35. Mercantilist Restrictions

The fundamental attitude of England toward its colonies was one of imperial domination, regulation, and exploitation for the benefit of the merchants and manufacturers of the imperial center. The basic mercantilist structure was built up by the Navigation Acts during the seventeenth century, even before Britain was in a position to attempt to enforce these regulations. The aim was to benefit English trade, and to supply the home country with raw materials, but always for the enhancement of the English merchant or manufacturer. The means was a growing network of restrictions and prohibitions, to be enforced by the arm of the state.

The Navigation Acts had begun with the Cromwellian Protectorate, as the Puritan Revolution began to be transformed into the counterrevolution, and eventually into a not very jolting Restoration of the Stuarts. The first acts of 1650–51 prohibited the export of colonial and non-European products to Britain in ships not owned or largely manned by Englishmen (or English colonists), and prohibited the export of European goods to the colonies in non-English ships that did not come from the producing country. The major aim of the acts was to crush the efficient and flourishing Dutch carrying trade, which provided unwelcome competition for English shippers.

The Navigation Act of 1660 greatly broadened the navigation laws by prohibiting in colonial trade all non-English or non-American ships manned by crews less than seventy-five percent English. An early addition also insisted that the ships must be English-built. Furthermore, the act erected a category of “enumerated articles”—the most important commodities in the colonial trade—which Americans could sell only to England or to another English colony. Thus, other European countries could not bid against English purchasers or English shippers. Tobacco was the major commodity in the enumerated list, which also included sugar and indigo.

The next Navigation Act, the Staple Act of 1663, assured a monopoly of colonial trade to English merchants by prohibiting any import of European goods into the colonies that did not pass through England and pay English duties, and were not carried on English-built ships. (There were a few specified exemptions.) The extra tax also constituted a subsidy to English manufacturers in the colonial market by artificially burdening their foreign competitors.

From the beginning, the Crown had great difficulty in enforcing these acts, and the American colonists happily participated in the ancient English tradition of extensive smuggling. The later blocks of the Navigation Act structure consisted of attempts to counteract these evasions and enforce the regulations. The Plantation Duty Act of 1673 tried to crack down on the practice of one colony shipping tobacco to another (for instance, Virginia to Maryland, or North Carolina to Boston), the second colony then freely reexporting the staple to Europe. The new act provided that the colony must pay the English import duty on all shipments of enumerated goods from one colony to another, and also prohibited their reexport. The act also provided for colonial royal customs collectors, of whom the redoubtable Edward Randolph was an outstanding early example.

The climactic Navigation Act came in 1696. It provided for tightened enforcement of previous acts, including giving customs officials the right of forcible entry in search for violations, and the creation of vice admiralty courts without jury trials for violators, thus trying to circumvent the tendency of American juries not to convict smugglers. Furthermore, in 1705, the list of enumerated articles was lengthened to include rice, molasses, timber, and naval stores, plus many other items. Copper and fur were added in 1722.

To supervise the workings of the imperial structure and to administer the colonies, the Crown established several important agencies. The continuing operating head was the Board of Trade, newly revivified in 1696, with eight paid and active members and allied to the English merchants. During its first twenty years, the board pursued an energetic course, but by the early 1720s, it had succumbed to the happy and deliberate indolence of the Walpole administration in England. In 1714, Queen Anne, a high Tory possessed of reactionary instincts, died and was succeeded to the throne by George I. With King George, the Whigs came securely to power, and in 1722 Robert Walpole entered upon a long tenure as the king’s chief minister. Walpole, moderately liberal and pacific, headed a centrist Whig oligarchy. Walpole wanted only to govern in peace and quiet, to keep government meddling low-key, and to let natural social forces bring prosperity to England. He was wise enough to know that an inactive and sluggish—and therefore harmless—government implied an active and thriving citizenry.

Under Walpole not only did the Board of Trade become quiet and inactive, but also the once powerful Privy Council became an innocuous and virtually honorary body. The colonies were governed by one of Britain’s two secretaries of state—the secretary of state for the Southern Department. His foreign duties included not only all the colonies but France and southern Europe as well. Under Walpole’s rule, the American colonies found to their delight that the numerous mercantile regulations, prohibitions, and dictates were simply not being enforced. One reason was Walpole’s happy instincts for letting men be free to administer their own affairs, as well as his insight that colonial trade needed to be let alone rather than regulated and restrained. Another reason was the heavy burdens laid upon the secretary of state. The third was Walpole’s inspired choice for secretary of state for the South. This was young Thomas Holies Pelham, Duke of Newcastle.

Willing and eager to leave the colonies alone so long as he could control the patronage of his office, Newcastle pursued a policy of what was later happily conceptualized by Edmund Burke as “salutary neglect.” Under Newcastle, delighted Americans found that the onerous regulations, restrictions, and charges upon them were simply not being attended to. Newcastle brought the activists of the British colonial administration to despair as messages piled up on his desk unread and unheeded. Newcastle has too often been written off as a dolt by historians. Better would be the explanation that he was close to the moderately liberal Whig intellectuals of St. John’s College, Cambridge, where Master John Newcome kept alive a tradition of civil liberty and of Locke and Newton. Newcome’s nephew, Bishop Samuel Squire—also an historian, and educated at St. John’s—became Newcastle’s chaplain and private secretary. Particularly beloved in the colonies was John Lord Monson, president of the Board of Trade in the 1740s, who magnificently refused even to submit colonial business to higher authorities or to make any recommendations whatever on colonial affairs.

Apart from the Navigation Acts, other imperial restrictions on the colonies were designed to cripple any threatened growth in manufactures that might compete successfully with English firms. As woolen factories began to develop in New England and on Long Island in effective competition with English woolens, England passed the Wool Act in 1699, viciously prohibiting any exportation of raw wool or of finished woolens to any other colony—or to England. Woolen goods in this period constituted the largest single item (over one-half) of British exports to the American colonies, and the British manufacturers were anxious to shore up their position. Although it is easier to enforce restrictions on manufacturing than on the more mobile commerce, and although the Wool Act blighted the development of American woolens, the industry was still able to grow. In 1702, the Board of Trade grumbled about English wool workers being “enticed” to America to work at the more efficient and therefore higher-paying woolen firms there. During the War of the Spanish Succession, a shortage in the available supply of English cloth led Americans to manufacture their own woolens, especially in Rhode Island and Massachusetts. To escape the provisions of the Wool Act, the colonists often drove their sheep to and from the place of woolen manufacture, since carrying the wool itself out of a colony had been outlawed.

In 1732, Parliament, under pressure of marginal and inefficient felt hat-makers in London, moved to crush nascent hat manufacturers in the Northern colonies. The Hat Act (1) prohibited the export of hats from one colony to another; (2) restricted the people allowed to make hats to those who had been apprenticed for seven years; (3) limited the number of apprentices in each hat firm to two; and (4) prohibited Negro apprentices. Fortunately, the act was only sporadically enforced. In fact, Martin Bladen of the Board of Trade ranted that the colonies were “running into all sorts of manufactures, which must be stopped.” Bladen went so far as to propose that people acquitted of violations in colonial courts be retried in England, but, fortunately, this extreme suggestion was not followed.

During the same year, Parliament outlawed the export of hops from the colonies to Ireland, in reaction to American hops competing successfully with the English in the Irish market. Before this, in 1722, beaver skins, furs, and copper had been placed on the enumerated list, thereby at least partially crippling the New York fur trade, over a third of which exports had been to the European continent. In 1736, four years after the Hat Act, Parliament struck savagely at the growing colonial manufacture of canvas (sailcloth), decreeing that all future ships built in the colonies must be constructed with sails of British-made cloth only.

The Iron Act of 1750 was a compromise between two groups of English manufacturers, each seeking a conflicting set of special privileges. The iron industry, second only to the woolen industry in importance to the English economy, was divided into two groups: the iron masters, who smelted pig and bar iron from iron ore; and the finished-iron manufacturers, who transformed pig and bar iron into nails, machinery, etc. The economic interests of the two groups in public policy clashed squarely: the iron masters were alarmed at the rapid emergence of bar-iron production in the Northern colonies after 1735, and with bitterness they called for prohibitive tariffs on the importation of pig iron and even the total suppression of the American iron industry. In this demand they were joined by English iron-mine owners and by forest owners who sold charcoal as fuel in the iron-smelting process. On the other side were the finished-iron producers, who wanted to encourage American bar- and pig-iron production by admitting its products duty-free, but to prohibit finished-iron manufacturing in the colonies. They were joined by the English shipowners, who wanted to encourage the two-way transatlantic traffic of pig iron for finished products.

Finally, the latter group triumphed completely with the Iron Act of 1750. The act admitted colonial pig and bar iron duty-free but prohibited any increase in finished-iron manufacturing, including slitting mills (to make nails), plating mills (to make sheet iron) or steel furnaces (to make steel). Fortunately, the Iron Act too was not very rigorously enforced. The iron industry continued to grow in the colonies, the urban finishing mills as well as the rural “plantation” blast furnaces for smelting ore into pig iron, and forges for converting pig into bar iron. The colonists, moreover, continued to finish most of their own bar iron. Ironworks were built in every colony but Georgia; the heaviest concentrations soon emerged in Pennsylvania around the Philadelphia area. However, the largest plants, each a large-scale investment of $250,000, were the Principio works in Maryland and the works of Peter Hasenclever in New Jersey, the bulk of which was blast furnaces and forges for pig and bar iron. By the eve of the American Revolution, American production of pig and bar iron had exceeded the output of all of Great Britain.

The British government, as early as the seventeenth century, had placed great importance on trees for masts for the Royal Navy. Although Britain acted to suppress competing colonial manufactures, it wished to stimulate supplies for the navy; for this purpose it coercively diverted colonial timber to the production of masts and other naval stores. The main conflict centered around this question: Who should gain the use and the profit of the larger trees suitable for naval stores, the individual settlers or the Royal Navy? The Royal Navy first struck a blow in the imposed Massachusetts charter of 1691, which decreed the reservation to the Crown of all trees of twenty-four inches or larger in diameter then situated on the public domain. The charter provision, however, was not enforced.

One of the main problems in trying to force American (particularly New Hampshire) timber into naval stores was that such use was uneconomic. Northern European naval stores were cheaper and of considerably higher quality. And the colonists had better and more profitable uses for their timber. A network of subsidies and prohibitions was therefore imposed; the New England merchants, for example, refused to produce naval stores unless the admiralty granted them the privilege of the advance guarantee of a fixed price, a fixed quantity, and a long-term contract. In 1705, the Naval Stores Act, accordingly, (1) extended the prohibition on private cutting to pitch-pines and tar trees on the public domain, and to trees with twelve-inch diameters or more (but the diameter was measured from higher up than in the Massachusetts charter) located in any of the Northern colonies; (2) placed naval stores on the enumerated list; and (3) granted generous bounties for the exporting of naval stores to England, including pitch, tar, rosin, turpentine, hemp, masts, and other timber. Thus the carrot was combined with the stick. Cutting of the bigger trees, moreover, could be done only under special royal license.

To ensure enforcement of the restrictions and to encourage naval-stores production, the English merchants had the Board of Trade send John Bridger to the colonies. Concentrating on the New Hampshire coast, Bridger was still unable to enforce the restrictions. What is more, the Massachusetts General Court refused to follow the lead of New Hampshire in reaffirming the restrictive clauses of the Massachusetts charter. Consequently, Parliament passed the White Pine Act of 1711, extending those provisions of the charter to New England, New York, and New Jersey. Moreover, the White Pine Act of 1722 prohibited cutting without royal license any white pine trees that were publicly or privately owned and growing outside township limits in New England, New York, or New Jersey.

The restrictions still proved unenforceable. As Bridger began to get convictions of woodsmen committing violations, the neighbors of the offenders refused to buy their condemned property at auctions and therefore the government could not collect its fines. Furthermore, Bridger’s zeal was cooled by woodsmen threatening to shoot him if they caught him interfering with their livelihood. The sturdy New Hampshire frontiersmen, dependent on timber cutting for their livelihood, averred that “the king has no wood... and they will cut what and where they please.” Indeed, the regulations could not be enforced, even though further restrictions were imposed on the cutting of pine trees. In 1729, cutting of any pine on public lands, even within township bounds, required a license, and any cutting on private lands (that had become private since 1690) of trees over twenty-four inches in diameter was prohibited without a license. Furthermore, in 1722, exclusive jurisdiction over the timber laws was turned over to the royally appointed and juryless vice admiralty courts.

Trying to enforce the tightened restrictions was the tyrannical Scot David Dunbar, surveyor general of the King’s Woods and lieutenant governor of New Hampshire. But Dunbar was checked not only by the decided lack of enthusiasm of Governor Jonathan Belcher, but also by magnificent countersuits filed by the timber-cutters for defense of their property against the surveyor. The countersuits, moreover, were tried in the anti-timber-law civil courts of New England. In reaction, Dunbar began to seize and destroy the timber and equipment of the illegal loggers. In 1734, a pitched battle broke out near Exeter, New Hampshire. Dunbar and his men found a party of illegal woodsmen and seized their cut timber. The infuriated woodsmen struck back, and Dunbar’s men were beaten up and Dunbar himself endangered. The unsympathetic New Hampshire Council refused Dunbar’s request for military support.

The New England courts were understandably inclined to regard the surveyor’s new power to reserve private trees for the Royal Navy as an invasive trespass against private property. Particularly galling to the colonists was the reservation of all pine trees to the Crown except for privately owned ones within township limits. Even Dunbar tried to permit the cutting of smaller pines unsuitable for ship masts, but he was sharply overruled by the Crown. When an employee of the naval subcontractor and merchant Samuel Waldo cut marked timber on private land for sale to the navy, he was arrested for trespassing and fined by the justices of the peace. Waldo employed the British placeman William Shirley, advocate general of the admiralty court, and Shirley won a not unsurprisingly favorable decision for the royal prerogative in the Privy Council (the case of Frost v. Leighton, 1736). Still, Governor Belcher, sympathetic to the private timberland owners and merchants, refused to enforce the onerous laws. In 1744, the new governor, William Shirley, who had intrigued to oust Belcher in league with naval contracting interests, capped his renewed drive for enforcement by putting through the Massachusetts legislature an extension of the reservation of large pine trees to all forests private and public. Furthermore, Colonel William Pepperrell, one of the great leaders in Maine timber, had changed from an opponent to supporter of the timber bill after having acquired close family connections with Samuel Waldo; he had received some of Waldo’s naval subcontracts for timber.

The upshot of the restrictions was unfortunate for the Crown: its decrees could not prevent a large-scale destruction of the royal woods, while at the same time they permanently enraged the Northern woodsmen. Indeed, the result of arbitrarily reserving the trees to the Crown meant that private persons could not own a body of trees, and therefore that the individual colonists were forced to cut down the trees as quickly as possible. Since a colonist was forcibly prevented from owning the standing trees themselves but could only use the cut lumber, this meant that the trees were in a de facto state of no ownership and it was to no one’s economic interests to keep any of them standing. On the contrary, it was to each man’s interests to cut the trees and thus bring them into private use before his neighbor could beat him to it.

The consequences of the various parts of British policy can be seen in New Hampshire, a main center for mast trees for the navy. Royal licensing to allow cutting of the large white pine trees was reserved for those persons who also had mast contracts from the navy. In New Hampshire, this meant the powerful Wentworth family. The Wentworths had, in the first place, a virtual monopoly of the naval mast contracts; they were also habitually the appointed surveyor generals—the rulers of the royal woods—and the governors of New Hampshire. Thus Benning Wentworth and his nephew John Wentworth each in his time combined all of these offices. By midcentury, the Wentworths were greatly helped in securing the contracts by powerful connections in England, including the Marquis of Rockingham.

Governor Benning Wentworth, royal New Hampshire’s first governor independent of Massachusetts, did not, however, prove to be an efficient enforcer of the royal timber regulations. For twenty years after his appointment as surveyor of the King’s Woods, Wentworth, secure in his naval contracts, happily bothered little with enforcement, and complaints of his laxity by his deputy surveyor came to the Board of Trade. Wentworth made two sporadic attempts at enforcement in these two decades. In 1753, Wentworth told his zealous deputy Daniel Blake to seize all cut white pine lumber in his native Connecticut, whether on public or private land, in the township or out. When Governor Roger Wolcott of Connecticut protested this high-handed act in vain, the people of Connecticut decided to resort to effective direct action. Blake was rudely thrown into a pond, which experience served to discourage any further enforcement efforts.

Wentworth’s other enforcement attempt turned out just as badly. In 1758, Wentworth seized 1,500 white pine logs in New Hampshire and nearly 2,000 in Massachusetts. But the confiscated logs were in each instance repossessed or destroyed by the angry citizens. In Massachusetts, the logs were either retaken by the public or floated down to sea. In New Hampshire, the populace burned down a saw mill at which Wentworth was busily converting the captured pine logs into boards of lumber.

Nor were the substantial bounties able to create a flourishing naval-stores industry in the Northern colonies, as had been their design. We have already seen the fiasco of the Palatine experiment, when the Crown shipped hapless Palatine-German farmers to up-country New York in a vain attempt to produce naval stores. When the bounties lapsed in 1724, the naval-stores industry in the North collapsed. Whereupon the bounties were resumed on a reduced scale in 1729. Only the South, particularly South Carolina, was able to develop a thriving naval-stores industry, even under the impetus of a bounty.

The most important restrictive act of the first half of the eighteenth century was the Molasses Act of 1733. Since the mid-seventeenth century, trade with the West Indies had become vital to the Northern colonies. Lacking the great staples of the South with their ready English market (for example, tobacco, rice), the North could buy English manufactures only by selling grain and provisions to the West Indies in exchange for sugar and its molasses derivative. The North could not sell its products to England, to a large extent because the English corn laws served to exclude Northern wheat, and imports of salted food were prohibited for the benefit of English producers.

Boston became the great center of “triangular trade” with the West Indies: New England merchants exchanged fish and lumber for sugar and molasses, and then traded the latter to England in exchange for English manufactures. After 1715, this triangular arrangement was further refined: the North (Newport, Boston, New York) began heavily participating in the slave trade. Northern ships would acquire Negro slaves in West Africa, transport the slaves to the West Indies where they were in heavy demand, and then exchange them for sugar and molasses. The molasses would be processed into rum in New England distilleries, and the rum carried to West Africa to pay for the slaves. By 1750, in fact, there were sixty-three distilleries in Massachusetts and thirty in Rhode Island. And by 1771, American slave ships reached a capacity of fully one-fourth of England’s mighty slave fleet.

Before 1700, the Northern colonists had conducted their trade with the British West Indies, but after that date production on these islands became less efficient and more costly. Burdened by old exhausted soil and inefficient absentee plantations, the British West Indies planters found themselves outproduced and outcompeted at every turn by the other West Indian islands, especially the French islands of Guadeloupe, Martinique, and San Domingo. The French West Indies raised sugar at lower costs on newer and more fertile soil, and their management was far more efficient.

Thwarted in the voluntary competition of the marketplace, the British planters turned to the coercive arm of the state to try to shackle the burgeoning American-French West Indies trade. The British West Indian planters, led by the sugar planters of Barbados, organized a powerful lobby in London centered in the Jamaica Coffee House, and agitated for prohibition of the French West Indies trade. In this they were allied to the London association of sugar bakers. Finally, after several years of successful agitation in the House of Commons, the planters obtained passage in both houses of Parliament of the Molasses Act of 1733. The Molasses Act levied prohibitively high duties on any foreign sugar, molasses, or rum imported into the English colonies. The Northern colonies protested bitterly that the subsequent great increase in the price of sugar and molasses, and the lowered price of their own staples in the narrow markets of the English West Indies, would be their ruination. How indeed could the Northerners purchase English manufactures (as England and its manufacturers desired) if they could earn no purchasing power, if colonial manufacturing and the vital trade with the French West Indies were to be banned?

The Molasses Act would certainly have dealt a grave blow to the economy of the Northern colonies. But there was one great saving grace: no British regulation was more cheerfully evaded and less adequately enforced. The Walpoles were willing to appease the powerful West Indies planters by passing the Molasses Act. But they were not willing to wreck the colonial economy by enforcing it—a typically charming Walpole compromise.

In 1739, the British Sugar Act threw another bone to the planters for their disappointment at the failure to enforce the Molasses Act: the planters were now allowed to ship their sugar directly to southern Europe, without going through English ports. In all sugar sales to Europe, the planters were freed from paying English duties. This concession was gained over the fierce protest of the planters’ erstwhile ally, the United Company of Grocers and Sugar Bakers, which wanted to continue forcing the planters to sell their sugar to it. Three years later, the planters gained another wise concession: permission to carry sugar in non-British-built ships. This gain was made over the expected bitter complaints of the English shipbuilding industry.