WEBVTT

NOTE 30. Economics Begins to Dissolve the Theocracy: Disintegration of the Fur Monopoly

1
00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:03.000
Volume 1, Chapter 30.

2
00:00:03.000 --> 00:00:10.000
Economics begins to dissolve the theocracy, disintegration of the fur monopoly.

3
00:00:10.000 --> 00:00:19.000
As happens on every new continent, the vast majority of Americans were engaged in transforming natural resources into use.

4
00:00:19.000 --> 00:00:29.000
In the case of New England, farming, fish, timber and furs purchased from Indians located deep in the interior.

5
00:00:29.000 --> 00:00:37.500
Merchants and shippers largely exported this produce and, in return, imported other desired goods from abroad.

6
00:00:37.500 --> 00:00:42.500
It should be noted that, in contrast to the glib assumptions of many critics,

7
00:00:42.500 --> 00:00:50.500
there is no inherent class conflict between farmers and merchants in the market economy.

8
00:00:50.500 --> 00:00:58.000
There is no agrarian interest in a per se clash with a commercial or mercantile interest.

9
00:00:58.000 --> 00:01:05.500
Both groups play an intermeshing and complementary role in the processes of production and exchange.

10
00:01:05.500 --> 00:01:12.500
How indeed could agrarians find a market for their produce without merchants and without farmers?

11
00:01:12.500 --> 00:01:18.500
In what goods would the merchants trade and to whom would they sell?

12
00:01:18.500 --> 00:01:25.000
New England, indeed all of America, north of the Potomac, had not the monoculture of the south,

13
00:01:25.000 --> 00:01:31.720
tobacco in the Chesapeake area and later rice in South Carolina bought a variety of products.

14
00:01:32.440 --> 00:01:37.960
The first products of New England were fish and furs and the bulk of the earlier settlements

15
00:01:37.960 --> 00:01:45.160
began as fishing stations or fur trading posts. From the Indians, the whites soon learned two

16
00:01:45.160 --> 00:01:52.120
techniques indispensable to carving a living out of the new land. How to clear these unfamiliar

17
00:01:52.120 --> 00:02:01.120
and how to grow that new product, Indian corn, maize, which soon became the North's leading agricultural product.

18
00:02:01.120 --> 00:02:07.120
Other important agricultural commodities in the North were wheat, rye and barley.

19
00:02:07.120 --> 00:02:19.120
To the first generation of devout Puritans migrating en masse to Massachusetts, intent on founding their Bible commonwealth, trade was more than slightly suspect.

20
00:02:19.120 --> 00:02:26.120
Suspect. Trade was something to be watched, regulated, controlled, a standing distraction

21
00:02:26.120 --> 00:02:32.640
from godly concerns. There was little conception that the market has laws and workings of its

22
00:02:32.640 --> 00:02:40.600
own. And yet, economic reality had, as always, to be dealt with, and even in the godliest

23
00:02:40.600 --> 00:02:47.080
of commonwealths, there was often chicanery afoot. When the Puritans began to arrive in

24
00:02:47.080 --> 00:02:52.180
In the late 1620s, the most highly developed enterprise in New England was the Plymouth

25
00:02:52.180 --> 00:02:54.900
fur trade with the Indians.

26
00:02:54.900 --> 00:03:00.360
But within a decade, the Plymouth fur trade had virtually disappeared, and the economically

27
00:03:00.360 --> 00:03:05.600
declining pilgrims had to content themselves with sending their agricultural produce to

28
00:03:05.600 --> 00:03:07.620
Boston to sell.

29
00:03:07.620 --> 00:03:09.160
How did this happen?

30
00:03:09.160 --> 00:03:15.040
How did Plymouth so swiftly become a sleepy backwater of Massachusetts Bay?

31
00:03:15.040 --> 00:03:19.480
It is misleading to say that Massachusetts, with its influx of puritans, was larger and

32
00:03:19.480 --> 00:03:25.400
wealthier, for this would not automatically have affected such a drastic revolution in

33
00:03:25.400 --> 00:03:26.400
fortunes.

34
00:03:26.400 --> 00:03:31.680
Moreover, Massachusetts supplanted Plymouth in the fur trade, even though very few furs

35
00:03:31.680 --> 00:03:34.720
were native to the Massachusetts area.

36
00:03:34.720 --> 00:03:42.080
The swiftness of this turnover is explicable only by contrasting the workings of governmental

37
00:03:42.080 --> 00:03:49.080
in 1627, Plymouth owed 1,800 pounds to its English financiers. Taking advantage of this opportunity, a group of eight leading rulers of the colony, as key members of the ruling oligarchy, in effect granted themselves a monopoly of the Plymouth fur trade in exchange for assuming the Plymouth debt.

38
00:04:12.080 --> 00:04:18.080
Also drawn into the monopoly scheme were four of the English merchant creditors.

39
00:04:18.080 --> 00:04:24.080
The monopoly was to run for six years, but was annually renewed for several years afterward.

40
00:04:24.080 --> 00:04:39.080
Monopoly never spurs enterprise or initiative, and this was undoubtedly a major factor in the swift decline of the trade in the late 1630s when competition from Massachusetts had to be faced.

41
00:04:39.080 --> 00:04:54.080
Plimmeth could not, after all, deal with Massachusetts Bay as it had dealt with the competition of the highly efficient fur trader Thomas Morton, that is, by wiping out his settlement and deporting him back to England.

42
00:04:54.080 --> 00:05:03.080
Furthermore, the London creditors, while ingesting monopoly profits, fraudulently failed to reduce the Plimmeth debt by that amount.

43
00:05:03.080 --> 00:05:07.080
The debt thus remained a heavy burden on the colony.

44
00:05:07.080 --> 00:05:18.080
So swiftly did the Plymouth fur trade collapse that virtually no one remained in it by 1640, and the monopoly was allowed to lapse.

45
00:05:18.080 --> 00:05:32.080
It is true that the Massachusetts settlers helped this process along by such acts as seizing the Windsor trading post on the Connecticut River in 1635, but these were scarcely decisive.

46
00:05:32.080 --> 00:05:39.500
Instead, it was private, independent settlers building trading posts in the interior, especially

47
00:05:39.500 --> 00:05:45.540
on the Connecticut River, building at their own risk and on their own initiative who developed

48
00:05:45.540 --> 00:05:48.240
the New England fur trade.

49
00:05:48.240 --> 00:05:54.120
The most important fur trader was William Pinchon, who founded Springfield, the strategic

50
00:05:54.120 --> 00:05:57.720
northernmost settlement on the Connecticut River.

51
00:05:57.720 --> 00:06:06.680
Pinchon became a virtual manorial lord of Springfield, functioning as landed gentry and chief magistrate.

52
00:06:06.680 --> 00:06:12.240
While the fur trade in Massachusetts and Connecticut was relatively free in contrast to Plymouth's,

53
00:06:12.240 --> 00:06:15.280
it was hardly a pure free enterprise.

54
00:06:15.280 --> 00:06:21.620
The governments regulated the prices of furs, taxed income from the trade, and moreover

55
00:06:21.620 --> 00:06:26.600
insisted on licensing each entry into the trade.

56
00:06:26.600 --> 00:06:37.600
Indeed, entrance into the vital fur trade became a lucrative monopolistic privilege restricted to influential men with connections in the government of the colony.

57
00:06:37.600 --> 00:06:44.600
William Pinchon was granted the exclusive monopoly of the entire fur trade in the crucial Springfield region.

58
00:06:44.600 --> 00:06:54.600
As a result, he was able to expand greatly and establish branch trading posts of Springfield and the new settlements at Hadley and Westfield.

59
00:06:54.600 --> 00:07:06.600
In 1644, Massachusetts granted a 21-year fur monopoly to one company that included Boston importers William Ting and Robert Sedgwick.

60
00:07:06.600 --> 00:07:13.600
The monopoly quickly went bankrupt, as did another attempt at a fur monopoly the following year.

61
00:07:13.600 --> 00:07:18.600
In Rhode Island, meanwhile, Roger Williams was the first leading fur trader.

62
00:07:18.600 --> 00:07:30.600
One of the secrets of his success was that his social philosophy of peace and friendship with the Indians was complemented by concrete, peaceful trading relations.

63
00:07:30.600 --> 00:07:43.600
But New England, in the final analysis, was fur poor, and by the late 1650s even the Massachusetts fur trade was beginning to decline rapidly.

64
00:07:43.600 --> 00:07:53.600
In New Haven, it was a drive for scarce furs that lay at the root of New Haven's desperate attempts to colonize the Delaware Valley.

65
00:07:53.600 --> 00:08:00.600
As New England's furs became scarcer, Indian trade concentrated deeper into the interior

66
00:08:00.600 --> 00:08:08.600
and was increasingly centered around the Dutch post of Fort Orange at the current side of Albany.

67
00:08:08.600 --> 00:08:15.720
New England fur interest gave way to interest in land, agriculture and other types of trade.