Beginnings of the American People

by Carl L. Becker

It was thus the West Indies which statesmen had chiefly in mind when they set about regulating trade and navigation to the end that "we may in every part be more sellers than buyers, and thereby the Coyne and present stocke of money be preserved and increased." Three acts of Parliament, embodying the ideas of London merchants interested in the tobacco and sugar plantations, formulated the principles of England's commercial code. The famous Navigation Act of 1660 confined colonial carrying trade wholly, and the foreign carrying trade mainly, to English and colonial shipping, and provided that certain colonial products—sugar, tobacco, cotton-wool, indigo, ginger, dyeing-woods; the so-called "enumerated" commodities—could be shipped only to England or to an English colony. In 1663 the Staple Act prohibited the importation into the colonies of any commodities raised or made in Europe,—with the exception of salt, of horses and provisions from Scotland and Ireland, of wine from the Madeiras and the Azores, and of commodities not allowed to be imported into England,—unless they were first landed in England. In order not to discriminate against English in favor of colonial consumers of colonial products, a third act was passed in 1673 providing that enumerated commodities, which paid a duty when shipped directly to England, should pay a duty when shipped from one colony to another. In 1705 rice, molasses, and naval stores were added to the list of enumerated commodities, and in 1733 prohibitive duties, never enforced, were laid upon rum, molasses, and sugar imported from foreign islands into the continental colonies. The purpose of these laws, and of the supplementary acts, of which more than half a hundred were passed between 1689 and 1765, was to foster the industries of the empire at the expense of foreign countries, and to develop colonial industry along lines that did not bring it into competition with English agriculture or manufactures.

Information gathered by the Privy Council committees, which the Stuarts appointed to coördinate the work of managing trade and the plantations, soon demonstrated that it was easier to make laws than it was to enforce them. Until the end of the century, illicit trade, inseparably connected with piracy, became increasingly flagrant in nearly every colony. West Indian buccaneers, lineal descendants of the Elizabethan "sea dogues," nesting at Jamaica under English sanction until after the peace with Spain in 1670, resorted to Charleston, New York, Providence, or Boston, and under licenses granted by royal governors joined hands with the colonial free-trader or East Indian "interlopers" to make the acts of trade a byword and a reproach. New England and Dutch merchants, "regarding neither the acts of trade nor the law of nature," carried provisions to Canada during the French wars. Tobacco was taken to Holland and Scotland, or smuggled from Maryland through Pennsylvania into the Northern colonies. Bolted flour and provisions were exchanged by New York traders in the Spanish islands for molasses and rum. European commodities and the spices and fabrics of the Orient, secured at trifling cost from pirates or "interlopers" in exchange for rum or Spanish pieces of eight, were carried in small boats up the innumerable estuaries that indent the coast from New England to Virginia. Indolent governors were often ignorant of the law; dishonest ones, willing for money down to wink at its violation; and even those, like Bellomont, who were honest and energetic, found themselves without the necessary machinery for its effective enforcement.

If the violation of the Trade Acts called loudly for a more direct supervision of the colonies, the growing menace of Canada enforced the same lesson. Under the imbecile Charles II, Spain was no longer, as in Elizabethan times, the first danger. Colbert's attention to colonial affairs, as well as Louis XIV's European ambitions, soon obscured the commercial rivalry of England and Holland, while the accession of William of Orange to the throne of the Stuarts, by pledging England to twenty years of war against the House of Bourbon, revealed the startling fact that it was New France rather than New Spain which threatened the security of British America. English settlements had not yet passed the Alleghany foothills before French missionaries and explorers had penetrated by the chain of lakes to the heart of the continent. Jean Nicolet as early as 1640, Radisson and Grosseilliers in 1660, were canoeing down the Wisconsin River toward the Mississippi; and in 1671, the year before Count Frontenac landed at Quebec to begin the regeneration of Canada, Saint-Lusson, with impressive ceremony in the presence of fourteen native tribes at Sault Ste. Marie, took possession of the great Northwest in the name of the Grand Monarch.

It was no mere spirit of adventure, or dream of limitless empire, that dispersed the French settlements over so wide an area. As Virginia was founded on tobacco, so was Canada on furs; and unless the Indians on the northern lakes could be induced to bring their furs down the St. Lawrence, Quebec might add luster to the crown of Louis, but it could not greatly increase the commercial strength of France. A firm alliance with the northern tribes was therefore the first object. It was for this that military posts were established on the waterways of the interior. And every stockaded fort was at once a trading camp and a mission house: merchants lured the Indian with brandy and firearms; civil officials and men at arms impressed him with the authority of the great king; Jesuit priests, strangely compounding true devotion and unscrupulous intrigue, learned the native languages, and with the magic of the crucifix and the Te Deum converted the spirit-fearing savages into loyal children of the Bishop of Rome. Canada, with its center at Quebec, and its outposts at Michilimackinac and Sault Ste. Marie, was little more than "a musket, a rosary, and a pack of beaver skins": not so much a colony, indeed, as a mesh of interlacing interests cunningly designed to convert fur into gold. And so long as the tribes of the northern lakes annually brought their rich freightage of mink and beaver to Fort Frontenac or Montreal, to be exchanged there for arms and brandy, beads, hatchets, bracelets, and gay-colored fabrics, gold was not lacking—for the pockets of clever merchant and corrupt official, if not always for the royal treasury of France.

"The colonies of foreign nations so long settled on the sea board," wrote the Intendant Talon in 1671, "are trembling with fright in view of what your Majesty has accomplished here in the last seven years." In fact, the thrifty and unadventurous farmers along the Atlantic were as yet only too indifferent to the importance of Canada; still less did they foresee the New France of which La Salle was at that moment dreaming. After a dozen years of heart-breaking discouragements, that somber idealist finally reached the Gulf of Mexico by way of the Mississippi. It was on the 9th of April, 1682, at the mouth of the Father of Waters, that he proclaimed the sovereignty of Louis XIV over "this country of Louisiana, from the mouth of the river St. Louis, otherwise called the Ohio, as also along the river Colbert, or Mississippi, and the rivers that discharge thereinto, from its source as far as its mouth at the sea." To make sure the title thus announced to the silent wilderness, a pillar bearing the arms of France was erected, and a lead plate buried in the sand. The inscription would scarcely have frightened away even a stray Englishman, had he chanced to see it; but when, in December of the same year, La Salle built his wooden fort on the rock of St. Louis, there began to emerge from the world of dreams to the world of realities the vision of a greater New France, held together by a chain of forts on all the inland waterways from the mouth of the St. Lawrence to the mouth of the Mississippi, and exploiting, through friendly alliance with the native tribes, the rich fur trade of the continent.

It was during the last decade of the Stuart régime, when the efficient committee known as the Lords of Trade had charge of colonial affairs, that the English Government first set seriously about the task of checking the growing power of France and of suppressing illicit trade. To aid the governors in enforcing the navigation laws, collectors and comptrollers of the customs had been established in nearly every colony by 1678; in 1688 William Dyre, responsible to the English customs commissioners, was appointed surveyor-general and placed at the head of the American service; and it was mainly on the ground of illegal trade that Massachusetts was made a crown colony in 1684. The doughty Colonel Dongan, who came out as Governor of New York in 1683, was one of the first to see the importance of Canada; and after 1685 he was supported by James in the attempt to divert the fur trade from Montreal to Albany by bringing the Iroquois Indians under English control. The scheme, which involved nothing less than the ruin of Canada, was by no means a visionary one. The Five Nations, lying south of the chain of lakes, could profit but little by the fur trade while it remained in French hands. But let Albany replace Montreal as the chief market, and they would become the indispensable middle carriers between the northern tribes and the English. And the northern tribes were themselves not ill-disposed to such a change. Undoubtedly the French had better manners than the English; undoubtedly French fire-water was of excellent flavor. But the traders whom Dongan sent to Michilimackinac proved beyond cavil that English goods were cheap; and so long as a beaver skin was the price of a debauch on French brandy, whereas a mink skin was sufficient to attain the same exaltation by means of English rum, the French control of the fur trade rested on a precarious basis. The chief obstacle to Dongan's scheme was the division of executive authority in the colonies, the apathy of colonial assemblies, and the lack of an adequate military force to protect the Iroquois from the enmity of the French. It was precisely to change these conditions, and to avoid the very evils which soon came to pass, that James II, who had at least the merit of an intelligent interest in the colonies, placed all New England under the single jurisdiction of Andros in 1686, and, in 1688, united New York and the Jerseys to New England.

The Revolution which drove James from the throne discredited his measures, but the twenty years of war with France which the Revolution brought in its train proved the wisdom of his policy. When Indian massacres inspired at Quebec made a desolate waste of the New England frontier, while Boston and New York merchants filled their pockets by supplying the enemy with munitions of war, the inadequacy of the colonial system for defense, as well as all the worst evils of illicit trade, stood clearly revealed. Until 1715, the Board of Trade, which William appointed in 1696, maintained the traditions, if it did not exhibit all the efficiency, of the old committee of the Lords of Trade. The Navigation Act of 1696, providing for nearly thirty officials at an annual cost of £1605, for the first time systematically extended the English customs service to the colonies. In the following year seven admiralty courts, subject to the Lords of the Admiralty, were erected in the continental colonies to try cases arising out of the violation of the Trade Acts, while special courts for dealing with piracy were established in 1700. But the customs and admiralty services, although directly responsible to the English Government, could never be fully effective unless they were vigorously supported by the colonial Governments. It was in order to make the enforcement of the commercial code more effective, as well as to secure better coöperation among the colonial Governments for military defense, that the Board of Trade repeatedly advised the recall of all the charters as a measure necessary above all others. The advice of the Board was followed only in part. The union of New England and New York was abandoned. Massachusetts received a new charter; Connecticut and Rhode Island retained their old ones; Penn's charter, annulled in 1692, was restored in 1694. But under the charter granted to Massachusetts in 1691 the governor was appointed by the Crown; New Jersey was made a royal province in 1702; and Maryland in 1691, although it was given back to the Baltimores in 1715. When the Peace of Utrecht was signed in 1713, the system devised by the Board of Trade for controlling the colonies thus lacked little of being completely established. The English customs and admiralty services had been fully extended to America; and while control of legislation was left mainly in the hands of assemblies elected in each colony, executive authority was entrusted to Crown officials in every colony except Pennsylvania, where the governor was appointed by the proprietor, and Rhode Island and Connecticut, where he was still elected by the people.

III

It is only by courtesy that these measures for confining the trade of the empire may be called a colonial system; and it would have been well if England, profiting by the experience of the French wars, had set seriously about the task of fashioning a method of government adapted to the political as well as the commercial needs of her New World possessions. But it was not to be. With the accession of George I, enthusiasm for plantation ventures declined; interest in the colonies, undiminished, indeed, was more than ever concentrated upon their commercial possibilities; and the constructive policy of the Stuarts gave way, in the phrase of Burke, to one of "salutary neglect." The neglect was, indeed, by no means complete. Information was assiduously gathered; many new laws were passed; the number of officials greatly increased, and governors more carefully instructed; colonial statutes, more consistently inspected, were more often annulled. Yet it is true that for three decades after the Peace of Utrecht no attempt was made to transform the commercial code into a colonial system. And even the commercial code was administered in "a gentlemanlike and easy-going fashion: little was embitered and nothing solved."

Of many circumstances which contributed to this result, the effect of the Revolution on English politics was fundamental. Kings who ruled by grace of a statute, instead of by divine right, inevitably lost administrative as well as legislative authority. Colonial policy was therefore no longer determined, as in Stuart times, by the king in council, but by the ministers; by ministers who might listen to the Board of Trade, but could not take advice unless it squared with the wishes of the Parliament that made them. When, in 1715, Secretary Stanhope appointed George Vaughan, an owner of sawmills in New Hampshire, to be lieutenant-governor of that province, the Board of Trade protested; and quoted, in support of its protest, the remarks of Bellomont about Mr. Partridge. "To set a carpenter to preserve woods," said Bellomont, "is like setting a wolf to guard sheep; I say, to preserve woods, for I take it to be the chiefest part of the business of a Lt. Governor of that province to preserve the woods for the king's use." The protest was ignored; and for thirty years, while the Board of Trade fell almost to the level of a joke, the colonies were managed by a Secretary of State who was likely to be less interested in preserving the woods for the king's use than in advancing the interests of the Whig oligarchy which governed England.