooks of northern New En­ gland relied more heavily on the hunt, occasionally trading furs for grain with their southern neighbors. Although the colonists were aware of these distinctions in practice, they tended to employ a single "savage" stereotype when they discussed matters of legal right and ownership. In addition, these European observers were judging Indian societies at a time when the latter were experiencing severe social dislocation and mortality as a result of contact with European disease. Some of the clearings the Pilgrims en­ countered had been abandoned not as a matter of course but because epidemics had decimated the native inhabitants and disrupted their subsis­ tence cycles. Moreover, for all their criticism of the Indians' waste, lack of productivity, and laziness, the first settlers' ability to purchase or appropriate small sur­ pluses of com and game from the Indians made the difference between star­ vation and survival. At least one observer admitted that the Indians' output per acre equaled that of fertilized English fields.16 The Mayflower'S passen­ gers obtained the seed com and beans they planted for their first harvest 14. See Richard White, "American Indians and the Environment," Environmental Review 9 (Summer 1985): 101-3; William Denevan. ''The Pristine Myth: The Landscape of the Ameri­ cas in 1492," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 82 (1992): 369-85; William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York, 1983), esp. chap. 3. 15. Francis Higginson, "New England's Plantation"; Thomas Graves to ?, September 1629; John Pond to William Pond, 15 March 1630/31, all in Everett Emerson, Letters from New England: The Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1629-1638 (Amherst. Mass., 1976), 30, 39, 64; Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 72. 16. Edward Winslow, Good News, in The Story of the Pilgrim Fathers (London, 1897), 594.

42

From Dependency to Independence

from a Nauset Indian cache on Cape Cod, and purchases of venison and grain succored Massachusetts Bay in 1630 and 1634 and Connecticut in 1637-38.17 Once the colonists harvested a few crops, this dependency de­ clined, but even then the Indians' continued willingness to trade provided Plymouth and Massachusetts with their most valuable remittance commod­ ity of the 1620 and 1630s: furs. By 1629, Salemites were selling com to the In­ dians in exchange for furs, and for many early settlers-as well as for the Massachusetts Bay Company governors-the fur trade was the only way to tum a profit or pay the high prices commanded by imported European manufactures and provisions. IS The colonists' strictures also ignored the fact that the native inhabitants' hunting and gathering economies left their "improving" mark on the envi­ ronment as well Seasonal firings that killed waste plants simultaneously fostered the growth of berry bushes and other edibles, and there is evidence that Indians transplanted and managed useful wild species; Roger Williams of Rhode Island was amazed that strawberry plants, so attractive to the colonists, grew in greatest profusion "where the Natives have planted." 19 Fire also created parklike stands of trees and grass meadows that facilitated deer hunting and reminded Williams of the "Parkes" and "great Forrests" maintained by English nobility and royalty for the coursing of game. These intentional burnings and other improvements, such as the deer traps that the Narragansetts constructed, led Williams to argue in 1635 that the Indi­ ans could legitimately claim ownership of established hunting grounds under English law.20 Williams's position was a rarity, however; only when it was in their inter­ est to do s-1705 and a fluctuating inter­ national market in precious metals also contributed to the flight of silver from New England The price of silver in relation to gold rose in the early eighteenth century, but both England and America failed to readjust their official currency valuations. As a result, gold coins were overvalued and sil­ ver coins were undervalued, and Massachusetts, along with the mother country, lost silver to Holland, France, and other markets.25 Contemporaries were quick to point out that New England's insatiable taste for English imports further sapped its economy of specie. Despite the promises of Mather and Blackwell, paper money had not helped the New England colonies balance their foreign trade. Thomas Banister estimated that the region remitted as much as £60,000 annually to the mother country by 1715, "till all was gone." But Banister also blamed the specie shortage on the dependent, underdeveloped nature of the colonial economy, for which English policy bore some responsibility. Without manufacturing or new ex­ port industries, he pointed out, the region could not hope to maintain a specie-based currency.26

In

addition to these general conditions, Boston in

particular faced a changed commercial landscape in the eighteenth century. At home, Newport, Providence, Salem, Portsmouth, New York, and other emerging ports challenged its primacy as the regional trading center. Abroad, Boston's international merchants complained about the harassment of privateers, increased regulation and duties, and competition from other

24. CCR, 1:34-35. 25. CCR, 1:34; Riesman, "Origins of American Political Economy," 93-96. 26. [Thomas Banister), A Letter to the . . . Lords Commissioners of Trade & Plantations . . . (London, 1715), 11-13, 8.

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suppliers in the Indies trade.27 King William's War and Queen Anne's War had brought some economic opportunities, but war's end generaUy precipi­ tated a downturn in the business cycle. Whatever its root causes, many New Englanders agreed that the dearth of specie made a new supply of bills even more necessary. The public's initial wariness of paper money had given way to broad acceptance. Many feared that if the assemblies redeemed and withdrew the bills on schedule, the re­ sulting contraction in the money supply might impede the colonies' recov­

ery from postwar economic stagnation, an outcome some inhabitants feared

more than inflation or depreciation. The Rhode Island legislature declared

in 1715 that "there is a sensible decay of trade, the farmers thereby discour­

aged, . . . and all sorts of business languishing, few having wherewith to

pay their arrears; and many not wherewithal to sustain their daily wants by

reason that the silver and gold . . . have been exhausted." 28 Converting al­ most any property or commodities into money was extremely difficult.29At the same time, the Massachusetts General Court noted the populace's aver­ sion to taxes; a peacetime emission of bills would require the levying of new assessments, and many on the court doubted the inhabitants' willingness to pay that price By the 16905, Massachusetts inhabitants were paying a 10shilling poll tax and a

25 percent personal property

tax annually; and tax

burdens during Queen Anne's War had grown to even more dizzying levels. In 1704-5, when campaigns against the French cost the province £40,000, the average family had paid £5; but by the end of the war, its annual costs had

tripled and Bostonians were rioting in the streets to protest grain prices.30 Yet if government postponed the taxes necessary to redeem the bills, some magistrates feared, depreciation and devaluation of the paper money and a loss of public faith would certainly result. Public officials whipsawed by these countervailing pressures regarding paper money soon confronted a third option. A group of merchants, includ­ ing Elisha Cooke, Jr., Oliver Noyes, John Colman, Samuel Lynde, and William Payne, resurrected proposals for a private bank of credit to meet the

colony's monetary needs.31 Lynde and Cooke were sons of merchants who had supported the bank proposal of 1686; John Colman was a Boston mer­

chant and representative. Other signatories included John Ouiton, a land speculator also interested in fisheries; Timothy Thornton, a Boston ship

-

27. See, for example, Edward Wigglesworth, The Country-Man's Answer, to a Letter Intituled, The Distressed State of the Town of Boston Considered (Boston, 18 April 1720), in CCR, 1:424. 28. Records of the Colony of Rhode Is/and and Providence Plantations in New England, ed. John R. Bartlett, 10 vols. (Providence, 1856-65), 4:189-90. 29. Banister, Letter to the . . . Lords Commissioners, 14-15. 30. Pencak, War, Politics, and Revolution, 47, 49. 31. CCR, 1:312-16; Hutchinson, History ofMassachusetts, 2:155.

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From Dependency to Independence

John Colman. Courtesy of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Boston.

builder and wharf lessee; Nathaniel Oliver, a Boston representative to the House; and Edward Lyde, a merchant and army supplier who had received a portion of the 1 711 loan to merchants who outfitted the Quebec expedi­ tion. After reprinting John Blackwell's 1 688 pamphlet, they submitted their plan to the General Court in February 1 71 4, requested a charter, and adver­ tised their intentions in the Boston News-Letter. The bank would issue to its subscribers £300,000 in bills based on security of land and personal prop­ erty. The bank would issue subscribers agreed to accept the bank' s bills in ordinary transactions. The plan placed a cap on individual subscriptions to ensure broad public involvement. In this same spirit, nonsubscribers who posted security could borrow from the bank at 5 percent interest. To protect themselves from charges of selfishness and profiteering (and to encourage the government to accept land bank bills in payment of taxes), the bankers promised to reinvest some of their profits in the community by contributing to Harvard College, county grammar schools, and other charities. They also

Paper Money and Public Policy, 1 690-1714

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made a conscious effort to link their project to capital improvements and the development of internal resources and import-substitution industries such as cordage and linen manufacturing.32 The private bank proposal aroused a storm of controversy in the Bay

Colony. Although the House endorsed Colman and Cooke's plan, Governor Joseph Dudley and key council members-Andrew and Jonathan Belcher, Samuel Sewall-refused to grant them a charter. The outcome, however, was far from a victory for anti-bank forces. The controversy cost Dudley the governorship; and his successor, Samuel Shute, gave an election speech to

the Assembly linking the people's happiness to a steady supply of paper

money. Shute made good on his word. To assuage public ire and to divert the continued pressure for a private bank, the court approved two addi­ tional emissions of public bills totaling £150,000 in 1714 and 1716.33 Moreover, instead of basing the new bills on future tax revenues, the Gen­ eral Court departed from precedent and borrowed aspects of the private bankers' plan. Massachusetts would operate a public bank of credit and loan bills to individuals for five years at 5 percent interest in exchange for mortgages on their lands. The new public bank project had something to

offer to both sides in the controversy: some of the loans went to disap­ pointed supporters of the private bank, while several councillors who had opposed the scheme, including Andrew Belcher, the elder Thomas Hutchin­ son, and Edward Hutchinson, were appointed trustees. Unlike the earlier public loan, which had gone to merchants and war contractors, the act of December 1716 extended the repayment period to ten years and appor­ tioned the bills to the towns in accordance with their tax burdens to provide "relief under these present difficulties, and that the husbandry, fishery and other trade and commerce of the province be encouraged and promoted." 34 The towns in tum appointed trustees who supervised the loans to individu­ als, collected interest (a portion of which the town fathers got to keep), and set limits of £50 to £200 on individual loans to prevent a few powerful men from monopolizing them. By 1717, all the New England colonies except Connecticut (which continued to base the bills it issued on tax revenues until 1733) had adopted this method of issuing paper money through a pub­ lic land bank.3S Rhode Island introduced its own variations to the process, however; the legislature distributed its bills through the mediation of "shar­ ers." These shareholders, often members of the Assembly, initially received the bills on loan and then could relend them at a higher interest rate to other individuals; the sharer could also sell his privilege of participating in the

32. CCR, 1:40-41; Banister, Letter to the . . . Lords Commissioners, 15. 33. Hutchinson, History of Massachusetts, 2:155-57. 34. MIlss. Acts and Resolves, 11:61�2; Brock, Currency of the American Colonies, 27-28; Hutchinson, History ofMassachusetts, 2:163. 35. Brock, Currency of the American Colonies, 41-42.

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From Dependency to Independence

loan issues. The Rhode Island system gave government officials an added personal interest in supporting regular public loans. The events of 1 714-16 marked the beginning rather than the end of New Englanders' contest over banking and money policy. Before 1714, aside from a few sermons and pamphlets by Cotton Mather and Blackwell, no one had subjected colonial currency policy to sustained analysis. The publication of Colman and Cooke's plan opened the gates to a flood of anti- and pro-paper writings. The currency debate was really two debates. The first and more se­ rious battle was over whether paper bills were a legitimate form of currency that might alleviate some of New England's economic woes and even stim­ ulate development. The second issue was whether a private bank or a public emission best served the colonies' need for a circulating medium and a source of credit. Several factors distinguished the banking and currency debates from pre­ vious policy conflicts. First, the new round of currency discussions took place in a public sphere that was expanding in response to changes in com­ munication and the dissemination of information.36 In the seventeenth cen­ tury, political and commercial information was a precious commodity. It was the provenance of educated, urban elites with access to political office, to London newspapers, and to networks of correspondents and well-placed friends and family, and it was subject to government censorship and con­ trol. This situation began to change in the eighteenth century. New England's first continuously published newspaper, the

Boston News-Letter, Boston Gazette, appeared in and James Franklin inaugurated his short-lived New England Courant

began publication in 1 704; a rival periodical, the 1719;

in 1 721. Likewise, by the eighteenth century the region boasted enough printing presses to sustain an ongoing pamphlet war. The weekly format of the newspapers facilitated swift ripostes and satire, while pamphlets offered sustained discussion of complex proposals. Between 1719 and 1721 alone, nineteen pamphlets or articles on paper money appeared in print.37 Although some accounts have placed white male literacy in colonial New England at 80 percent or more and the percentage of women with reading (as opposed to writing) skills at nearly the same level, it is important not to overstate the extent to which these materials circulated across space and within the hierarchic social order. John Campbell, printer of the News-Letter, seldom sold more than 300 copies weekly before 1719; as for books and pamphlets, the press runs of all but "steady sellers" were small; and the au­ dience for printed materials other than religious works, almanacs, and other standbys was correspondingly limited, consisting mostly of urban mer-

36. See Jiirgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, Mass., 1989); Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), 1-26, 36, 43-49. 37. CCR, 4:v.

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chants, clergymen, and officials.38 Still, newspapers and pamphlets reached larger numbers of people than direct sales might indicate. Samuel Sewall sent Boston newspapers and pamphlets to friends and relatives throughout Massachusetts, for example, and other readers could peruse them in port taverns and country stores; handwritten copies of important articles and public pronouncements also circulated in areas more distant from the me­ tropolis. Authors of pamphlets on currency in particular appear to have ag­ gressively circulated and promoted their works among both elite and artisan.aI audiences with some success.39 To paraphrase one historian, then, although the post-I720 changes in New England's print communication system did not immediately democratize public discourse, newspapers and pamphlets made information about commerce and policy available to a wider circle of elite and middling New Englanders, both Boston and beyond.40 The existence of multiple print vehicles for disseminating information not only broadened the circle of those who participated in its production and consumption but also altered the tone and content of public discussion of economic affairs. After 1714, the openness and partisan critical character of writings on currency policy seriously alarmed successive colonial gover­ nors. Samuel Shute attempted to censor the debate in 1720, objecting that certain pamphlets reflected "upon ye Acts & Laws of ye Province & other proceedings of ye Govemmt & halve) the tendency to disturb the adminis­ tration of ye Govemmt as well as the publici< Peace." 41 But the Massachu­ setts Assembly overwhelmingly refused to prosecute John Colman, the author of the pamphlet that provoked Shute's ire; thereafter the paper money debate remained largely immune to official censorship. The shifting character of public discourse on paper money was closely linked to a second important quality of the eighteenth-century currency de­ bates-they engaged in a dialectic with changes in colonial New England political culture, particularly in Massachusetts. The Glorious Revolution ushered in a new era of provincial politics that differed from that of the pre­ ceding decades in several respects. Having deposed Edmund Andros and the Dominion of New England under the banner of English rights, members 38. Frank Luther Mott. AmeriCiln lourntllism: A History, 1690-1960, 3d ed. (New York, 1962), 13. For a general discussion of the evolution of publishing and print in early New England, see the essays in William L Joyce, David D. HaU, et aI., Printing and Society in Early America (Worcester, Mass., 1983), esp. Hall's Introduction, "The Uses of Literacy in New England," 1-47. 39. Warner, Letters of the Republic, 45; Gary Nash, The Urban Crucible (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), 86. 40. Richard D. Brown. Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 17� 1865 (New York, 1989), 38-39. 41. Quoted in Charles K. Bolton, ''The Arrest of John Colman," in Transactions of the Colo­ nial Society ofMassachusetts, voL 6 (Boston, 1899-19(0), 83-85.

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From Dependency to Independence

of the lower house continued to employ the same language of resistance to prerogative power in controversies with successive executives and council­ lors, casting themselves in the role of protector of the people's freedoms. The new charter had increased the size of the eligible electorate by about one-third as well.42 Since many advocates of paper money and banking were also House leaders, the money question became inextricably inter­ twined with the political struggle between the executive and the Assembly, especially during the Shute and Belcher administrations.43 Elisha Cooke, Jr., Oliver Noyes, John Colman, John Wise, and later John Choate and James Allen made banks and currency issues a rallying cry of the "Popular party" through the mid-1740s. Cotton Mather condemned them as "a wicked Party in this Countrey who fill the Land with Strife and Sin . . . Hinder[ers] of good, and Misleader[s] and Enchanter[s] of the People"; a crown official ac­ cused Cooke of endeavoring "to pyson the Minds of his countreymen, with his republican notions, in order to assert the Independency of New En­ gland." 44 But no one disputed their ability to mobilize popular opinion. Initially these political rivalries involved a fairly small elite circle of urban merchants, landowners, and professionals, but the pro- and antibank forces increasingly appealed to the wider public for support and validation. In 1715 the Massachusetts House began publishing its proceedings; although edited to mask division and acrimony among the delegates, the House Jour­ nals exposed constituents to opposing official views on the issues of the day, including paper money.45 At the same time, as the General Court shouldered new tasks relating to war and finance, there were more issues to contest. Public emissions required action by the colonial legislatures, and even pri­ vate banks needed the government's imprimatur. As a general rule, local government had a greater impact on New En­ glanders' lives than provincial government did in the seventeenth century; but in the eighteenth century, with the rise of such issues as military appro­ priations, taxes, officials' salaries, and currency, provincial assemblies were making decisions that directly affected citizens' interests. Indeed, propo­ nents of paper money in the General Court took pains to convince people that this was so by delegating administrative responsibilities (and benefits) deriving from the distribution of paper money to the towns beginning in 1716. More significant, they actively dragged formerly quiescent localities 42. Pencak, War, Politics, and Revolution, 17. 43. See John Brooke, The Heart of the Commonwealth: Society and Political Culture in Worces­ ter County, Massachusetts, 1 713-1861 (Cambridge, Mass., 1989); and Robert Zemsky, Mer­ chants, Farmers, and River Gods: An E.ssay on E.ighteenth-Century American Politics (Boston, 1971). 44. "Diary of Cotton Mather" and Surveyor General Bridger to Lords of Trade, both quoted in John L. Sibley, Gifford K. Shipton, et aL, Biographical Sketches of Graduates of Har­ vard University, 17 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., and Boston, 1873-), 4:263, 352. 45. Zemsky, Merchants, Farmers, and River Gods, 24(}..42.

Paper Money and Public Policy, 1 690-1 714

141

into contentions over paper money by speechifying at town meetings, by drafting petitions, and by calling on the towns to send their representatives voting instructions when crucial bills came before the court. After 1719, pamphlet writers routinely encouraged their readers to evaluate the colonies' public policy and to support or oppose specific measures at the polls. By 1720, complained Thomas Hutchinson, trade issues, money short­ ages, war expenditures, and private bank schemes created an atmosphere in which "the minds of the people were prepared for impressions from pam­ phlets, courants, and other news papers, which were frequently published . . . that their civil liberties and privileges were struck at." 46 Thus the pamphleteers and political figures who contributed to the cur­ rency debates were not just engaging in philosophical arguments; they were trying to mobilize voters, as well as officials on both sides of the Atlantic, in support of specific currency policies. Provincial elections in 1719-21, 1728, and 1739-41 largely turned on money issues. By the 1720s, town meetings in Dighton, Hadley, Ipswich, Dedham, and other localities were discussing the currency question, petitioning the court for new emissions, and occasionally instructing their representatives on specific votes, a practice that escalated when the currency drama reached a crisis in the 174Os.41 Although editors of the Massachusetts House Journals generally avoided publishing roll call votes or verbatim accounts of assembly debates, this self-censorship began to break down under the pressure of the currency controversies; seven of the nine roll calls made public between 1739 and 1753 involved currency issues.48 More than innovative political, informational, and discursive modes, however, the banking and currency debates introduced new forms of eco­ nomic analysis into public life. As Perry Miller noted, the money controver­ sies of the early eighteenth century signaled a rejection of the jeremiad as a means of explaining commercial change in favor of the secular language of political economy.49 When they participated in currency debates, opposing clerics such as Edward Wigglesworth and John Wise did not invoke their ministerial authority, nor did they cast economic behavior in terms of sin and punishment. Instead, they offered competing macroeconomic analyses of political virtue, the balance of trade, and the role of money. Although their solutions to Massachusetts's economic woes differed dramatically-re­ trenchment versus a pump-priming flow of paper money-both assumed that those woes were amenable to human tinkering (as opposed to divine intervention). They drew distinctions between socioeconomic and religious affairs unthinkable in John Winthrop's generation, when civil leaders had 46. Hutchinson, History of Massachusetts, 2:174-75.

47. Chapter 10 examines politicization at the town level in more detail. 48. Zemsky, Merchants, Farmers, and River Gods, Statistical Appendix, Table 12, 315-16. 49. Miller, New England Mind, 310.

142

From Dependency to Independence

consulted with ministers to craft economic legislation. Writers on all sides of the controversy took for granted the existence of competing economic inter­ ests in New England society to a degree incompatible with earlier concep­ tions of an organic body politic and the covenant. Proponents of paper money took these general assumptions and tactics a step further. They reexamined seventeenth-century truisms about human nature, motivation, work, commerce, and self-interest and injected the lib­ eral language of the marketplace into public debate. Writers such as Wise were careful not to reduce religion to a purely utilitarian role, however; in­ stead, they grafted the language of industry, frugality, and Puritan statism onto their proposals for banks and commercial expansion. In the portrait of New England society they limned, commerce, prosperity, individual recti­ tude, piety, and social benevolence joined hands. Despite similarities in language and approach, then, the opposing sides in New England's currency debates offered substantially different visions of the colonies' economic future.50 This social and ideological content of the paper money debate, not merely the new forms and styles in which it was disseminated, prompted a high level of interest and politicization. Propo­ nents and opponents of paper money diagnosed many of the same prob­ lems-- ,�

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The Imperial Crisis

283

stop imports of specific British goods through May 1766. With the Revenue Act and Free Port Act of 1766 Parliament offered concessions designed to as­ suage earlier colonial grievances: repeal of the Stamp Act, reduced duties on non-English goods, a smaller duty on foreign molasses, the free reexporta­ tion of plantation commodities, and two free ports in the Caribbean. English authorities trumpeted this program as "the basis of an extensive system of trade between Great-Britain and her Colonies, framed on liberal principles of reciprocal advantage." 37 Such reforms came too late, however, for discourse in New England had moved beyond free trade arguments to more generalized complaints about the underdevelopment of the New England economy. An economy that had formerly seemed healthy and functional now appeared fundamentally flawed. By the middle of the 1760s, New England merchants were feeling the effects of the transatlantic credit contraction; their stocks were glutted with imported goods, and notices of bankruptcies and auctions appeared with increasing frequency in local newspapers. A perception of chronic cur­ rency shortages, indebtedness to British suppliers, bankruptcies, and trade deficits shaped the deliberations of colonial legislatures and newspapers, and many blamed British policy in part for the economic downturn. Even more than in 1763-64, the inequality of the imperial relationship­ not just specific duties or legislation within the system-became the target of colonial complaints after 1765. The citizens of Roxbury knew where to ap­ portion blame for their depressed trade and currency shortages; the prob­ lem was not just high duties or the "Customs Officers, like the horse leech," it was the colonies' economic dependence on the mother country.38 In a peti­ tion to Lord Shelbourne in 1768, the Boston Town Meeting also decried colo­ nial dependency. According to the petitioners, because "the Colonists are prohibited from importing commodities and manufactures of the growth of Europe," the resulting lack of competition had allowed British producers to set artificially high prices, to the detriment of colonial consumers. Worse, "the same reasoning holds good with respect to the many articles of [New England] produce, which the Colonists are restrained by Act of Parliament from sending to foreign ports"; in other words, England's monopoly artifi­ cially depressed the value of local exports.39 Squeezed as bOth producers and consumers, residents of New England towns found that Britain's eco­ nomic dominance threatened their "comforts," the material cushion that separated competency from mere subsistence. Against this background, the nonimportation movement, particularly the second wave of boycotts in 17�70, unleashed a critical reexamination of 37. Portsmouth Mercury, 1 September 1766; Tyler, Smugglers and Patriots, 95-96. 38. Boston Weeldy News-Letter, 1 June 1769; Massachusetts Gazette and Boston News-Letter, 1 7 March 1768. 39. Massachusetts Gazette and Boston News-Letter, 31 March 1768.

284

From Dependency to Independence

the region's productive capacity, internal trade networks, and consumption patterns. This second nonimportation movement, a response to the Town­ shend Act-which created an American Board of Customs, levied duties on glass, lead, paint, tea, and paper, and granted trade concessions to the East India Company-differed from its predecessor in several respects. Whereas Boston merchants had led the regional boycotts of 1765-66, a broader con­ stituency of policymakers and consumers participated in the more compre­ hensive boycotts of 1767-70. A writer in the Boston Gazette first proposed the nonimportation of British goods in August 1767; by October, the Boston Town Meeting had presented the Board of Customs with a list of grievances and resolved not to purchase certain luxury goods-silks and millinery products, as well as such commodities as starch, glue, cheese, and paper­ that could be produced in America40 Towns throughout Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, as well as a few in New Hampshire and Maine, adopted their own nonimportation resolves in 1768 or instructed their representatives to condemn English actions. Participating communi­ ties included such country towns as Windham and Norwich, Connecticut, and the commercial centers of Providence and Newport. Writers who favored nonimportation quickly adopted a broader agenda than mere repeal of the Stamp Act and Townshend duties. Although initial agreements specified that the boycott take place in a limited time frame, within a year some Boston merchants argued that it should be extended whether or not Parliament repealed the duties. Articles and petitions con­ cerning nonimportation addressed a broad array of economic concerns. Similarly, town resolutions went beyond boycotts and encouraged the local manufacture of prescribed goods. The Boston merchants' meeting of March 1768, for example, specifically exempted capital goods-the tools of manu­ facture-from the boycott in order to "encourage the produce & Manufac­ tures of these Colonies." "Coals, Fish Hooks & Line, hemp & duck [used in ships' cordage and sails], barr Lead & Shott, wool Cards & Card Wire" were all permissible.41 Because of this emphaSiS on local manufactures and ex­ change, nonimportation resonated with the economic and political interests of artisans competing with British goods, as well as with "middling" mer­ chants, internal traders, and retailers who resented the dominance and criti­ cism of Atlantic merchant-importers. Thus the boycott appealed to a large number of New Englanders with no ties to the Atlantic trade who had nothing to lose and everything to gain from expansion of the internal economy. 40. Tyler, Smugglers and Patriots, 111, 113; Charles M. Andrews, The Boston Merchants and the Non-Importation Movement (New York, 1968), 33-34.

41. "Boston Merchants, 1768-69 (Subscription lists, resolutions, agreements, &rc. relative to the importation of merchandize from Great Britain)," Massachusetts Historical Society (facsimile in the Huntington Library).

The Imperial Crisis

285

As a result, a growing number of New Englanders began to argue that the region should use the opportunities provided by the boycott-an inadver­ tently protectionist climate-to diversify its economy. Ironically, this agenda represented something of a reversion to mercantilist ideas, which presented fewer conceptual problems now that New Englanders viewed England as a commercial antagonist. Proponents of dOf!\estic manufacturing combined some aspects of liberal economic rhetoric with an economic nationalism that placed New England at the center and called on local governments, produc­ ers, and consumers to redirect capital, public support, and labor into indus­ try. lhe political economy of nonimportation endorsed economic liberalism by investing a wide range of economic activities-nonconsumption of British goods and the consumption, exchange, and production of local man­ ufactures-with political and moral significance. lhey applied the princi­ ples of free trade to the internal economy. lhis interpretation is at odds with prevailing accounts of nonimportation, which read into the colonists' anticonsumption rhetoric a republican cri­ tique of selfishness and competition, a repudiation of (or at least ambiva­ lence toward) their own commercial behavior, and the search for communal rituals designed to recover the virtue of earlier, simpler times.42 Certainly, nonimportation offered numerous opportunities to castigate British luxury and to repudiate the "Superfluities" and "Extravagance" (and concomitant indebtedness) that constituted the bulk of English imports in the colonists' opinion.43 But a close reading of newspapers and pamphlets of the period indicates that boycott proponents showed no signs of resigning themselves permanently to the lower standard of living and stagnant economy that nonimportation of British goods promised. For precisely this reason, opponents of nonimportation believed that New Englanders' love of comfort and prosperity made the boycott a ludicrous proposition. Since all the developmental models with which the colonists were familiar held that America was not ready for manufactures, nonimpor­ tation would require a severe material sacrifice. Representing the governor and council of Massachusetts against the General Court in 1768, !lDlOthy Ruggles contended that New England could never "wage a successful com­ mercial war" against England, "because as in the war with the sword the greatest power must ever overcome the less." Another author, the "Impar­ tialist," writing in the pro-administration Boston Weekly News-Letter, joined Ruggles in predicting that decayed trade, "annihilated" colonial ports, and a loss of civility would accompany such a suicidal move." Even Oxenbridge 42. See Crowley, This SHEBA, Self; Edmund Morgan, "The Puritan Ethic and the Ameri­ Revolution," Willislm and Mary Quarterly 24 (1967): 3-43. 43. See, for example, Boston Weekly News-Letter, 2 November 1769. 44. Boston Weekly News-Letter, 5 January 1769; MlIssachusetts Gazette and Boston News­ Letter, 17 March 1768.

can

286

From Dependency to Independence

Thacher had conceded in 1764 that any attempt at self-sufficiency, at least in the short term, would leave the colonists "reduced to mere necessaries, . . , clothed like their predecessors the Indians with the skins of beasts . . . [to] sink into like barbarism." 45 Even if one rejected the more gloomy prognosti­ cations, a degree of economic backwardness seemed to be the only alterna­ tive to submitting to English economic regulation. Yet proponents of nonimportation insisted that productivity and diversi­ fication could stave off these dire predictions.46 "There is not the least doubt," agreed a writer in the

Boston Weekly News-Letter,"

soon free ourselves from the Burthens with which we

are

but we should

now opress'd, and

lay the foundation of American Liberty . . . by encouraging American man­ ufactures." 47 To emphasize this goal, the nonimportation movement aimed its rhetoric at producers as well as consumers and envisioned a fundamen­ tal restructuring of the New England economy that went beyond reducing consumption of British goods. Although many doubted that the colonies could export manufactured goods on a grand scale in the near future, a more autonomous economy based on manufacturing necessities for domes­ tic use seemed possible. The impressive range of enterprises that the colonists advocated in the late 1760s suggests that anti-British agitators en­ visioned more than "straitened prosperity" or rural self-sufficiency. In pur­ suit of this goal, they advocated private and public efforts in manufacturing, invoking the language of industry, virtue, and frugality in defense of a pro­ gram committed to diversification and development. To begin with, several polemicists voiced the increasingly common opin­ ion that densely settled New England had reached a stage in development that made manufactures a feasible, natural next step: "Colonies settled in new countries may for a time do very well, without manufactures, But old colonies, in time, must, and will, as necessarily, and as naturally swarm, as the original hive." 48 A writer in the

News-Letter argued that local producers

could overcome the paucity and cost of labor by advertising for skilled im­ migrants and by operating year-round to provide full-time employment. Providence and Boston artisans advertised in English newspapers for skilled workers, and several manufacturers, such as John Barclay, a Lynn clothier, mentioned the presence of immigrant laborers with superior skills at their manufactories. The able-bodied poor represented another potential labor pool, one that added social benefits to the economic advantages of do­ mestic manufacture. At Caleb Earle's clothworks in Newport, "the spinning is partly performed by poor People, whom he supplied with Wool, and who, being thus employed, and punctually paid for their Work were greatly

45. 46. 47. 48.

Thacher, Sentiments of a British American, 496. Boston Weekly News-Letter, 1 June 1769. Ibid., 4 May 1769. Boston Gazette, 23 October 1769.

287

The Imperial Crisis assisted in supporting themselves and Families." 49

In Providence and Nar­ ragansett, merchant-manufacturers such as the Browns found that slaves

could play a key role in industrial activity. Still, obstacles to manufactures remained According to conventional wis­ dom, the high price, limited supply, and reputed poor quality of locally made goods discouraged consumers, so proponents of nonimportation at­ tempted to assuage these concerns as well. They used the same reciprocal, naturalistic models and analyses of markets that Otis and Thacher em­ ployed in the early 176Os, this time applying them to internal trade. One writer in the

Massachusetts Gazette

pointed out that although local goods

were more expensive, "we shall have the pleasing consolation, that the money which we advance for them, will not only remain in the country, but will undoubtedly (by the course of dealing) revert to our hands again in a little time."

In other words, profits from the Atlantic trade flowed largely to

England, but internal exchange enriched the entire province-a reversal of previous valuations of internal and external trade. If Americans could be

persuaded to patronize domestic producers, a Boston commentator pointed out, the resulting demand combined with the unofficial "tariff" provided by nonimportation would give local industry a significant boost Increased quantity of production would eventually result in lower prices, and New England might even export manufactures at a profit.50 Household manufacturing was certainly a key component of this antici­ pated production, but defenders of nonimportation proposed ventures on a larger scale as well. The Massachusetts

Gazette proudly announced that man­

ufacturers had produced 17,000 yards of cloth in East Hartford, Connecticut, and 60,000 yards in Dartmouth, Massachusetts. The same article estimated that shoemaking enterprises in Lynn were already so numerous in 1768 that the town had generated nearly 80,000 pairs of shoes. Aside from the expan­ sion of existing "necessary" industries such as cloth, iron, glass, paper, and shoe manufacturing, colonial newspapers reported efforts in such new and exotic areas as millinery and silk production, as well as sophisticated ma­ chinery such as printing presses and typefaces. "There is scarce a necessary article or even a luxury of life, but what might be raised and brought to per­ fection in some of our provinces," insisted one writer.51 This confidence con­ trasted with the cautious approach to manufactures that characterized most discussions before 1760. Public policy at the local and colonial levels provided additional encour­ agement to new and existing manufacturing ventures. Following seven­ teenth-century

traditions,

new

laws

and

resolutions

49. Massachusetts Gazette and Boston News-Letter, 4 February 1768. 50. Ibid., 7 January 1768. 51. Ibid., 14 January 1768, 4 May 1769.

promoted

and

288

From Dependency to Independence

regulated the raising of sheep and hemp to increase the supply of raw mate­ rials for clothing manufacture. Just as they had done a century earlier, pro­ moters of manufactures emphasized the link between agriculture and industry and appealed to farmers to support the movement. Country towns responded vociferously, sponsoring a variety of manufacturing efforts. The Windham, Connecticut, town meeting not only established a committee to investigate "a means of making glass," but resolved to encourage the culti­ vation of hemp, wool, flax, and hops for beer as a patriotic substitute for im­ ported liquor. Other towns, including Abingdon, Plymouth, Sandwich, Truro, Lexington, Bolton, Grafton, and Dartmouth, reported manufacturing efforts. These laws and resolutions built on an existing framework of eco­ nomic encouragement in New England-quality controls, monopolies, in­ ternal improvements, bounties and incentives, and legal adjustments-that had facilitated private enterprise deemed to be in the public good. Thus the political economy of revolution assumed a strong government regulatory role, although now the center of promotion and regulation would be the colonial legislatures and towns, not Parliament. More tangible support came from the private sector. Some traders who later supported the revolutionary movement began to invest significantly in internal projects in the years preceding independence.52 Nonimportation ad­ vocates urged merchants troubled by the stoppage of trade to divert their capital and management skills from commerce to industry, and many ap­

parently did, judging from the enhanced level of manufacturing activity during the fifteen years before the Revolution. So many Massachusetts and Rhode Island firms had entered the candle-making business by 1 763 that participants organized cartels to control price competition for both the raw materials and the finished products.53 Stephen Hopkins and the Browns founded their Hope Furnace ironworks in 1 765, the year the nonimportation movement began. In Connecticut, entrepreneurs such as Simon Huntington, Nathaniel Niles, the Pitkin family of Hartford, and Christopher Leffingwell of Norwich enlarged existing enterprises and initiated new ventures in mining, fulling and cloth mills, earthenware production, wire and card manufactures, and chocolate-making, stocking-knitting, and hat-felting en­ terprises between 1766 and 1774. Leffingwell's Norwich Paper Manufactory supplied Norwich and Hartford newspapermen with the raw materials of their art "at the rate of ten sheets per minute" by the late 17605.54 Investors rebuilt and expanded the Salisbury Furnace in 1771, which employed over 52. In a suggestive article, Edward Countryman tracked the investments of Tory and Pa­ triot merchants in New York during the Revolution and found that the latter invested more heavily in the internal economy ("The Uses of Capital in Revolutionary America: The Case of New York Loyalist Merchants," William and Mary Quarterly 49 (1992): 3-28). 53. Hedges, Browns of Providence Plantations, 114. 54. Quoted in Carl Bridenbaugh, The Colonial Craftsman (1950; Chicago, 1961), 47.

The Imperial Crisis

289

seventy men. and additional forges and smithies sprang up in the surround­ ing area to turn out finished ironware. The extent to which an ideological commitment to internal development and economic and political independence influenced these investment deci­ sions is difficult to determine, for few participants explicitly cited such mo­ tives. But at the very least, the timing of this burst of investment reflected a hardheaded calculation that domestic manufactures aimed at colonial mar­ kets represented a rational choice in view of the downturn in foreign trade. Correspondence among the Brown brothers suggests that a relative decline in the price of labor during the postwar depression may also have been a factor in their deliberations. The internal economy played an indirect role in this decision-making process as well; several of the people who put money into the metal and doth trades were merchant-traders who had accumu­ lated capital through domestic trade as commissary agents during the French and Indian War.55 Private local bodies analogous to present-day chambers of commerce ac­ tively promoted such ventures. Existing groups in the larger cities, such as the Boston Society for Encouraging Industry and Frugality, experienced an increase in membership and activity, and organizations in support of the boycotts emerged in secondary towns such as Middletown. Connecticut. These organizations offered premiums and bounties to producers of goods ranging from cheese to woolen stockings, staged contests, maintained a model cloth works in Boston. and lobbied provincial governments to sup­ port local industry. In February 1769 the Society for Encouraging Industry and Frugality awarded £10 to James Vautie "for erecting a stocking Loom" and presented a medal to a woman who spun fine linen thread; the organization also urged its members to invest in John Barrett's cotton duck manufactory. The Massachusetts Gazette passed out mulberry seeds to entre­ preneurs interested in cultivating silk and reprinted instructions on how to make some rather dubious home-grown substitutes for boycotted goods: thread from nettles, paints from whale oil, "Cloth from Hop-Stalks," and a "Method . . . of preparing FLAX so as to resemble COITON." They also publi­ cized scientific and technological innovations related to local industry.56 However interesting a treatise on nettle thread might be, writers commit­ ted to New England's economic development recognized that successful 55. Among them were the Huntington and Pitkin families of Connecticut See "Connec­ ticut Treasury. A Manifest of the Cost and Charges of Provisions and other Necesaries [sic) . . . , 19 February 1757," Huntington Ubrary; Bridenbaugh, Colonial CraftS11llln, 47-48; Glenn Weaver, Jonathan Trumbull: Connecticut's Merchant Magistrate (Hartford, 1956), 41-42, 61-90; A. P. Pitkin, The Pitkin Family in America, Introduction; Margaret E. Martin, "Mer­ chants and Trade of the Connecticut River Valley, 1750-1820," Smith College Studies in History 24, nos. 14 (Northampton, Mass., 193&-39), 184-85. 56. Boston Weekly News-Letter, 7 September 1769; Massachusetts Gazette and Boston News­ Letter, 7 January 1768; Connecticut Courant, 29 February 1768, 5 and 26 June 1769.

290

From Dependency to Independence

import substitution required high-quality goods. To improve the quality of domestic products, the Boston society's manufacturing contests held local producers to European standards, encouraged variety, and raised public consciousness about the variety and availability of local commodities that were "equal in Goodness to any imported." "Fifteen samples of different kinds of Cloths" were placed on view at Scituate, including ''Broad Ooths, Serges, Tammys, Challoons, Camblets, figur'd stuffs, &tc., which are said, by goods Judges, to be superior in Quality to any of the Sort usually imported from abroad," noted the Boston News-tetter.57 Advertisers reiterated this theme, comparing their domestic products favorably with Polish starch, Dutch canvas, and English woolens. This impatience to establish a sophisticated level of production testifies to the complexity of the colonists' attitudes toward consumption. Although nonimportation resolutions constantly invoked "frugality," consumption of imports, not consumption in general, was the target. Indeed, consumption of locally made goods-condemned by most commentators as a drain on national wealth before the appearance of Smith's WtIllth ofNations-became a patriotic act in prerevolutionary New England. Even traditional distinc­ tions between moral "necessaries" and questionable "luxuries" disappeared in the fervor for home industry. Initially, the calls for native manufactures focused on necessaries: ironware, glue, leather goods, paper, glass, and es­ pecially cloth-woolens, linen, cotton, and duck for sailcloth. Soon, how­ ever, local manufacturers rushed to fill "luxury" markets for gloves, china, and other fine commodities. The colonists could feel morally superior to their extravagant, corruption-ridden English counterparts while still enjoy­ ing many of the same products. In some cases, existing manufactories added new lines of higher quality for local consumers to their ongoing trade in rough goods aimed at planta­ tion markets. Lynn shoemakers, for example, began to tum out fashionable "callamanco" shoes (formerly imported from Flanders), which boasted up­ pers covered with flowered or striped cloth. Ann Ducray's shop, which of­ fered "Ladies Head-Flowers, which for Beauty and Colours surpass any imported," was only one of many female-operated establishments that of­ fered fancy stays, mantuas, riding dresses, and other apparel based on Lon­ don patterns.58 Other products that gained a patriotic aura from nonimportation included such unnecessary goods as violins, plaster of paris figures, and "an elegant COACH in the modem Taste," which the paper re­ ported was "finished last Week for an honorable Gentleman here . . . and the Workmanship is judg'd to be as compleat and as good as any one ever im57. MIIsSQchusetts Gazette and Boston News-Letter, 14 January 1768. 58. Massachusetts Gazette, 19 May 1768, 23 November 1769; "Postcrlpt," ibid., 27 April

1769.

The Imperial Crisis

291

ported." One Connecticut man even promised to vend locally made wine "u1Uldulterated with Duties" to an appreciative public.59 Indeed, rather than deploring this behavio� a few commentators played with concepts of fashion and taste. Rather than deploring human tendencies to enjoy finery, they suggested that the movement exploit New Englanders' love of luxury and desire to emulate their betters through genteel consump­ tion The preference for English goods was merely a fancy, not a rational cal­ culation of quality and price. If New England seaport gentry would just don homespun in public, "Home-made Ooth would soon become plenty, and the Shops would be full . . . for the fashionableness of any Thing makes it look beautiful in the Eyes of most people." 60 Nor did "homespun" have to imply rough, uncouth garments. The household of Wtlliam Hanks of Lebanon, the enterprising Connecticut vintner mentioned above, received praise for raising sufficient sii,k to make "three Womens Gowns." 6\ Granted, condemnations of conspicuous consumption and fashion excess, especially among women, continued to appear in colonial newspapers and pamphlets; but such rhetorical flourishes should not obscure the growing acceptance of a domestically oriented consumer society. The writers involved did not con­ sider consumption alone but as a crucial part of the cycle of production. Advertising methods reflected the new priority on domestic commodi­ ties. Whereas before 1765 merchants stressed the English or West Indian provenance of their wares, beginning in 1768-69 many began to tout Ameri­ can-made goods, identifying local producers and aeating brand-name recognition for commodities such as Lynn shoes and Milton paper. Journey­ man cobblers who had trained in Lynn methods took pains to announce this association to the public when they set up shop in Exeter and Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Peter Etter & Sons of Boston advertised men's hose, gloves, caps, and breeches "MANUFACTURED IN BRAIN1REE." Similarly, John Allman and Company's ad for locally made tobacco pipes clothed their manufacture in patriotic rhetoric: '1t's the Detennination of the Company, to carry on the above Business in an extensive Manne� so as may be suffi­ cient to supply this Country with that article in hopes thereby . . . of serving the Public as well as themselves." In Connecticut, Caleb Bull proudly stocked Lynn shoes, locally tanned sole leather for those who made their own footwear, and nails made in Hartford.62 The Salisbury ironworks ad­ vertised retail sales of capital goods that would facilitate other manufac­ tures: molds for casting pots and implements and clothier's plates.63 Advertising efforts were so successful at creating demand for domestic 59. Boston Wttkly Nt'WS-Letter, 23 November and 27 April 1769. 60. MRss4chusetts Gazette /Uld Boston Nt'WS-utter, 7 January 1768. 61. "P06tcrlpt." Boston Weekly Nt'WS-Letter, 27 April 1769. 62. Connecticut Courant, 7 July 1769, 21 May 1770, 20 April 1773. 63. Ibid., 24 October 1768.

From Dependency to Independence

292

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