The charges and countercharges were prolix, ponderously documented, bitter, and vivid. But what mattered in the end was the judgment of Parliament’s plantation commissioners, and for them the issue proved to be clear. They had no interest in entertaining endless appeals from Massachusetts and no interest in narrowing the compass of the powers granted in the colony’s charter. We leave the colony, they wrote, “with all that freedom and latitude that may, in any respect, be duly claimed by you; knowing that the limiting of you … may be very prejudicial (if not destructive) to the government and public peace of the colony.”54
Massachusetts could have asked for no more. Its establishment had been vindicated. But it was a costly victory. Not only had the ironworks failed but something essential had been lost in Child’s departure, besides the prospect of imaginative, large-scale projects. He had never been an enemy of Puritan reform. He represented, in fact, the magnification of its most exalted aspirations, the transformation of mankind in the approach to the final days. And there was no contradiction between the Puritans’ concept of work and Child’s sphere of activity, which, like Hartlib’s and Winthrop, Jr.’s, was devoted to the exploitation of the resources with which God had endowed mankind. He too operated, Margaret Newell writes, “within an organic, hierarchical social structure inimical to notions of possessive individualism, domestic consumption, and competition.… For Child, economic progress and Protestantism were inextricably intertwined.” Yet though intimately involved in Puritanism, Child—age thirty-three, confronting the sixty-year-old Winthrop—was responding too to an impulse that would supersede both his and the governor’s world. At the heart of his efforts, though still mingled with and dominated by the moral imperatives of reformed Protestantism, lay a more ruthless force that in the next generation would emerge freely: the force of entrepreneurship for its own sake, of profiteering for profit’s sake, of avarice unencumbered with moral obligations. For Child the moral integument of his enterprise was essential. His struggle had been with the external constraints and institutional structures of a peculiar Puritan regime, whose essential purpose he could only endorse.55
Freed from New England, Child continued his redemptive entrepreneurship in Ireland, where he actively and happily communed with Hartlib’s “invisible college,” occasionally recalling his frustrated efforts in New England.56 So too Winthrop, Jr. continued his studies, his experiments, his widespread medical practice, and his collaboration with the illuminati in London, and he turned also to public service. In 1659 he accepted the governorship of Connecticut, a position he held until his death nineteen years later. But the failure of the ironworks project and the troubles of his colleague Child had been trials for him too, in a deeply personal way.
His respect and affection for his father, who had led the proceedings against his friend Child and the other Remonstrants, never diminished. He remained dutiful, respectful, and caring. But increasingly, and especially at this time, the two Winthrops differed on the limits of toleration, the father deeply entrenched in defense of his carefully delimited domain, the son reaching out more and more broadly to the open-ended world of science, arcane experimentation, and energetic entrepreneurship. All magistrates, the younger Winthrop wrote, must defend the profession of the Gospel and maintain civil order. But when “men exercising a good conscience” differ in interpreting the ways of worship or the meaning of doctrine without disturbing others, “there is no warrant for the magistrate under the Gospell to abridge them of their liberty.”
The tension between father and son led to sadness and concern, and also to the respectful avoidance of confrontation. Winthrop, Jr. had remained silent during the Antinomian Controversy, busying himself with private matters, and he had been absent also at the trials of Child and the Remonstrants. He knew, as Richard Dunn has written, that his father’s “operating Massachusetts like a sovereign state, dissociated from Parliament as well as the King, was harming New England’s development,” but he did not say so. Similarly, Winthrop, Sr. did not object to his son’s takeover of Pequot land for his experimental settlement in New London, though he had reason to do so. At the end he did not counsel his son but only asked him to respect authority, hoping that he would do the right thing.57
7
By 1649, when Winthrop, Sr. died, New England’s economy was beginning, slowly, to recover, despite all the early failures, but in ways that the great Puritan magistrate would not have approved. While schemes for a self-enclosed, self-sustaining domestic economy had come and gone, while government subsidies had been devised and discarded and ordinary people had hoped and despaired, small traders had been busy feeling their way into the elaborating trading circuits of the Atlantic basin. They were obscure men of the first Puritan generation, none of them very wealthy, few of them greatly daring, but most of them well connected at home. All were convinced that New England had to “learn commerce or perish.” Later the question would arise how, if at all, their involvement in the intractable world of Atlantic commerce might be accommodated within the Puritan scheme of things. But in the 1640s the main problem was simply how they might engage with the Atlantic trading system and profit from it.
The rudiments had long been evident, in trading connections with the chaotic West Indies in general and Barbados in particular. Despite the tumultuous, often bloody conflicts among the European powers for control of the increasingly valuable islands, trade with New England had been established in the 1630s. Indeed, the possibility of such contacts had been evident even before the Great Migration. Winthrop’s “scrapegrace” second son, Henry, had been one of the first colonists on Barbados, serving the powerful Courteen syndicate there as early as 1627, while the Winthrop family’s good friend from Suffolk, Sir Thomas Warner, settled in as the long-serving governor of the English part of the divided St. Kitts. Later the possibilities of a lucrative trade with the Caribbean would be explored in a letter to Winthrop, Jr. by his cousin George Downing, then a wandering twenty-two-year-old, in which he shrewdly assessed the economic potential of each of the main islands, concluding from Barbados that “Negroes [are] the life of this place.” The more the settlers bought them, “the better able they are to buye, for in a yeare and halfe they will earne … as much as they cost.” He had a receptive reader. John, Jr., like others in the family, especially Stephen and Samuel, would eventually be involved in the slave trade, as they would be in all aspects of West Indian commerce.58
The essence and starting point of the Caribbean trade were New England’s fisheries. The region’s fishing grounds had long been known to be fertile, close to shore, and easily workable. The value of the fish—cod, mackerel, bass, and sturgeon—for Catholic Europe and the plantations in the Atlantic and Caribbean islands was obvious, as were the markets there for the produce of New England’s farms—beef, pork, bread, flour, and timber products, especially pipestaves, and horses to power the sugar mills.59
Simple bilateral trade with the Caribbean islands had sprung up quickly. Between 1630 and 1640 at least twenty ships are known to have sailed between New England and Barbados, Bermuda, Providence Island, St. Kitts, and Tortuga, returning with cotton, tobacco, sugar, slaves, and tropical produce. In 1640 alone eleven ships loaded with lumber sailed from New England’s ports to the West Indies, and it was at that point, as New England’s economy plummeted, that the potential of this commerce began to be fully appreciated and its benefits realized. Like the English and French traders, the Puritan merchants “poured like flies,” a leading historian of the West Indies writes, “upon the rotting carcase of Spain’s empire in the Caribbean.”60
In all of the expanding trade to the Caribbean they were not acting alone. English merchants were eager for a share of the trade and the profits of freightage, and they had the capital, shipping, and potential markets needed for complex, expensive, and risky ventures. Often they worked within family networks, for the most reliable partners and agents were kinsmen. Brothers, sons, and in-laws became key cogs in the commercial me
chanism. Together, in shifting patterns of shares, partnerships, and agencies, they joined in ventures that spread across large areas of the Atlantic. So Valentine Hill drew bills of exchange on his brother John, “merchant at the Angell and Starre in Cheapside.” Joshua Hewes received shipments of merchandise from his uncle Joshua Foote, who became so interested in the American trade that he sent over his son Caleb to join his Hewes cousins in the family’s transactions. The success of Henry Shrimpton, who left property worth £12,000 at his death in 1666, was based on the credit he received from his brother Edward, a London merchant. John Hull built up a flourishing business with the help of his uncle, Thomas Parris, a haberdasher, and his “coz Edw” Hull at the “Hatte-in-Hand” within Aldegate, London. When young Samuel Winthrop moved from Tenerife to Barbados and eventually Antigua, the Winthrops, centered in England and Massachusetts, extended their trade from Rhode Island and Connecticut to the West Indies. So too the troublesome William Vassall, together with his wealthy merchant brother Samuel in London, was careful to keep in touch with his commercial agents in New England and to protect his extensive landholdings there. Settled permanently in Barbados, he joined with Samuel in far-flung enterprises, but the connection with New England remained vital; its produce was essential for the development of his West Indian properties. For others of the business elite in London whose religious views had brought them into the Puritans’ orbit—Maurice Thompson, Matthew Craddock—New England’s West Indian trade became a normal part of the networks of Atlantic commerce they personally controlled.61
But the Hutchinson network was the most complete such trading unit of which we have knowledge. It was based on the continuous flow of manufactures sent from London by the affluent Richard Hutchinson to his brothers Samuel and Edward and his nephews Elisha and Eliakim, in Boston, who worked together with Richard’s brother-in-law Thomas Savage. All five marketed the imported goods in the bay area and in inland communities, whose products they shipped out to the West Indies in exchange for cotton and sugar, which were shipped back to London. Much of the family’s trade was managed by Peleg Sanford in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, a nephew of Richard, hence cousin and nephew of the family’s Boston merchants. Peleg ran the family’s cattle farms in Rhode Island and shipped horses, provisions, and manufactured goods to his brothers, the Barbadian merchants William and Elijah Sanford. Richard in London, the Hutchinson kin in Boston and Rhode Island, together with their Barbadian relatives, operated in a constantly shifting series of combinations, as partners or agents or as customers to each other. They formed a self-conscious family group that considered it unfortunate but not unnatural that Edward Hutchinson should go to jail, as he did in 1667, as a consequence of his support of his nephew Peleg in a lawsuit.62
The ties of kinship mattered most, however, in the more dynamic, riskier, more volatile, less predictable ventures that reached out south and east into the farther reaches of the Atlantic trading system. Such far-flung exchanges were initiated in 1641 by Massachusetts’s stubborn Anglican, Samuel Maverick, who paid for purchases in Bristol by sending clapboards to Málaga, on Spain’s Mediterranean coast, whence his agent sent remittances back to his creditors in England. The New Havenites made similar exchanges through the Canaries, and a small group joined to send fish, oil, and pipestaves to Fayal in the Azores for similar remittances. In 1643 no fewer than five vessels left New England with shiploads to Fayal, Bilbao, Málaga, and Madeira. In April 1645 a ship left Massachusetts for the Canaries loaded with pipestaves; from there it turned to the Cape Verde islands, where it took on “Africoes,” who were sold in Barbados for wine, sugar, salt, and tobacco. The ship’s principal owner was listed simply as “Winthrop,” probably John, Jr., whose uncle Emmanuel Downing had written enthusiastically about the value of importing slaves. “I doe not see,” he wrote, “how wee can thrive untill wee gett into a stock of slaves suffitient to doe all out buisnes.” For indentured servants, he explained, will “desire freedome to plant for them selves, and not stay but for verie great wages.” It is cheaper to maintain twenty “Moores,” he concluded, than one English servant.63
THUS IN ITS ENGAGEMENT with the greater Atlantic world, New England found its economic bearing, which would remain secure for the next century and beyond. As a result, while the country towns multiplied in stable and familiar form, increasingly provincial and rustic, the main commercial centers—Charlestown, Salem, and especially Boston—were transformed into dynamic economic hubs. Their expanding businesses required wharves and storehouses, shops and marketplaces. The preparation and disposition of their cargoes called for laborers, handicraftsmen, and roadways into the interior; and the equitable conduct of trade called for official regulation of markets and of weights and measures, the care and protection of the harbors, and easily accessible courts of law. In thirty years the makeshift hamlet on the peninsula in Massachusetts Bay had grown into a thriving commercial community of three thousand souls that could muster “fouer companys of Foote and a Troope of horse.”64
But this was not Winthrop’s world, and its development was marked by repeated clashes with the custodians of the City on the Hill. Piety was not incompatible with commerce, not then and not later. In the smaller port towns of Marblehead and Gloucester, “the coming of commerce did nothing to alter the character of local religious belief and practice.” But in general the spiritual health of the Puritan community required isolation from the contamination of Old World sin and respect for the domination of the Puritan magistrates. By performing their indispensable economic function, the merchants, most of whom did not seek the destruction of Puritan society, deprived the community of its isolation and challenged its patriarchalism. Trade required the free movement of people and goods and a rising population. Should strangers come freely to New England shores? Should the sailors and merchants of all nations traffic in Massachusetts ports? In 1645 four prominent merchants, including Robert Sedgwick, led a group that protested the laws limiting residence of unaccredited strangers in Massachusetts to three weeks and banishing the Anabaptists. The General Court, under pressure from the clergy, rejected the protest, refusing not only to alter the laws but even to explain them. In 1651, well after the struggle over Child’s Remonstrance, the General Court required every stranger over sixteen years of age to present himself upon arrival to two magistrates, who would pass on his fitness to remain. The next year the Court required a written oath of fidelity to Massachusetts from all those suspected of disloyalty and from any stranger who had lived in the colony for two months or more.65
Though the merchants sympathized with all efforts to maintain civil order, they tended to side with the dissidents in the attacks, small and large, directed at the reigning magistracy. For the establishment, the future, as seen in the behavior of the rising generation, looked bleak. The children of the founders, however well intentioned, knew nothing of the fire that had steeled the hearts of their fathers. They seemed to their elders to be frivolous, given to excess in dress and manners, lacking in fierceness of belief, and only too receptive to some of the most alien among the incoming strangers.
As the original Puritan tradesmen and merchants died off in the 1650s and early 1660s, new men began to appear. Some were utter strangers, entirely alien to the Puritans’ culture—men like the supercargo Thomas Breeden, whose interests were exclusively commercial. Even his dress was outlandish, defiant—a four-cornered hat and breeches hung with ribbons from the waist downward, “one row over the other like shingles on a house.” The children in the street made such a commotion at the sight of him that people came out of their houses to see what the trouble was. Breeden was after big game in the commercial hunt, but he was himself a small figure next to Richard Wharton, who also arrived in the 1650s. To this “economic imperialist, interested in business as a source of private wealth, of public prosperity, and of national expansion,” whose interests would expand into large-scale land speculation, monetary policy, commercial warfare with the Dutch, naval stores, and mining, a
nd who favored a royal government for Massachusetts, the attitudes and institutions of Puritanism were archaisms, alien to his interests, which he sought relentlessly to pursue.
That pursuit was greatly enhanced by the Restoration in 1660. The restored monarchy projected powers that, while restrictive for some, created opportunities for others that led to advancement and profits at a new, elevated level. For those so favored, royal preferment and its benefits meant not only economic and political advantages unknown before but a new form of social distinction. At the same time, the influence and institutions of the Puritan elders were crumbling. The mere passage of years, attended by a “declension” of religious fervor, splintered the ecclesiastical unity within the Bible Commonwealth and weakened the position of its church. Continuously through the post-Restoration years, the voices of the guardians of the Puritan virtues were heard, shrill and anxious, pleading with the sons and grandsons of the founders to remember the rock whence they were hewn. But stronger forces were at work. In 1663 the powerful Salem preacher John Higginson cried out, in his election day sermon, against the notion that God’s purpose in establishing New England was “the getting of this world’s good.” Never forget, he declared to his congregation and to the world at large, “that New England is originally a plantation of religion, not a plantation of trade.” Nine years later his daughter Sarah married Richard Wharton.66
The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 Page 61
