New England's First Depression

Journal of Interdisciplinary History, xxxiii:1 (Summer, 2002), 1–20.

James E. McWilliams New England’s First Depression: Beyond an Export-Led Interpretation In a painfully ironic twist, the stream of migrants fueling New England’s early economy dried to a trickle at the very moment when settlers were beginning to establish a viable infrastructure. Improved political and economic Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/33/1/1/1695210/00221950260028995.pdf by guest on 03 October 2021 conditions within England stemmed the Great Migration in late 1639, diminishing New England’s primary source of liquid capital just as the roads, fences, bridges, and homes that would have better facilitated that capital’s efªcient movement were creating a stable local economy. John Winthrop commented frequently on the unfortunate timing of the downturn, which he claimed to have begun in May 1640. “Merchants would sell no wares,” he conªded in his journal, “but for ready money, men could not pay their debts...prices of lands and cattle fell soon to the one half and less, yea to a third, and after, one fourth part.”1 Winthrop’s business partners shared his pain. Tinker explained to Winthrop that, “It is a very greate greivanc and generall complainte among all the merchants and dealers to New England that they can have noe Returns, and theire bills are very naught insomuch that if there be not some course taken for beter pay- ments of our Creditors our trading will utterly cease.” The Gen- eral Court, the region’s governing body, also spilled substantial ink on the problem, noting that “many men in the plantation are in debt, and heare is not money sufªcient to charge the same.” Grain almost completely lost value, and the price of a healthy cow dropped from £20 to about £4. These conditions led a frustrated

James E. McWilliams is Assistant Professor of History, Southwest Texas State University. He is the author of “Work, Family, and Economic Improvement in the Massachusetts Bay Re- gion: The Case of Joshua Buffum,” New England Quarterly, LXXIV (2001), 355–384; “Brewing Beer in Massachusetts Bay, 1630–1690,” New England Quarterly, LXXI (1998), 543– 569. The author would like to thank Jack P. Greene and members of his research seminar on colonial British America, especially Tom Foster and Alec Haskell.

1James Kendall Hosmer (ed.), Winthrop’s Journal, 1630–1649 (New York, 1908), II, 31 (June 2, 1641). 2 | JAMES E. MCWILLIAMS Thomas Hooker to ask, “Why should a man stay untill the house fall on his head and he continue his being ther, where in reason he shall destroy his subsistence?”2 Historians have made much of this economic plummet. Al- most ªfty years ago, Bailyn claimed, “The ending of the Great Migration...destroyed the embryonic economy of the Puritan Commonwealth.” A version of his singular assessment has charac- terized every subsequent examination of the topic. Rutman de- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/33/1/1/1695210/00221950260028995.pdf by guest on 03 October 2021 scribed the early 1640s as a time during which “fatal changes had occurred.” Carroll explained that “the economy of New England . . . was suddenly and dramatically shattered.” “The resulting depression in New England,” McCusker and Menard have more re- 3 cently conªrmed, “was profound.” NEW ENGLAND’S FIRST DEPRESSION Historians complemented this narrative of economic decline with a happy ending; Massachusetts started to recover from the depression as early as 1642. Winthrop identiªed the cause of this economic reversal: “These straits set our people on work to provide ªsh, clapboards, planks, etc....andtolook to the West In- dies for a trade.” A depletion of migrant cash, he explained, became the motivating factor that inspired the immediate embrace of export markets. “The general fear of want of foreign commodities, now [that] our money was gone,” he wrote, “set us on to work to provide shipping of our own.” Historians followed Win- throp’s lead, asserting that colonists quickly weathered the depression by embracing export markets. Vickers accounted for the initial emergence of a regional export industry: “As local practices collapsed and the credit dried up overseas, necessity forced New Englanders to come up with marketable resources and pay their own way.” Innes wrote, “[A]s with the Bay Colony’s economic development generally, it was the depression of 1640 that cata- lyzed public efforts to both promote shipbuilding and initiate

2 Ibid. (June 2, 1641); John Tinker, “From the Downes” [England], letter to Winthrop (May 28, 1640), Winthrop Papers (Boston, 1929–1947), IV, 251; Nathanial Shurtleff (ed.), Re- cords of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England (Boston, 1854), I, 307. Information on grain and cow prices can be found in Marion H. Godfried, “The First Depression in Massachusetts,” New England Quarterly, IX (1936), 660. Hooker to Thomas Shepard (November 2, 1640), Hutchinson Papers, Massachusetts Archives, Boston. 3 Bernard Bailyn, New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century (New York, 1955), 46; Darrett B. Rutman, Winthrop’s Boston: Portrait of a Puritan Town (New York, 1965), 183; John McCusker and Russell Menard, The Economy of British America, 1607–1789 (Chapel Hill, 1984), 95; Margaret Ellen Newell, From Dependency to Independence: Economic Revolution in Co- lonial New England (Ithaca, 1998), 54. NEW ENGLAND’S FIRST DEPRESSION | 3 commercial ties with the West Indies.” Carroll agreed: “[C]hanges in the West Indies suddenly and completely trans- formed the economy and society of Barbados, invigorating and balancing the economy of New England as well.” Rutman encap- sulated this consensus in his clever claim that “[t]rade...wastobe the salvation of Massachusetts.” The turn to exports, according to this dominant interpretation, exclusively supported economic recovery from the depression.4 Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/33/1/1/1695210/00221950260028995.pdf by guest on 03 October 2021 methodology This seamless trajectory—depression followed by a sudden recovery—currently stands as the pivotal economic transition in seventeenth-century Massachusetts’ economy. But was the connection between recovery and export transition so clear? One problem with this prevailing line of reasoning concerns the methodological approach that historians have adopted to ana- lyze this seemingly straightforward turn of events. By relying heavily on an export-led model of economic change—a model that primarily highlights the export economy’s inºuence on local economic change—historians have overstated the connection between Massachusetts’ economic upturn and the export orientation that gradually occurred throughout the 1640s. A vent-for-surplus emphasis certainly has its interpretive advantages, especially when applied to regions with a dominant staple commodity. In a place like seventeenth-century Massachusetts, however, where the economy was immature and comparatively diverse, such an approach obscures what was happening within the region’s internal economy. Developments there were generally independent of the export market. Hence, what gets lost in the export-led approach is the kind of systematic analysis of local economic development that an economist of, say, early nineteenth-century America would in- stinctively have applied to the question at hand.5

4 Hosmer (ed.), Winthrop’s Journal, II, 23–24; Daniel Vickers, Farmers and Fishermen: Two Centuries of Work in Essex County, Massachusetts, 1630–1850 (Chapel Hill, 1994), 98; Stephen Innes, Creating the Commonwealth (New York, 1995), 288; Newell, From Dependency to Inde- pendence, 55; Rutman, Winthrop’s Boston, 184; Charles Carroll, The Timber Economy of Puritan New England (Providence, 1975), 82–83. 5 For a summary of the problems surrounding the export-centered approach, see James Sheridan, “The Domestic Economy,” in Jack P. Greene and Jack Richon Pole (eds.), Colonial British America: Essays in the New History of the Early Modern Era (Baltimore, 1984) 43–44. See also Marc Egnal, New World Economies: The Growth of the Thirteen Colonies and Early Canada (New York, 1998), 4–21. A more thorough discussion of the historiographical problem can be found in McWilliams, “From the Ground Up: Internal Economic Development and Local 4 | JAMES E. MCWILLIAMS Yet the numbers required to support a quantitative, export- led interpretation do not exist. Ideally, economic historians would test the hypothesis that export-led growth supported economic recovery through a quantitative measurement that compared data on export amounts, prices, and sales with such leading domestic economic indicators as property values, agricultural prices, and warehouse inventories. A positive correlation between these trends would sufªciently conªrm the export-led interpretation of Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/33/1/1/1695210/00221950260028995.pdf by guest on 03 October 2021 the region’s recovery. The critical problem is that systematically compiled export numbers for the 1630s and 1640s were either never kept or never survived. This dearth of documentary support has not prevented historians from assuming a steady increase in exports and basing conclusions upon that questionable assumption. In view of the fact that the concrete data required to conªrm an export-led hypothesis is unavailable, this article confronts the in- evitable question, What conclusions can legitimately be drawn, given this lack of methodically maintained economic data? This article removes the issue of the region’s subsequent recovery away from the export-led perspective, locating it, instead, within the much more thoroughly documented context of local infrastructural development, deªned herein as the process whereby a settlement society established the most rudimentary preconditions for local economic exchange. The construction of roads, fences, homes, and mills was crucial to this project. More- over, early town records documented it assiduously. In tapping these abundant resources in this frequently ignored context, this article—in the absence of comprehensive export data—ap- proaches the question of Massachusetts’ recovery indirectly. The perspective of common settlers trying to make an unfamiliar land conform to the basic needs of a local economy has long been the purview of social historians, but it can serve as a useful “data base” for economic historians as well. This article reveals the settlers’ dominant concern for economic issues of immediate material relevance—issues essential not so much for overseas trade, but rather for pragmatic survival in the internal economy. On the basis of this discovery, the analysis herein attempts an end-around the problem of export documentation, concluding with a suggestive, if not irrefutable, alternative

Exchange in the Massachusetts Bay Region, 1630–1710,” unpub. Ph.D diss. (Johns Hopkins University, 2001), 1–22. NEW ENGLAND’S FIRST DEPRESSION | 5 interpretation of a problem that has for too long gone unchal- lenged. limitations to export trading: conditions in the west indies The argument that the rise of export trade saved the Bay Colony from early economic ruin remains incommensurate with the documented evidence of the colony engaging in export trading during the 1640s. The Bay Colony was clearly beginning to embrace Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/33/1/1/1695210/00221950260028995.pdf by guest on 03 October 2021 overseas markets, but the sweeping claim that the fulªllment of export markets became the source of the region’s “economic salvation” is too strong. Progress in the West Indian markets, insofar as the existing evidence indicates, inched forward hesitantly. In 1641, the Bay Colony dispatched a ship to the West Indies. According to Win- throp, it “returned home with a good supply of cotton, and brought home letters with them from Barbados and other islands in those parts, intreating us to supply them with ministers.” About the next recorded trip to Barbados in 1645, Winthrop remarked, “One of our shipps which went to the Canaryes with Pipestaves . . . returned now, and brought wine and sugar and salt and some tobacco which she had at Barbadoes in exchange for Africoes, which she carried from the Ile of Maio.” A slave trade was under- way, but the direct, consistent exchange of staple commodities between the West Indies and Massachusetts apparently was not. Winthrop’s last mention of the 1640s West Indian trade came in 1648, when he noted that “one Bethzaliel Payton . . . comminge from Barbados in a vessell of 60 tu., was taken in a storme of winde and rayne.” Although historians of New England com- monly portray the West Indies as a ripe market for Bay Colony provisions, the surviving documentary snippets conªrm only a tenuous intercoastal link between these two British American pe- ripheral outposts during the 1640s. The lack of surviving documentation does not, ipso facto, conªrm the lack of trade; trade might have been brisk but unrecorded. Other factors, however, strongly suggest that this lack of documentation does, in fact, point to a lack of regular export trade.6

6 Bailyn, New England Merchants, 85–86; Carroll, Timber Economy, 80–83; Hosmer (ed.), Winthrop’s Journal, II, 406, 458, 573, 722; Vickers, Farmers and Fishermen, 101. More systematic evidence of export-trading activity can be found in several account books maintained by Bay Colony traders. See McWilliams, “From the Ground Up,” 268–364. 6 | JAMES E. MCWILLIAMS The assumption of a systematic West Indian trade also over- looks the fact that New England’s movement into the West Indian market responded to the islands’ crucial transition to sugar production. In 1640, when New England’s depression was starting to tighten its grip, Barbados had yet to initiate even the earliest move toward a monocultural sugar economy. Instead of tens of thou- sands of slaves toiling on large plantations, Barbados’ population was comprised of about 10,000 mostly Irish servants working Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/33/1/1/1695210/00221950260028995.pdf by guest on 03 October 2021 small, self-sufªcient farms. The change that would later render the region so proªtably dependent on New England exports primarily involved clearing the land of timber to grow sugarcane and im- porting slave labor from West Africa to process it. With minimal land allotted for the full-scale production of subsistence crops, livestock, and timber, Barbadians would eventually become fully reliant on Massachusetts for basic provisions. Historians who argue that the emergence of export trade saved the Bay Colony from continued depression in the early 1640s fail to recognize the pre- cise timing of this pivotal internal transition; they tend to assume that it was complete by the late or even mid-1640s.7 Regarding Barbados’ demand for timber, planters noted the increasing cost of wood fuel as early as 1648, but supplies did not run low until the middle 1650s. At that time, a contemporary ob- server noted that the island ªnally began to seek outside sources as a result of “the wood being almost already spent.” Furthermore, when planters began to look for wood, they turned not to New England but to nearby regions that had yet to embrace sugar production. The wood required to turn molasses into sugar and to make the hogsheads that contained it came initially from places like Tobago, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent, Dominica, and Brazil. Bridenbaugh and Bridenbaugh identify the years 1650 through 1665 as “the era of the Great Clearing” in the English West Indies, implying that regional supplies remained viable throughout the 1640s. The timing of West Indian depletion is completely out of sync with Massachusetts’ supposed need for a hungry timber market as early as 1642 to alleviate its economic downturn.8 7 Carroll, Timber Economy, 82–83; Carl and Roberta Bridenbaugh, No Peace Beyond the Line: The English in the Caribbean, 1624–1690 (New York, 1972), 269–270; Richard Ligon, A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados (London, 1657), 22–25; Dalby Thomas, The Rise and Growth of the West-India Collonies (London, 1690), 16; Eva Germaine Rimington Taylor, Late Tudor and Early Stuart Geography (New York, 1968), 127. 8 Winthrop Papers, V, 172; Richard Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies (New York, 1972), 67; Carroll, Timber Economy, 80–84. NEW ENGLAND’S FIRST DEPRESSION | 7 Other factors related to sugar production delayed the New England–Barbados link that would eventually become so tight. Technological capability, as well as the knowledge needed to produce high-grade sugar, took several years to obtain. Ligon, writing in 1647, explained that the previous seven years had been charac- terized by the production of “bare muscovedos,” or, in Dunn’s words, sugar that was “too dark, too moist, and full of molasses.” Most of this unreªned sugar dripped from the underequipped Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/33/1/1/1695210/00221950260028995.pdf by guest on 03 October 2021 mills that the English cobbled together before the Portuguese in Brazil taught them to build more sophisticated reªneries. Not until he left the island in 1650 did Ligon mention the presence of even modest improvements to the more primitive techniques. Without sophisticated mills, sugar production remained comparatively low in the West Indies. Modest sugar production translated into a minimal and sporadic need for Massachusetts cod and other food products.9 The tedious process of consolidating small plots of acreage originally platted for tobacco, indigo, and cotton into appropri- ately sized sugar plantations occupied most of the 1640s and 1650s. Farms that the English had surveyed during the 1630s were either too small or too large for the cultivation of sugarcane, and the task of converting these unwieldy plots into ideal 200-acre lots proved to be a time-consuming prerequisite for producing exportable sugar. By 1647, Vines offered an early indication that these divi- sions and consolidations were cohering into a productive plantation economy eager for Bay Colony provisions when he explained to Winthrop that planters “would rather buy foode at very deare rates than produce it by labour, so inªnite is the proªt of sugar works after once accomplished.” On the whole, though, the process of building plantations was another factor delaying the West Indian demand for imported provisions that would later characterize its monocultural economy. It further weakens the no-

9 Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 62, 67–68, 87; Ligon, True History of Barbados, 24, 85–86, 95; Dunn, “Barbados Census of 1680,” William and Mary Quarterly, XXVI (1969), 3–30; Hilary McD. Beckles, “The Two-Hundred Year War: Slave Resistance in the British West Indies— An Overview of the Historiography,” Jamaican Historical Review, XIII (1982), 1–8; idem, “The Economic Origins of Black Slavery in the British West Indies, 1640–1680: A Tentative Anal- ysis of the Barbados Model,” Journal of Caribbean History, XVI (1982), 36–56; Elsa V. Goveia, A Study on the Historiography of the British West Indies to the End of the Nineteenth Century (Mex- ico City, 1956); Greene, “Society and Economy in the British Caribbean during the Seven- teenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” American Historical Review, LXXIX (1974), 1499–1517; Bridenbaughs, No Peace Beyond the Line, 269–270. 8 | JAMES E. MCWILLIAMS tion of an early connection between the Massachusetts Bay Col- ony and the West Indies.10 Sufªciently stafªng these plantations with slave labor, no mat- ter how enthusiastically the English imported it, required two de- cades or more; a successful plantation needed at least one slave per two acres to maximize sugar output. In 1645, a New England visi- tor to Barbados estimated that the English had purchased “no lesse than a thousand Negroes.” Although this number represented a Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/33/1/1/1695210/00221950260028995.pdf by guest on 03 October 2021 radical demographical change from Barbadian life in the 1630s, it paled next to the 40,000 slaves who would toil on matured sugar plantations thirty-ªve years later. As a result of what Dunn calls “a rather gradual switch from servants to slaves,” a situation prevailed in which “no Barbadian in the 1640s and 1650s had the manpower to operate a really large plantation.” This demographical condition further mitigated the sustained demand for Massachusetts’ products. Slaves, after all, would eventually consume the bulk of Mas- sachusetts’ cod exports.11 When the Massachusetts Bay Colony entered the West In- dian market in the 1640s, it was recovering from a debilitating depression, and the West Indian economy had by no means turned the corner toward monocultural production. Witness the oft- quoted comment by Winthrop in 1648: “It pleased the Lorde to open to us a Trade with Barbados and other llands in the w: Indyes which as it proved gainfull so the Comodytyes we had in exchange there for our cattle and provisions: as sugar, Cotton, Tobacko, and indico, were a good helpe to discharge our engage- ments in England.” Notwithstanding the optimistic tenor of Win- throp’s assessment, his mention of tobacco, indigo, and cotton, not sugar, serves as a reminder that Barbados’ transition to a monocultural economy dependent on Massachusetts provisions was in its infancy. From the perspective of its own internal demand, the West Indies were in no position to save Massachusetts from its ªrst depression.12

10 Winthrop Papers, V, 172; Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 67; Greene, “Society and Economy”; Bridenbaugh, No Peace Beyond the Line; Richard Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery: An Economic His- tory of the British West Indies, 1623–1775 (St. Lawrence, Barbados, 1974). 11 Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 62, 67–68, 87; Ligon, True History of Barbados, 24, 85–86, 95; Dunn, “Barbados Census of 1680,” 3–30. 12 Dunn, James Savage, and Laetitia Yeandle (eds.), The Journal of John Winthrop (Cam- bridge, Mass., 1996), 692–693 (April–March 1648): “By 1647 the Barbados planters had discovered how to cultivate sugar cane; converting most of their land to this immensely NEW ENGLAND’S FIRST DEPRESSION | 9 limitations to export trading Not only was the West In- dian market short on the demand side; conditions on its supply end were also too undeveloped to support New England’s economic recovery. Moreover, the Bay Colony’s traders lacked the necessary internal resources to initiate an economic rebound through consistent overseas trade. The debilitating factors were twofold: the colonists’ unfamiliarity with coastal transportation and the scarcity of suitable trading vessels. Negotiating the high Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/33/1/1/1695210/00221950260028995.pdf by guest on 03 October 2021 seas in a shallop or small vessel was neither common nor comfort- able. Every successful overseas journey mentioned in Winthrop’s journal had its counterpart in a debacle on the high seas. Settlers might have mastered the obstacles of their local environment (the decrease in recorded overland mishaps indicates so), but they found overseas travel to be, in general, a harrowing experience. This evidence must be handled gingerly. Overseas mishaps have occurred throughout history. Conªrmation of their fre- quency throughout the 1640s might not, on the surface, indicate anything exceptional, or especially revealing, about these accidents. Nonetheless, reading both Winthrop’s journals and the Essex County court records in broader context suggests that the trading mishaps that plagued the Bay colonists during these early years represented a discrete phase of maritime inexperience. Not only do trading mishaps diminish substantially in the court records after the 1650s, when trading increased and recordkeeping became more thorough; the nature of the disasters during the ªrst two de- cades of settlement differ fundamentally from those that occurred later. Seagoing accidents between 1630 and 1650 resulted from factors endemic to a newly settled society: inexperienced sailors, poorly constructed vessels, and lack of knowledge about currents, depths, and routes. Although these disasters were possible under any conditions, they were more likely under these speciªc ones. They offer support of the larger claim that Massachusetts lacked the infrastructural prerequisites to initiate economic recovery through export trade.13 proªtable cash crop, they imported slave labor from Africa and provisions from Britain and New England.” New England had overcome the depression well before 1647. 13 George Francis Dow (ed), Records and Files of the Quarterly Court of Essex County (Salem, 1911–1916), I–IX; McWilliams, “From the Ground Up,” 158–214. Contemporary commen- tators regularly attributed seagoing mishaps to inexperience. William Hubbard, A General His- tory of New England (Boston, 1815), attribued mishaps to “want of experience and judgement 10 | JAMES E. MCWILLIAMS The seagoing debacles were often so mysterious that nobody could ªgure out what had happened. In January 1647, Winthrop reported that “a small Pinace” bound for Barbados on its ªrst voyage ran aground in Scituate. A group of men discovered the shallop with, mysteriously, “the goodes in her, but not a man, nor any of their clothes.” The small open boat probably struck an under- water shelf of boulders. Such a mistake, obviously due to inexperience, would have been less likely to happen again.14 Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/33/1/1/1695210/00221950260028995.pdf by guest on 03 October 2021 Maritime inexperience continually undermined trading voy- ages. John Turner, a Roxbury merchant with no overseas experience, entertained ambitious plans to establish a West Indian trade in January 1642. He sailed to the Caribbean in “a small pinnace of 15 tons,” and returned with “great advantage in indigo, pieces of 8, etc” without notable incident. Despite suspicion that he could have achieved such “great advantage” only “by prize [that is, through plunder],” not “by trade,” Turner “prepared a bigger vessell” the next winter; this one, unlike the ªrst, was “well manned” when it set sail. According to Winthrop, however, Turner, on his second voyage, “was forced in again 3 times: 1. by leak 2. by a contrary wind; and 3. he spent his mast in fair weather.” After stopping at Cape Anne for a new mast, he then “lost it by the way, and, so by these occasions and by the frost, he was kept in all winter.” In the end, “[h]e gave over his voyage and went to Virginia, and there sold his vessell and shipped himself and his commodities in a Dutch ship for the West Indies.”15 The dearth of large trading vessels—a condition common in any nascent settlement—contributed heavily to routine seagoing disasters. In the early 1640s, the Bay Colony initiated a shipbuilding industry that drew upon the region’s abundance of white oak to build sturdy masts. Throughout the decade, however, this industry managed to produce only a few large trading vessels designed for extended overseas travel. Most of the overseas trading that occurred in the 1640s depended on underequipped, under- staffed, and undersized pinnaces. The consequences were predict- able. “There was a shallop with eight men to go from in things of such a nature” (11). Two ªshermen drowned in Massachusetts Bay “for not being acquainted with the channel” (196). 14 Dunn, Savage, and Yeandle (eds.), Journal of John Winthrop (October 10, 1646; January 1647), 684–687. 15 Ibid., 386 (January–February 1642). NEW ENGLAND’S FIRST DEPRESSION | 11 Pascataquack to Pemiquid about the beginning of the frost,” Win- throp recounted. “They were taken with a N.W. tempest and put out to sea 14 days....Four of them died with cold, the rest were discovered by a ªsherman a good time after, and so brought off the island.” These hazards would gradually diminish throughout the century, as sailors obtained a better sense of the region’s weather patterns. But in 1640, they were serious impediments to smooth intercoastal sailing.16 Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/33/1/1/1695210/00221950260028995.pdf by guest on 03 October 2021 Even the possession of a large ship did not necessarily protect seamen from a treacherous experience. The few hefty ships of 300 tons or more that the Bay Colonists built frequently suffered from what seems to have been shoddy craftsmanship. Winthrop, for example, described a ship called the Make Shift, so named because “she was built of the wreck of a greater vessell.” While “on a voyage to the southward,” the recycled craft was “cast upon a ledge of rocks near Long Island,” upon which it quickly crumbled. The “goods were all lost, but the men were saved.” Shortly thereafter, in another incident, the Coach, which was heading south from Sa- lem, “sprang a leak, so as in the morning they found her hold half ªlled with water.” With the ship going down, the seamen and passengers “betook themselves to their skiff, being a very small one, and the wind then growing very high.” Men paddling for shore in the foreground of a sinking vessel became a common sight for coastal New Englanders still unaccustomed to traveling long distances in new waters.17 One major indication of a region’s immersion into export markets is the presence of what staple theorists call “top-down linkages.” Assessing the economic situation prevailing in the late seventeenth-century Massachusetts Bay, for example, Innes wrote, “Along with sawmills and the cod ªshery, New England shipyards afforded the region with a rich network of backward (production) and forward (consumption) linkages.” These connections, he con-

16 The shipbuilding industry in New England remains an underexamined topic, but the following works provide a good introduction: Innes, Creating the Commonwealth, 270–279; Jo- seph A. Goldenberg, Shipbuilding in Colonial America (Charlottesville, 1976), 37; Bernard Bailyn and Lotte Bailyn, Massachusetts Shipping, 1697–1714: A Statistical Study (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), 100–105; Ralph A. Davis, The Rise of the English Shipping Industry in the Seven- teenth and Eighteenth Centuries (London, 1962); Carroll, Timber Economy, 68–71. Dunn, Sav- age, and Yeandle (eds.), Journal of John Winthrop, 384 (December–January 1642). 17 Dunn, Savage, and Yeandle (eds.), Journal of John Winthrop (October–December 1640), 340. 12 | JAMES E. MCWILLIAMS tinues, “allowed local capitalists to invest in sawmills...aswell as the gristmills constructed in virtually every town of consequence.” Although historians often overstate the impact of the linkage ef- fect, its central interpretive point is undeniable: Export relations had a tangible impact on local economic growth. Accordingly, the port towns north of Boston and Salem should exhibit concrete signs of developmental linkages to the rising export trade. The analysis of several town records, however, reveals no such re- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/33/1/1/1695210/00221950260028995.pdf by guest on 03 October 2021 sponses during the 1640s.18 Examination of Bay Colony town records from the 1660s on- ward reveals a concentrated focus on export-related developments. Once the region had become incorporated into the transatlantic world, towns directed their energies to such issues as the construction of boardinghouses, ships, wharfs, and merchant warehouses; the sale of liquor to foreign traders; port fees; timber and ªshing licenses; and many other matters indicative of the region’s established place in the transatlantic economy. This situation after 1660 provides a useful point of contrast for the 1640s. If, by extension, the linkages generated by the region’s export transition were inºuencing the shape of the local economy in the 1640s, they would presumably be evident in the town records from that period as well. By the same token, their absence would indicate the absence of a systematic export trade. The town of Salem, the unusually complete records of which allow for a modest quantitative presentation, is a case in point. Be- tween 1640 and 1644, Salem’s records yield almost no evidence of any activity to embrace the West Indian markets. Of the 220 entries, 121 (45 percent) were land grants to settlers who were either expanding their original farms or acquiring land for the ªrst time. Of the remaining 99 entries, 10 (10.2 percent) involved livestock regulation, 22 (22.2 percent) fences, 11 (11.1 percent) transportation/road-related issues, 28 (28.2 percent) appointments to civic positions, and other internal matters, 5 (5.2 percent) small industries (mostly corn mills), 6 (6.2 percent) boundary clariªca-tions, and the rest miscellaneous concerns. Only two entries explicitly addressed the export trade. One of them proclaimed that a Cap-

18 Innes, Creating the Commonwealth, 276. For the origins of the linkage concept, see Albert O. Hirschman, The Strategy of Economic Development (New Haven, 1958). In Innes’ words, Hirschman “contends that the creation of backward and forward linkages produces an economic dynamic that is considerably greater than the sum of its parts” (383, n. 18). NEW ENGLAND’S FIRST DEPRESSION | 13 tain Trask “hath leave to set up a tide mill upon the North River, provided hee make passage for a Shallope from halfe ºood to full sea.” The other export reference was a stipulation that those who “have felled timber trees within two miles of the towne of Salem, and any timber trees within one mile of Marblehead that are ªtt for shipping” be paid accordingly. Curiously, the records during these years never mention the cod trade, ªshermen, or ªshing ventures of any sort. On the whole, they give the impression of Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/33/1/1/1695210/00221950260028995.pdf by guest on 03 October 2021 people going about their routine business in a local settlement economy.19 Settlers in Ipswich also concentrated their resources on the local economy during the time period when, according to the export-led thesis, they should have been devoting energy to the export market. According to the town’s records, citizens did not build their ªrst saw mill until 1649; throughout the 1640s, they held to their policy that “no man shall sell any timber on the common to make sale of.” A second grant for a saw mill did not appear until 1656. Nor did a salt house—an important prerequisite for extensive cod shipments—appear until 1652. The town did not bother to build a wharf until 1656. The ªrst grant for a shipyard came in 1668, when the town allowed an acre of land “for a yard to build vessels and employ workmen for that ends.” Throughout the 1660s, the economic connections to the export markets tight- ened; other warehouses followed in 1662 and 1668. All of these developments occurred far too late to support an export transition in the 1640s.20 Ipswich’s ªshing industry also showed a much later matura- tion than the traditional export-led argument would imply. The town clearly understood the signiªcance of potential ªsh exports. In 1641, it established a “Committee for the Furthering of Trade.” This organization allotted land for ªshing stages and ºakes (plat- forms for drying ªsh), granted ªshermen the liberty to build on them, and allotted space for ªshing boats. Vickers showed, how-

19 Records of Salem Massachusetts, I, 1634–1659, Essex Institute Historical Collections (Salem, 1868), I, 98–164. Further insights into early Salem can be found in Joseph Felt, Annals of Salem (Salem, 1845), 167–176; Vital Records of Salem, Massachusetts (Salem, 1916), I; Sidney Perley, The History of Salem, Massachusetts (Salem, 1924), I. 20 Franklin J. Waters, Ipswich in the Massachusetts Bay, 1633–1700 (Ipswich, 1905), 21, 77–81. Other useful sources for early Ipswich include Felt, Ipswich, Essex, and Hamilton (Ipswich, 1966); Vital Records of Ipswich, Massachusetts (Salem, 1910), I. 14 | JAMES E. MCWILLIAMS ever, that most ªshermen abandoned the rough and unsteady life of the sea for the more secure and independent life of a farmer despite these inducements. According to Ipswich’s records, expan- sion of ªshing stages and ºakes did not occur until 1696. The ªshermen who became farmers were not replaced by immigrants; immigration reached a virtual halt after 1639.21 The town of Rowley did not give much indication of responding to export pressures in the 1640s either. One sure sign of Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/33/1/1/1695210/00221950260028995.pdf by guest on 03 October 2021 frequent wood milling for commercial exportation in the highly regulatory atmosphere of early New England was the establish- ment of dam regulations. Not until 1681, however, did Peabody Mill and Dodge’s Mill—Rowley’s two saw mills—come under regulation that “the water must be let out of the mill pond in the Spring: the date for [unreadable] off the ºash boards...was 6 May.” Other apparent connections to export formed relatively late as well. No shipwright enters the records until the 1670s. The town did not build a wharf until 1681; it expanded it in 1694. Rowley eventually connected the wharf to the town’s main warehouse via a broad highway, but not until 1706.22 Marblehead’s town records of the 1640s are hardly consistent with a full-scale export transition. Unlike other Essex County towns to the north, Marblehead experienced modest shipbuilding activity in the 1630s and 1640s. But these ships did not necessarily integrate the Bay Colony into overseas trade. Matthew Craddock and Hugh Peters, for example, funded construction of the Desire, a 120-ton vessel, in 1636. This ship, instead of trading goods in the Wine Islands and the West Indies, shipped passengers from Eng- land to New England, thus fueling the Great Migration until 1640. On its rare excursions to Barbados, it did not engage in the sort of commerce that historians have noted for the late seventeenth century. Instead, as seen in its ªrst trip to the West Indies, the Desire exported Pequot boys and women in exchange for slaves. The De- sire’s ultimate fate was to sink in the Caribbean Sea after bombard- ment from a Spanish ship.

21Waters, Ipswich in the Massachusetts Bay, 21, 77–81. 22 Amos Everett Jewett, Rowley, Massachusetts, 1639–1850 (Rowley, 1946), 176; idem, The Early Settlers of Rowley, Massachusetts (Ipswich, 1932); Vital Records of Rowley, Massachusetts to the End of the Year 1849 (Salem, 1928). NEW ENGLAND’S FIRST DEPRESSION | 15 Securing the labor of ªshermen in a land-rich settlement was as difªcult in Marblehead as in Ipswich. When, in 1644, Salem (which maintained jurisdiction over Marblehead) allowed Marblehead to allot their own plots of land, the town erased the 1636 Salem law that no new land be given to ªshermen. As a result, so many ªshermen received land grants that captains could not secure enough labor to undertake offshore ªshing expeditions. Throughout the 1640s, Marblehead residents continued to gravi- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/33/1/1/1695210/00221950260028995.pdf by guest on 03 October 2021 tate toward the land rather than export commerce. Historians have often noted Winthrop’s remark that Marblehead caught £4000 worth of ªsh in 1647; they might also have considered the implications of his decision to mention this relatively small amount in the ªrst place. The necessary infrastructural support for a systematic export trade was simply not in place during the early and mid-1640s.23 local infrastructural development If towns were not strongly responding to the dictates of overseas trade, then what kind of economic decisions pulled them out of the depression? The details of a Marblehead town meeting suggest an answer. In 1648, Marblehead ªnally managed to convince the General Court to grant it a jurisdictional status distinct from Salem. The ªrst meeting that the town held after this decision reºects the speciªc economic concerns preoccupying the settlers who had been living in Marblehead for more than a decade under Salem’s purview. The issues slated for consideration were a cattle tax, fence regulations, warden appointments, land division, cow keepers, deed re- strictions, and common regulations. Settlers focused their immediate attention on the resources that comprised the natural capital of their domestic economic lives. Policies related to transatlantic or Caribbean trade did not arise at this meeting. In mar- shaling local economic resources rather than those resources supportive of exportation, Marblehead was not alone in conªrming the ongoing importance of local economic manage- ment to their overall economic viability. This focus provides an

23 Pricilla Sawyer Lord and Virginia Clegg Gamage, Marblehead (Philadelphia, 1972), 23– 25; Thomas Gray, The Founding of Marblehead (Baltimore, 1984), 12–16; Vickers, Farmers and Fishermen, 91–108. 16 | JAMES E. MCWILLIAMS important clue to the underlying sources of Massachusetts’ recovery in the early 1640s.24 Cows and wood, not ªsh and ships, were the initial priorities for settlers who were trying to build an infrastructure supportive of a viable local economy. During the 1640s, the residents of Marblehead were still preoccupied with regulating the placement and movement of their burgeoning inventory of livestock. The selectmen appointed two cow keepers, one a master and the other Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/33/1/1/1695210/00221950260028995.pdf by guest on 03 October 2021 an apprentice, at a salary of 4s. and 6s., respectively. Their job was “to sound a warning horn at sunrise and take herd to Walshingham Chillson’s house by a half an hour after sunrise,” later to take it “past the ªrst bridge,” and ªnally to return it there “an hour before sunset” with another “blow of the horn to give notice.” The selectmen warned the keepers to be “especially care- ful in wet weather.” These measures hardly seem like sophisticated policies, but in a developing local economy, they had an immediate and tangible economic impact.25 Maintaining access to fence supplies and ªrewood also de- manded the town’s attention. Fishermen who had established operations on shore required a steady supply of timber to build their ºakes. The selectmen of Marblehead did not necessarily want to hinder their ability to catch ªsh for commercial purposes, but they needed to protect local timber supplies for local use. As a result, they passed a measure requiring any ªsherman who wanted local timber to get their permission ªrst. This decision reºected both the “increase of non-ªshing interests at the plantation” and the ac- tions of “foreign” ªshermen who “came into the plantation each year and gathered wood to construct ºakes and use as for ªrewood and for stages.” Fishermen eventually had to pay the town 10s. a year for “their wood ºake stuff.” These ordinances do not inti- mate a region primarily concerned with export trade.26 To supervise road maintenance, the selectmen chose two men as “way wardens” for the year, warning that “whoever so shall neglect to come out such times as they are warned” to assist

24 Marblehead Town Records, Essex Institute Historical Collections, LXIX, 212 (reprinted in Gray, Founding of Marblehead, 22–23). For information about Salem’s early relationship with Marblehead, see Essex Institute Historical Collections, LXIX, 208. 25 Gray, Founding of Marblehead, 26–27. 26 Marblehead Town Records, 212–213; Vickers, Farmers and Fishermen, 95; Inness, Cre- ating the Commonwealth, 288; Newell, From Dependency to Independence, 56–59. NEW ENGLAND’S FIRST DEPRESSION | 17 with road repair, “shall pay 2s 6d every day they shall be absent.” The selectmen chose several other men “to order the affairs of the plantation,” which required them to “stint the commons for the inhabitants . . . and appoint upland ªeld on the farm as all so to make a rate for the repair of the Meeting House and town way.”27 Such measures were fundamental in the long process of orga- nizing a new town. From the perspective of the traditional historiography, however, they may seem surprising, since during the Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/33/1/1/1695210/00221950260028995.pdf by guest on 03 October 2021 early 1640s, towns like Marblehead were supposedly re-orienting their economic vision toward export concerns, particularly with respect to the ªshing and timber industries. An overview of two other towns conªrms that Marblehead was not alone in spending its depression and early post-depression years focusing on internal matters essential to the functioning of a local economy. Between 1638 and 1645, Ezekial Rodgers and Company settled and developed the town of Rowley by following the basic blueprint drafted by settlers who had organized the region’s earliest towns. Rowley’s ªrst recorded act involved tracing the out- lines for a major road through town and into neighboring towns that would not disrupt private pasture or farm land. Working under the general Court’s stipulation that “every town shall choose 2 or 3 men who will join with 2 or 3 of the next town...tolayout the highways where they may be most convenient,” selectmen appointed way wardens and established prerequisites for the road’s construction. Most notably, the settlers had to build the road without “puling downe any man’s house, or laying open any gar- den or orchard...oranycorne ground.” Whatever the prevailing transatlantic balance of trade may have been at that moment, settlers intent on laying the foundation of an economically viable town understood that this initial act transcended it.28 Rowley enjoyed extensive natural resources. Its coastal loca- tion afforded access to the Bay’s ample stock of cod, and its rich hinterland teemed with mature timber. The logic of an export-led model predicts that this major road would have connected Rowley to the coastal towns of Salem and Boston, thereby foster- ing the overseas trade in timber and ªsh. Yet this “highway,” as the town called it, served primarily as an interior artery. By May

27 Marblehead Town Records, 210. 28 Jewett, Rowley, 210–213. 18 | JAMES E. MCWILLIAMS 1640, it connected Rowley with Ipswich, Wenham, and Newbury rather than the more commercially oriented towns along the coast. The “Cart Bridge,” built in 1647 over the Ipswich River at the Ipswich/Rowley border, provided Rowley settlers with ready access to Ipswich’s active grist mills. “Thurlow’s Bridge,” located at the Newbury border, offered Rowley’s chil- dren passage over the Parker River to Newbury’s schoolhouse. Rowley’s arrangement with the bridge’s owner allowed him to Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/33/1/1/1695210/00221950260028995.pdf by guest on 03 October 2021 take 2d. for “every horse, cow, oxe, or any other great cattle, as also one half a penny a piece for every hogg, sheep, or goat that shall pass over the said bridge.” In short, the construction of this major road responded primarily to local economic demands, as did most economic decisions at the time.29 During these early years of settlement, Rowley residents not only set up farms, built fences, and laid out roads; they also took modest steps toward establishing necessary industrial operations. Their choice of industries, however, further conªrms the immediate local mandate for certain services rather than an emphasis on an emerging export market. Historians have interpreted the rise of these manufacturing operations as a reaction to the depression. A more plausible interpretation is that these new industries represented a logical step in the evolution of the towns and that, depression or no depression, their emergence would have occurred anyway. For example, settlers cut their timber by hand in saw pits instead of building a sawmill capable of processing the quantity of timber requisite for exportation. The ªrst mill constructed, however, was a corn mill rather than a saw mill. Its owner received permission to build it in 1638 on the condition that he “make his mill ªt to grynde corne, and do so maintain the same and keep a man to grind.”30 Other industrial ventures, albeit only modest ones designed to fulªll local needs, quickly followed. Edmond Bridges set up a blacksmith’s shop in the early 1640s, and a tanyard emerged under the town’s protective proviso that “no butcher, currier, or shoemaker should be a tanner, nor should any tanner be a butcher, currier, or shoemaker.” Winthrop complained of wool “supplies from England failing much,” but, with the help of a fulling mill

29 Ibid. 30 Rowley Town Records, as partially excerpted in ibid., 156–157. NEW ENGLAND’S FIRST DEPRESSION | 19 constructed in 1643, Massachusetts soon passed an act forbidding New England’s export of wool. Conceptualizing these endeavors as the direct results of external economic forces—which historians traditionally have done—fails to recognize the impact of local demand on a settlement’s economic evolution.31 In Cambridge, the developments of the 1630s were further reªned throughout the 1640s. Land grants, cattle regulations, fence repairs, and timber regulations continued to dominate the Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/33/1/1/1695210/00221950260028995.pdf by guest on 03 October 2021 policies of the local economy. In 1640, for example, the town en- acted ten pieces of legislation, six involving basic land grants to in- coming settlers and the other four dealing with fences and livestock. The town “[a]greed with Richard Beckeells to keepe the heard of milch Cows for this yeere,” and arranged “with Goodman Oaks for his man to keepe the drie heard on the other side of the water at 12s pr week.” In order to regulate hog movement with greater control and efªciency, town leaders agreed that “what ever Hogges shall be found either in streete or common without a keeper not sufªciently yoaked and rung they who are the owners of such hogs for every defalt are to pay 6d and if found in corne or gardens they are to pay the dammage.” Echoing its policy of the 1630s, the town declared, “All fences belonging unto the necke shall sufªciently be kept as was ordered that last yeare by the townesmen.” This underlying continuity of local economic behavior provides a crucial context for a fuller understanding of the depression and the region’s response to it.32 More than any other town in the Bay Colony, Cambridge tightly monitored the usage and movement of local timber. Like Marblehead, the town passed rules explicitly designed to limit timber within the town’s boundaries, keeping it available for such local uses as home and fence building. Cambridge declared that any person who “cutt out or take away directly or indirectly any wood or timber on this side of the path which goeth from the mill to water towne ....shall forfeit for such load, be it timber, ªve shillings pr loade, and if wood., 2s.” Those who wanted to re- move timber from common ground had to apply to the town: “liberty granted to B. Sell to the number of twelve trees for fenc-

31 Ibid., 159. 32 The Records of the Town of Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1630–1703 (Cambridge, 1901), 43–45 (November 10, 1640); Luciius R. Paige, History of Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1630–1877 (Boston, 1877). 20 | JAMES E. MCWILLIAMS ing and building, to be felled by mayday next”; “liberty granted to Mr. Pellum and Bro Jacksonn to fell soe many tres as may serve to fence between them on the backside of Bro Jacksonne house”; “liberty granted unto Edmond Frost for to fell some timber for the building of an house.” On rare occasions, the town permitted a settler to fell trees for the processing of clapboards, presumably for export. However, if the town records are any indication, the exportation of timber was of secondary concern to settlers.33 Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/33/1/1/1695210/00221950260028995.pdf by guest on 03 October 2021

Town records tell a more systematic story about Massachusetts’ export capability than do the few scattered references to export trade that historians have traditionally cited to answer the question of Massachusetts’ recovery from its ªrst depression. Economic activity on the local level fails to conªrm the export transition that historians have long promoted. Contrary to the sort of export- oriented activity that would later dominate town records throughout the Bay Colony, settlers in the 1640s hewed closely to the practices that prevailed during the ªrst decade of development. Although such mundane activities as building fences, clearing roads, and acquiring timber for fuel might seem like secondary economic endeavors from a modern, or even an early nineteenth- century, perspective, placed in their more accurate historical context, they had far greater importance to the average settler than transatlantic activity. The export economy’s absence in town records calls for a re- conceptualization of economic growth that highlights the role that infrastructural changes played in the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s ability to overcome its famous economic downturn. Export-led economic growth ultimately played an important role in colonial New England’s economic development, but not in the 1640s. Recognizing the limitations of export-led interpretations, especially for a settlement society like seventeenth-century New Eng- land, will only lead to a more complete picture of regional economic development.

33 Cambridge Town Records, 57–59 (January 11 and March 8, 1646); 49 (November 13, 1643); 52 (February 12, 1645).