Mr. Cramp, in one of his reminiscences, relates an interesting anecdote of the Cope Line. Soon after Jackson was inaugurated President, he appointed John Randolph, of Roanoke, Minister to Russia. The Cope Line being then far ahead of all other channels of ocean travel from Philadelphia to Europe, Mr. Randolph presented himself at its shipping-office. In his usual grandiloquent manner he said to the first man he encountered: “Sir, I want to see Thomas P. Cope.” He was shown to Mr. Cope’s office, and said to him, “I am John Randolph of Roanoke. I wish to take passage to Liverpool in one of your ships.” Mr. Cope replied, “I am Thomas Cope; if thee goes aboard the ship and selects thy state-room and will pay $150, thee may go.” Mr. Cope apparently could see no reason why a Philadelphia ship-owner and head of a great packet line should stand in awe of even a Virginia statesman.
About 1828-30 the India and China trade of Philadelphia suddenly declined, and in a few years passed almost entirely into the hands of New York and Boston. In a historical paper, Mr. Cramp describes the conditions of this traffic at its zenith, and suggests the cause or causes of its remarkable decline.
The custom, he says, was upon the arrival of the vessels to announce in the papers not only of Philadelphia but also of New York, Boston, Baltimore, and even less important cities, that the goods would be sold at auction, to begin on a certain day. These auction sales brought great numbers of merchants from other cities to Philadelphia, and during the first quarter of the nineteenth century it was beyond doubt the most profitable single line of traffic on the continent. The merchants engaged in it were not mere buyers and sellers as the term is understood now. They were important public characters, diplomatists and financiers, and their influence extended to the remotest parts of the earth. They amassed enormous fortunes and lived like princes. Some of them, either singly or in associations, owned fleets that would compare favorably with our then existing navy in numbers and tonnage. At its highest development, say, between 1825 and 1836, the volume of Philadelphia’s Oriental trade frequently reached sixty millions a year.
CRUISER YORKTOWN
Finally, however, causes began to operate which gradually changed the tide of affairs. These causes, as stated in the historical paper by Mr. Cramp, were numerous. Among them was the fact that, as the original merchants who had built up the trade grew old or died, their immediate heirs or descendants did not care to carry on the enterprises of their fathers or their grandfathers, and many of them lived permanently abroad. Eventually, at the moment when the jealousy, envy, and ambition of rivals, particularly in New York and New England, had reached the critical stage, the Legislature of Pennsylvania enacted a law imposing a certain tax on all auction sales within the State. This was a tax ostensibly universal and covering the whole business of sales by auction, but its real purpose was to get at and derive revenue from the great auction business of the China and India trade of Philadelphia. In those days it might easily happen that the auction sales of two or three ships’ cargoes would exceed in value, and therefore in revenue, all the rest of the auction sales in the State at large during the same time.
Of course, this was a development of a tendency on the part of the rural or country legislator of that time, which unfortunately has not entirely died out, to tax the great cities by special enactments for the benefit of the general revenue of the State.
As already stated, other causes had for some time been operating to weaken or shake Philadelphia’s supremacy in the Oriental trade, but the imposition of this tax, falling upon the heels of those causes, proved to be the last straw that broke the camel’s back. The result was that between 1825 and 1836 the great India and China traffic of Philadelphia almost disappeared. However, and notwithstanding the diversion of this trade to other ports, principally in New England, the marine architects and ship-builders of Philadelphia managed to retain the better part of the construction of vessels, which for many years afterward were employed by their successful rivals.
This somewhat extensive and discursive survey of the early colonial and post-Revolutionary conditions of Philadelphia ship-building seems requisite to a proper understanding of the state of the art and its accompaniments at the time when the subject of this Memoir first appeared upon the scene, and it also serves to indicate or explain what he had to do and the prior achievements which he had to equal or excel in his pursuit of professional success and eminence.