The American colonists initially responded to the British blockade by boiling sea water. But boiling used up an enormous quantity of wood to make a very small amount of salt. About 400 gallons of seawater were needed to make one bushel of salt. In the winter, families would keep an iron caldron of seawater cooking over the household fire, which was not a great additional expense, since the fire was burning continuously anyway to heat the house. But only a small amount of salt was produced this way. Salt makers drove wooden stakes into tidal pools, and salt would crystalize on the wood as the pools evaporated. This technique was inexpensive but also yielded little.
The Continental Congress passed several measures addressing the salt shortage. On December 29, 1775, the Congress “earnestly recommended to the several Assemblies and Conventions to promote by sufficient public encouragement the making of salt in their respective colonies.”
In March 1776, Pennsylvania Magazine published a lengthy excerpt from Brownrigg’s essay on making bay salt. The article was reprinted as a pamphlet and circulated by the Congress. On May 28, 1776, the Congress decided to give a bounty of one third of a dollar per bushel, which weighs about fifty pounds, to all salt importers or manufacturers in the colonies for the next year. The moment the pamphlet and bounty offer were published, salt-works were started along the American coastline. New Jersey had contemplated establishing a state-operated saltworks, but so many private ones were built along its coast in 1777 that it canceled these plans as unnecessary.
In June 1777, a congressional committee was appointed “to devise ways and means of supplying the United States with salt.” Ten days later the committee proposed that each colony could offer financial incentives to both importers and producers of salt. Some of the thirteen colonies had already been doing this. New Jersey declared that any saltwork could exempt up to ten employees from military service.
ONE OF THE many sea salt operations to start up in response to the government’s publication of the Brownrigg pamphlet and bounty offer was the first saltworks on Cape Cod. Given the cod-fishing communities and the presence of sea and wind, Cape Cod was a logical place to make salt. The water both on the bay side and in Nantucket Sound is even saltier than that of the open Atlantic.
The first works was started in the town of Dennis by John Sears, who spent his days so lost in thought that he was known as “Sleepy John Sears.” The neighbors were skeptical of the 10-by-100-foot wooden vat Sleepy John built in Sesuit Harbor. The vat leaked, and after many weeks he had produced only eight bushels of salt.
The neighbors laughed, but Sleepy John Sears spent the winter caulking the vat as a ship’s hull would be sealed. In the summer of 1777, a time of great salt scarcity, he produced thirty bushels of salt and his neighbors stopped laughing, and Sleepy John became known as Salty John Sears.
The following year, the British man-of-war the Somerset ran aground trying to round the Cape. The coastline was poorly marked, and scavenging shipwrecks was a strong local tradition. Sears took the Somerset’s bilge pump to fill his vats. But even with the bilge pump, producing Sears’s salt required a great deal of heavy manual labor, and only wartime prices made this high-cost salt economically viable.
Then a man named Nathaniel Freeman, from nearby Harwich, suggested that Sears use windmills to pump seawater. The same thing had been done in eighth-century Sicily, in Trapani, but Cape Codders thought this was a brilliant new idea. Soon the wooden skeletons of rustic windmills were seen on the edges of most Cape Cod towns. The windmills, known as saltmills, pumped seawater through pipes—lead-lined hollowed pine logs—to the evaporation pans. But in a climate where solar evaporation was viable only in the summer months, the hardship of wartime made this operation profitable. And still these rebel colonies could not produce enough salt to meet their needs.
Fishermen with catches to be salted and farmers with pigs and cattle to slaughter and salt before winter hoped for a short war, but that was not to be. By the time it ended with the Treaty of Paris in September 1783, the American Revolution would be, until Vietnam, the longest war ever fought by the United States. A new nation was born with the bitter memory of what it meant to depend on others for salt.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Liberté, Egalité, Tax Breaks
IN 1875, A prominent German botanist named Matthais Jakob Schleiden wrote a book, Das Salz, which contended that there was a direct correlation between salt taxes and despots. He pointed out that neither ancient Athens nor Rome, while it remained a republic, taxed salt, but listed Mexico and China among the salt-taxing tyrannies of his day. It seems uncertain if salt taxes are always an accurate litmus test for democracy, but the French salt tax, the gabelle, clearly demonstrated what was wrong with the French monarchy.
The argument for the gabelle had been that since everyone, rich and poor, used salt more or less equally, a tax on salt would be in effect a poll tax, an equal tax per person. Throughout history, poll taxes, charging the same to the poorest peasant as the richest aristocrat, have been the most hated. The gabelle was not an exception. The tax performed the peculiar service of making a very common product seem rare because the complex rules of taxation inhibited trade. And even more infuriating, the gabelle made a basic product expensive, for the profit of the Crown.
Even the Crown’s claim that the gabelle was fair because it taxed everyone equally was not true. There were many arbitrary provisions, such as the exemptions for the town of Collioure; for some, but not all religious institutions; some officers; some magistrates; some people of note.
The gabelle, like France, was established piecemeal. The first attempt at a comprehensive salt administration occurred in the Berre saltworks near Marseilles in 1259, by Saint Louis’s brother, Comte Charles de Provence. The following century, this administration was extended to Peccais, Aigues-Mortes, and the Camargue—an area that became known administratively as Pays de Petite Gabelle. In 1341, Philip VI established a salt administration in northern France that was labeled the Pays de Grande Gabelle. At the time, these two areas included most of the territory controlled by the French Crown.
At first the gabelle imposed a modest 1.66 percent sales tax on salt. But each monarch eventually found himself in a crisis—a prince to be ransomed, a war to be declared—that was resolved by an increase in the salt tax. By 1660, King Louis XIV regarded the gabelle as a leading source of state revenues.
One of the gabelle’s most irritating inventions was the sel du devoir, the salt duty. Every person in the Grande Gabelle over the age of eight was required to purchase seven kilograms (15.4 pounds) of salt each year at a fixed high government price. This was far more salt than could possibly be used, unless it was for making salt fish, sausages, hams, and other salt-cured goods. But using the sel du devoir to make salted products was illegal, and, if caught, the perpetrator would be charged with the crime of faux saunage, salt fraud, which carried severe penalties. Many simple acts were grounds for a charge of faux saunage. In the Camargue, shepherds who let their flocks drink the salty pond water could be charged with avoiding the gabelle.
A 1670 revision of the criminal code found yet another use for salt in France. To enforce the law against suicide, it was ordered that the bodies of people who took their own lives be salted, brought before a judge, and sentenced to public display. Nor could the accused escape their day in court by dying in the often miserable conditions of the prisons. They too would be salted and put on trial. Breton historians have discovered that in 1784 in the town of Cornouaille, Maurice LeCorre had died in prison and was ordered salted for trial. But due to some bureaucratic error, the corpse did not get a trial date and was found by a prison guard more than seven years later, not only salted but fermented in beer, at which point it was buried without trial.
A woodcut showing salt being measured, from Ordonnances de la Prévôte des Marchands de Paris 1500. The Granger Collection
LOUIS XIV PUT the state’s finance and commerce in the hands of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the son of a me
rchant family from the Champagne region. Colbert was a leading advocate of the school of economics known as mercantilism, which held that the value of the state was measured in the goods it exported and the precious metals it imported. To this end, both production and trade were to be tightly controlled by the state through such tools as taxes and tariffs. Mercantilism held that the sum total of world trade was limited, so that if England increased its trade, it would be at the expense of France and everyone else.
In salt, Colbert reasoned, France had a valuable export product. He was directly involved in marketing French salt to the Nordic countries, and he made important improvements in French waterways to move salt more efficiently. He believed that France made the world’s best salt, which is not a surprising point of view for a Frenchman, but many Englishmen, Dutch, and Germans of the time agreed. Colbert corresponded with salt makers about technical improvements. Today, in Guérande it is proudly asserted that Louis XIV would only eat Guérande salt. If this is true, it would explain why he was so interested in improving the color. Colbert pointed out that if it were white like the salt of France’s primary salt competitors, Spain and Portugal, it would sell better. But the paludiers of Guérande continued to rake up salt with green algae and the charcoal-colored clay mud on which the ponds were built.
Colbert’s name became infamous in French salt history when, in 1680, he revised the gabelle, codifying the inequities among regions into six unequal zones. The Pays de Grand Gabelle was the oldest part, the heart of France, including the Paris region. With only one third of the French population, who used only a quarter of the French salt, and yet who paid two-thirds of the state’s salt revenue, the residents of this region were the angriest people in France. Local merchants imported inexpensive salt from Portugal, the white salt of Setúbal, to try to lower the local price.
The Pays de Petite Gabelle, on the Mediterranean, where much of the salt production was owned by the Crown, was less rigidly controlled but also so heavily taxed that one fourth of all salt tax revenue was squeezed from this fifth of the population.
In the third region, the Pays de Salines, which included Lorraine and other areas of inland brine wells, the Crown also owned much of the production. But in this region, unlike the Grande and Petite Gabelles, both wholesale and retail sales were carried out by private merchants rather than agents of the state. Hence, far less political tension existed in this region, but far less revenue was earned by the Crown. People in the Pays de Salines consumed twice as much salt as those in the Grande Gabelle. Adam Smith would no doubt have argued that the relative free trade of the Pays de Salines increased sales, though it could also be argued that the northern French did not traditionally eat as much salted food as in eastern France with its ham, sausage, and choucroute.
In southwestern France, François I, the sixteenth-century monarch who kept his table salt in a Cellini, dropped the small but irritating consumer tax and replaced it with a much larger tax on producers. After a year of angry protest, he cut this tax in half, and a year later, in 1543, the tax was entirely dropped. Instead, the rigid administration of the Grande Gabelle, with its controls on production, wholesale operations, and retail sales, was to be extended to this region. The result was a movement of some 40,000 farmers, who rose up in armed rebellion with the slogan “Vive le roi sans gabelle”—Long live the king without the gabelle. The French Crown, shocked by the size and ferocity of the uprising, backed down, thankful that at least they were still saying “Vive le roi.”
It was decided that in this troubled region, known to the gabelle as Pays Redimées, it would be prudent for the Crown to content itself with only the revenue from tolls on the transport of salt. When Colbert codified the gabelle, he kept this southwestern Pays Redimées with its exemptions, which meant that while the north endured severe salt controls, and the east and the Mediterranean also had some, untaxed southwestern salt could be traded across the region’s southern border into Spain at competitive prices. Worse, the Basque provinces, which were right on the Spanish border, as a condition of their participation in France, were exempted from the gabelle, leaving the Basques in an ideal position to trade inexpensive salt in both countries.
Added to the gabelle’s complicated multitiered system was yet another privileged border region, a small area on the English Channel where salt makers boiled seawater with the ashes of seaweed, making a fine, white salt similar to peat salt. The Crown had pleased this region with only light salt taxes, but then realizing that such high-quality inexpensive salt could easily flood the neighboring Grande Gabelle, restricted the amount of salt produced by limiting the number of saltworks.
To the rest of France, the most irritatingly unequal region was the Pays Exempt, made up of Brittany and newly acquired areas in the north such as Flanders, which had been brought into France with the promise that they would not have to participate in the gabelle. These were also fishing regions, like Collioure, and Colbert wanted fishing areas to be exempt from the salt tax. He had a great belief in the value not only of salt fish as an export but of fishermen as a potential navy.
The Pays Exempt also included the entire salt-producing coast from Guérande to the salt-making islands off La Rochelle. In the mid–eighteenth century, salt provided work for 950 families in the Guérande region alone. About 500 men were paludiers, working 32,000 salt ponds. More than 3,000 ponds had been added since the sixteenth century. The gabelle had made paludiers an agricultural elite, earning a better living than most peasants of the time. Some even owned small parts of their saltworks.
Brittany, like Basque country, was a border region with cheap untaxed salt to trade, in this case across the Channel to England and up the coast to Holland. In the seventeenth century, so many English, Welsh, Scottish, and Dutch ships put into Le Croisic for salt that the local Catholic church worried about a Protestant influence on the townspeople.
IN 1784, THE French government turned to Jacques Necker, a Swiss banker so brilliant in his administration of the disastrous French economy that for a moment it appeared he would save the monarchy. In 1784, he reported that a minot of salt, which was forty-nine kilograms (107.8 pounds), cost only 31 sous in Brittany, but 81 in Poitou, 591 in Anjou, and 611 in Berry. Necker recognized that with such price differences, France was rich in opportunities for smugglers.
Salt smugglers and clandestine salt makers, the faux-sauniers, were simply opportunists amassing illegal fortunes underselling legal salt. Yet, they became popular heroes who could wander the countryside helping themselves to farm products without ever hearing a complaint from a peasant. Colbert’s 1680 revision of the gabelle made it a crime for an innkeeper to give a room to a salt smuggler. A repeat offender could be sentenced to death.
The gabelous, the hated collectors and enforcers of the gabelle, were often crude and lawless men, abusive of their special privileges, which included carrying arms and stopping, questioning, searching, or arresting people at will. The gabelous were especially distrustful of women and abusive to them, sometimes squeezing a choice part for the pleasure of it. Often, to their disappointment, they would find bags of salt in these places. Women hid salt in their breasts, corsets, posteriors—places where they hoped not to be squeezed. Sometimes entire faux culs, false rears, would be constructed for hiding salt in a dress.
Something close to a state of permanent warfare developed between salt smugglers and the gabelous. Gabelous would be murdered, and the Crown would respond by having royal troops sack the village where the crime took place. On September 8, 1710, the gabelous went heavily armed into the woods near Avignon to intercept salt smugglers, and forty or fifty salt traders opened fire on them. The area was in open rebellion. Similar rebellions were breaking out all over France.
The most important smuggling border in France was the Loire River, which marked the line between the Pays Exempt and the Pays de Grande Gabelle, between Brittany and Anjou, regions where Necker had found the price of salt to be 31 sous and 591 sous, respectively. In 16
98, a government official reported that “salt smuggling is endless on the Loire.” Normally impoverished peasants living along the river could earn comfortable incomes from moving salt. The legendary smugglers had colorful pseudonyms, such as François Gantier a.k.a. Pot au Lait, milk pitcher. Because local fishermen, who knew all the hidden islands and coves of the river, would carry salt, the Crown declared it illegal to fish at night. By 1773, the gabelle had 3,000 troops stationed on the Loire to stop salt smuggling.
Some ruses were complicated. Salt cod that landed at Le Croisic was moved up the Loire for sale in France. Some of the cod had been salted and dried on land, but another product, known as green salt cod, not because of its color but because it was closer to its natural state, was made on board ship, where it was only salted but not dried. This was a more delicate cure and required ample salt to prevent spoilage while in transit. But at times, it seemed to inspectors, the fish was considerably oversalted. Cod would be shipped in thick layers of salt. Salt inspectors on the Loire would examine the cod shipments from Le Croisic entering the Pays de Grande Gabelle, fish by fish, shaking off the excess salt, making note of how much salt fell off of how many fish. If too much salt fell off, it would be reported. However, merchants found that their journey could be expedited by the gift of a few salt cod to the right official.
BY THE LATE eighteenth century, more than 3,000 French men, women, and even children were sentenced to prison or death every year for crimes against the gabelle. The salt law in France, as would later happen in India, was not the singular cause of revolution, but it became a symbol for all the injustices of government.
In 1789, the French revolted, declaring the establishment of a National Assembly. When King Louis XVI tried to send troops against this revolutionary legislature, a mob attacked the Bastille and an armed revolution began. That same year, the revolutionary legislature repealed the gabelle. Some in the Assembly had argued for a low salt tax universally applied. But in the end the Assembly voted for no salt tax at all, not even bothering to replace this mainstay of state revenues with another source of income.
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