Transcript
April 18
1689
On the morning of April 18, 1689, armed townsmen and militia filled the streets of Boston, in the English colony of Massachusetts. They arrested the royal governor and his officials, and from the Town House gallery a man read out their reasons:
The Declaration of the Gentlemen, Merchants and Inhabitants of Boston We do therefore seize upon the persons of those few Ill men which have been (next to our sins) the grand authors of our miseries.
One of the men they jailed was Edward Randolph, the King's collector of customs, who enforced England's trade laws in Boston.
Edward Randolph All the blame lyes upon me, who first attacked and overthrew their Charter.
The charter he meant was the royal grant that let Massachusetts govern itself, and he had spent thirteen years attacking it.
Bostonians still called themselves the King's loyal subjects, and their fight with his collector had started in 1676.
The Rules
1651–1676
In 1676, King Charles II sent Randolph to Boston with a royal letter and orders to report on the colony and its trade.
England's rules for colonial trade grew out of mercantilism, the belief that a country grew rich by selling more abroad than it bought.
Colonies fit that plan by sending raw materials like sugar, tobacco and timber home and buying English-made goods in return.
Parliament, England's lawmaking body, wrote that idea into the Navigation Acts, beginning in 1651. The first rule said colonial trade had to travel in English or colonial-built ships, with mostly English crews.
The second rule named valuable colonial goods, such as sugar and tobacco, and colonists could ship them only to England or another English colony.
The third rule, from 1663, said most goods made in Europe had to pass through England before they reached the colonies.
When Randolph landed in Boston in June 1676, he found merchants ignoring these rules, and he later reported to London:
Edward Randolph There is no notice taken of the act of navigation, plantation, or any other lawes made in England for the regulation of trade.
Try the rules yourself: decide which of these six cargoes the Navigation Acts allowed.
Some colonists gained from these rules: colonial-built ships counted as English, so New England's shipyards built and sold ships to English merchants. The Royal Navy also protected colonial ships from French and Spanish raiders.
Chesapeake planters gained too, because England banned tobacco farming at home. In 1667, the diarist Samuel Pepys heard that the King had sent his Life Guard to the English village of Winchcombe to destroy illegal tobacco.
But the rules also cost planters, who could sell their tobacco only inside the empire, even when prices fell. And colonists paid more for European goods, because those goods had to come through England first.
Massachusetts's governor, John Leverett, told Randolph that his colony obeyed Parliament's laws only when they suited it:
Edward Randolph He freely declared to me that the lawes made by your Majestie and your parliament obligeth them in nothing
Edward Randolph but what consists with the interest of that colony,
The Mart Town
1676
Randolph reported that Boston's merchants traded in every port they could reach:
Edward Randolph …and Boston may be esteemed the mart town of the West-Indies.
A mart town was a market town, and the West Indies were the islands of the Caribbean.
On Barbados, England's richest colony in the Caribbean, planters grew sugar for Europe, and enslaved Africans did the work. Europeans wanted more sugar every year, so the planters kept buying more enslaved Africans to plant, cut and boil the cane.
Boston fed those islands, and Randolph listed what it sent: fish, horses, barrel staves, even ready-framed houses. The ships came back with sugar, molasses and rum, and Boston's merchants sold those cargoes in other ports.
Boston's trade was one part of an Atlantic economy that tied together Europe, West Africa, the Caribbean and the mainland colonies. Harbors and rivers carried each region's goods to the ocean: New England's fish and timber, the middle colonies' grain, Chesapeake tobacco and Carolina rice. In return, England shipped cloth, tools, guns and other manufactured goods to its colonies.
Ships also carried cloth, iron bars, guns and rum to West Africa, where European traders bought captives from African rulers and merchants. The traders forced the captives across the ocean in crowded ships, a voyage called the Middle Passage, and many died before they landed.
After 1698, when the Royal African Company lost its monopoly, more New England merchants joined the slave trade, many from Newport, Rhode Island. By the 1750s, Newport sloops carried rum to Africa, captives to the West Indies and molasses home, a loop called the triangular trade.
Back in Randolph's Boston, those cargoes depended on the work of shipwrights, sailors and enslaved Africans. In 1676, during Metacom's War with the Native nations of southern New England, colonists sold Native captives overseas as slaves.
Back in London, Randolph warned the King's advisers that Massachusetts behaved as if it answered to no one:
Edward Randolph …that government would make the world believe they are a free state,
Over the next years, Randolph urged London to cancel the charter, because he thought the trade laws would fail while Massachusetts kept it.
Within the Four Seas
1678–1687
In 1678, the General Court, Massachusetts's elected assembly, answered London's complaints bluntly:
The General Court of Massachusetts The laws of England are bounded within the four seas, and do not reach America.
The General Court of Massachusetts The subjects of his majesty here being not represented in Parliament…
Since the colony had no members in Parliament, the Court said, its merchants did not consider themselves bound by Parliament's trade laws.
That same year, the Crown named Randolph its collector of customs for New England, and he began seizing ships that broke the trade laws. But each case went before a local jury, and in Boston the jurors were often merchants and ship captains themselves.
Here are four ships Randolph seized: pick the one case that ended in a penalty.
Of the ten seizures on his list, juries cleared seven.
Edward Randolph the Jury consisting of either Merchants or Masters of Ships leap'd over all, and found for the Defendant.
Empires competed for Native trade as well, and in 1684 the governor of New France met the Haudenosaunee on Lake Ontario. He told these five allied nations, from what is now upstate New York, to stop bringing English traders onto the Great Lakes. Their speaker, Garangula of the Onondaga nation, answered him:
Garangula We may go where we please, and carry with us whom we please,
Garangula and buy and sell what we please:
In 1684, an English court cancelled the Massachusetts charter, partly because the colony kept defying the trade laws. Without its charter, Massachusetts had no legal right to its elected government.
In December 1686, Sir Edmund Andros arrived in Boston with English soldiers, as governor for England's new king, James II.
James had combined the New England colonies into one Dominion of New England, ruled by Andros and an appointed council with no elected assembly. Andros and his council set taxes themselves, and Randolph served as their secretary.
In August 1687, the town of Ipswich, north of Boston, voted not to help collect a tax that no elected assembly had approved. Andros's judges jailed the town's minister, John Wise, and fined him fifty pounds.
Liberty and License
1689–1696
In April 1689, news reached Boston that William of Orange had invaded England to overthrow James II, in what became the Glorious Revolution. Bostonians rose on April 18, jailed Andros and Randolph, and ended the Dominion of New England.
From his cell, Randolph wrote to the governor of Barbados with a plan to get himself freed:
Edward Randolph I am confident they will never part with me, unlesse demanded by a force
Edward Randolph or their ships stoped in the plantations till I am delivered up for their liberty and license to trade.
He wanted Barbados to hold Boston's ships, because Boston's merchants needed the sugar islands as badly as the islands needed Boston's food.
Barbados planters had their own grievance: London taxed their sugar heavily and let them sell it only inside the empire.
A Barbados planter We are commanded as Subjects, and we are crusht as Aliens.
The same pamphlet counted enslaved mill workers among the planters' losses:
A Barbados planter If a Mill-feeder be catch't by the finger, his whole body is drawn in, and he is squeez'd to pieces.
The Dominion was gone, and in 1691 Massachusetts got a new charter with an elected assembly, though the King now chose its governor.
England's trade laws stayed in force, and in 1696 Parliament tightened them with a new Navigation Act. The King also created the Board of Trade, a committee in London that watched over colonial trade and government.
The new law let customs officers take smuggling cases to vice-admiralty courts, where a royal judge decided without a jury. It was the court Randolph had wanted ever since Boston juries started freeing the smugglers he caught.
The Smuggler
1733–1743
Even with the new courts, smuggling went on, and in December 1743 the Boston merchant Thomas Hancock sent his captain these orders:
Thomas Hancock proceed direct to St. Eustatia where you will hear how the Marketts Govern
Thomas Hancock I'd have you unload at Nantaskett if no man of War there.
Saint Eustatius was a Dutch island in the Caribbean, where ships of every empire traded. Nantasket was a quiet landing outside Boston, away from Royal Navy warships.
London rarely stopped merchants like Hancock, because it was an ocean away and needed colonial help in its wars with France.
In the ports, merchants bribed customs officers to look the other way. This loose enforcement, which lasted until 1763, came to be called salutary neglect.
In 1733, Parliament passed the Molasses Act, a tax of sixpence a gallon on molasses from French and other foreign islands. Molasses was the syrup left from making sugar, and New England's distillers made it into rum. Parliament meant the tax to protect British sugar planters, because French islands sold molasses more cheaply.
Now compare what the law demanded with what the customs men actually collected. New England's distillers kept buying French molasses, and merchants smuggled it in or bribed customs officers, so the treasury collected little of the tax.
In an earlier order, from 1741, Hancock had given the same captain a different errand:
Thomas Hancock buy you Eight or Ten Good Negro Slaves
Thomas Hancock …proceed to the Bay of Honduras, where dispose of them.
The Bay of Honduras was in Central America, and like many New England merchants, Hancock made money trading enslaved people.
Every Necessary Thing
1700–1754
Early in the 1700s, Muscogee and Cherokee hunters in the Southeast traded deerskins to Carolina merchants for wool cloth, kettles, knives and guns. The new goods changed daily life, as metal tools replaced stone ones and guns gave some nations an edge in war.
From the 1670s to 1715, Carolina traders also bought captives taken by Native allies in raids, and shipped many to the West Indies as slaves.
Far to the west, Spanish horses spread north across the Great Plains, and the Piikani, a Blackfoot people, first saw one around 1730. They called it the Big Dog, and within a generation horses had changed how Plains peoples hunted buffalo, moved camp and fought.
In 1753, the Cherokee headman Skiagunsta told South Carolina's governor at Charles Town how much his people now relied on English goods:
Skiagunsta What are we red People? The Cloaths we wear, we cannot make ourselves…
Skiagunsta Every necessary Thing in Life we must have from the white People.
He said it while asking the governor for a steady trade, and Carolina's traders still wanted the deerskins.
Fifteen years earlier, smallpox spread along the trading paths, swept through the Cherokee towns and killed thousands of people. Epidemics like that one struck Native nations across the continent, and some shrinking towns joined with their neighbors.
In the 1740s, far to the north, Native traders at Hudson Bay's English posts bargained hard, because French traders inland would buy their furs instead.
Loyal Smugglers
1750 · coda
By 1750, more ships than ever crowded the wharves of Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Charles Town. Colonists filled their homes with English teapots, plates and printed cloth, and many felt proud to be British. Many colonists wanted the empire's profits and protection, and the freedom to run their own trade.
In 1775, the British politician Edmund Burke looked back and said the colonies owed their wealth to London's light touch, or in his words:
Edmund Burke …through a wise and salutary neglect…
Back in May 1689, Randolph had written from his cell that Boston would free him only to save its liberty and license to trade.
Boston defended its charter and its trade together, because its own juries and elected leaders protected its merchants from the King's officers.
For a century, England wrote trade laws to make the colonies serve the empire. Colonial merchants followed the rules that helped them and broke the rules that cost them, and many grew wealthy doing it.
April 18 Old Style