An address of the British House of Commons to the king, presented on the 27th of March, 1766, called forth a description of the textile manufactures in the province of New York at the close of the period of which this chapter treats. The Society of Arts and Agriculture of New York City had about this date established a small manufactory of linen, with fourteen looms, to give employment to several poor families, hitherto a charge upon the community. No broadcloth was then made in the province, and some poor weavers from Yorkshire, who had come over in the expectation of finding remunerative work, had been sadly disappointed. But coarse woollen goods were extensively made. One of these native textile fabrics, called linsey-woolsey, and made of linen warp and woollen woof, became a political sign during the Stamp Act excitement. People “desirous of distinguishing themselves as American patriots” would wear nothing else. The manufacture of these coarse woollens became an ordinary household occupation, and what was made in excess of family needs found its way to market. Governor Moore says, “This I had an opportunity of seeing during my late tour;... every house swarms with children, who are set to work as soon as they are able to spin and card; and as every family is furnished with a loom, the itinerant weavers, who travel about the country, put the finishing hand to the work.”
The making of beaver hats was an industry in which the colonial competition with the English hatters led to most oppressive legislation in Parliament. The middle colonies, particularly from their connection with the beaver-hunting Indians, had carried the art to a degree which produced a cheaper if not a better covering for the head than was made in England, and they found it easy to market them in the West Indies, where they excluded the English-made article. Accordingly the export of hats from England fell off so perceptibly that in 1731 the “Master Wardens and Assistants of the Company of Feltmakers of London” petitioned the Lords of Trade to order that the inhabitants of the colonies should wear no hats but such as were made in Great Britain. The prayer was denied, but Parliament was induced, in 1732, to forbid the exportation of hats from American ports.
But most trades in the colonies failed of the natural protection which arises from cheap labor, while the opportunities of acquiring lands and establishing homes with ample acres about them served further to increase the difficulties of competition with the Old World, in that artisans were attracted by lures of this kind to the new settlements, and away from the shops of the towns.
The commerce of the colonies easily fell into four different channels: one took produce to England, or to such foreign lands as the navigation laws permitted; the second bound the colonies one with the other in the bonds of reciprocal trade; a third was opened with the Indians; and the fourth embraced all that surreptitious venture which was known as smuggling.
The ports of New York and Philadelphia absorbed the foreign and transatlantic trade of the middle colonies, notwithstanding the efforts which New Jersey made to draw a share of it to Perth Amboy. Before Governor Dongan’s time, ships coming to Amboy had to make entry at New York, as it was feared that goods brought to the New Jersey port and not paying New York duties might be smuggled to New York by way of Staten Island. “Two or three ships came in there [at Amboy] last year,” writes Governor Dongan in 1687, “with goods, and I am sure that country cannot, even with West Jersey, consume £1,000 in goods in 2 years, so that the rest must have been run into this colony.” Some years later the Lords of Trade decided that the charter did not give to either West or East Jersey the right to a port of entry, but she, nevertheless, in due time obtained the right to open such ports at Amboy and Burlington. The displeasure of the New York authorities was manifest in the refusal of their governor to make proclamation of such decree, and the larger province was strong enough occasionally to seize a vessel bound for Amboy. New Jersey could protest; but her indignation was in vain, and she never succeeded in establishing a lucrative commerce. How steadily the commerce of her neighbor increased is shown in the record that in 1737 New York had 53 ships with an aggregate of 3,215 tons; in 1747, there were 99 ships of 4,313 tons; and in 1749, 157 with a capacity of 6,406 tons. The records of the New York custom-house show that the articles imported from abroad or from the other British colonies on this continent and from the West Indies were principally rum, madeira wine, cocoa, European goods, and occasionally a negro slave,[491] while the exports of the colonies were fish and provisions.
New Jersey had little Atlantic trade, since New York and Philadelphia could import for her all the European and West India goods which she needed. In intercolonial trade, however, she had a large share, and she supplied her neighbors with cereals, beef, and horses. New York, on the contrary, was sometimes pressed to prevent certain exportations, when she needed all her productions herself, as was sometimes the case with cereals. This intercolonial trade naturally grew in the main out of the products of the several colonies; while for their Indian trade, they were compelled to use what the avidity of the natives called for,—blankets, weapons, rum, and the trinkets with which the Indian was fond of adorning his person, and for all which he paid almost entirely in furs. The nature of this traffic was such, particularly in respect to the sale of arms and spirits, that legislation was often interposed to regulate it in the interest of peace and justice.
As respects the illegal or last class of commercial channels, we find that before Bellomont’s time there had grown up, as he found, “a lycencious trade with pyrats, Scotland and Curaçao,” out of which no customs revenue was obtained. As a consequence, the city and province of New York “grew rich, but the customes, they decreased.” Certain Long Island harbors became “a great Receptacle for Pirates.” The enforcement of the law gave Bellomont a chance to say, in 1700, that an examination of the entries in New York and Boston had shown him that the trade of the former port was almost half as much as that of the other, while New Hampshire ports had not the tenth part of New York, except in lumber and fish. The Philadelphia Quakers objected to fight the West Indian enemies of the crown; but they had little objection to trade with them, and to grow rich on such more peaceful intercourse.
Towards the end of the period spoken of in this chapter, a “pernicious trade with Holland” had sprung up, which the colonial governors found hard to suppress, but which was successfully checked in 1764 by the English cruisers; but shortly before the War of Independence it began again to flourish.
A diversity of trade brought in its train a great variety in the coin, which was its medium, and a generation now living can remember when the great influx of Spanish coin poured into the colonies in the last century was still in great measure a circulating medium. The indebtedness to the mother country which colonists always start with continued for a long while to drain the colonies of its specie in payment of interest and principal. As soon as their productions were allowed to find openly or clandestinely a market in the Spanish main and the West Indies, the return came in the pieces of eight, the Rix dollars, and all the other varieties of Spanish or Mexican coinage which passed current in the tropics. So far as these went to pay debts in Europe, the colonies were forced to preserve primitive habits of barter in wampum, beaver, and tobacco. By the time of Andros, foreign trade and the increasing disuse of these articles of barter had begun to familiarize the people with coin of French and Spanish mintage, and at that time pieces of eight went for six shillings, double reals for eighteen pence, pistoles for twenty-four shillings. Soon after this the metal currency began to be very much diminished in intrinsic value by the practice of clipping. Both heavy and light pieces were indiscriminately subjected to this treatment, and the price of the heavier pieces of eight advanced in consequence, so that in 1693 a standard of weight had to be established, and it was determined by a proclamation that “whole pieces of eight of the coins of Sevill, Mexico, and Pillar pieces of 15 pennyweight not plugg’d” should pass at the rate of 6 shillings; pieces of more weight to increase or lose in value 4-1/2 pence for each pennyweight more or less. Pieces of eight of Peru were made current at fourpence for each pennyweight, and Dog dollars at five shillings sixpence. English coin was of course current in the colonies, and the emigrants of that day brought their little hoard in the mintage of their European homes, instead of buying, as to-day, letters of exchange or drafts payable in a currency unknown to them. In 1753 it became necessary to enact, in New York, a law to prevent the passing of counterfeit English half-pence and farthings, and in the second half of the last century the coins mostly current, besides English ones, were the gold Johannis of eighteen pennyweight, six grains; Moidores of six pennyweight, eighteen grains; Carolines of six pennyweight, eight grains; Double Loons (Doubloons) or four Pistoles of seventeen pennyweight, eight grains; double and single Pistoles; French Guineas (louis d’ors) of five pennyweight, four grains; and Arabian Chequins of two pennyweight, four grains.