Colossus how the corporation changed america

“OF A HUGE AND UNKNOWN GREATNESS”THE CALVINIST STRAIN THE ETHIC OF PROSPERITY by Stephen Innes THE CORPORATE ROOTS OF AMERICAN GOVERNMENT FROM CORPORATION TO COMMONWEALTH by Stephen Inne

“OF A HUGE AND UNKNOWN GREATNESS”

THE CALVINIST STRAIN

THE ETHIC OF PROSPERITY by Stephen Innes

THE CORPORATE ROOTS OF AMERICAN GOVERNMENT

FROM CORPORATION TO COMMONWEALTH by Stephen Innes

ECONOMIC METABOLISM

THE NEW ENGLAND MERCHANTS IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY by BernardBailyn

TRAFFICKING IN SOULS

THE SLAVE TRADE by James B Hedges

THE CASE FOR AND AGAINST INCORPORATION

THE PARTNERSHIP FORM OF ORGANIZATION: ITS POPULARITY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY BOSTON by Naomi R Lamoreaux

EARLY-LEGACIES

THE REVOLUTION AND THE CORPORATION by Jack Beatty

PART TWO: A MAGICIAN’S ROD 1820–1860

THE (SLOW) CONQUEST OF AMERICAN SPACE

TOWARD SCALE AND SCOPE by Jack Beatty

WOMEN AND CHILDREN FIRST

THE BOSTON MANUFACTURING COMPANY by Thomas Dublin

A BUSINESS UTOPIA?

CHARLES DICKENS ON THE MILL GIRLS OF LOWELL

THE COURTS AND THE CORPORATION

CHARLES RIVER BRIDGE V WARREN BRIDGE, 1837

THE MACHINE IN THE GARDEN

THE AMERICAN SYSTEM OF MANUFACTURING by Jack Beatty

AMERICA ON TRACK

THE RAILROADS: THE FIRST MODERN BUSINESS ENTERPRISES, 1850s–1860s

by Alfred D Chandler, Jr

THE DEBT

SLAVE LABOR AND THE SOUTHERN RAILROADS by Jack Beatty

OMNIPOTENT WITHOUT VIOLENCE

THE CIVIL WAR AND THE SEARS ROEBUCK CATALOG by Jack Beatty

PART THREE: THE AGE OFINCORPORATION 1870–1930

“THE OUTSTANDING FACT OF MODERN LIFE”

A RIOT OF INDIVIDUALISTIC MATERIALISM by Jack Beatty

AT&T: THE VISION OF A LOVED MONOPOLY by Roland Marchand

TAYLORISM

THE CINDERELLA OF OCCUPATIONS: MANAGING THE WORK OF

DEPARTMENT STORE SALESWOMEN, 1900–1940 by Susan Porter Benson

“LIKE TRYING TO SCREW AN ELEPHANT”

FORD VS GM by Richard S Tedlow

THE TWENTIES

THE BUSINESS OF AMERICA by Jack Beatty

PART FOUR: BUST TO BOOM 1930–1973

THE AMERICAN HIGH

OLIGOPOLY’S GOLDEN AGE by George David Smith and Davis Dyer

THE CORPORATE SURROUND

THE MODERN CORPORATION AND PRIVATE PROPERTY by A A Berle andGardiner C Means

THE MONSTER

From THE GRAPES OF WRATH by John Steinbeck

WASHINGTON INC

THE MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX by Jack Beatty

THE SCIENTIFIC-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX

MAKING “R” YIELD “D”: THE IBM LABS by Robert Buderi

OFFICE POLITICS

“THE OFFICE IN WHICH I WORK” by Joseph Heller

COMPANY MEN

THE OTHER-DIRECTED ROUND OF LIFE by David Riesman

WHAT PRICE SUCCESS?

From THE MAN IN THE GRAY FLANNEL SUIT by Sloan Wilson

VISION AND THE BOTTOM LINE

MORE THAN PROFITS by James C Collins and Jerry I Porras

PART FIVE: UNBUNDLED 1973–1999

U-TURN

THE CRISIS OF THE AMERICAN CORPORATION by George David Smith andDavis Dyer

BLAME THE HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL

MANAGING OUR WAY TO ECONOMIC DECLINE by Robert H Hayes and William

J Abernathy

MANAGEMENT’S WORST HOUR

THE HOSTILE TAKEOVER AND ITS DISCONTENTS by Peter F Drucker

BETRAYAL

RECKONING AT SAFEWAY by Susan C Faludi

POLLUTING THE CULTURE

THE WAR ON TIME WARNER by Paul Alexander

WOMEN IN A MAN’S WORLD

GIVING AT THE OFFICE by Arlie Russell Hochschild

IS DEMOCRACY CATCHING UP TO CAPITALISM?

A SEA OF TROUBLES by Jack Beatty

NOTES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PERMISSIONS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Copyright

To David Outerbridge for a lifetime of friendship

The economic interpretation of history merely represents an effort to

explain the deep flowing currents moving underneath the

surface of the past.

—Arthur M Schlesinger, New Viewpoints in American History (1922)

Big business has been the lever of big change over time in American life, change in economy,society, politics, and the envelope of existence—in work, mores, language, consciousness, and in thepace and bite of time itself Such is the pattern revealed by this historical mosaic: an anthology ofreadings tracing the rise of the American corporation In school we absorbed a model of change inwhich politics and government—popular movements, political leaders, and the passage of laws—drive history; and, partly from a Cold War–era repugnance toward the Marxian politics andmetaphysics of economic determinism, the dynamic role of business in the making of what theeconomist Robert Heilbroner calls America’s “business civilization” got shorn down in ourtextbooks to anecdotes about “robber barons” and “industrial statesmen,” annexing institutionalhistory to biography However well or ill it may fit the past, the politics-drives-history model isdiscrepant with our own experience of recent decades, when few would argue for the primacy ofpolitics and government as instrumentalities of change While government has barely rippled societysince the civil rights and environmental legislation of the 1960s and early 1970s, the greatcorporation, through diffusing technology, has changed the way we work, communicate, play, andtalk “A new corporate language has been invented,” Michael Lewis shrewdly notes, “to supportpeople’s need to believe that their work is actually an endless quest for novelty ‘Outside the box,’for instance ‘Outside the box’ is to our age what ‘plastics’ was to the 1960’s.”(Lewis adds, wryly: “The one thing that is certain is that anyone who uses thephrase is as deeply inside the box as a person can be.”) The ubiquity of “thebottom line” signals an expanding corporate beachhead from language to values Writing in the

Atlantic Monthly, the billionaire/philosopher George Soros fears that we are advancing from a

market economy toward a “market society,” where everything is for sale; and the corporation, throughassiduous billions spent conditioning the American Dream, is taking us there

Whether downsizing or reengineering, merging or unbundling, de-skilling or re-skilling, shiftingjobs abroad or automating them at home, fanning wants with advertising or subsidizing electioncampaigns—in the 1998 election cycle business contributed $660 million to candidates to labor’s

$66 million—today the corporation gathers up millions across the globe in a hurricane of creativedestruction of which it is at once vortex and plaything, sweeping and swept along “Today’s leadingrevolutionary force,” Michael Novak, of the American Enterprise Institute, writes, “is not the state butthe business corporation, turning the mechanical industrial age into the electronic age.”

Politics is comparatively a sideshow, a diversion from the real precincts of power Discussing

the AOL/Time Warner merger during the 2000 election campaign, James Ledbetter of the Industry

Standard calculates that AOL’s 20 million subscribers plus the 35 million customers of Time

Warner’s HBO “represent more people than will vote in presidential primaries.” Government,

increasingly, is run strictly for the people, without their interest, knowledge, direction, or more than flickering curiosity “Who cares what Washington does,” Burt Solomon asks in the National Journal,

“when the nation’s course is being driven from Silicon Valley and Wall Street? One can imagine, a century hence, schoolchildren laboring to remember the names of Ford and Carterand whether Clinton served before or after Bush (or both).” Americans, Ledbetter observes,participate in the economy as never before through the Internet and the stock market “Business

stories,” he writes in Microsoft-owned Slate, “are the dramas of this age.”

This book examines the past through the prism of a present when the great corporation loomscolossus-like over economy, society, and culture Hyperbole? Consider the maker of consciousness,the media industry Eleven companies now own over half of the nation’s daily newspapers, downfrom forty-six as recently as 1983 Two corporations now account for more than half of all magazinerevenue Five control more than half of book publishing In 1946 80 percent of daily newspaperswere independently owned; now 80 percent are owned by corporate chains The four majortelevision networks append from giants like General Electric and Disney “The same few firms,” thejournalism critic Ben Bagdikian writes, “are slowly tightening their stranglehold on the news, views,literature, and entertainment that reach a majority of Americans.”

Mark Crispin Miller, director of the Project on Media Ownership and a professor of MediaStudies at New York University, says the antitrust laws don’t cover media mergers like the pendingunion of AOL and Time Warner “The danger of concentration lies not in the risk of prices getting

higher, which is what antitrust measures,” Miller said in an interview with the New York Times “The

real danger is much subtler You’re talking about the disappearance of alternative views You’retalking about an exponential increase in conflicts of interest.* You’re talking about fewer interestshaving greater market power These are consequences that are extremely troubling,that worry most Americans, but that don’t attract any kind of sustained political or judicial attentionbecause they are not simply economically quantifiable.” Our laws lag economic reality as they did inthe years after the Civil War, when even predacious monopolies like Standard Oil were not againstthe law because they were not anticipated by it

How did concentration on today’s scale occur? What were the historical dynamics that led us tothis age of the megacorporation? Multifariously, the readings supply pieces of the answer Somedocument while others evoke the transformative power of the economic forces—“omnipotent withoutviolence,” Emerson characterized them—coiled up in the corporation

Colossus has a second preoccupation: It seeks to give perspective to the debate over the

corporation’s place in the good society

From the Civil War on, “the corporation problem,” a turn-of-the-twentieth-century usage, hasbeen one of balancing economic benefit with social cost A contemporary instance is the link betweencorporate stock and downsizing, with the latter swelling the value of the former, so that the morepeople a corporation lays off the more attractive it becomes to investors—economic gain atincalculable social cost We can count the gain, but there is no Dow-Jones average for depression,family conflict, community breakup, and downward mobility Should the corporation be allowed toinflict such social harms? Former Secretary of Labor Robert B Reich takes a severe line on thisquestion Construing harm politically, he asks whether corporations, which the Supreme Courtdefined in 1907 as “creature[s] of the state presumed to be incorporated for thebenefit of the public,” should be allowed to spend, for example, $100 million on lobbying, give 350free trips to members of Congress, and spend $60 million on advertising to defeat President BillClinton’s 1993–94 effort to provide health insurance to the 40-plus million Americans without it.Where’s the public benefit here? Just what does the corporation owe society anyway?*

One side of the hundred-year-old debate over that question holds that the corporation servessociety best by making efficient use of the resources society entrusts to it, by furnishing opportunity tonew generations of Americans, by earning profits adequate to support innovation, by paying taxes andspurring economic growth Economic performance, critics on the other side have said, is not nearlyenough from an institution with the corporation’s social and political reverberations The corporationmust be “socially responsible,” accountable for social and environmental problems, some, likedownsizing and pollution, corporate-caused; others, like race, rooted in history This debate oversocial responsibility has been with us since the distended shadow of the corporation, bigger thanarmies, dwarfing governments, a national institution in a society of what the historian Robert Wiebecalls “island communities,” first fell across late-nineteenth-century America

By an irony of history, that shadow has prodigious grown when the corporation by some estimates isstill in and by others only shakily emerging from a crisis of performance Across the industries,corporations face a novel challenge: competition As we will see, the business corporation began as

a kind of organizational reaction against the iron whims of the market In significant ways, thecorporation sought to replace the “invisible hand” of the market with “the visible hand” ofmanagement, a corporate social innovation ranking in significance with the most wonder-workingprodigies of technology Expanding backward into raw materials and forward into marketing, theAmerican corporation internalized functions earlier performed externally, by the market Andimportantly, to escape the price wars that nearly destroyed corporate capitalism at birth, thecorporation established a new market form—oligopoly—that sanctioned competition on productquality, image, and the like but rarely on price “The cigarette manufacturer recruits customers not bythe self-defeating and dangerous device of cutting cigarette prices,” John Kenneth Galbraith noted

wryly in American Capitalism (1952), “but, with the unreluctant aid of his advertising agency, by

recourse to the radio, billboards and television screens and through magazines and the press.”

Starting in the early 1970s, by which time Europe and Japan were ready to competeinternationally, global market forces broke the postwar slumber of our domestic oligopolies To be

sure, the picture is complicated by the multinational corporation and by the networking and partnering

of American with foreign corporations that make it increasingly difficult to say where the “American”leaves off and the “foreign” begins It’s clear, nevertheless, that over three decades U.S.-basedcompanies have steadily lost ground to foreign competitors In 1956, the United States had 81 percent

of the Global Top Fifty industrial firms, and as late as 1969 it had 80 percent; but by 1974 it wasdown to 57 percent, and by 1993 had fallen to 37 percent From 1975 through 1979 the U.S tradedeficit with Japan multiplied by ten, as consumers bought imports in preference to American-made

goods, which, in the drowse of oligopoly, had grown “costly and crummy,” David Frum writes in

How We Got Here, a history of the 1970s A 1977 survey Frum cites found that almost a third of

American workers refused to buy the products they made To compete on the scale required by thenew global economy, American corporations have been in a fever of amalgamation, sizing themselves

to be players in the emerging global oligopolies (augured by the 23,000 mergers and acquisitions

worldwide in 1997 alone) A third of the Fortune 500 in 1980, The Economist calculates, “had lost

their independence by 1990 and another 40% were gone five years later.” At the same timetechnology has introduced a strain of strategic instability, with companies wedded to industrial ageprocesses threatened by upstarts exploiting the charismatic appliances of the information age

The corporation is also facing a crisis of reputation, a loss of public regard, a good deal of itbrought on by CEOs with the ethics of pirates and the “compensation packages” of kings, and by thebrazen financialization of the corporation (“You don’t have to know what a junk bond is,” thefinancial writer Michael Thomas observes, “to hate one.”) One study of people reporting “a [g]reatdeal of confidence in the leaders of major companies” documents a decline from 55 percent in 1966

to 13 percent in 1992 (In fairness, the decline in confidence in the “leaders” of television news waseven sharper.) In the 1960s polls showed that more Americans feared the power of organized labor

than corporate power The reverse is true today In a BusinessWeek/ Harris poll conducted in 2000,

82 percent of Americans agreed that business “has gained too much power over too many aspects ofAmerican life” and 74 percent said that big corporations have too much influence over politics andpublic policy Only 2 percent said small business had such influence “Corporate,” as a Nexis-Lexissearch will reveal, has become an epithet of odium, keeping bad company like “greed” and even

“killers”—as in “Corporate Killers,” a Newsweek cover headline for a story about CEOs notorious

for wholesale downsizing—and, from “brutalism” to “bureaucracy,” connoting nothing good

Why is not far to seek Downsizing used to be auto-industry jargon for making smaller cars;but that was before 1975, when the Fortune 500 began shedding 4.5 million jobs, cutting totalemployment among the giants from 16 to 11 million justifiably anxious people “Everybodyknows the rules of corporate life now,” a former sales representative for a computer firm who

lost his job in the mass layoffs of the 1990s told the Wall Street Journal “Forget job security,

forget upward mobility, and most of all, forget the past.” If the layoffs were part of an equality

of sacrifice to save going concerns, which as we will see are the only “immortal beings” to berecognized under American law, downsizing would have at least gestured to a norm of justice.However, while a Massachusetts of men and women lost their jobs, dividends increased andexecutive salaries left the planet—in the 90s, while workers’ pay went up 28%, beforeadjusting for inflation, CEO pay tempted Jehovah by vaulting 443% Indeed, some CEOs, their

compensation linked to the price of their companies’ stock, got rich by defenestratingemployees, a practice Peter Drucker condemns as “a socially unforgivable crime.” In Susan

Faludi’s Pulitzer Prize–winning reporting on the LBO of Safeway, in a 1990 Wall Street

Journal story reprinted here, one reads of an employee at Safeway’s headquarters in

California, so dedicated that she refused to take lunch hour, dying of a heart attack after, withthousands of others like her, she was discarded by Safeway in a transaction manipulated bytheir CEO to make an ignominious fortune for himself The high rollers who took overSafeway cut wages and benefits for the remaining employees, and fired people for trivialoffenses like forgetting to pay for a cup of soup at the store deli “They have to produce up toplan,” one of these stones of finance told Faludi, after she told him that the soup thief wasdistracted by his son’s murder, “if they are going to be competitive with the rest of the world.It’s high time we did that.” Such trashing of the community of the corporation has rubbed off on

it, personifying “corporate greed,” and helping to make the corporation “public enemy numberone,” to quote Michael Novak, who deplores the fact

It has been that on and off down the decades At the turn of the last century what J P.Morgan’s biographer Jean Strouse calls “a national wave of revulsion” broke against theunanswered power of the behemoths fused by mergers that compacted 4,277 firms into 257colossi in a seven-year period Revulsion galvanized reform—the 1907 law, for instance,banning corporate contributions to political campaigns (since breached by “soft money”) The1920s saw the corporation back in public favor The business of America was business, saidRepublican president Calvin Coolidge; and, in the midst of the first automobile boom, much ofthe country, including the Democratic party, agreed—in the Al Smith years, the chairman of theDemocratic National Committee, John J Rascob, was also the treasurer of DuPont The GreatDepression brought the corporation low, a casualty of the smash-up of capitalism; but the warresumed a prosperity that stretched into the early 1970s, with an accompanying rise in thecorporation’s reputation Polls of graduating college seniors in the 1950s showed that mostwanted careers as organization men in the great corporations, which had the aspect ofmortuaries of security, with young men willingly burying entrepreneurial ambition for thepatient slog toward the gold watch Undoubtedly the profoundest change in the lives of theemployees of the great corporation is the one from the job security of the fifties to thepervasive job insecurity wrought today by competition, globalization, and technology

“Companies once built to last like pyramids,” Peter Drucker writes, “are now more liketents,” and a career in a tent can hardly be imagined

There is, however, a disingenuousness in the facile disparagement of the corporation, a refusal

to face the gray realities, to connect the implicating dots It doesn’t make the cover of Newsweek, but

among American workers rampant job insecurity coexists with all but unanimous job satisfaction In a

seven-part series in 1996, “The Downsizing of America,” the New York Times detailed “the most

acute job insecurity since the Depression,” finding in its National Economic Insecurity Survey that

“nearly three quarters of all households have had a close encounter with layoffs since 1980.” Yetaccording to a recent Rutgers/University of Connecticut survey of work trends, 91 percent ofAmericans like their jobs The same employers who provide these good jobs, apparently, also

threaten to destroy them How is it possible to like jobs under imminent threat of downsizing? Theparadox resists easy resolution, but it suggests a more complex public attitude toward majoremployers than one would guess from the ubiquitously negative connotations of the word “corporate.”

Economists who have thought the issue through contend that downsizing is anyway lessrevelatory of “corporate” than of “pension-fund greed.” Robert B Reich asks, “Who’s to blame fordownsizing?” And answers, “Blame me.” Through his college teacher’s pension fund, one of thecountry’s leading institutional investors, Reich has a money stake in downsizing—less of it makes forsmaller returns, which make for a smaller pension Before our dimly comprehending eyes financialcapitalism is supplanting managerial capitalism as institutional investors flit restlessly fromcorporation to corporation, seeking the highest possible return, and forcing managements to eitherfatten the quarterly bottom line or get out, with golden parachutes to break their fall or “golden bungee

cords,” a Wall Street Journal coinage, to keep them on with the new or restructured company The

caricature capitalist is no longer the swag-bellied robber baron of the nineteenth century or theautonomous manager of the twentieth; he is Robert B Reich and the 45 percent of the rest of

Americans who own stock The capitalist c’est moi!

Moral ambiguity should therefore inhibit the sincerity of our indignation at public enemy numberone, reminding us that, with management, we stockholders share responsibility for the thingscorporations do that offend our values—for downsizing, for running sweatshops in the Third World,for befouling the air and water, for cutting employee medical and pension benefits, for breakingunions, for putting Congress on the auction block, and much else besides.* The trend toward thedemocratization of ownership in America has upended the terms of the debate over social

responsibility The corporation is no longer pitched against society; the corporation is society.†

“The capitalist is capital personified.” That is among the most insulting sentences Karl Marxever wrote It takes the capitalist off the moral hook His freedom is an illusion Capital is his master.The evolution of ownership of the corporation forces the question, Is it ours, too?

PART ONE

THE CORPORATE

FOUNDATIONS OF AMERICA

Trade planted America.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

“OF A HUGE AND UNKNOWN GREATNESS”

In the beginning was the corporation “Bodies corporate” chartered by the British Crown, first settledAmerica, hoping to make the New World pay in a plenitude of goods conjured from rumor improved

by imagination For the 700-odd Elizabethan “adventurers,” including Sir Francis Bacon, who boughtstock in the Virginia Company of London, with the capital to cover the transportation and other costs

of colonization, America was a bad investment Over the dozen years of its existence, the Companyexpended over £100,000 not only without profit but with no return of the principal Some of theearliest colonists were “venturers,” investors who followed their money to America, but most wereservants and employees indentured (for an average of fifty-six months) either to individual settlers or

to the company; and all were taking more than business risks On May 31, 1607, a journal of the firstsummer in the first American settlement, at Jamestown, records, one Eustace Clovell had barelycleared the log walls of the Jamestown fort when Indians “lurking in the long grasse” outside quilledhim with six arrows In the Great Massacre of 1622, Warrascoyack Indians slaughtered 347 men,women, and children “most by their owne weapons,” according to a Virginia Companycorrespondent “[A]nd not being content with taking away life alone,” he continues,

they fell againe vpon the dead, making as well they could, a fresh murder, defacing, dragging,and mangling the dead carkasses into many pieces, and carrying some parts away in derision,with base and brutish triumph

The Company advised its colonists not to dwell on such matters in their letters home, lestwould-be settlers take fright

Having settled Colonial America, both in Virginia and, through the Massachusetts Bay Company(chartered in 1629), in New England, the corporation became the chosen vehicle for local and stategovernments of the new American republic to achieve public ends—like the building of roads,bridges, and canals—through private investment The strictly private business corporation appearedonly in the early nineteenth century, first in textile manufacturing and then in railroads By 1900, itsinherent advantages over the sole proprietorship and the partnership, the competing organizationalmodels, as the business form best-suited to exploit the large-scale technologies of the industrialrevolution had long since made the corporation king of the American economy

Which it remains: “In 1990, the latest year for which statistics are available,” Carl Kaysennotes, “a total of 20.0 million nonfarm businesses reported to the tax authorities: 16.3 millionproprietorships and partnerships, 3.7 million corporations The corporations accounted for 90percent of the sales and receipts reported by all business firms There were some seven thousandcorporations with assets of $250 million or more, the largest class demarcated They accounted formore than half (51 percent) of the total sales and receipts of all businesses Large corporations were

most dominant in manufacturing (2,602 with 74 percent of sales), utilities and transportation (716with 76 percent of sales), and finance and real estate (1,503 with 71 percent of sales).”

To judge the productivity of this industrial and mostly private economy, compare Mexico, anagrarian and, until recently, highly nationalized economy In 1700 product per capita in Mexico wasworth about $450 in today’s dollars; in Colonial America it was roughly only $40 more In 1800, itwas still $450 in Mexico but $807 in the United States By 1989, it was $3,500 in Mexico and

$18,000 in the United States This economic growth was not just a result of the far greater scale andintensity of industrialism in the United States than in Mexico It owed everything to the corporation.The major impetus of American economic growth came from industries led by a handful of largecompanies

The United States of 1800, before the advent of the business corporation, was not a good

candidate for industrialization As Ronald E Seavoy writes in The Origins of the American Business

Corporation, 1784–1855, next to Britain the United States was technologically backward It was an

agrarian/commercial economy and if you had asked an American of 1800 where he thought theeconomic future of his country lay, he would have said in feeding the world The Americanpopulation was widely dispersed compared to the snugly bordered industrializing countries ofEurope Transportation was by river and coast; by land, it was primitive at best It took seventy-fivedays, for example, for a freight wagon to travel between Worcester, Massachusetts, and Charleston,South Carolina Indeed, it cost more to carry freight thirty miles inland from the coast than to ship it toLondon The United States had no landed magnates to supply the capital for industrialization, nostrong central government capable of raising the taxes needed to subsidize and otherwise promoteindustry “In spite of these deficiencies,” Seavoy writes, “the United States did industrialize Theseed capital had to be contributed voluntarily from numerous small savers, and a means had to befound to mobilize and magnify it The means of voluntary mobilization was the business corporationand the means of magnification was banks.”

Industrialism, a material process, takes on the character of an abstract dynamism in textbooks, atechno-economic Zeitgeist But American industrialism happened through the business corporation.Grasping the right relation between industrialism and the corporation, Nicholas Murray Butler, thelongtime president of Columbia University, called the corporation “the greatest single discovery ofmodern times,” next to which “even steam and electricity would be reduced to comparativeimpotence.”

The nonbusiness corporation is an ancient form, used for towns, guilds, and colonies in Rome andfrom the early Middle Ages also for universities, religious orders, and other so-called benevolentorganizations performing civic services and thus subject to government license and oversight Whatmade these bodies corporate was their relative immortality; unlike partnerships, their public charterslent them life beyond the death of their founders As early as the 1400s, some English courts hadestablished a second defining feature of the corporation, the doctrine of “limited liability”—“Ifsomething is owed to the group, it is not owed to the individuals nor do the individuals owe what the

group owe.” Limited liability proved to be a spur of economic growth Without it, in enteringcollective business ventures investors put all they owned at risk—they were liable for the debts of thebusiness should it go bankrupt With limited liability, they risked only the amount of their investment.During the reign of Queen Elizabeth, the Moscovy Company in 1555, the Spanish Company in 1577,and the East India Company in 1601 received history’s first recorded business charters ofincorporation The London Company, soon to be called the Virginia Company of London, followed in1606.

England came late to colonial expansion Richard Hakluyt, an eminent Elizabethan geographerand an investor in the Virginia Company, was the inspiriting figure; his medium, stripped of its florid

touches and whimsical spelling, was the corporate prospectus In his Divers Voyages Touching the

Discovery of America, published in 1582, he lamented “that since the first discoverie of

America after so great conquests and plantings of the Spaniardes andPortingales there, that wee of Englande could never have the grace to set fast footing on such fertilland temperate places as are left as yet unpossessed.” The explorer John Cabot had made England’sinitial claim to territory in the Western Hemisphere in 1497, but it was not until political and businessmotives enhanced the lure of exploration a century later that colonization began on what Hakluytconsidered “the continent of Virginia.” Depicted on his map as stretching from Atlantic to Pacific,Virginia, according to the legend printed across the map, was “Of a Huge and Unknown Greatness.”

CHAMBER POTS MADE OF GOLD

Written in 1605, Eastward Hoe!, a comedy by George Chapman, Ben Jonson, and John

Marston, sends up the giddy enthusiasm for riches ready for the taking in “VIRGINIA, Earth’sonly Paradise.” The “Virginian Colonel” these denizens of the Blewe Anchor Taverne areexpecting is Sir Petronell Flash (whom William Shakespeare may once have played)

Enter Seagull, Spendall, and Scapethrift in the Blewe Anchor Taverne, with a Drawer.

SEAGULL Come, drawer, pierce your neatest hogsheads, and lets have cheare—not fit for your

Billingsgate taverne, but for our Virginian Colonel; he will be here

instantly

SEAGULL Come, boyes, Virginia longs till we share the rest of her maiden-head

SPENDALL Why, is she inhabited alreadie with any English?

SEAGULL A whole countrie of English is there, man, bread of those that were left there in ’79;

they have married with the Indians, and make ’hem bring forth as beautifull faces asany we have in England; and therefore the Indians are so in love with ’hem, that all thetreasure they have they lay at their feete.

SCAPETHRIFT But is there such treasure there, Captaine, as I have heard?

SEAGULL I tell thee, golde is more plentifull there than copper is with us; and for as much

redde copper as I can bring Ile have thrise the waight in gold Why, man, all theirdripping-pans and their chamber-potts are pure gould; and all the chaines with whichthey chaine up their streets are massie gold; all the prisoners they take are fetered ingold; and for rubies and di- amonds they goe forth on holydayes and gather ’hem by thesea-shore to hang on their childrens coates, and sticke in their children’s caps, ascommonly as our children weare saffron-gilt-brooches and groates with hoales in

’hem

—From The Genesis of the United States by Alexander Brown (New York: Russell & Russell, 1964), pp 30, 31.

In his Discourse on Western Planting, which he presented to Queen Elizabeth in 1589 to

massage the royal consent, Hakluyt made political and religious as well as economic arguments forAmerican colonization Settlement in the New World would be “a great bridle to the Indies of theKing of Spain,” whose fishing fleets “we may arrest at our pleasure,” balancing in some degree the

“mischief” of the treasure taken by the Spaniards from Mexico and South America Colonizationwould also advance “the enlargement of the gospel of Christ” by converting the native inhabitants ofNorth America to Christianity (Ministers, Hakluyt slyly noted, would be too occupied inproselytizing for “the coyning of newe opynions.”) Economically, America would not only “yieldunto us all the commodities of Europe, Africa, and Asia; the colonists would buy all theirmanufactured goods from England”—here Hakluyt outlined the mercantilist system that would vexrelations between the colonies and the mother country A western planting, finally, would provide for

“the manifold employment of numbers of idle men,” England “swarminge at this day with valiantyouths rusting.”

Conceived in corporation, the colonies made only little and late use of it The New LondonSociety for Trade and Commerce (1732–1733), a Connecticut trading company, has perhaps thestrongest claim to being America’s first business corporation But the Connecticut Assembly soonrevoked its corporate charter, fickle government putting America’s first business corporation out ofbusiness America’s second corporation, eventually known as The Union Wharf Company of NewHaven (1760), was created to extend and maintain today’s Long Wharf, a piece of infrastructureessential to a seaport As a business, it too was a failure; by 1799 no dividends had been paid to itsowners, the construction and repair of the dock having absorbed its earnings A scattering of similarlocal institutions round out the picture of the business corporation before the Revolution

1624 “NO OTHER THAN WILD BEASTS”

The correspondence of the Virginia Company shows few documents as historically resonant asthis letter of 1624 After narrating the events of the Great Massacre, the correspondentsketches a plan of conquest of the Warrascoyack that prefigures the tactics used for the nexttwo centuries to clear North America of its original inhabitants

“Because the way of conquering them is much more easie than of ciuilizing them by fairemeanes, for they are a rude, barbarous, and naked people, scattered in small companies, whichare helps to Victorie, but hinderances to Ciuilitie: Besides that, a conquest may be of many,and at once; but ciuility is in particular, and slow, the effect of long time, and great industry.Moreouer, victorie of them may bee gained many waies; by force, by surprize, by famine inburning their corne, by destroying and burning their Boats, and Canoes, and Houses, bybreaking their fishing weares, by assailing them in their huntings, whereby they get the greatestpart of their sustenance in Winter, by pursuing and chasing them with our horses, and blood-Hounds to draw after them, and Mastiues to teare them, which take this naked, tanned,deformed Sauages for no other than wild beasts, and are so fierce and fell vpon them, that theyfeare them worse than their old Deuill which they worship, supposing them to be a new andworse kinde of Deuils then their owne.”

—From History of the Virginia Company by Edward D Neill, p 321.

To be sure, associations and partnerships operating without corporate charters were common,especially to develop land The young George Washington, for example, was an investor in theMississippi Company, and there was a commercial discouragement in Virginia known as the GreatDismal Swamp Company These unincorporated private business associations, not the mixedprivately financed, publicly purposed–seventeenth-century trading corporations, are the directancestors of the modern corporation; for like it, they operated with only perfunctory approval fromgovernment as against the special legislative or royal charter required for the early corporation

The true business corporation had to await the American Revolution and the peopling of theinterior The Revolution freed the economy from mercantilist encumbrances, but with offsettingeffects It both accelerated American economic development, a historian of the period observes, anddelayed “the emergence of a more capitalistic society”—one built around industry, wage labor, andthe corporation The Revolution did the former by creating vibrant local markets to replace theBritish imperial market lost in seven years of war It did the latter by stimulating American commerce

at the expense of American industry With independence, American ships became neutral carriers;and during the wars of the French Revolution in the 1790s, their neutrality was so commerciallyadvantageous that it “diverted capital into maritime investments”—capital that could have gone intomanufacturing Moreover, “commercial capitalism inhibited the growth of domestic manufacturingcapacity because its greatest profits came from trade in imported goods.” It took a flattening out of theprofits derived from commerce, in the period 1808–1812, to give merchants the incentive to become

With an estimated 250,000 pioneers pressing beyond the Appalachians in the twenty-five yearsbetween independence and 1800, the settlement of the American interior gave impetus to thetransportation revolution of the early nineteenth century, a precondition of the modern corporation Achild of nation-building, the professionally managed corporation began in the effort to reach the ever-receding line of settlement by the railroad, America’s first big business

The first section of this book takes us to 1815, when the energies of industrialism become ripefor economic exploitation The readings sketch in the corporate frame of America and the Americanframe of the corporation They discuss the economic culture of Puritan New England so propitious tothe growth of American business They document the role played in commerce by slavery, and thepath leading from merchant to manufacturer They help us understand why some early businessmendecided to form corporations and why others chose not to Finally, the readings present brief portraits

of emblematic people in the story of American business from 1600 to 1800

The corporation is a human enterprise Entrepreneurs, managers, workers, and stockholders act

in a social as well as an economic dimension How American corporations have balanced theirresponsibility to society with their responsibility toward investors will be a recurrent focus of thesereadings

THE CALVINIST STRAIN

capitalism may even be identical with the restraint, or at least

a rational tempering, of this irrational impulse.

—Max Weber, in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, explaining why capitalism is not

synonymous with greed

A 1633 correspondent to the secretary of state distinguished between the settlers of Virginia, who emigrated “only for profit,” and those of Puritan New England, who “went upon two other designs, some to satisfy their own curiosity in the point of conscience, others (which was more general) to transport the Gospel.” This is hardly fair to the Virginians, who also professed godly motives Moreover, it misses the entwining of religious and profit motives in the economic culture of New England that gave the bent to American thinking about economic life.

The following reading, from Creating the Commonwealth, by Stephen Innes, affords an efficient sketch of the

re ligious/e conomic mentalitie of early New England, and notably of the emergence of the American work ethic It also

reveals something of the tensions between individual economic striving on the one hand and the ends of Puritan society on the other Economic freedom vs community: That conflict runs all through our story.

THE ETHIC OF PROSPERITY

by Stephen Innes

Massachusetts Bay was a commonwealth that flourished in large part because its notion ofredemptive community endowed economic development with moral, spiritual, and religiousimperatives The settlers’ providentialism—the belief that they were participating in the working out

of God’s purposes—made all labor and enterprise “godly business,” to be pursued aggressively andjudged by the most exacting of standards As Max Weber later intuited, Calvinist social ethics—imagined in the Old World—decisively shaped the economic culture of this portion of the New Theformative dynamic was the link between outward success and inward conviction of being right withGod The doctrine of vocation embraced by the saints (Calvin’s Elect) made labor sacred andgrounded all striving behavior in communal obligation The Bay Colonists established a marketeconomy and erected a moral-cultural system and civic society to supplement and control it Theyauthorized a regime of private property and freedom of contract but endeavored to see that it waschecked and balanced by moral witness and civil restraint Preachers such as Thomas Shepard(1605–1649) never tired of reminding the saints that self-interest was a “raging Sea which wouldoverwhelm all if [it] have not bankes.” In creating a culture of development that was at oncemetaphysically grounded and socially binding, the Massachusetts settlers fashioned a potent engine ofeconomic and human development

For Weber, Puritanism was instrumental in early modern economic development in part becauseits notion of “improvement” channeled individuals’ behavior along capitalist paths The doctrine ofimprovement led to the modern bourgeois-directed economy in which nature is “transformed into aninstrument for the satisfaction of human needs, which multiply and diversify and can therefore no

longer be understood as ‘natural.’ ” The motive force of a free enterprisesystem—the drive to expand capital—grew naturally out of the Protestant notion of improvement AsPerry Miller averred, perhaps with some conscious oversimplification, “Devotion to business,accumulation of estates, acquisition of houses and lands: these were the duties of Christians.” Theneed to improve one’s talents led to the inescapable injunction to employ one’s estate “so that itshould become a larger estate.”

If the Calvinist work ethic was to be found anywhere in its more purely distilled form in theearly modern world, that place was Puritan Massachusetts The explanation for this is relativelysimple Nowhere else in the post-Reformation world did Calvinist social ethics find such fullexpression While in Geneva, Holland, and low-country Scotland, Calvinist divinity was alwaysqualified by pre-existing practices, in New England doctrine was the foundation for practice NewEngland represents the only historical case in which Calvinistic, sectarian Protestantism wasinstitutionalized at the founding of the social order

As Perry Miller has shown so brilliantly, the very extent of New England’s commercial successeventually produced a spiritual—and social—crisis for its people Pious industry, many BayColonists believed as early as the 1660s, was wrecking the “Citty upon a Hill.” For the New Englandclergy, in particular, economic success seemed to produce—inevitably—spiritual failure.Industriousness and frugality brought wealth, which in turn brought temptation and worldliness,something we might dub the “Protestant dilemma.” At the core of the Puritan ethic was a tension thatwas at once extraordinarily productive economically and tremendously difficult psychologically Thefundamental problem was something that the early modern world had not yet come to grips with:social mobility The concept of the calling, by demanding that every person pursue his livelihoodrelentlessly and methodically, always tempted him to get out of his place, to strive to grow richer, andeventually seek profit for himself and not for God and community The Protestant ethic, in otherwords, always threatened to turn into the calculative rationalism that Max Weber called the “spirit of

capitalism.” For Weber, the Protestant ethic when divorced of its religious motive became the spirit

of capitalism In New England, the Protestant ethic—even while remaining firmly within its religiouscontext—threatened to undermine the ancient notions of social hierarchy that all early modern people,Puritans included, believed essential for good order and stability Not until the publication during the

1750s of James Burgh’s The Dignity of Human Nature and Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s

Almanack would the social mobility that was the almost inevitable result of the Protestant ethic in a

New World setting be openly sanctioned

The classic American jeremiads, from John Cotton through such twentieth-century commentators

as Reinhold Niebuhr and Daniel Bell, are all essentially variations on the Protestant dilemma: pietyproduces industry which produces wealth which produces status conflicts and worldliness As CottonMather (1663–1728) declared of Plymouth during the 1690s, “Religion begot prosperity, and thedaughter devoured the mother.” In the mid-eighteenth century, John Wesley mournfully observed that

“religion must necessarily produce both industry and frugality, and these cannot but produce riches.But as riches increase, so will pride, anger, and love of the world in all its branches.” In 1819, JohnAdams asked Thomas Jefferson: “Will you tell me how to prevent riches from becoming the effects oftemperance and industry? Will you tell me how to prevent riches from producing luxury? Will you tell

me how to prevent luxury from producing effeminacy, intoxication, extravagance, Vice and folly?” Bythe twentieth century, this cycle would be secularized by Joseph Schumpeter into the process bywhich capitalism “destroys” the moral foundations upon which it is built.

The most memorable—and influential—depiction of the early New England version of this

jeremiad is of course Perry Miller’s Indeed, although not often recognized as such, Miller’s New

England Mind is at heart an arresting commentary on the region’s culture of economic development.

It was “pious industry,” after all, that “wrecked the city on a hill.” The celebrated jeremiads of theclergy, upbraiding second-generation New Englanders for their worldliness, told the story of a

“society which was founded by men dedicated, in unity and simplicity, to realizing on earth eternaland immutable principles—and which progressively became involved with fishing, trade, andsettlement.” A growing chorus of ministers lamented from the 1660s onward that economic growthhad brought “a decay of godliness, class struggles, extravagant dress, and contempt for learning.”Miller describes the process in a memorable passage: “The more everybody labored, the moresociety was transformed The more diligently the people applied themselves—on the frontier, in themeadows, in the countinghouse or on the Banks of Newfoundland—the more they produced a decay inreligion and a corruption of morals, a society they did not want, one that seemed less and lessattractive.”

The central irony of the Protestant dilemma is that it was inescapable The problem, says Miller,was that “the wrong thing was also the right thing.” Industry, temperance, and self-discipline mightwell lead to the temptations of wealth, but a Puritan who foreswore these virtues was no longer aPuritan Sloth, indolence, and idleness within the workforce could not be countenanced And, neithercould a lack of striving in the marketplace Increasing material expansion after 1650 may well havesignaled that New England was “deserting the ideals of its founders”—becoming a “plantation oftrade” rather than a “plantation of religion”—but the clergy “would have deserted them even morehad they not also exhorted diligence in every calling—precisely the virtue bound to increase estates,widen the gulf between rich and poor, and to make usury inevitable.” At base, Miller declares, thejeremiads represent “a chapter in the emergence of the capitalist mentality, showing how intelligencecopes with—or more cogently, how it fails to cope with—a change it simultaneously desires andabhors.”

—Adapted from Stephen Innes, Creating the Commonwealth: The Economic Culture of Puritan New England (New York:

Norton, 1995) Taken from pp 5, 6, 7, 11, 12, 13, 25, 26, 27.

THE CORPORATE ROOTS OF AMERICAN GOVERNMENT

In the reading below, Stephen Innes traces the roots of representative government in America to a surprising source—the corporation The planting of British America took place in an era when kings still ruled by divine right Lucky America, behind its ocean moat, was a tabula rasa for an alternative form of government.

Under the leadership of its Treasurer, Sir Edwin Sandys, the Virginia Company authorized a General Assembly, or colonial legislature, for Virginia, on July 30, 1619, at Jamestown, ordaining in one of its first acts that public drunks should

“lye in boltes” for twelve hours While a member of the British House of Commons, Sandys had made a historic speech questioning the legitimacy of any government not founded on mutual contract between ruler and ruled This slap at the divine right of kings as a justification to rule angered King James, who ordered Sandys confined to London The Royal displeasure was less effectual in Virginia, where Sandys was free to initiate the American experiment in self-rule for which

he has been called “the founder-in-chief of representative government in America.”

The Virginia Company’s procedural democracy, with members voting their shares, choosing the company’s officers, and deciding on company policy, became the template for representative government not alone in America King James, complaining that “the Virginia Company was a seminary for a seditious Parliament,” feared the contagion had also spread to England Altogether, in the seventeen years before a jealous king revoked its corporate charter, one historian writes, “the liberal leaders of the sponsoring Company labored long and endured grievous losses in guiding one of the most important developments in human history.”

In its transformation from corporation to commonwealth, the Massachusetts Bay Company made no fetish of the meaning of “commonwealth,” but instead rested the colony on the institution of private property The company had learned from the failed experiment in communal property—common wealth—undertaken by the Plymouth colony, a failure analyzed

in the long passage below from Plymouth’s Governor William Bradford His insight into the “discontent” and inhibited productivity of labor divorced from ownership is echoed today by management writers like Charles Handy and Michael Hammer who urge corporations to make stockholders of their stakeholding employees.

FROM CORPORATION TO COMMONWEALTH

by Stephen Innes

The constitutional underpinnings of the Holy Commonwealth were found in the Massachusettscorporate charter of 1629, which the King—astonishingly—permitted the settlers to bring to the NewWorld Although Charles I had issued a charter with the explicit proviso that all laws passed by theMassachusetts General Court be “not contrairie to the Lawes of this Realm of England,” the settlerswasted little time in repudiating the King’s will in matters both large and small Like its Virginiacounterpart, the Massachusetts Bay Colony began as a trading corporation Its patent was originally acommercial charter offering concessions of powers by the Crown to enterprisers willing to assumethe risk of exploration and settlement The new ventures created in Tudor-Stuart England forcolonizing and trading with distant lands broke new ground in commercial practice by initiatingtechniques now associated with the modern corporation These included the crucial concept oflimited liability for the majority of the stockholders, as well as the use of perpetual stock,management committees, and dividend payments And, as in Virginia, a commercial chartermetamorphosed into the frame of government for a state

Company meetings in Boston became the basis of a representative government in which virtuallyall heads of families were offered the chance to become freeholders John Winthrop took the lead inusing the 1629 charter to create a representative government, although he later would have cause to

regret unleashing democratizing forces that ultimately led to his impeachment by the House ofDeputies in 1645 Most consequential was Winthrop’s decision to allow the redefining of “freemen”from stockholders in a commercial venture to citizens of a state Between 1630 and 1634,Massachusetts freemen were transformed from members of a limited business venture torepresentatives in a public government At its 19 October 1630 meeting, the General Court—acting inclear violation of the charter—transformed itself from a trading company into a commonwealth Thetwelve ruling Assistants (magistrates) were given the power to select the Governor and Deputy-Governor from among themselves and to make laws and select officials to carry them out.

In 1631, Winthrop and the Assistants expanded the franchise to include all male churchmembers On 18 May of that year, to “the end [that] the body of commons may be preserved by honestand good men,” the General Court ordered that “noe man shalbe admitted to the freedome of this bodypolliticke, but such as are members of some of the churches within the lymitts of the same.” Churchmembers were admitted into the ranks of freemen, thereby giving them more of a stake in society and

—presumably—making governing easier In 1632, the leadership mandated that all civil officerswould be elected by the freemen In effect making Massachusetts a republican government ineverything but name, every adult male church member received the power to vote for Governor,Deputy-Governor, and Assistants That same year, when the residents of Watertown balked at beingtaxed by the General Court without their consent, Winthrop assured them that “this government wasrather in the nature of a parliament.”

The Massachusetts General Court thereby was transformed from an executive council of acommercial company into a legislative government This transformation reflected the saints’ politicalconvictions that the commonwealth should be divided into two ranks, gentlemen and freeholders, andeach should be given a veto over the decisions of the other Most of the university-trained leaders ofthe Bay Colony accepted the Platonic and Renaissance postulate that only the very few possessed atalent for governing In the spring of 1634, the freemen appointed two Deputies from each town toconsider what issues should be brought before the General Court’s May meeting By this action, andwithin four years of its creation, Massachusetts Bay became a representative government

Property rights and basic political liberties were inextricably linked in the Bay Colony For themiddling-rank settlers of New England, the foundation of liberty rested on land ownership, and theopportunity to work for one’s own family The Puritan commonwealth was to rest on privateproperty, with security of tenure The cautionary tales provided by the failure of several years ofcommunal ownership in both Virginia and Plymouth only strengthened such sentiments amongMassachusetts’ founders A system that severed the link between work and land ownership, according

to Plymouth Governor William Bradford, was doomed to failure, even among the saints Bradford’sdescription of Plymouth plantation’s three-year experiment with communal property distills some ofthe major imperatives of the Protestant ethic—and this includes its application to young and old, maleand female, alike:

The experience that was had in this common course and condition, tried sundry years and thatamongst godly and sober men, may well evince the vanity of that conceit of Plato’s and other

ancients applauded by some of later times; that the taking away of property and bringing incommunity into a commonwealth would make them happy and flourishing; as if they werewiser than God For this community [of property] (so far as it was) was found to breed muchconfusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to their benefitand comfort For the young men, that were most able and fit for labour and service, did repinethat they should spend their time and strength to work for other men’s wives and childrenwithout any recompense The strong had no more in division of victuals andclothes than he that was weak and not able to do a quarter [that] the other could; this wasthought injustice The aged and graver men, to be ranked and equalized in labours and victuals,clothes, etc., with the meaner and younger sort, thought it some indignity and disrespect untothem And for men’s wives to be commanded to do service for other men, as dressing theirmeat, washing their clothes, etc., they deemed it a kind of slavery .

The Protestant dimension of English attitudes toward land, property, and inheritance bearsemphasis here The Catholic Church had not accepted the legitimacy of private property until thetwelfth century, and canonists and theologians thereafter continued to display an extreme warinessregarding its potentially corrupting influence English Protestants during the Elizabethan period werethe first Western Christians openly to challenge the ancient, communally based system of landownership—the notion that “the earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof, and its fruits belong to allHis creatures in common.” The Thirty-Eighth Article of Religion of the Church of England,promulgated in 1563, openly legitimated private property It declared that “The Riches and Goods ofChristians are not common, as touching the right, title, and possession of the same, as certainAnabaptists do falsely boast.” Such rhetoric often explicitly yoked the work ethic to the principle ofprivate property The Puritan magnate Nathaniel Rich, in leading the County of Essex’s vigorousresistance to Charles I’s Forced Loan in 1628, linked security of property to both personal industryand national security: “If no propriety there will be no industry, and then nothing will follow butbeggary, and if no propriety there will follow no valor.”

THE NEW ENGLAND MERCHANTS IN THE SEVENTEENTH

CENTURY

by Bernard Bailyn

Enmeshed in the politics of Cromwellian England, New England’s trade was already a formativeinfluence on the development of colonial society It determined the character of urbanization in NewEngland, shaped the growth of the merchant group and its relations with other parts of the community,and led the merchants, for the most part Puritans themselves, to challenge the Puritan leaders onimportant points of policy

As trade rose and the European shipmasters sought a familiar New England harbor wherereliable merchants would be waiting to provide ship stores and cargoes, Boston, with its excellentharbor, access to the Massachusetts government, and flourishing agricultural markets, became themajor terminus of traffic originating in Europe To it were drawn the produce not only of thesurrounding towns but also of New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Connecticut as well With theexception of Salem and Charlestown, the other promising mercantile centers slipped back towardruralism Plymouth, which had been the first trading center east of Manhattan, was described in 1660

as “a poor small Towne now, The People being removed into Farmes in the Country.” Thecommercial promise of Newport faded And New Haven, whose optimistic merchant leaders had laidout “stately and costly houses,” was “not so glorious as once it was” with its “Merchants either dead

or come away, the rest gotten to their Farmes.” Maine continued to be a sparsely settled district offishermen and trappers The inhabitants in the string of settlements along the Piscataqua lived byfarming and the lumbering made lucrative by the enterprises of the merchants The whole hinterlandfrom the Merrimack River to New London had become the producing area for the marts aroundBoston Bay

In three towns, however—the three towns in continuous commercial contact with Europe—the

merchants imposed themselves on the lives of their fellow-townsmen with unique force InCharlestown, Salem, and especially Boston, they exercised a decisive influence in public affairs Thesatisfaction of the physical needs of their commerce transformed the appearance of the towns Theirexpanding businesses required wharves and storehouses, shops and market places; the preparationand disposition of their cargoes called for laborers, handicraftsmen, and highways into the interior;the equitable conduct of trade called for official regulation of markets, weights and measures, the careand protection of the harbors, and easily accessible courts of law Offering to the settlers not only themanufactures of Europe but also wealth and contact with the greater world left behind, they were notrefused Their mark was left most clearly on that commercial hub, the “Metrapolis” of New England,Boston.

In thirty years the makeshift hamlet on the peninsula in Massachusetts Bay had grown into athriving commercial community of 3,000 souls which could muster “fouer full companys of Foote and

a Troope of horse.” Along the beach of the deep cove formed by the fingers of Fort Hill and the MillField, the merchants had built a string of wharves and warehouses near which stood their houses,elegant and impressive by the standards of the majority of the settlers The town was “full of goodshopps well furnished with all kind of Merchandize and many Artificers, and Trad’s men of allsorts.”

It was a merchants’ town, and the General Court, in creating an inferior tribunal in Boston in

1651 to deal with the litigation rising from “the great concourse of people and increase of tradethere,” was justified in appointing seven merchants to be the new judges

The true center of the business life in Boston and, indeed, of the whole of New England, was thetownhouse, the imposing edifice made possible by the legacy of Robert Keayne This two-storiedstructure lay at the main intersection of the town, in the center of the market and meetinghouse square.Keayne’s desire that the townhouse combine a shelter “for the country people that come with theireprovisions to sitt dry in and warme both in cold raine and durty weather” with a

“convenient room or too for the Courts to meete in” and a “roome for a Library and a gallery or someother handsome roome for the Elders to meete in and conferr together,” as well as an armory for theArtillery Company—all built on pillars so that “the open roome between the pillars may serve forMerchants, Mr of Shipps and Strangers as well as the towne house to meete in”—had been fullyrealized Under the chambers of the court and library the merchants congregated daily From thistownhouse exchange radiated a large part of the commercial cords that laced New England to theother coastal ports, to the West Indies, the Wine Islands, Spain, and especially to England Since, by

1660, almost all importations from England were handled by Boston merchants, their meeting place inthe townhouse exchange was economically closer to the “New England walke” on the Londonexchange than it was to some of the market places of the surrounding towns It was the exact pivotpoint of the primary orbit of Atlantic trade in New England

As obvious to contemporaries as was the impact of the Boston merchants on the physicaldevelopment of the towns was the extent of their power over the lives of their neighbors To thefarmers and fishermen, forced to supply their constant needs with the fruit of irregular production, themerchants dictated prices and the terms of credit The limited money supply of New England flowed

into their hands By 1650 good bills of exchange on England could be found only in the Boston Baytowns and in Salem.

Complaints of the greed and injustice of the Boston merchants came from the fishermen of thenorth as from the farmers and cattle raisers of the south The heir of Ferdinando Gorges asked theroyal commission visiting New England in 1664 to consider ways of founding a port city in Maine as

a “Means to relieve the Inhabitants from the great Inconveniency they are at by being forced to carrytheir Goods to the Bay of Boston and there also to buy at Second or Third Hand all such Goods of[those] Parts as are necessary for them.”

The extent of the economic power of the merchants cannot be explained merely as a result oftheir control of goods and money It was also the consequence of three peculiar conditions of theirbusiness enterprises: specialization was impossible; expansion required an increasing control overcertain natural resources; and real property was the most secure, if not the only secure, form ofinvestment

Specialization in trade is possible only when a freely flowing medium of exchange or a bankingsystem makes it possible for a merchant to realize the profit of his sales without entering into a furtherexchange of goods In New England during this period, as, in fact, throughout most of the followingcentury, the balance of trade and the supply of coin or paper was such that currency flowed as fast as

it entered, and no amount of legislation by mercantilist-minded colonials could reverse the process.Despite the establishment of the Massachusetts mint and the passage of laws against the exportation ofcoin, New England suffered from so chronic a deficiency of currency that as early as 1663 Winthrop,Jr., was led to propose to the Royal Society a scheme for a “banke without mony.” Payments tomerchants for their goods were, for the most part, made in kind, and thus the larger a merchant’s salesthe greater the variety of goods he accumulated The merchants sold manufactures, for example, notfor coin or good paper but for crops, animals, fish, and percentages of ships or of current voyages Aman had only to enter trade in one commodity to become immediately involved in the exchange ofseveral more

The necessary variety of commodities dealt in by a merchant helps to explain the fact thatshopkeeping did not become a separate occupation as the Boston merchants rose in wealth andpower All the leading merchants in the town, no matter what their economic or social position,maintained shops—general stores—where they sold imported goods and the produce of the NewEngland farms in small quantities The shops were valuable to the merchants not only because retailsales to the growing Boston population were lucrative but also because these retail stores provided anecessary outlet for the odd lots of goods left over from wholesale exchanges

To be a merchant in Boston in 1660 meant to be engaged, wholesale and retail, in the exchange

of a great variety of goods, to be ready to accept payment in all sorts of unexpected commodities andcurrencies, always to be seeking new markets in which to sell new kinds of goods and new kinds ofgoods to satisfy new markets Versatility was one of the keys to success; to specialize was to decline.The merchants reached deeper and deeper into the inland regions of New England seeking control ofthe resources they needed for the expansion of their trade, especially timber, rough for masts and

spars, or worked into planks, pipestaves, and barrels If horses and sheep were valuable, why notraise them oneself instead of relying on a number of small farmers for a supply? With freight charges

a considerable burden to a merchant, would it not be better for him to build his own vessels and addcarriage and the vessel itself as salable commodities?

1639: EXCEEDING THE JUST PRICE

Was the selling of 6d nails for 8d per pound such a crying and oppressingsin?

—the exclusive right to board incoming ships and make the first bid on their cargo, forexample—within the colony Frustrating to the spirit of enterprise, these local monopolieswere characteristic of an early Puritan regulatory scheme that, in attempting to subordinate theprofit motive to the social good, also empowered the governor to set just prices and fairwages The just price, Bernard Bailyn writes, “was one willingly paid by a personexperienced in such matters and in need of the article but under no undue compulsion to buy.”

An unjust price flowed from personal greed, not “the impersonal workings of the market,” andany legitimization of greed threatened the religious framework of Puritan society To JohnCotton, credited with being “the architect of the Bay Colony’s public policy on the just price,”the Puritan businessman thus needed a “strangely mixed combination ofvirtues”—“a diligence in worldly business, and yet deadness to the world.”

Deadness, that is, to greed and the temptation to exceed the just price In 1639 RobertKeayne, a prominent Boston merchant, fell afoul of Cotton’s ideal by overpricing a bag ofnails He was hauled into court for “oppression”—price-gouging—and fined with didacticseverity Alan Heimart and Andrew Delbanco, two students of the period, see deep import in

Keayne’s run-in with Puritan regulation “Despite Keayne’s humiliation,” they write in The

Puritans in America, “the ultimate outcome of this confrontation was a foregone conclusion:

Keayne’s party would prevail in the life of the colony; Cotton’s would not .[T]his was perhaps the last time in American history that there existed a governmentalauthority as well as private conscience to hold every individual accountable for what we nowbelieve to be the ‘natural’ thing—the desire, as our jargon puts it, to maximize profit.”

Economically all-powerful, politically influential but circumscribed, the merchants—willingly

or not—were prime movers in a gradual, subtle, but fundamental transformation of New Englandsociety Their involvement in the world of Atlantic commerce committed them to interests andattitudes incompatible with life in the Bible Commonwealths Most of them did not seek thedestruction of the Puritan society; but they could not evade the fact that in many ways commercialsuccess grew in inverse proportion to the social strength of Puritanism

The continued spiritual health of the Puritan community required both isolation from thecontamination of Old World sin and the unquestioned authority of the Puritan magistracy Evil wascancerous, spreading uncontrollably once it took root in sensitive flesh If good men ruled the BibleCommonwealths the disease could only originate abroad By performing their indispensableeconomic function the merchants robbed the Commonwealths of their cherished isolation If the health

of Puritanism required isolation and the most rigorous selection of newcomers, the well-being oftrade demanded the free movement of people and goods and a rising population Should strangerscome freely to New England shores? Should the sailors and merchants of all nations traffic in theMassachusetts ports? On these points Puritanism and commerce flatly disagreed

In 1650 the Court felt obliged to require that every stranger over sixteen years of age presenthimself upon arrival to two magistrates who would pass immediately on his fitness to remain, and inthe following year this regulation was given the force of law In 1652 the Court demanded a writtenoath of fidelity to the Massachusetts government of all whose loyalty was suspected and particularly

“of all strangers who, after two moneths, have theire aboade here.”

The question of strangers was part of the more general and fundamental problem of the toleration

of dissent in a Bible Commonwealth The orthodox view, which had triumphed in the Antinomiancontroversy of 1637, was that toleration was an unmitigated evil, a sinful welcome to Satan’sclamorous hordes But it had become clear that this precept, made effective in law, was as harmful totrade as it was beneficial to the perpetuation of orthodoxy Persecution, a growing number ofmerchants discovered, was simply bad for trade; it “makes us stinke every wheare,” as the business-minded George Downing wrote to Winthrop, Jr Not only did it lessen the appeal of New England toimmigrants, but it also blackened the reputation of New Englanders in English trading circles At eachpoint of controversy merchants appeared in defense of a softer, more latitudinarian policy

The Remonstrance and Petition to the General Court of 1646 attacked the very basis of Puritansociety by demanding the broadening of church membership and of the civil franchise Theseriousness of its consideration by the magistrates reflected both the importance of its originators andthe widespread sympathy it found among the settlers, particularly those of the younger generation Itwas largely the work of the enterprising Dr Robert Child who, though a medical man by profession,was a metallurgist by avocation and one of the leading spirits in exploiting the resources of NewEngland He had invested in the Saugus ironworks and young Winthrop’s graphite mine, hadattempted to set up a vineyard as a beginning of a wine industry, and had joined in supporting thefruitless search for the Great Lake Yet he, like all but one of the signers, was outside the membership

of the New England churches Of the other six signers, three—Thomas Fowle, Samuel Maverick, andDavid Yale—were Boston merchants and a fourth, John Dand, though apparently not engaged in trade

in New England, had been a grocer in London Their petition, expressing the increasingdissatisfaction with the civil and ecclesiastical limitations of Puritan orthodoxy, was rejected by theGeneral Court after it had justified its position in a powerful counterblast The remonstrants werelectured on their sins and fined severely, Child receiving the stiff penalty of £200 After enduring anumber of indignities, Fowle, who had been one of the most active merchants in Boston, theimaginative and energetic Child, and the affluent David Yale returned permanently to England.Orthodoxy had triumphed again, but its victory had been costly.

If certain of the merchants stood in opposition to the institutions of Puritan orthodoxy, none ofthem did so as anarchists Their dissent turned on points of dogma and of civil and ecclesiasticalpolicy, but as men of property they joined ranks with the most enthusiastic Puritans against thefanatical Quakers during the first phase of their persecution Like the church elders, the merchantssaw in the Quakers’ “superadded presumptuous and incorrigible contempt of aucthoritie” thedestructive “Spirit of Muncer [Münster], or John of Leyden revived.” Though the treatment accordedthe Quakers by the Salem merchant Edmund Batter was extraordinary in its brutality, a large number

of merchants joined in a petition to the General Court for more severe laws against them

The character of the merchant group was changing not only as a result of the differences betweenthe first and second generations but also because by mid-century the group was being recruited in partfrom a different portion of English society The growing economic promise of New England wasbeginning to attract men intent on careers in trade who were not only strangers to New Englandorthodoxy, but to Puritanism itself They were adventurous Englishmen seeking their fortunes and theybrought with them the spirit of a new age

Within the single decade during which the first generation mercantile leaders were dying off—Keayne died in 1656, Cogan in 1658, Hill in 1661, Shrimpton in 1666, Allerton in 1659, Gibbons in

1654, William Tyng in 1652, Webb in 1660—the new men began to appear The first to make hispresence felt was Thomas Breedon, who, in 1648, entered the records of New England as a

supercargo on the Thomas Bonaventure of London, bound from Málaga to Boston By 1652 he had

settled in the New England port, bought property there, and started his tempestuous career as a NewEngland merchant From the start it was clear that he was alien corn His interests were entirelycommercial, and he had little sympathy with Puritanism His personality reflected a strange light fromevery facet Even his dress was foreign:

He appeared in Boston [a contemporary wrote] in a strange habit with a 4 Cornered Capinstead of a hat, and his Breeches hung with Ribbons from the Wast downw[ard] a gr[ea]tdepth, one row over another like shingles on a house: The Boyes when he came made anoutcry, from one end of the streete to the other calling him a Devill, which was so greate, thatpeople woundering came out of there houses to see whatt the matter was

Breedon, like another important new arrival of the fifties, Richard Wharton, was an economicimperialist, “interested in business as a source of private wealth, of public prosperity, and of naturalexpansion.” To them the attitudes and institutions of Puritanism were annoying archaisms In the years

after 1660 such men proved to be effective catalysts of changes that favored their interests.

—Adapted from Bernard Bailyn, The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,

1955), pp 94–100, 105–111.

As we saw in the last reading, “specialization was impossible,” for the Colonial merchant, who, in a money-scarce economy, made his living by trading goods of all kinds: “A man had only to enter trade in one commodity to become immediately involved in the exchange of several more.” This trade-for-everything way of doing business extended to the traffic in human beings A merchant might get pulled into the trade by opportunity, only to abandon it in shame For another, avarice might silence shame The Browns of Providence Plantation illustrated both moral fates.

The Browns are among the best researched merchant families in the Colonies and the 1764 voyage of one of their

ships, the Sally, is among the best-documented episodes in the slave trade To be sure, the brothers Brown—Moses,

John, Joseph, and Nicholas—also ran iniquity-free businesses like banks, insurance companies, and, ultimately, in 1793, a textile factory; indeed, with the English machinist Samuel Slater, the Browns financed one of the nation’s first textile mills From the father of the dynasty, Chad Browne, who emigrated from England in 1638, on up through the generations, the Browns gave generously to their community—the land for the College of Rhode Island, the future Brown University, for example They were model business citizens So it may seem unfair to their memory to single out from the palette of their

enterprise one of the three flyers they took in the slave trade But the following account of the Sally’s voyage and its

repercussions on the conscience and conduct of Moses Brown, the reader may feel, reflects more credit than blame on the family Here is a model of social responsibility etched by a businessman with a moral life transcending the claims of

business and blood alike This reading is excerpted from The Browns of Providence Plantations, by James B Hedges.

THE SLAVE TRADE

by James B Hedges

The cargo of Sally consisted of 159 hogsheads and 6 tierces of rum, amounting to 17,274 gallons, 25

casks of rice, 30 boxes of spermaceti candles, 10 hogsheads of tobacco, 6 barrels of tar, 40 barrels offlour, a quantity of loaf sugar, 2 tierces of brown sugar, 96 pounds of coffee, and 1800 bunches of

onions The ship’s stores emphasized the desperate nature of the voyage upon which Sally was

embarked She was carrying a small arsenal—7 swivel guns, 1 cask of powder, “40 hand Cufs” and

“40 Shakels,” 3 “Chanes,” 2 pair of pistols, “8 Small arms,” 13 “Cutleshes,” 1 dozen “pad Locks,” 1pair of “Blunder Bursses.” The combined value of the merchandise and stores on board the Brig was

£97,723 Old Tenor, or about 14,000 dollars

Because of his owners’ “Thoraugher acquaintance and Satisfaction” with [Captain] EsekHopkins’ ability and integrity, their sailing directions, dated September 10, 1764, allowed him alarge measure of discretion on the voyage He was free to dispose of his cargo for slaves or “anyother thing” which would net as good as a “proffet.” It was suggested that he proceed to Barbados

with his slaves, although he was at liberty to visit any other port in the West Indies which he thought itbest for his owners’ interest Failing a satisfactory market in the West Indies, he might sell inCarolina, Virginia, or Maryland He was to accept only “Hard Cash or good Bills of Exchange” inpayment for his slaves Should he deem it advisable, he was authorized to sell the Brig along with thecargo The Browns requested that he bring “four likely Young Slaves Home for Owners about 15Years old.” Captain Hopkins’ privilege was to be ten slaves, with a commission of four slaves forevery 104 obtained, plus 5 per cent of the net proceeds on the sales of the Negroes.

On December 30, 1764, Nicholas Brown and Company wrote Hopkins that they had nothing new

by way of orders “only that you dew as you Shall Think Best for Our Interest its an old proverb and

we doubt not you will veryfye it, Despach is the Life of Business.”

Captain Hopkins arrived aboard Sally on the Guinea coast in early November 1764 Few, if any, records of African slave voyages as complete as those of Sally now exist Captain Hopkins faithfully

wrote down his day-to-day transactions His account reveals the method of doing business It showsthe hardships, the bribery, the greed, and above all the horror that went with this traffic in human

flesh The first Notation in “Brige Saley, Trade Book” bears the date of November 10, 1764 On that

day the Captain traded one gallon of rum for some wood, another gallon for “1 Small Tooth” and “3botles powder for Corn & fowels.” Two days later he sold “2 bunches onyons” at one shilling,sixpence per bunch and 10 pounds of loaf sugar at one shilling per pound The following day CaptainHopkins made his first overture to the tribal hierarchy when he gave three “galons Rum to alkade andhis people.” He obtained his first slave on the 15th when he sold Captain “Hewett 156 galons Rum”and “1 barel flower” for £17, balancing his account “by 1 garle slave” at £10 and 1 boy at £7

NEW ENGLAND’S SLAVE ECONOMY

New England was described by the most careful student of early modern wealth levels ashaving achieved in 1770 the highest standards of living “for the bulk of the population in anycountry up to that time .” The most important underlying fact in this wholestory, the key dynamic force, unlikely as it may seem, was slavery New England was not aslave society On the eve of the Revolution, blacks constituted less than 4 percent of thepopulation in Massachusetts and Connecticut, and many of them were free But it was slavery,nevertheless, that made the commercial economy of eighteenth-century New England possibleand that drove it forward As Barbara Solow and others have shown, the dynamic element inthe region’s economy was the profits from Atlantic trade, and they rested almost entirely,directly or indirectly, on the flow of New England’s products to the slave plantations and thesugar and tobacco industries that they serviced The export of fish, timber, agriculturalproducts, and cattle and horses on which the New England merchants’ profits mainly dependedreached markets primarily in the West Indies and secondarily in the plantation world of themainland south Without the sugar and tobacco industries, based on slave labor, and withoutthe growth of the slave trade, there would not have been markets anywhere nearly sufficient to

create the returns that made possible the purchase of European goods, the extended credit, andthe leisured life that New Englanders enjoyed Slavery was the ultimate source of thecommercial economy of eighteenth-century New England Only a few of New England’smerchants actually engaged in the slave trade, but all of them profited by it, lived off it.

—Bernard Bailyn, “Slavery and Population Growth in Colonial New England,” in Engines of Enterprise, edited by Peter

Temin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp 254–255.

That times were dull and slaves scarce is indicated by the complete absence of entries betweenNovember 16 and December 1 On the latter date Captain Hopkins made his first important deal Hesold “Mr Hudson” rum, loaf sugar, and onions to the value of £70; and he purchased “1 man & 1 manboy slave,” 1 “woman” and “2 garles & 1 boy,” all for £70 The next day “195 galons Rum,” valued

at £19, fetched 1 “garle” and 1 boy slave Nine days elapsed before more slaves were to be had,when goods worth £164 brought 13 Negroes, including “5 prime slaves” and “2 grone slaves.”

In a sense the trade which Esek Hopkins had thus far carried on was of a preliminary nature, as

he had not yet paid his proper respects to tribal officialdom But that diplomatic mission was soonaccomplished He tells us in his “Trade Book” under date of December 21st that he “wated on theKinge with 2 barels Rum and 1 Cagg of Snuff for him and his officors.” The following day he gave “1cask to alkade” and “a bout So much more give a way to the Retenna on board.” The next severaldays were similarly occupied with matters of protocol On the 23rd the Captain “Went a Shore tomeet the King under the palavor Tree Cared 5 Caggs 14 flask Rum and paid the King 75 galons forhis Customs and Recd a Cow a present.” But the 24th was a really notable day The entry for that datereads: “Wate on the King with a Cagg of Rum & he opened my Trade by Sending of a Slave for which

I give 112 galons Rum.” But the purchase of a slave did not mean that official ceremonies were at anend The African king knew how to bargain Captain Hopkins records that later in the day he “PaidKing fodolgo Talko his Customs—36 galons Rum”; and with various quantities of rum, “Tobacor”and bar iron he paid the “Customs” of the “Kings Son,” and the “King arger or high Cunstable,” the

“geograff,” the “Alkade,” and the “owner of the founten.” While “paying the Customs” of thesedignitaries he “Expended to all their Retinue at Lest 50 galons Rum besides Sugarand vitles.”

Although his primary purpose was the procurement of slaves for sale in America, the Master of

Sally disposed of some of his Negroes while still on the Coast On February 18th he “Sold 4 Slaves 2

men 2 women” for 270 iron bars On March 25th he brought “a Small garle Slave” whom he sold thesame day to Captain Rotto, making a profit of 4 bars In the next month he disposed of “4 Slaves 2 oldwoman & 2 old man” to Captain Portages Snow for 240 bars Thus Esek Hopkins parted with nine ofhis slaves by sale prior to his departure from the Guinea Coast On August 1st he recorded theexchange of “a man Slave with his foot bitt of by a Shark and goot a boy in his Roume.”

But sale was not the only means by which the total number of Sally’s slaves was reduced Long

before she was ready to leave the Coast death began to take its toll The first occurred on April 1,

1765, when Captain Hopkins noted that “a boye Slave died.” On June 8th a “woman Slave hanged her

Self between Decks.” By August 20th, when he purchased his last slave, he had already lost twenty.Captain Hopkins had then been on the Coast for more than nine months By dint of constant trading hehad procured 196 slaves As he had sold nine and lost twenty by death, his net cargo comprised 167Negroes.

In mid-July Nicholas Brown and Company received an indirect report that the Captain had lostall his “Hands in the River Basa.” But almost immediately thereafter came a letter from the Captainhimself, written on May 25th, which Moses Brown said “Quite aleviates our Misfortune” by itsfavorable account of his circumstances Replying to this letter Moses, in behalf of the Company,advised Captain Hopkins, as the South Carolina market was now glutted, that he sell his slaves atBarbados if he could get £28 Sterling for them Otherwise, he was to proceed to Jamaica

The internal evidence contained in the “Trade Book” indicates that Captain Hopkins took hisdeparture from African shores shortly after he recorded the purchase of his last slave on August 20th

Scarcely had he set Sally upon her course through the Middle Passage when misfortune, which was to

make a financial disaster of the voyage, began to plague him Under date of August 21st he recordedthe somber fact that “1 garle Slave Dyed,” being number twenty-one taken by death since April 1st

On the 25th “one boye Slave Dyed,” while “1 woman & 1 boye slave Dyed” on the 27th Moreominous were the events of August 28th when the “Slaves Rose on us was obliged to fire on them andDestroyed 8 and Several more wounded badly 1 Thye & ones Ribs broke.” This brought the number

of dead to thirty-two Through September, as Sally sailed toward the Caribbean, deaths were almost

daily occurrences On the 8th “2 women and 2 boys dyed.” Another day Hopkins recorded the deaths

of “3 boys & 1 garle.” On the 19th “1 man slave Dyed of his wounds on the Ribs when Slaves Rose.”

Early in October Sally arrived in the West Indies, calling at Barbados in accordance with the original

instructions to Captain Hopkins Failing, apparently, to find there any of the letters the Browns hadaddressed to him, Captain Hopkins continued on his own initiative to Antigua In a letter from that

port, he told the story of the last tragic days of Sally’s voyage The uprising of the Negroes on board

ship and its suppression brought heart-breaking results The surviving Negroes were “so disperited”that “some drowned themselves, some starved and others sickened and died.” Eighty-eight of the

slaves were dead and the remaining were in a “very sickly and disordered manner.” Sally had traded

her cargo of rum for tragedy, disease, and death

On November 25, 1765, Alexander Willock, merchant at Antigua, wrote Nicholas Brown andCompany, enclosing bills of exchange for £417 Sterling, being the net proceeds of the sale of twenty-four slaves placed in his hands by Captain Hopkins for sale Willock remarked that these “Slaveswas verry Indifferent.” Had the “Negroes been Young and Healthy” he would have been able to sellthem “pritty well.” As there is no record of the further sale of Negroes from this voyage, some of theslaves procured by Hopkins cannot be accounted for The records show that on December 20, 1765,there occurred the 109th death Allowing for these deaths and for the 16 slaves constituting theprivilege of the Captain and crew, there should have been left for sale on account of the Brownbrothers a total of 62 Negroes Of these only 24 are known to have been sold What became of theremaining 38? Were they so “indifferent,” in such “bad order,” so “sickly,” so old and infirm as not

to be disposable at any price? And, if they were not sold, what disposition was made of them? Thesequestions cannot be answered

But, from a business standpoint, whether 24 or 62 slaves were sold does not greatly matter Ineither event, the voyage was a financial disaster for Nicholas Brown and Company If only the 24Negroes were sold, the loss on the voyage was approximately 12,000 dollars If the 38 unaccountablefor were sold at the same average price as the 24, the loss was still close to 9,000 dollars In the face

of this staggering blow the owners of Sally were stoical in the extreme Writing to Esek Hopkins the

day after the receipt of his disappointing letter of October 9, 1765, they said: “We need not mentionhow Disagreeable the Nuse of your Luseing 88 Slaves is to us & all your Friends, but your SelfContinuing in Helth is so Grate Satisfaction to us, that we Remain Cheirful under the Heavy Loss ofour Ints.”

It is virtually certain that Nicholas, Joseph, and Moses never again participated in a slave

voyage after the ill-starred venture of Sally in 1765 But not so with John, who continued to be

intrigued by the African trade almost to his dying day During the score of years remaining to him,John became the foremost defender of the Guinea traffic in Rhode Island And by a curious trick offate it was his brother Moses who shared with the Reverend Samuel Hopkins of Newport the honor ofbeing the most distinguished leader of the opposition to what he termed “that Unrighteous Traffic.”

As early as June 1774 the General Assembly of Rhode Island had passed an act providing that

“no negro or mulatto slave shall be brought into this colony.” In 1784 the Assembly enacted a lawauthorizing the gradual abolition of slavery in the state and repealing the provisions in the act of 1774allowing the importation into the colony of slaves which could not be disposed of in the West Indies.Although this was a substantial gain for the opponents of slavery, both Moses Brown and SamuelHopkins were disappointed Alluding to the failure to obtain a more drastic measure directed at theAfrican trade, Moses wrote that the influence of the mercantile interest “in the House was greatlyExerted, and the Justice of the subject thereby Overbourn.” Sorrowfully Moses had to say that his

“Brother John was deep in the Opposition,” although, as a member of the General Assembly at thetime, he was instructed by the Providence town meeting to support the measure John thoughtemancipation a “shallow policy.”

John’s principles, however, were sufficiently flexible to permit him to shift his attitude on theAfrican trade as circumstances might require In 1787 he was making his plans for the dispatching of

his ship General Washington on the voyage which inaugurated the East India trade of Providence In

an effort to purchase the financial coöperation of brother Moses, he promised that, should the venturematerialize, he would “not be aney more Concerned in the Guiney Trade.” He also urged Moses tobecome a member of the Rhode Island Assembly, pointing out that “if you are in the House You can

do what you think Right Respecting the proposed proabbition to the Guiney Trade or Reither theSlave Trade.”

In that same year Moses Brown and his fellow abolitionists won a notable victory when theRhode Island Assembly, much to their surprise, enacted the first law in America prohibiting theAfrican slave trade The act forbade citizens or residents of the state to be in any way concerned inthe transport of Negroes from Africa for the purpose of selling them into slavery Violation of the lawincurred a penalty of £100 lawful money for each Negro thus transported, plus £1,000 for everyvessel employed in such traffic Realizing that Rhode Island slave traders were preparing to

circumvent the law by fitting out their vessels at Norwich and Middletown in Connecticut, Moses andHopkins quickly turned their propaganda to that state In particular they sent their literature to theyounger Jonathan Edwards, minister at New Haven and member of a committee of the clergy chosen

to petition the legislature of Connecticut for a law abolishing the African trade In October 1788 theyhad the satisfaction of seeing such an act placed upon the statute books of Connecticut

Continuing his opposition to slavery in all its aspects, Moses Brown in 1789, with the assistance

of several friends of like mind, organized the Providence Society for Promoting the Abolition ofSlavery One of the functions assumed by this Society was that of guarding against violation of theRhode Island Act of 1787 forbidding citizens of the state to participate in the African trade Andwhen Congress, in 1794, enacted a law designed to close that traffic to all American citizens, theSociety became the self-appointed agency for the enforcement of that measure within the limits ofRhode Island Moses probably did not anticipate that his brother John would one day be one of those

to be prosecuted at the instigation of the Society In 1797, however, John succumbed once more to thelure of the “Guiney” trade and thereby found himself the defendant in litigation brought against him bythe Abolition Society Although the vessel was condemned, Moses tells us that John “found meansnotwithstanding, by the Peculiar Turn of the Jurors, even before the federal Court at Newport to getacquitted on Tryall for the Penalty on part of the Slaves.”

This court battle occasioned an exchange of letters between John and Moses in which the formerappears in no very favorable light In them John’s customary arrogant bravado gives way to awhining, plaintive note He implies that he deserves special consideration for “never having beenConcerned in but one Voyage Since the Law passed.” And he sought to plead as an added extenuationthat he had undertaken the slave voyage “from Nessesity Seeing no other way to pay the Reveneu ofthe United States to whome I then owed near 100,000 Dols.” Continuing, he wrote that “NotConstering the Law as it has since beene, I did not suppose I was doing Rong but to the Conterary that

I was doing the best I could to Inable me to help pay this Grait Sum to the Government for ImportDutys.” To John’s plea that these alleged alleviating circumstances justified an “accommodation,”Moses was quite unsympathetic He observed that the “terms offered at Newport were Moderate &Such as he [John] would have accepted had it not been for the flatterings of his friend.” And he addedthat “there were those at Newport & elsewhere who would have prosecuted him more severely had itnot been for the Influence of those he calls his enemies.”

Once the litigation was safely behind him, John quickly recovered his accustomed assurance As a candidate for the national House of Representatives in 1798 he solicited the votes ofMoses Brown and his son Obadiah, of George Benson and other leaders in the abolition movement inProvidence As a member of Congress he still continued to be a source of mortification to Moses InJanuary 1800 the latter wrote that John “has now a Ship he has been refiting which if he does not Sell

self-I fear he would, again, be tempted to send on a Slave Voyage.”

It is doubtful that this “Guiney” venture ever materialized But, in any event, John Brown hadexperienced no change of heart In May 1800, Congress passed an act intended to strengthen the law

of 1794 prohibiting the carrying on of the “slave-trade from the United States to any foreign place orcountry.” As a member of the House of Representatives, John not only cast one of the five votes