Conceived in Liberty (46 page)

But, as in the case of the Quakers, persecution only swelled the ranks of the persecuted. In 1679 the Baptists were strong enough to build their own meetinghouse. The General Court immediately passed a law confiscating all churches built without government permission. The authorities
promptly seized the building, and banned services there “without license from authority.” The congregation continued to meet in the yard, and finally the General Court gave up, fearful of defying the king, who was leaning increasingly toward religious freedom. The court eventually returned the church to its owners. The Baptists too had won their right to worship in their own way.

*
Published in 1661 as
New-England Judged, Not by Man’s, but the Spirit of the Lord.

As happens on every new continent, the vast majority of Americans were engaged in transforming natural resources into use; in the case of New England, farming, fish, timber, and furs purchased from Indians located deep in the interior. Merchants and shippers largely exported this produce and in return imported other desired goods from abroad. It should be noted that, in contrast to the glib assumptions of many critics, there is no inherent “class conflict” between farmers and merchants in the market economy. There is no “agrarian interest” in a
per se
clash with a “commercial” or “mercantile” interest. Both groups play an intermeshing and complementary role in the processes of production and exchange. How, indeed, could “agrarians” find a market for their produce without merchants, and without farmers, in
what
goods would the merchants trade and
to whom
would they sell?

New England, indeed all of America north of the Potomac, had not the monoculture of the South (tobacco in the Chesapeake area and, later, rice in South Carolina), but a variety of products. The first products of New England were fish and furs, and the bulk of the earlier settlements began as fishing stations or fur trading posts. From the Indians, the whites soon learned two techniques indispensable to carving a living out of the new land: how to clear these unfamiliar woods, and how to grow that new product, Indian corn (maize), which soon became the North’s leading agricultural product. Other important agricultural commodities in the North were wheat, rye, and barley.

To the first generation of devout Puritans migrating en masse to Massachusetts, intent on founding their “Bible Commonwealth,” trade
was more than slightly suspect. Trade was something to be watched, regulated, controlled—a standing distraction from “godly” concerns. There was little conception that the market has laws and workings of its own.

And yet, economic reality had, as always, to be dealt with—and even in the godliest of commonwealths there was often chicanery afoot. When the Puritans began to arrive in the late 1620s, the most highly developed enterprise in New England was the Plymouth fur trade with the Indians. But within a decade the Plymouth fur trade had virtually disappeared, and the economically declining Pilgrims had to content themselves with sending their agricultural produce to Boston to sell. How did this happen? How did Plymouth so swiftly become a sleepy backwater of Massachusetts Bay?

It is misleading to say that Massachusetts, with its influx of Puritans, was larger and wealthier. For this would not automatically have effected such a drastic revolution in fortunes. Moreover, Massachusetts supplanted Plymouth in the fur trade even though very few furs were native to the Massachusetts area.

The swiftness of this turnover is explicable only by contrasting the workings of governmental monopoly privilege with free private enterprise. In 1627 Plymouth owed £1,800 to its English financiers. Taking advantage of this opportunity, a group of eight leading rulers of the colony —as key members of the ruling oligarchy—in effect granted themselves a monopoly of the Plymouth fur trade in exchange for assuming the Plymouth debt. Also drawn into the monopoly scheme were four of the English merchant-creditors. The monopoly was to run for six years, but was annually renewed for several years afterward. Monopoly never spurs enterprise or initiative, and this was undoubtedly a major factor in the swift decline of the trade in the late 1630s, when competition from Massachusetts had to be faced. Plymouth could not, after all, deal with Massachusetts Bay as it had dealt with the competition of the highly efficient fur trader Thomas Morton, that is, by wiping out his settlement and deporting him back to England. Furthermore, the London creditors, while ingesting monopoly profits, fraudulently failed to reduce the Plymouth debt by that amount; the debt thus remained a heavy burden on the colony. So swiftly did the Plymouth fur trade collapse that virtually no one remained in it by 1640 and the monopoly was allowed to lapse.

It is true that the Massachusetts settlers helped this process along by such acts as seizing the Windsor trading post on the Connecticut River in 1635, but these were scarcely decisive. Instead, it was private, independent settlers, building trading posts in the interior—especially on the Connecticut River—building at their own risk and on their own initiative, who developed the New England fur trade. The most important fur trader was William Pynchon, who founded Springfield, the strategic northernmost settlement on the Connecticut River. Pynchon became a
virtual manorial lord of Springfield, functioning as landed gentry and chief magistrate.

While the fur trade in Massachusetts and Connecticut was relatively free in contrast to Plymouth’s, it was hardly a pure free enterprise. The governments regulated the prices of furs, taxed income from the trade, and moreover, insisted on licensing each entry into the trade. Indeed, entrance into the vital fur trade became a lucrative monopolistic privilege restricted to influential men with connections in the government of the colony. William Pynchon was granted the exclusive monopoly of the entire fur trade in the crucial Springfield region. As a result, he was able to expand greatly and establish branch trading posts of Springfield in the new settlements at Hadley and Westfield. In 1644 Massachusetts granted a twenty-one-year fur monopoly to one company that included Boston importers William Tyng and Robert Sedgwick. The monopoly quickly went bankrupt, as did another attempt at a fur monopoly the following year.

In Rhode Island, meanwhile, Roger Williams was the first leading fur trader. One of the secrets of his success was that his social philosophy of peace and friendship with the Indians was complemented by concrete peaceful trading relations.

But New England, in the final analysis, was fur-poor, and by the late 1650s even the Massachusetts fur trade was beginning to decline rapidly. In New Haven it was a drive for scarce furs that lay at the root of New Haven’s desperate attempts to colonize the Delaware Valley. As New England furs became scarcer, Indian trade concentrated deeper into the interior, and was increasingly centered around the Dutch post of Fort Orange at the current site of Albany. New England fur interests gave way to interests in land, agriculture, and other types of trade.

From the first, the Massachusetts oligarchy, seeing that in the New World land was peculiarly abundant in relation to labor, tried by law to push down the wage rates that they had to pay as merchants or landowners. Maximum-wage controls were persistently imposed. John Winthrop set the tone in 1633, complaining that “the scarcity of workmen had caused them to raise their wages to an excessive rate....” What else was supposed to happen with a scarce product?

As in the South, there were at the base of New England’s economic structure indentured servants and Negro slaves, who sometimes were farm labor but mostly were artisans, helpers, and domestic servants. After the servants’ terms expired, they received small grants of land and became farmer-settlers. The Massachusetts gentry also supplemented this system of labor with general compulsory service in harvesting neighboring farms—a neat way of exploiting the local citizenry at wage rates far below the market.

Maximum-wage control always aggravates a shortage of labor, as employers will not be able to obtain needed workers at the statutory price. In trying to force labor to be
cheaper
than its price on the free market, the gentry only made it more difficult for employers to obtain that labor. By 1640 Winthrop was admitting that Massachusetts had “found by experience that it would not avail by any law to redress the excessive rates of laborers’ and workmen’s wages, etc. (for being restrained, they would either remove to other places where they might have more or else being able to live by planting or other employments of their own, they would not be hired at all)....”

Of course, one method of alleviating this induced shortage was by using the
forced
labor of slavery, servitude, and compulsory harvest service. Thus, one intervention by violence in the market created conditions impelling a further and stronger intervention. But apart from forced labor, the Massachusetts authorities, as we have noted, found it extremely difficult to enforce maximum-wage control.

The first maximum-wage law was enacted by Massachusetts as early as 1630. Due to the high wages commanded by the scarcity of construction craftsmen, the law concentrated on maximum-wage rates in the building trades. Carpenters, bricklayers, etc., were limited to two shillings a day and any payment above this rate would subject both the employer and the worker to punishment (for instance, a buying-cartel of employers established by the law punished the recalcitrant employer who decided to break ranks). Almost immediately, the magistrates decided to imbibe more of the magic medicine, and legal wage rates were pushed down to sixteen pence a day for master carpenters and bricklayers, and correspondingly lower for other laborers.

But the economic laws of the market made enforcement hopeless, and after only six months, the General Court repealed the laws, and ordered all wages to be “left free and at liberty as men shall reasonably agree.” But Massachusetts Bay was not to remain wise for long. By 1633 the General Court became horrified again at higher wage rates in construction and other trades and at the propensity of the working classes to rise above their supposedly appointed station in life by relaxing more and by spending their wages on luxuries. Denouncing “the great extortion... by divers persons of little conscience” and the “vain and idle waste of precious time,” the court enacted a comprehensive and detailed wage-control program.

The law of 1633 decreed a maximum of two shillings a day without board and fourteen pence with board, for the wages of sawyers, carpenters, masons, bricklayers, etc. Top-rate laborers were limited to eighteen pence without. These rates were approximately double those of England for skilled craftsmen and treble for unskilled laborers. Constables were to set the wages of lesser laborers. Penalties were levied on the employers and the wage earners who violated the law. Sensing that maximum controls below the market wage led to a shortage of labor, the General Court decreed that no idleness was to be permitted. In effect,
minimum hours
were decreed in order to bolster the maximum-wage law —another form of compulsory labor. Workmen were ordered to work “the whole day, allowing convenient time for food and rest.”

Interestingly, the General Court soon decided to make an exception for the
government
itself, which was naturally having difficulty finding men willing to work on its public-works projects. A combination of the carrot and the stick was used: government officials were allowed to award “such extraordinary wages as they shall judge the work to deserve.”
On the other hand, they were empowered to send town constables to conscript laborers as the need arose.

Although merchants were happy to join the landed oligarchy and the Puritan zealots in forcing down the wage rates of laborers, they were scarcely as happy about maximum controls on selling prices. The gentry were eager, however, to force downward the prices of products they needed to buy. A blend of mercantilist fallacies and Puritan suspicion of commerce, the result was persistent attempts to force commodities below their market prices. Having little conception of the function of the price system on the free market, the Massachusetts authorities also felt that maximum-price control would bolster the maximum-wage-rate program. There was no understanding that general movements in prices and wages are governed by the supply of and demand for money, and that this too can best work itself out on the free market.

Corn was the major monetary medium of the North, and in 1630 Massachusetts set the sterling price of corn at six shillings per bushel. Failing to work, this control was repealed along with the wage laws of 1631, and corn was “left at liberty to be sold as men can agree.” In 1633, however, maximum-price controls were reimposed as an auxiliary to the wage controls.

The massive wage laws of 1633 were quickly discovered to be a failure; once again the quiet but powerful economic laws of the market had triumphed over the dramatic decrees of the coercive state. After one year the actual wage rates were fifty percent higher than the statutory levels. At that point, the General Court repealed the penalties against
paying,
but retained those against
receiving,
wages above the fixed legal rate. While, in fact, no
employer
had ever been tried or penalized under the old act, the wage law was now an open and flagrant piece of class legislation. This was nothing new, however, as there were ample precedents in English maximum-wage laws since the early fifteenth century.

Another change made in 1634 allowed a little flexibility in decreed prices and wages by permitting each town to alter the legal rate in case of disputes. Only a year later the General Court, despairing of the continued failure of the law to take hold, repealed the comprehensive wage controls and the auxiliary price controls. Just before this comprehensive repeal, the courts had apparently been driven by the failure to inflict ever harsher penalties; fines had been so heavy that two workers were imprisoned for failure to pay. The authorities were at the crossroads: should they begin to impose on workers violating clearly unworkable economic decrees the sort of punishment meted out to heretics or to critics of the government? Happily, common sense, in this case, finally prevailed.