Salt

by Mark Kurlansky

  On March 22, 1790, the National Assembly, calling the salt tax “odious,” annulled all trials for violation of the gabelle and ordered all those charged, on trial, or convicted to be set free.

  Louis, accused of conspiring with Austrians and Prussians to overthrow the revolution, was beheaded. His wife, Marie Antoinette, who loved choucroute, was also beheaded, as were many of the Swiss soldiers of the Garde Royale. They also had acquired the court taste for choucroute and numerous inns had sprung up near the Palais Royal, where they had spent their meal breaks, feasting on choucroute with sausages and salted meats. The tradition of restaurants serving midday choucroute in that part of Paris continues to this day.

  IN 1804, NAPOLÉON Bonaparte, who had risen to head of the revolutionary army and then rose to first consul, became emperor of the French. He reinstated the gabelle but without an exemption for Brittany.

  Their salt no longer having a competitive advantage, the paludiers, instead of being slightly better off than the average French peasant, were now among the poorest. They continued to wear large, floppy, three-cornered hats in the style of eighteenth-century peasants. Visitors found this a picturesque part of Brittany. Novelist Honoré de Balzac abandoned poetic restraint in his description of the paludiers and their treeless salt marsh, writing that they had “the grace of a bouquet of violets” and asserting that it “was something a traveler could see nowhere else in France.” He compared the area to Africa, and in the age of French colonialism many followed, comparing the impoverished Breton paludiers to Tuaregs, Arabs, and Asians. Faced with an onslaught of affluent French who found them exotic, the paludiers made souvenirs: ceramic plates depicting their dress and dolls in paludier costume fashioned out of seashells. Le Bourg de Batz became Batz-sur-Mer, Batz-by-the-sea, to make this salt town by the swamp sound more suitable for tourism.

  Watercolor of a paludier from an 1829 book by H. Charpentier illustrating the clothing worn by salt workers in the Guérande area.

  Musée des Marais Salants, Batz-sur-Mer

  The salt cuisine of Brittany showed its poverty. Breton cooking was based on the few simple crops that paludiers could grow in their clay-bound soil, mostly potatoes and onions, which absorbed a salty taste from the seaweed in the soil. Ragoût de berniques, literally a stew made of nothing, was in fact made of potatoes, carrots, and onions. While France was one of the last European nations to accept the eating of potatoes, Brittany was one of the first potato-eating parts of France. Almost forty years earlier Antoine-Augustin Parmentier had persuaded the royal family to promote the eating of potatoes, a man named Blanchet launched a potato-eating campaign in Brittany. Soon after that, a cleric named de la Marche distributed potatoes to poor parishioners and was nicknamed d’eskop ar patatez, the potato bishop. After the Revolution, paludiers supplemented their diminished income by growing potatoes, which were boiled in brine that left a fine salt powder on the skin—patate cuit au sel.

  A nineteenth-century postcard of sardines being salted in Pouliguen, near Batz. Musée des Marais Salants, Batz-sur-Mer

  A Breton expression was “Kement a zo fall, a gar ar sall”—Everything that is not good asks to be salted. Everything from meat to butter to potatoes was salted. Salt was Brittany’s cheapest product, the one everyone could afford. Another Breton proverb was “Aviz hag holen a roer d’an nep a c’houlenn”—Advice and salt are available to anyone who wants it.

  Kig-sall, salted pig, usually was made with the ears, tail, and feet—sometimes better cuts if they could be afforded—put in a barrel with lard and salt, and kept two or three months until preserved like ham. And there was oing, known in Breton as bloneg, which was nothing more than pork fat rendered with salt and pepper, dried in the open air on paper, and then smoked in a fireplace. A slice of oing was added to a vegetable soup as a substitute for meat.

  IN THE 1870S, when the area was connected to the national railway system, the floppy, three-cornered hats vanished. The same railroad system favored eastern France, where the new industries such as steel were, and made the salt of Lorraine more accessible than sea salt. The gabelle remained a part of French administration until it was finally abolished in the newly liberated France of 1946.

  Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, the Comte de Mirabeau, the man who had defied Louis XVI by opening the National Assembly, said, “In the final analysis, the people will judge the revolution by this fact alone—does it take more or less money? Are they better off? Do they have more work? And is that work better paid?”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Preserving Independence

  TREATIES ARE USUALLY imperfect solutions, and the Treaty of Paris did not end all hostilities between the new United States and Britain. The United States was embargoed from any British goods, and British colonies were not permitted to engage in U.S. trade. The Turk Islands, the present-day Turks and Caicos, including Salt Cay, became havens for Americans still loyal to Britain. In Cape Cod the price of salt rose from fifty cents a bushel to eight dollars.

  In 1793, in a postwar economy that was still demanding salt, another Sears, Reuben Sears, a Cape Cod carpenter, invented a roof that slid open and shut on oak rollers, allowing sea salt to now be made efficiently from March until November. The vats were exposed while the sun was shining, but after sunset and whenever it began to rain the roofs were rolled over the vats. Though the saltworks were privately owned, the Cape Cod communities considered them so essential to the general well-being that when clouds began to darken the daytime sky, men and women would run out to roll all the roofs closed and children would be sent from the schools to help, and the coastline would rumble like nearby thunder from the sound of hundreds of oak wheels.

  One of the last Cape Cod saltworks still in operation in Yarmouth in the late nineteenth century with vats full of brine and rolling roofs open. An operating windmill is in the background. The Snow Library, Orleans, Massachusetts

  The small-scale Yankee entrepreneur, for whom New England was famous, found an opportunity in salt. By 1800, a small initial investment in a Cape Cod saltworks would quickly yield returns of 30 percent. Most of the stretches of virgin sand beach and upland dunes, land considered useless until then, were becoming marred with windmills, pipes, and huge vats with rolling roofs. The prices were high, and the market seemed endless. Whatever salt was not used by local fishermen was shipped to Boston or New York. As long as the profits were copious and easy, Cape Codders cared no more about their spoiled dunes than did the people in Cheshire worry about their blackened skies.

  On Cape Cod they talked of “the lazy man’s gold mine,” and it seemed everybody wanted to get into salt making. The glassworks in Sandwich, famous in the nineteenth century for their little glass saltcellars, needed intense heat for glassmaking. The cooling fires still gave off enough heat to evaporate sea-water, and salt became a by-product of their glassmaking.

  With an increased salt supply, the fishing industry grew.

  THE AMERICANS DID not forget the salt shortages of the Revolution. Several states, including Massachusetts, still paid bounties to salt producers. The new nation remained, in principle, determined to encourage salt production. In practice, this was not always the case. When the new government realized that there was an unregulated commerce in whiskey in western Pennsylvania, traded across the Allegheny for salt, it responded by taxing the whiskey in order to stop the trade. In 1791, the whiskey-producing farmers rebelled, and beloved President Washington shocked the public by calling out a militia to put down what has become known as the Whiskey Rebellion.

  In 1787, the new Americans began producing salt in Onondaga, New York. Jesuit missionaries who had been with the Onondaga tribe in the seventeenth century, first told Europeans of the salt springs there. One French missionary, Father Simon Le Moyne, wrote in his diary: “We tasted a spring which the Indians dared not drink. They say it is inhabited by a demon who makes it fetid. I found it was a salt spring. In fact, we made salt as good as sea salt and carried a quantity of it to Quebec
.”

  The Onondaga are an Iroquois-speaking tribe, hosts to the annual meeting of the Iroquois. Like some, but not all, of the Iroquois groups, they had sided with the British during the Revolution. In 1788, New York State negotiated a treaty with the Onondaga establishing a 10,000-acre reservation with joint ownership. But in 1795, the treaty was renegotiated, and the Onondaga, a people that traditionally had not even used salt, gave up their rights to the land in exchange for the annual delivery to the Onondaga nation of 150 bushels of salt. In 1787, when the whites began producing salt there, it had been at a rate of only ten bushels a day.

  The state is still delivering its annual salt payments, though some Onondaga now feel that they would rather have the land returned. The payments amount to a truckload of five-pound bags, which the state buys for the best price it can find—usually between $1,000 and $2,000, which is not a huge increase from the $900 that 150 bushels of salt cost at the time. Today the Onondaga use much of their salt for preserving deer and other game and making a great deal of sauerkraut, neither of which was a tradition before contact with Europeans. According to Audrey Shenandoah, a member of the Onondaga: “We make a lot of sauerkraut, that is, since the contact. We grow a lot of garden vegetables. A lot of cabbage and make sauerkraut. But we didn’t use salt for much but medicine before the contact.” Salt is still used by the Onondaga to draw out the infection from an insect bite or the prick of a thorn.

  In 1797, the state of New York began granting leases for working the brine springs of Onondaga. The state fixed a maximum price of sixty cents per bushel with a four-cents-per-bushel tax. That year, production at the springs, centered in the town of Salina, was 25,500 bushels, but by 1810, Onondaga and Cayuga Counties were producing about 3 million bushels annually, using both solar and wood-fired evaporation. The brine springs had become the most important saltworks in the new United States.

  THE FEELING WAS strong in the United States that the British were not to be trusted. They had never withdrawn as promised from U.S. territory along the Great Lakes, they encouraged the hostility toward the United States of native Americans, including the Onondaga and Cayuga, and they refused any agreement that would be in any way helpful to the U.S. economy. John Jay’s 1795 treaty with Britain, which opened trade but on terms more favorable to England than the United States, was unpopular.

  The British claimed the right to force into their own service any British sailor serving on a U.S. ship and boarded American merchant vessels in search of them. They frequently also took American sailors. In 1807, a British warship fired on the American frigate Chesapeake. President Thomas Jefferson responded with the Embargo Act, banning U.S. ships from foreign trade. This act was aimed at both the British and the French because both boarded American merchant vessels. Not only did the trade ban fail to change European policy, but it was an economic disaster for New England. The embargo was dropped, but there were calls for a retaliatory invasion of the remaining British colonies in North America, present-day Canada.

  In a young country in which the North and South were increasingly at odds with each other, the cry for such radical measures against Canada usually came from Southerners. New Yorkers simply complained that Canada was able to attract the larger share of upstate commerce because it had better commercial waterways.

  In 1808, a resolution recommending consideration of a canal connecting the Great Lakes to the Hudson River was introduced in the New York Assembly by Joshua Forman, from the salt-producing town of Salina. Forman believed that the canal was the necessary key to expanding the salt industry. It would offer the Onondaga salt region an inexpensive route for bulk shipment to New York City. From there, the world would be their market.

  Despite considerable opposition to the proposal, $600 was appropriated to survey a possible route. Politicians and financiers in New York were distrustful of the project, fearing it would undermine the importance of the port of New York. The exception was the former mayor of New York City and current governor, De Witt Clinton. The leading advocate of the canal, Governor Clinton was from one of the most prominent New York families. His father, James, had been a Revolutionary War hero, and his uncle, George, served as vice president from 1805 to 1812 under both Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. But both of these presidents expressed their doubts about the project.

  Governor Clinton appointed James Geddes to make the survey. Geddes, who lived in Onondaga County, was a lawyer, a judge, a former state legislator, and an amateur surveyor. The salt-producing town of Geddes was named after him, and he had been one of the pioneers of the local salt industry—the industry that needed the canal. He spent most of 1808 traveling between the Hudson River and Lake Erie, examining the topography.

  In 1809, a New York delegation went to Jefferson, hoping to persuade him to consign federal funding for the project. The moment seemed auspicious. For the first time in the short history of the United States, the nation was solvent, had settled its huge debt, and revenue was expanding. But Jefferson said, “It is a splendid project and may be executed a century hence,” and concluded, “It is little short of madness to think of it at this time.”

  Clinton then went looking for New York State funding for the project that was increasingly known as “Clinton’s ditch.” In 1810, the New York state legislature approved a “Board of Commissioners” with a $3,000 budget to investigate the feasibility of constructing a commercial canal connecting Lake Erie and the Hudson River. If this could be done, the United States would have a waterway from New York City to what is now the Midwest but was then thought of as the western frontier.

  The public regarded this commission as a scam—a summer vacation at taxpayers’ expense to upstate New York, an area viewed in New York City as a scenic vacation ground. This suspicion was reinforced by the revelation that a number of the commissioners were planning to take their wives.

  The commission was losing support and probably would have been canceled had it not been for a completely unrelated concern about a mud bar. The legislature assigned the canal commission to investigate the mud bar, which was of far greater public concern than the possible canal.

  De Witt Clinton took part in the 1810 commission, which reported that the saltworks were producing far below their capacity but were limited by poor roads. Exploring alternatives, they asked locals what they felt would be the result if they built a good road from the saltworks to Lake Erie, only nine miles away. Locals gave Clinton his ideal response by agreeing that such a road would only profit the British. Canadian schooners on Lake Erie would pick up the salt and sell it in British North America.

  The final argument for the canal was the inevitable war with Britain from 1812 to 1815. When this war broke out, the Americans were faced once again with a salt shortage. The British blockaded Massachusetts and tried to prevent Cape Cod salt from reaching Boston or New York, though wily New England sailors sometimes slipped through at night. In December 1814, the British landed a warship in Rock Harbor, on the bay side of Orleans, Cape Cod, and threatened to burn down the local salt-works. The summer before, the British had gotten to Washington, D.C., and burned most of the public buildings including the presidential residence, forcing President Madison to flee. So no one in Orleans doubted the British resolve to burn their little windmill-and-rolling-roof saltworks.

  A Cape Cod militia was waiting on the beach when the British attempted to land, and reportedly shot and killed two British sailors in a brief skirmish that forced the British to withdraw. A month later, Andrew Jackson won the final battle, the Battle of New Orleans, in which 2,000 British soldiers died, and Cape Codders could not resist calling their own brief engagement over their saltworks “the Battle of Orleans.”

  AS SOON AS the war ended, lawmakers pushed to approve the Erie Canal, and work began in 1817. The estimated cost of the project was $6 million—almost $5 per inhabitant of New York State.

  Among the state’s plans to finance the completion of the canal was to tax upstate salt at a rate of 12.5 cents p
er bushel. It was one of the few salt taxes in history that was not resented. The canal would bring prosperity to the salt region.

  The canal was built in sections, and each was put into service upon its completion. The first section to be completed was the ninety-eight miles from Utica to the Seneca River, the section that ran through the salt-producing region. A weigh station to assess barge loads, designed to look like a Grecian waterside temple, was built in the tiny, backwoods stopover of Syracuse.

  In October 1825, the last section of the canal was completed, and Governor Clinton and other notables went to Buffalo to board the boats of a flotilla making the inaugural voyage to New York City. The lead vessel was the Seneca Chief, which carried a portrait of Clinton in Roman toga by a distinguished lithographer of the day. Among the notables joining Clinton on board was Joshua Forman. The vessel was provisioned with symbolic items, including two kegs of Lake Erie water to be poured into the Atlantic off Sandy Hook, some whitefish, a canoe made by Lake Superior tribesmen, and potash from the saltworks.

  The Erie Canal was 363 miles long. Like most famous bridges and waterways, it occasionally attracted unhappy romantics wishing to leap to their death. But when they hit Clinton’s ditch, they were shocked to discover that, with limited funding, the state had only been able to afford to dig the canal four feet deep.

  THE CANAL HAD opened at a prosperous time for American salt. In 1837, Cape Cod alone had 658 salt companies producing more than 26,000 tons per year. But Cape Cod lost its competitive advantage once upstate New York had its own waterway to New York City.