#104 The Massachusetts Puritans: What You Need to Know!

Welcome to the History of the Americans Podcast Episode 104. I'm your host, Jack Heneman, and I'm recording this episode on January 28, 2023 in my bedroom closet in New Orleans. We are telling the history of the lands now encompassed by the United States from the beginning without presentism. Okay, it's become clear that I'm no longer even close to putting out new episodes on a regular schedule. For the first year and a half of this podcast, it was pretty good about getting episodes at more or less between Thursday night and Saturday morning, and I had hoped to resume doing that since everybody says that podcast should come out on a regular schedule. Alas, my travel schedule has been very hectic and will continue to be. So for now, I'm going to throw in the towel and just put out episodes as I finish them. I still hope to do three or four a month, but consider that a more or less subjective. I also want to say again, how much I appreciate your emails, reviews on Apple, and promotion on Twitter. And not just the pets on the back, although they are very much appreciated. The corrections are very important, and I try to confess to errors and correct them in a rat a notes when I get something wrong or you disagree with my emphasis as it were. So thank you. This episode is a bit of a departure from the usual fare for this podcast, sort of a context setter background or rather than a detailed look at any point in time. The plan here is to get a bunch of ideas and themes out there so the following episodes more obviously fit together. Fortunately, for me, Alan Taylor, one of the great historians of early America, wrote a very interesting introduction to the Puritans in his book, American Colonies, the Settling of North America. Rather than pains taking re-write Taylor, this episode is mostly or in large part excerpts from his account and some with commentary interjected. For those of you who are very long standing and attentive listeners, this episode will you a bit like one from the summer of 2021. Queen Elizabeth I, what you need to know, even so it would be useful to have listened to the last three episodes before this one. Among the background that perhaps needs the most reinforcement, it must be said that in the first half of the 1600s, nearly everybody in Christendom, from the most devoted Catholics to the most Calvinist Protestants, believed that everybody in a country or civil society needed to subscribe to the same religion. This idea known in English as conformity made religious disagreement existential and it explains why religious wars were so unbelievably brutal. Occasionally there would be monarchs who for practical reasons or to end as astra civil wars would permit some small non conformity. In 1598, for example, France's humane King Henry IV signed the Edict of Nantes, which ended decades of ruinous confessional wars by granting France's Calvinists the Eugenos a measure of religious freedom. Nearly 12 years later though, a Catholic zealot would assassinate Henry. And over the course of the 17th century, the Eugenos would come under pressure until finally Louis XIV revoked the Edict. England was a different matter and so far as its own reformation was top down and its national church reported to the monarch. With the exception of a few hardcore separatists, a tiny number of which went up to Plymouth on the Mayflower in 1620, Calvinism existed within the construct of the Church of England. Sometimes the monarch would be sympathetic to the Calvinists, known in England as Purins, and sometimes not so much. Elizabeth I relied on hardcore Calvinists on a privy council and in the West Country privateering fleet, meant like Sir Francis Drake, to defend her from internal and external threats, many of which were explicitly Catholic attempts to recover England for the Pope. Her successors, as you all know by now, did not much like the Calvinists and began to pressure and indeed persecute them into conformity with Anglican liturgy. That struggle was not over religious freedom. Even Puritans believed that there could only be one religion in England, but over which expression of English Protestantism would be universal. Eventually, the pressure became such that many of England's Calvinists decided that they had to get out. Yet they were English and wanted to live under English law and tradition. So they went to English possessions abroad, including, of course, Massachusetts, but also the English West Indies in Ireland. Their hope was to retain their rights as Englishmen, but put themselves out of sight in their fore-out of mind, of archbishop lawd, and the other hardcore conformists in the Church hierarchy. But none of that meant they believed in liberty of conscience. They were in the main even more zealous in their commitment to conformity than most Anglicans. That would lead them to do some things that we modern would consider quite nasty to the non-conformists who fell under their jurisdiction, especially in Massachusetts. There would be moments which we will get to in future episodes when the only thing that tempered zealous Purit and conformity in New England would be the personal compassion of individual leaders, including especially John, Winthrop and William Bradford. But that compassion had real limits as we shall see soon enough. The Puritans of Massachusetts believed as strongly as anybody anywhere that failure to follow God's law would lead inexorably to God's retribution. That is why, for example, neither Bradford nor John Indicott could tolerate Thomas Morton's band of merry men in their midst, even if Bradford would more than once give the lord of misrule, refuge at Plymouth, though under conditions and with no little controversy. There was, however, far more to the Puritans than rigid conformity. They built a society unlike any other in the New World, or even the Old, both socially and economically. To set that table, let's go down to Taylor's overview of the Massachusetts Puritans with occasional interjections, elaborations, and inflammatory commentary for me. Quote. About 14,000 English Puritans participated in the great migration of the 1630s. Although certainly great in its consequences for New England, this migration had three important limits. First, most English Puritans persisted at home, waiting to see how God would treat both the mother country and the New England experiment. Second, the New England Immigration represented only 30% of all the English who crossed the Atlantic to the various colonies during the 1630s. Many more immigrated to the Chesapeake and the West Indies. Third, the Great Migration was brief for immigration decline to a trickle after 1640, accounting to only 7,000 for the rest of the century. Consequently, colonial New England became people primarily by the descendants of the one great surge of immigrants during the 1630s. By colonial standards, New England attracted an unusual set of immigrants, the sort of skilled and prosperous people who ordinarily stayed at home rather than risk the rigors of a transatlantic crossing and the uncertainties of colonial life. Most 17th-century English immigrants were poor young single men who lacked prospects in the mother country. Seeking regular meals in the short term and a farm in the lawn, they gambled their lives as indentured servants in the Chesapeake of the West Indies. In sharp contrast, most of the New England colonists could pay their own way and emigrate it as family groups. In 1631, a Puritan boasted that the immigrants were "endowed with grace and furnished with means." At mid-century, the New England sex ratio was six males for every four females, compared with four males for every female in the Chesapeake. New England's leader balance encouraged a more stable society and faster population growth. New England lacked a profitable plantation crop that would both demand and finance the importation of indentured servants during the 1630s. Dentured servants constituted less than a fifth of the New England immigrants. In contrast to the Chesapeake and West Indies, where servants came in large numbers for sale upon arrival to new masters, almost all of the New England servants came with the immigrant families, generally one or two per family. Over time, the servant numbers declined as their terms expired. By the end of the century, servants amounted to less than 5% of the New English population. Nor could the New Englanders afford to buy Africans. In 1700, less than 2% of New England's inhabitants were slaves, compared with 13% for Virginia and 78% for the English West Indies. Compared with the rest of the empire, New England possessed an unusually homogeneous colonial population and culture, free, white, and transplanted English. Relative to the Chesapeake, the New England environment demanded more labor and provided smaller rewards, but it also permitted longer and healthier lives. In contrast to the Chesapeake tidewater with its long, hot, and humid summers and low topography, New England was a northern and hilly land with a short growing season and faster flowing rivers and streams, which discouraged the malaria and dysentery that afflicted southern planters. In New England, people who survived childhood could expect to live to about 70. In the Chesapeake, only a minority survived beyond 45. France's Higginson boasted that for a healing nature, a sup of New England's air is better than a whole draft of Old England's ale. This healthier, longer-lived and more sex-balanced population sustained a rapid growth through the natural increase, whereas in the Chesapeake and West Indies, only continued human import sustained growth. During the 17th century, New England received only 21,000 immigrants, a fraction of the 120,000 transported to the Chesapeake, not to mention the 190,000, who colonized the West Indies. Yet in 1700, New England's colonial population of 91,000 exceeded the 85,000 whites in the Chesapeake and the 33,000 whites in the West Indies. Although not the wealthiest English colonial region, New England was the healthiest, the most populous, and the most egalitarian in the distribution of property. The New England colonies granted lands to men who banded together as a corporate group to found a town. This town system contrasted with the Chesapeake colonies, where the leaders allocated land directly to individuals and usually in large tracks to the wealthy and well-connected. The Chesapeake practiced disperse settlement, which rendered it more difficult to sustain schools and churches and to repel Indian attacks. New English leaders favored relatively compact settlement in towns to concentrate people sufficiently for defense, to support public schools, to promote mutual supervision of morality, and above all to sustain a convenient and well-attended local church. The colonial legislature defined the town boundaries, but left to each town corporation, the allocation of land for household farms, and the location of a village center with church and school. More than simply attractive land, the town was also a local government, fundamental to New England politics, in contrast to the Chesapeake colonies, which relied on the larger county. Gathered in town meeting, the male property holders elected their local officials, principally a board of select men. Favouring a gradual and modest distribution of land, the town founders initially awarded each household only 10 to 50 acres, depending on social status. Eventually, however, most 17th century families acquired between 100 and 200 acres of farmland. Although about half the size of most Chesapeake plantations, the average New England farmer significantly larger than most land holdings in England, where few farmers owned as many as 50 acres, and where over half the men possessed no land. And in New England, almost all farmers enjoyed completed ownership, known as a freehold, in contrast to the lease holds that prevailed in England. Freehold lands offered security from the rising rents charged by English landlords or Chesapeake great planters. The New English also avoided paying the quit rents, those were property taxes in effect, charged by the Lord's proprietor or the crown, and the more southern colonies. A pure and immigrant to New Jersey swore God's Zooks he would have nothing to do with land as paid quit rents, for they paid none in New England. To make farms, the colonists had to cut clearings in the forest, chop firewood, erect fences, build barns and houses, plow and plant fields, harvest crops, construct mills, all from scratch by hand labor. This work was more demanding and cold in Rocky, New England than in the flatter, warmer and fertile Chesapeake, and while demanding more labor to build, the New England farm generated smaller profits than the Chesapeake plantation. The shorter growing season and rougher land precluded the cultivation of the colonial staples and greatest European demand, tobacco and sugar. Instead, the New English farmers raised a northern medley of small crops, wheat, rye, maize, potatoes, beans and garden plants. None could be profitably shipped for sale in England, whereas similar climate permitted the same crops. The New England farm family also tended a modest but critical herd of livestock, commonly two oxen, five other cattle, a horse, a couple of sheep and six pigs. Because livestock needed more land than grains, the New England farm had large pastures and hay fields, but relatively small fields of grain. The farm families consume most of their own crops, and butchered animals or traded them for the goods and services of local artisans, principally carpeners, blacksmiths and shoemakers. New England's diversified farms were less prone to disruption by the boom and bust price cycle than where the southern plantations specializing in a staple crop for an external market. Unable to afford servants or slaves, the New English instead relied upon the family labor of their sons and daughters. A 17th century Englishman reported, Virginia thrives by keeping many servants and these in strict obedience. New England conceives they and their children can do enough, and so they have rarely above one servant. The healthy climate and good diet enabled parents to raise six or seven children to maturity. By age 10, boys work with their fathers in the fields and barn. While daughters assisted their mothers in the house and garden, most sons remained unmarried and worked on the paternal farm until their middle or late 20s, retained by the prospect that their father could eventually provide each with a farm from the family rights in the town lands. Dilligent and realistic, most New England families sought an independent competency, independent meant owning enough property, a farm or a shop to employ a family without having to work for someone else as a hired hand or servant, a competency, met a sufficiency, not an abundance of worldly goods, enough to eat, add equity of simple clothing, a roof over their heads, some consumer goods, and an ability to transmit this standard of living to many children. Edward Johnson of Massachusetts noted that even the poorest person, Hathahouse and Land of his own, and Bread of his own growing, if not some cattle. Parents regarded such a broad-based prosperity as more compatible with a godly life than the extremes of wealth and poverty found in England, the Chesapeake and the West Indies. The Pirate Minister John White observed nothing sorts better with piety than competency. Here with those in the Chesapeake or West Indies, social gradations were subtle among the new English, who overwhelmingly belonged to the middle sort. Their modest and diversified farms produced less wealth than did the staple plantations of the Chesapeake and the West Indies, but the New England economy distributed its rewards more equitably among men who were farmers and tradesmen. In New English country towns, the leading men were substantial farmers who worked with their hands on properties only two or three times larger than the local average. And the leading were all men, possessed few, if any, imported servants or slaves. The largest seaports, Boston, Salem and Newport, did host a wealthy elite of merchants, lawyers, and lands speculators. But they enjoyed less collective power than the great planters in the Chesapeake and West Indies, because the New England system of many autonomous towns dispersed political power in the countryside. Because New England had the most decentralized and popularly responsive form of government in the English Empire, royalists despised the region as a hotbed of republicanism. Back to me for an interjection. This difference in class structure between New England and the Chesapeake would persist and grow over the ensuing decades. It happened to be reading David McCulloch's book 1776 the other night in which he discusses the cultural differences between the New Englanders and the Virginians and Washington's army during the siege of Boston. McCulloch quotes John Adams. whom he describes as "acutely sensitive to the differences between new Englanders and Virginians." "Gentlemen and other colonies have large plantations of slaves, and are accustomed, habituated to higher notions of themselves and the distinction between them and the common people than we are. I dread the consequence of this dissimilitude of character, and without the utmost caution on both sides, and the most considerate for a barren's with one another and prudent condescension on both sides, they will certainly be fatal." Indeed they would, but it would take longer than Adams then supposed, back to Taylor, quote, "It took a family to cope with the diverse and constant demands of building and maintaining a farm in New England. English culture expected all adults to marry and divided their labors in a male and female responsibilities." Men conducted the heaviest work, including clearing, constructing, tending the livestock, harvesting the hay and cultivating the grain crops. Women maintained the home and its nearby garden, cared for the numerous children, made clothing and soap, and prepared and preserved foods, including butter, eggs, and cheese. But when a husband was away or incapacitated, the wife also had to assume his labors, taking on the role of "deputy husband" to be clear. Taylor has that phrase in quotation marks, "For heaven's sakes, even I wouldn't have the courage to say that with a straight face." The New English understood marriage is both romantic and economic. Husband and wife were supposed to be temperamentally and financially compatible, able to work together as a loving couple and provident parents for the rest of their days. Parent and parents really dictated marriage partners to their children. But they could veto choices that seemed unwise. In general, a young couple developed an attraction and proposed their marriage to parents for approval. If amenable, the two sets of parents negotiated a property settlement to provide the new couple with a land, tools, and livestock to commence a farmer trade. In seeking a balance between young choice and parental authority and between romance and property, New England Puritans were somewhat more indulgent than was traditional in the old country. As in the mother country, New English men monopolized legal authority, land ownership, and political rights. As patriarchs, they expected to govern their families as so many little commonwealths, the essential components of the social order. The minister John Cotton asserted that God meant civilized people to live in societies first of family, secondly church, and thirdly commonwealth. Because the 17th century English understood all three to interlock and mutual support, this orderly families threatened to dissolve society into violent anarchy. Understanding every commonwealth, small and large, was needing an ultimate ruler. The English expected husbands to govern their families as petty monarchs by the love of Covature, wives were subsumed within the name and the legal identity of their husbands. Only widows who had not remarried could own property, enter contracts, and resort to the courts and property disputes. Now women, not even widows, could vote or hold public office or aspire to the ministry. In all of this, New England simply replicated the gender hierarchy of the mother country. More note where the other modest ways in which the Puritan faith provided a bit more authority, protection and respect for women in New England than they enjoyed in the Chesapeake or Old England. Although Puritan ministers dwelled on the wife's duty to submit to her husband, they took equal pains to uphold his duties to behave kindly and generously. Love all Puritanism preached the importance of love and mutual respect as the foundations for a Christian marriage. In contrast to their counterparts in England and the Chesapeake, where authorities rarely intervened in domestic disputes, New England magistrates and church congregations routinely protected women from insult and abuse. Sometimes they had to protect husbands. New England women could also more easily obtain divorce when abandoned or sexually betrayed. Historian Cornelia Dayton concludes that the effort to create the most god-fearing society tended to reduce the near absolute power that English men by law wielded over their wives. Puritanism regarded women and men as spiritual equals. Indeed after 1650, women seemed spiritually superior, as they outnumbered men as full church members. In 1692, the Boston minister Cotton Mather acknowledged, quote, "There are far more godly women in the world than there are godly men. I have seen it without going a mile from home. That in a church between three and four hundred communicans, there are but few more than 100 men, all the rest are women." Back to me for a brief personal story, you know, to add a bit of authenticity. Almost 30 years ago, I worked for four years as the general counsel of a company run under Orthodox Jewish law and accordance with the wishes of its stockholders, management and most of its employees. Being a Gentile and a pretty waspie one at that, this was the first and frankly only time that I was an ethnic minority in my own workplace. And not surprisingly, I learned a lot. Anyway, one day I was sitting in the lunchroom with an orthodox mathematician making small talk. He asked whether I went to church. It should be said in an absolutely non-judgmental tone. And I grumbled something like, "Yes, when my wife makes me." I was not nice. I should have said, "When my wife feels strongly that I should go or something." Anyway, the mathematician took my comments seriously and responded, "Hmm. I understand that in many Christian sects, women are the keepers of the religious flame. That startled me as a spot on observation from outside Christianity." And so that night I called my medievalist father to report the exchange. He noted in a elaboration that many of the really critical conversions of powerful men in Christianity's early history have been at the behest of their wives. So it was, apparently, in the Massachusetts Bay of the 17th century, back to Taylor. Although church membership afforded women considerable public honor, that did not stop Puritan men from continuing to monopolize the government of church affairs, including the hiring and firing ministers. Thanks to the more even gender balance in the tighter communities of denser settlement, larger numbers of new English women lived in close proximity than did their chesapeake sisters. In New England, women could more readily and routinely visit to borrow land, help, and talk. Female mutuality was strongest and most conspicuous at the most important perilous and joyful occasion in their lives. Childbirth. Men were excluded from the birthing chambers as the neighboring women gathered to pray into a cyst. In the early stage of labor, the mothers served refreshments of beer and cake. As their pains increased, the guests assisted the midwife in conducting the birth, supporting the squatting mother in their arms. Interjection. Who among us would say that the childbirth situation even today would not be improved upon by beer and cake? Back to Taylor, who is about to tell us that Puritan women would have been powerful influences on Twitter. Quote. Through their female networks, women exercised considerable informal influence, especially in regulating the all-important reputation of individuals. Women played a leading role in the oral circulation of news and opinion that determined the standing of men as well as fellow women in the community. Anyone, even a minister, who ran a foul of female opinion, lost credit and faced court or church inquiry, recognizing women's oral power over reputation. New English men frequently hailed women into court for slander. Indeed, women routinely appeared as plaintiffs, defendants, and witnesses in 17th century New England courts. The central concerns of Puritan law reinforce the female role in maintaining neighborly harmony, ensuring fair trading in the marketplace, and regulating sexual conduct. Women appeared less frequently in the 18th century when the courts became reoriented to regulate the increasingly extensive credit networks of expanding commerce, the realm of property men. During the late 1630s, New England thrived primarily from the regular infusion of newcomers, who brought currency and other capital and consumed and enhanced prices, the crops produced by the first commerce. Consequently, the termination of the Great Migration in 1640 produced an economic depression. Repeating conventional wisdom, Oliver Cromwell wrote off New England as poor, cold, and useless. in the center. In the 1640s, however, the new English innovated developing a complex and profitable place within the Atlantic Networks of Commerce. The process began with a creation of a fishing trade based in the northeastern coastal towns of Maine, New Hampshire, and Essex County, Massachusetts, primarily the towns of Marble Head and Gloucester. The fishermen primarily pursued Cod on the nearby Georgia's bank, or in the more distant, larger grandbags near Newfoundland. The New England fishermen exploited the disruption rot during the 1640s by civil war in England, which often prevented English fishing boats from venturing across the Atlantic. New England entrepreneurs rushed their boats into the gap, securing the leading share and a valuable staple. In 1641, the New English Cod and marketed 600,000 pounds of fish, accashed the grew 10 fold to 6 million pounds in 1675 when the New England fisheries employed 440 boats and more than 1,000 men. The New English shipped the better quality fish to Spain in Portugal, and their Atlantic islands, the Azores, Madera, and the Canaries. The inferior grades of fish went to the West Indies to feed the slaves working on sugar plantations. Especially hard, cold, dirty, dangerous, and poorly paid work. Fishing had little appeal to middling sort puritons, especially in a region that offered substantial farms. In New England, as in Old England, fishing employed hard drinking and hard swearing men with scant property and little reputation to lose. In contrast to the Puritans, who came primarily from southeastern England, most fishing folk originated in the English West country and came to New England with previous experience in the waters around Newfoundland. By developing the fishing trade, the Puritans rescued the region's economy, but at the cost of accepting the presence, albeit limited, the sort of rowdy and defiant folk, who made hope to leave behind in England. Loud and smoky waterfront taverns abounded in marblehead, but the inhabitants lacked a church until 1684. When obliged to choose a faith, most fishermen preferred a relaxed anglicanism with its ceremonies to an intense Puritanism with its strict morality and long sermons. A horrified cotton mather reported that a fellow minister had visited a northern fishing village to rebuke the people for neglecting the main end of planting this wilderness, a dedication to religion. A defiant fisherman retorted, "Sir, you think you are preaching to the people at the Massachusetts Bay. Our main end was to catch fish." Fisherman disproportionately appeared in the Puritan courts, charged with public drunkenness, assault and battery, blasphemy, Sabbath breaking, and fornication. The fisherman scandalized a 1664 official investigation that concluded some here are of the opinion that as many men may share a woman as they do about, and some have done so. Although important to the New England economy, the codfish never dominated the region in quite the way that tobacco determined prosperity or ruin in the Chesapeake. In New England, exports, cod was but the first among a diverse set of equals. And what Johnson explained, "Everything in the country provided a staple commodity. Wheat, rye, oats, peas, barley, pork, beef, fish, butter, cheese, timber, masts, tar, soap, plank boards, frames of houses, clabbard and pipe staves." Although New England farmers raised crops primarily for family and local consumption, they also generated small surpluses, which they sold to merchants to obtain West Indian and Chesapeake produce, as well as manufactured goods imported from England. No family wished to live by subsistence farming alone without the comforts of sugar, rum, tobacco, cloth and tools. Paradoxically, because New Englanders generated many small surplus crops, each of modest value, rather than a single, especially valuable staple. The region became the most pervasively commercialized within the empire. Indeed, the New English became notorious for their commercial acumen and cunning. Their wheeling and dealing to obtain small advantages. Seaport merchants packed and exported the agricultural surplus, along with lumber and fish to the West Indies to help feed and has the indentured servants and slaves working there. In exchange, the merchants procured molasses, rum and sugar, some for new English consumption, but most for carrying to other markets in the Chesapeake in Europe. The New English exported more to the West Indies than to the Mother Country, which did not need what New England could produce, but did demand the West Indian produce that the New English could convey to England in their own ships. During the 1680s, about half of the ships that served the English Caribbean came from New England. Although few New Englanders own slaves, their region's prosperity depended upon a trading system that serviced the wealthier slave-based economy of the West Indies. The royal official Edward Randolph concluded that it is then, in a great part, by means of New England, that the other plantations are made prosperous and beneficial. But it was also commerce for the West Indian plantations that enabled New England a prosper. If we combine the population figures of New England and the West Indies, we obtain a commonwealth that in its proportions of black and white, slave and free looks much like the Chesapeake, which was a region that sustained both farming and plantation agriculture. In effect, 17th century New England and the English West Indies developed in tandem, as mutually sustaining parts of a common economic system. Each was incomplete without the other. New English freedom depended on West Indian slavery. Okay, back to me for a moment. I wonder if New English freedom, as Taylor says, depended on West Indian slavery. But he concluded that New English prosperity depended on it, as he began the paragraph. I think Taylor would have been on stronger ground. Freedom and material prosperity are manifestly different things, as we are reminded endlessly by the big world in which we live, even allowing for expansive notions of freedom. Now, I am not an expert on the economic connections between New England and the British West Indies, which were no doubt very significant, as Taylor says. But that does not mean that New England would not have thrived, had there been no British West Indies. Suppose the Spanish had retained their hammer lock on the West Indies. Would Puritan Massachusetts have not found another way to succeed? I suspect it would have. And I suggest you listen to the rest of Taylor's own description of the economic development of the region with that very question in mind. So here we go. Back to Taylor, quote, "New England's fisheries and the carrying trade to the West Indies demanded ships. By the end of the 17th century, the New English were building almost all of the vessels they employed, as well as growing numbers for English merchants. New England shipbuilders exploited the abundant and cheap supplies of high quality timber harvested from the dense forests of New Hampshire and Maine. The low price of wood more than compensated for the higher cost of colonial labor, enabling New England to produce ships at half the cost of London shipyards. Between 1674 and 1714, New Englanders built more than 1200 ships, totally at least 75,000 tons. By 1700, Boston alone had 15 shipyards, which produced more ships than the rest of the English colonies combined, indeed, Boston ranked second only to London as a shipbuilding center in the empire. Shipbuilding was a powerful engine of economic development and diversification. To construct a hundred and fifty-ton merchant ship required up to 200 workers, most of them skilled artisans. Shipyards also stimulated an array of associated enterprises, sawmills, sailoffs, smithies, iron foundries, rope walks, barrel shops, and taverns. In addition, New England farmers benefited from feeding the artisans, victuallying the ships, and providing the timber to build them. In dad with good ships and skilled mariners, New England merchants developed profitable and far-flung transatlantic trading networks of growing complexity. New English shippers insinuated their vessels throughout the shipping lanes of the empire, earning freight charges for goods and either produced nor consumed in New England. By 1700, Boston was the third city in the empire and shipping, lagging behind only London and Bristol. Economic historians estimate that the carrying trade was worth more to colonial New England than all of its own exported produce. Although overseas trade certainly enriched a class of seaport merchants, the transatlantic [BLANK_AUDIO] commerce also attracted and benefited a broad array of small investors. Primarily, master mariners, shipwrites, and other skilled artisans. Boston shipping register for 1697 to 1714 reveals that over a quarter of the town's adult males own shares in at least one ship. In some, New England shipping and shipbuilding generated powerful linkages in contrast to a plantation staple, which discouraged collateral diversification and development. Aside today, the season such would call that an ecosystem. Ironically, for one of a plantation staple like tobacco or sugar, New England avoided the traps of a plantation economy. The highly uneven distribution of skill and income as a labor-intensive crop polarizes the population into large numbers of unskilled workers exploited by a smaller, wealthier elite. Built more on human frugality, labor, and ingenuity than upon material abundance, New England's surprising economic success generated more envy than admiration elsewhere in the English empire. Too much like the old country and climate resources and people, New England did not perform the preferred colonial function of producing high-value warm climate agricultural staples for the homeland. During the 1670s, an imperial official declared that Massachusetts was one of the smallest and poorest tracks of land and produces least of any of the other colonies for exportation. Whereas yet, New England conducted fisheries that carrying trade and shipbuilding, rendering the region a competitor rather than a complement to the economy of the mother country. English fishermen, merchants, and shipbuilders cried foul as they lost markets to the New English. Sir, Josiah Child warned, "Of all the American plantations as majesty has, none are so apt for the building of shipping as New England, nor none more comparably so qualified for the breeding of semen. Not only by reason of the natural industry of that people, but principally by reason for their cod and macro fisheries, and in my poor opinion, there is nothing more prejudicial and in prospect more dangerous to any mother kingdom than the increase of shipping in her colonies, plantations, or provinces." Seizing upon New England's reputation in the mother country is a den of puret and heretics and hypocrites, English economic interests call for an end to New England's virtual autonomy within the empire. Back to me. I hope this turns out to be a useful overview, so that the more granular episodes to come make sense in the wider context. To all of this, then, there are a couple of closing thoughts that have probably already occurred to you. First, by the standards of today, both the pace of social and technological change and economic growth in the 16th century were glacial. Things were happening much more rapidly than they did before 1492, but unlike today, people mostly expected that their world would not change very much between their childhood and their death. That New England, during one lifespan between 1630 and 1700, most of that time without the catalyst of immigration, would grow so quickly that it became worrisome competition for the mother country was nothing short of astonishing. Much of that had to do with the available natural resources, dast forests from which to build the ships to sail out of spectacular natural harbors. But a lot of it sprung from the extraordinary Puritan work ethic. Even the new English, as Taylor described them, were legally and culturally English, but their society and culture were diverging rapidly, especially because inbound immigration dried up. They did not know it then, and nobody used the word, but they were becoming American. In only one more lifespan, they would feel so profoundly American that they would go to war rather than submit to English rule any longer. Thank you again for listening to the History of the Americans podcast. Your emails have been very encouraging. Please keep them coming. You can reach me with questions, corrections, eruptions of indignation or pets on the back on the contact page for the website, thehistorytheamericans.com, or by email at [email protected]. And please do me the great favor of giving the podcast a robust rating on Apple, and following me on Twitter or the Facebook page for the podcast. Until next time.