Conceived in Liberty (132 page)

The British government, as early as the seventeenth century, had placed great importance on trees for masts for the Royal Navy. Although Britain acted to suppress competing colonial manufactures, it wished to stimulate supplies for the navy; for this purpose it coercively diverted colonial timber to the production of masts and other naval stores. The main conflict centered around this question: Who should gain the use and the profit of the larger trees suitable for naval stores, the individual settlers or the Royal Navy? The Royal Navy first struck a blow in the imposed Massachusetts charter of 1691, which decreed the reservation to the Crown of all trees of twenty-four inches or larger in diameter then situated on the public domain. The charter provision, however, was not enforced.

One of the main problems in trying to force American (particularly New Hampshire) timber into naval stores was that such use was uneconomic. Northern European naval stores were cheaper and of considerably higher quality. And the colonists had better and more profitable uses for their timber. A network of subsidies and prohibitions was therefore imposed; the New England merchants, for example, refused to produce naval stores unless the admiralty granted them the privilege of the advance guarantee of a fixed price, a fixed quantity, and a long-term contract. In 1705, the Naval Stores Act, accordingly, (1) extended the prohibition on private cutting to pitch-pines and tar trees on the public domain, and to trees with
twelve-inch diameters or more (but the diameter was measured from higher up than in the Massachusetts charter) located in any of the Northern colonies; (2) placed naval stores on the enumerated list; and (3) granted generous bounties for the exporting of naval stores to England, including pitch, tar, rosin, turpentine, hemp, masts, and other timber. Thus the carrot was combined with the stick. Cutting of the bigger trees, moreover, could be done only under special royal license.

To ensure enforcement of the restrictions and to encourage naval-stores production, the English merchants had the Board of Trade send John Bridger to the colonies. Concentrating on the New Hampshire coast, Bridger was still unable to enforce the restrictions. What is more, the Massachusetts General Court refused to follow the lead of New Hampshire in reaffirming the restrictive clauses of the Massachusetts charter. Consequently, Parliament passed the White Pine Act of 1711, extending those provisions of the charter to New England, New York, and New Jersey. Moreover, the White Pine Act of 1722 prohibited cutting without royal license any white pine trees that were publicly or privately owned and growing outside township limits in New England, New York, or New Jersey.

The restrictions still proved unenforceable. As Bridger began to get convictions of woodsmen committing violations, the neighbors of the offenders refused to buy their condemned property at auctions and therefore the government could not collect its fines. Furthermore, Bridger’s zeal was cooled by woodsmen threatening to shoot him if they caught him interfering with their livelihood. The sturdy New Hampshire frontiersmen, dependent on timber cutting for their livelihood, averred that “the king has no wood... and they will cut what and where they please.” Indeed, the regulations could not be enforced, even though further restrictions were imposed on the cutting of pine trees. In 1729, cutting of any pine on public lands, even within township bounds, required a license, and any cutting on private lands (that had become private since 1690) of trees over twenty-four inches in diameter was prohibited without a license. Furthermore, in 1722, exclusive jurisdiction over the timber laws was turned over to the royally appointed and juryless vice admiralty courts.

Trying to enforce the tightened restrictions was the tyrannical Scot David Dunbar, surveyor general of the King’s Woods and lieutenant governor of New Hampshire. But Dunbar was checked not only by the decided lack of enthusiasm of Governor Jonathan Belcher, but also by magnificent countersuits filed by the timber-cutters for defense of their property against the surveyor. The countersuits, moreover, were tried in the anti-timber-law civil courts of New England. In reaction, Dunbar began to seize and destroy the timber and equipment of the illegal loggers. In 1734, a pitched battle broke out near Exeter, New Hampshire. Dunbar
and his men found a party of illegal woodsmen and seized their cut timber. The infuriated woodsmen struck back, and Dunbar’s men were beaten up and Dunbar himself endangered. The unsympathetic New Hampshire Council refused Dunbar’s request for military support.

The New England courts were understandably inclined to regard the surveyor’s new power to reserve private trees for the Royal Navy as an invasive trespass against private property. Particularly galling to the colonists was the reservation of all pine trees to the Crown except for privately owned ones within township limits. Even Dunbar tried to permit the cutting of smaller pines unsuitable for ship masts, but he was sharply overruled by the Crown. When an employee of the naval subcontractor and merchant Samuel Waldo cut marked timber on private land for sale to the navy, he was arrested for trespassing and fined by the justices of the peace. Waldo employed the British placeman William Shirley, advocate general of the admiralty court, and Shirley won a not unsurprisingly favorable decision for the royal prerogative in the Privy Council (the case of
Frost
v.
Leighton,
1736). Still, Governor Belcher, sympathetic to the private timberland owners and merchants, refused to enforce the onerous laws. In 1744, the new governor, William Shirley, who had intrigued to oust Belcher in league with naval contracting interests, capped his renewed drive for enforcement by putting through the Massachusetts legislature an extension of the reservation of large pine trees to all forests private and public. Furthermore, Colonel William Pepperrell, one of the great leaders in Maine timber, had changed from an opponent to supporter of the timber bill after having acquired close family connections with Samuel Waldo; he had received some of Waldo’s naval subcontracts for timber.

The upshot of the restrictions was unfortunate for the Crown: its decrees could not prevent a large-scale destruction of the royal woods, while at the same time they permanently enraged the Northern woodsmen. Indeed, the result of arbitrarily reserving the trees to the Crown meant that private persons could not own a body of trees, and therefore that the individual colonists were forced to cut down the trees as quickly as possible. Since a colonist was forcibly prevented from owning the standing trees themselves but could only use the cut lumber, this meant that the trees were in a
de facto
state of no ownership and it was to no one’s economic interests to keep any of them standing. On the contrary, it was to each man’s interests to cut the trees and thus bring them into private use before his neighbor could beat him to it.

The consequences of the various parts of British policy can be seen in New Hampshire, a main center for mast trees for the navy. Royal licensing to allow cutting of the large white pine trees was reserved for those persons who also had mast contracts from the navy. In New Hampshire, this meant the powerful Wentworth family. The Wentworths had, in the first
place, a virtual monopoly of the naval mast contracts; they were
also
habitually the appointed surveyor generals—the rulers of the royal woods—
and
the governors of New Hampshire. Thus Benning Wentworth and his nephew John Wentworth each in his time combined all of these offices. By midcentury, the Wentworths were greatly helped in securing the contracts by powerful connections in England, including the Marquis of Rockingham.

Governor Benning Wentworth, royal New Hampshire’s first governor independent of Massachusetts, did not, however, prove to be an efficient enforcer of the royal timber regulations. For twenty years after his appointment as surveyor of the King’s Woods, Wentworth, secure in his naval contracts, happily bothered little with enforcement, and complaints of his laxity by his deputy surveyor came to the Board of Trade. Wentworth made two sporadic attempts at enforcement in these two decades. In 1753, Wentworth told his zealous deputy Daniel Blake to seize all cut white pine lumber in his native Connecticut, whether on public or private land, in the township or out. When Governor Roger Wolcott of Connecticut protested this high-handed act in vain, the people of Connecticut decided to resort to effective direct action. Blake was rudely thrown into a pond, which experience served to discourage any further enforcement efforts.

Wentworth’s other enforcement attempt turned out just as badly. In 1758, Wentworth seized 1,500 white pine logs in New Hampshire and nearly 2,000 in Massachusetts. But the confiscated logs were in each instance repossessed or destroyed by the angry citizens. In Massachusetts, the logs were either retaken by the public or floated down to sea. In New Hampshire, the populace burned down a saw mill at which Wentworth was busily converting the captured pine logs into boards of lumber.

Nor were the substantial bounties able to create a flourishing naval-stores industry in the Northern colonies, as had been their design. We have already seen the fiasco of the Palatine experiment, when the Crown shipped hapless Palatine-German farmers to up-country New York in a vain attempt to produce naval stores. When the bounties lapsed in 1724, the naval-stores industry in the North collapsed. Whereupon the bounties were resumed on a reduced scale in 1729. Only the South, particularly South Carolina, was able to develop a thriving naval-stores industry, even under the impetus of a bounty.

The most important restrictive act of the first half of the eighteenth century was the Molasses Act of 1733. Since the mid-seventeenth century, trade with the West Indies had become vital to the Northern colonies. Lacking the great staples of the South with their ready English market (for example, tobacco, rice), the North could buy English manufactures only by selling grain and provisions to the West Indies in exchange for sugar and its molasses derivative. The North could not sell
its
products to England, to a
large extent because the English corn laws served to exclude Northern wheat, and imports of salted food were prohibited for the benefit of English producers.

Boston became the great center of “triangular trade” with the West Indies: New England merchants exchanged fish and lumber for sugar and molasses, and then traded the latter to England in exchange for English manufactures. After 1715, this triangular arrangement was further refined: the North (Newport, Boston, New York) began heavily participating in the slave trade. Northern ships would acquire Negro slaves in West Africa, transport the slaves to the West Indies where they were in heavy demand, and then exchange them for sugar and molasses. The molasses would be processed into rum in New England distilleries, and the rum carried to West Africa to pay for the slaves. By 1750, in fact, there were sixty-three distilleries in Massachusetts and thirty in Rhode Island. And by 1771, American slave ships reached a capacity of fully one-fourth of England’s mighty slave fleet.

Before 1700, the Northern colonists had conducted their trade with the British West Indies, but after that date production on these islands became less efficient and more costly. Burdened by old exhausted soil and inefficient absentee plantations, the British West Indies planters found themselves outproduced and outcompeted at every turn by the other West Indian islands, especially the French islands of Guadeloupe, Martinique, and San Domingo. The French West Indies raised sugar at lower costs on newer and more fertile soil, and their management was far more efficient.

Thwarted in the voluntary competition of the marketplace, the British planters turned to the coercive arm of the state to try to shackle the burgeoning American-French West Indies trade. The British West Indian planters, led by the sugar planters of Barbados, organized a powerful lobby in London centered in the Jamaica Coffee House, and agitated for prohibition of the French West Indies trade. In this they were allied to the London association of sugar bakers. Finally, after several years of successful agitation in the House of Commons, the planters obtained passage in both houses of Parliament of the Molasses Act of 1733. The Molasses Act levied prohibitively high duties on any foreign sugar, molasses, or rum imported into the English colonies. The Northern colonies protested bitterly that the subsequent great increase in the price of sugar and molasses, and the lowered price of their own staples in the narrow markets of the English West Indies, would be their ruination. How indeed could the Northerners purchase English manufactures (as England and its manufacturers desired) if they could earn no purchasing power, if colonial manufacturing and the vital trade with the French West Indies were to be banned?

The Molasses Act would certainly have dealt a grave blow to the economy of the Northern colonies. But there was one great saving grace: no British regulation was more cheerfully evaded and less adequately enforced.
The Walpoles were willing to appease the powerful West Indies planters by passing the Molasses Act. But they were
not
willing to wreck the colonial economy by enforcing it—a typically charming Walpole compromise.

In 1739, the British Sugar Act threw another bone to the planters for their disappointment at the failure to enforce the Molasses Act: the planters were now allowed to ship their sugar directly to southern Europe, without going through English ports. In all sugar sales to Europe, the planters were freed from paying English duties. This concession was gained over the fierce protest of the planters’ erstwhile ally, the United Company of Grocers and Sugar Bakers, which wanted to continue forcing the planters to sell their sugar to it. Three years later, the planters gained another wise concession: permission to carry sugar in non-British-built ships. This gain was made over the expected bitter complaints of the English shipbuilding industry.

The emergence of French colonial trade in the first quarter of the eighteenth century, spurred by liberal economic policies instituted by the French premier, Cardinal Fleury, provoked desires by its less-efficient competitors to crush the trade by force. This was true not only of French West Indian sugar but also of the New France fur trade, which by the late 1720s was outcompeting the English colonies in the supply of beaver. It was true also of French fishing in the North, which was more efficient than English fishing, even after France had lost Newfoundland and Nova Scotia to England at the Peace of Utrecht. A typical reaction was that of Governor William Shirley of Massachusetts, who repeatedly proposed to end the competition by seizing French Canada by force. But standing athwart all rising pressures for renewed aggression against France was the great Walpole, who brought to his long rule an overriding love of peace and opposition to foreign meddling and aggression.