CHAPTER V.

NEW ENGLAND'S SHIPPING INTERESTS.

"It was easy to foresee, what we know also to have happened, that the first great cause of collision and jeal­ousy would be, under the notion of political economy then and still prevalent in Europe, an attempt on the part of the mother country to monopolize the trade of the Colonies....

"The second century opened upon New England under circumstances which evinced that much had already been accomplished....

"The commercial character of the country, notwith­standing all discouragements, had begun to display itself, and five hundred vessels, then belonging to Massachu­setts, placed her, in relation to commerce, thus early at the head of the Colonies."

-Webster's Plymouth Ad­dress, December 22, 1820.

Having brought the record of events up to the forma­tion of the new government, we need to be somewhat familiar with the different interests of the different sec­tions of the Union, which could be benefited or injured by Congressional legislation. We begin with New Eng­land's shipping interests, because they were among the first to ask for special favors, and to sow the seeds of that sectional conflict which produced the war between the Northern and the Southern States.

The people who came over and settled in Massachu­setts in 1620 - '23, had spent from eleven to fifteen years in Leyden, the oldest city in Holland, containing at that time about one hundred thousand inhabitants, engaged in manufacturing, ship-building, foreign commerce, and domestic trade.

The historians tell us that: "At the end of the six­teenth century, the Dutch gained the possession of the Molucca Islands, and secured a monopoly of the spice trade. At the end of the seventeenth century, they owned nearly half of the shipping of Europe." They also tell us that: "Living along the estuaries of rivers abounding in fish," they "soon became a sea-faring peo­ple," while "manufactures flourished in a remarkable degree." The intelligence, the skill, the enterprise, the industry, and the thrift of those people commanded the admiration, and in some quarters excited the jealousy of their contemporaries; and the spirit and temper of the Leydeners had found expression, 33 years before the Puritan " Separatists" landed there, in the establish­ment of their famous University, to which gathered Europe's most renowned teachers of letters, art, and science.

These Englishmen, spending so long a time in such a city, amazed, no doubt, at the marvelous results of the skill and enterprise Of the Dutch, could not fail to profit by what they witnessed. Hence, after landing in Massa­chusetts and familiarizing themselves with their envi­ronment, they soon began to put their acquired knowl­edge to practical use, stimulated by the ambition which contact with the Dutch had engendered. They estab­lished schools and set their daughters to teaching, in order that they might give to their children some of that intellectual culture which had evidently been the mainspring of Holland's success and of Leyden's phe­nomenal wealth; and they put their sons to farming, to fishing, to ship-building, to trading, and to manufac­turing, their skill in the latter becoming famous in after times by their reputed success in the production of tin mirrors, basswood hams, and wooden nutmegs! [fraudulent products]^[1

Of the beginning and progress of ship-building in New England, in the early days, our historians give us few records; but from these few we may infer that the business was extensive and prosperous.

In 1634 Cradock had a ship-yard at Medford; Win­throp had the Blessing of the Bay built at his expense; the Rebecca was built about the same time; a trade in corn and cattle had commenced with Virginia, includ­ing Carolina; and West India products - sugar, molasses and rum - were exchanged for furs with the Dutch of New York.2

In this same year (1634) Captain Stone and Captain Norton commanded trading vessels on the Connecticut River. In 1636 Captain Oldham commanded a trading vessel on the same river; and during this year the first New England slave-ship, the Desire, was built at Mar­blehead, and entered upon that inhuman traffic, which was kept up till May, 1862.3

In 1642, according to Hildreth,4 their ships carried cargoes of staves and fish - the manufacture of rum did not begin till 1733 - to Madeira and the Canaries; and on these trips they were accustomed to touch on the coast of Guinea " to trade for negroes," whom they generally carried to Barbadoes and other English islands in the West Indies, "the demand for them at home be­ing small."

In this same year (1642) six large ships were com­pleted at Salem.⁵

Ship-building, indeed, soon became the leading indus­try in all the seaboard towns, and continued so for about one hundred and seventy years, when "protection" rendered manufacturing equally remunerative. The ships were built for the whale, mackerel, and cod fishe­ries, for inland, coastwise, and foreign commerce, for the African slave trade, and for sale. For the ship market so many were built that in 1727 the "ship carpenters in the Thames complained that their trade was hurt, and their workmen emigrated."6

For about a century and a half those industrious people enjoyed almost a monopoly, in these Colonies, of the carrying trade, except when interfered with by restric­tions imposed by the mother State, since there was never any competition attempted by New York and Philadelphia till near the close of that period, nor by the seaports south of Philadelphia till after the Revolution.7

After the Revolution, of which British restrictions on New England's commercial interests were the prime cause, "free trade and sailors' rights" followed, with corresponding benefits to those interests; and special privileges were secured, in the treaty of peace, to their fishermen on the Banks of Newfoundland and in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

After the breaking out of the war and the consequent disturbances of commerce, much of the money made by the slave trade and other commercial operations was invested in manufacturing and mechanical trades to fill army contracts and supply the wants of the people; another portion was employed in speculating in Conti­nental and State securities, including the bills of credit; another was devoted to privateering enterprises; and another to traffic with the soldiers.

After the war was over commerce resumed its old importance, stimulated to vigorous expansion by the preferences accorded to it because of the bitter memo­ries of Britain's aggressions; and up to the formation of the more perfect Union, it would not be far from the truth to declare that New England's shipping interests enjoyed almost as many monopolistic privileges as were afterwards conferred on them by acts of Congress.

The result up to 1786 is thus given by Hildreth, Vol­ume III, pages 465-66:

"One large portion of the wealthy men of Colonial times had been expatriated, and another part had been impoverished by the Revolution.8 In their place a new moneyed class had sprung up, especially in the Eastern States, men who had grown rich in the course of the war as suttlers,9 by privateering, by speculations in the fluctuating paper money, and by other operations not always of the most honorable kind. Large claims against their less fortunate neighbors had accumulated in the hands of these men, many of whom were dis­posed to press their legal rights to the utmost. The sudden fortunes made by the war,"10 etc.

But, while giving the result, Hildreth omits one of the essential causes. This is supplied by a New Eng­lander (probably J. Q. Adams), who, under the nom de plume of Algernon Sidney, addressed "an appeal to the people of New England," December 15, 1808 (printed as a public document in State Papers, 2d sess., 10th Cong.), designed to reconcile them to the non-inter­course acts of Jefferson's Administration. Among other things he said: "Recur to the period between peace and the present Government. Did not the commercial States enrich themselves at the expense of the agricultural?"

The freeing of the commerce of these people from British restrictions and the securing of privileges to their fishermen ought, one would suppose, to have been enough; but they wanted more, and, as soon as the Federal Government was empowered in the Constitu­tion to regulate commerce and to lay taxes on imported goods, they applied through their representatives for greater privileges; and they received them. An abso­lute monopoly of the coastwise trade was conferred on ships built in the United States, with the privilege of adjusting freight and passenger rates to suit the own­ers; a discriminating tonnage tax was imposed on all foreign ships engaged in carrying goods to or from these States; a discriminating tariff tax was imposed on all articles imported into these States in foreign ships; ship-builders in the United States were granted an ab­solute monopoly of the "home market" for ships; and New England's cod-fishermen were quartered on the taxpayers of all the States.

Such favoritism as this, bestowed mainly on a people unsurpassed in the United States for intelligence, skill, and energy, bore its legitimate fruits:

1. The victims of this paternalism began to ask what had become of the "justice" promised in the Constitu­tion, and the resulting sense of wrong passed from father to son long after the occasion of it was forgotten; and

2. By 181011 the shippers of the United States con­trolled a greater proportion of the world's carrying trade than either Holland or England.12

It is not necessary, in closing this chapter, to enlarge on the interests of other classes of the people. It is well known that agriculture was the principal business of an overwhelming majority at the time of the adop­tion of the Constitution and for several decades after­wards; and, furthermore, that diversification of employ­ments was confined almost exclusively to the Northern States, with the result, at an early day, that the sur­plus crops of their farmers were consumed by those engaged in other occupations, while the Southern farmers were obliged to seek a market for most of their surplus in foreign lands.13 It was impossible, therefore, for them to quarter themselves on the taxpayers of the Union unless they could have prevailed on the Congress to give them bounties out of the Federal treasury. This they never applied for, because they inherited a respect for the Constitution which, they very well knew, con­ferred no such power on the Congress.

Under these circumstances the South was subjected to two wrongs by operation of Federal laws:

1. Foreign prices had to be accepted for her crops whether sold abroad or in the United States, and tariff laws compelled her to purchase her supplies of manu­factured articles at prices considerably above those charged in foreign markets; and

2. Every act of Congress designed to counteract hos­tile commercial legislation by any foreign government - most of the tariff acts included - led to further restric­tions on exports from the United States, of which the South furnished from 80 to 90 per cent. In other words, every movement on the part of Congress to check im­ports of foreign manufactures has been met by real or threatened restrictions on our exports of agricultural products. In later years this retaliatory spirit has dis­covered trichinosis in the pork and tuberculosis in the beef exported from the United States.

The farmers and other producers of provisions and other raw material in the South were, therefore, kept between the upper and the nether millstone - the do­mestic manufacturer and the foreign farmer.

1. "William Kieft... determined... to flood the streets of New Amsterdam with Indian money. This was nothing more nor less than strings of beads wrought out of clams, periwinkles, and other shell-fish, and called...wampum.... He began by paying all the servants of the company, and all the debts of Government, in strings of wampum....

For a time affairs went on swimmingly.... Yankee traders poured into the Province, buying everything they could lay their hands on, and paying the worthy Dutchmen their own price - in Indian money. If the latter, however, attempted to pay the Yan­kees in the same coin for their tinware and wooden bowls, the case was altered; nothing would do but Dutch guilders and such like 'metallic currency.' What was worse, the Yankees introduced an inferior kind of wampum made of oyster-shells, with which they deluged the Province, varying off in exchange all the silver and gold, the Dutch herrings, and Dutch cheeses: thus early did the knowing men of the East manifest their skill in bargaining the New-Amsterdamers out of the oyster, and leaving them the shell."  - Knickerbocker's New York, pages 224-225.

2. Hildreth, Volume I, page 200.

3. Naval War Records, Volume I, pages 12, 29, 366, 367.

4. Volume I, page 282.

5. Ibid., page 331.

6. Hildreth, Volume II, page 297.

7. In Carroll's Historical Collections of South Carolina there is a pa­per which was published in London in 1761, wherein, after giving an account of the trade of Charleston, the author (believed to have been Governor Glen) said: " But with all this trade we have few or no ships of our own. We depend in a great measure upon those sent from Great Britain, or on such as are built in New England for British merchants, and which generally take this Country in on their way to get a freight to England."

8. See Note G.

9. A sutler is a civilian merchant who sells provisions to an army in the field, in camp, or in quarters. [footnote added to online edition]

10. 'The Atlantic Monthly for December, 1897, says that one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence took "advantage of in-formaion of the needs of the Continental cause for wheat to corner the supply at once so far as he was able."

11. Twenty one years of paternalism ran up the tonnage in the follow­ing States, vessels under 20 tons being omitted, to the figures in the table:

This was about eight times, on an average, what the tonnage of these States was in 1789.

But the principal beneficiaries of the favoritism can only be dis­covered by comparing tonnage with population. This comparison gives per 1,000 persons -

- (See State Papers, Commerce and Navigation, Vol. I, pp. 896-901).

12. Smith's Wealth of Nations, American Edition, Volume I, page 266, foot note.

13. In the Convention of 1787 Mr. Madison, on June 28, said: " The staple of Massachusetts is fish and the carrying trade; of Pennsyl­vania, wheat and flour; of Virginia, tobacco " , and on the next day he said: " The great danger to our general government is the great Southern and Northern interests of the continent being op posed to each other." - Yates.

NOTE G.

The comparative wealth of the two sections before the Revolution can be approximately arrived at from the exports to Great Britain. Hildreth, Volume II, page 559, says: "The trade between Great Britain and the Colonies is stated for the year 1770, as follows, and the average for the last ten years, allowing for a moderate increase, had not been materially different:

EXPORTS TO GREAT BRITAIN.

Comparing these exports with population in 1790, we find that for every one hundred persons, including slaves, the value of the exports was as follows:

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