Manufactures appeared, though, with one exception, on a smaller scale than in Pennsylvania. The exception was shipbuilding. New England built ships for both American and English markets. With her splendid timber at the water's

edge, Massachusetts could launch an oak ship at about half the cost of a like vessel in an English shipyard; and in 1775 at least a third of the vessels flying the English flag had been built in America. The swift-sailing schooner, perfected in this period (page 119), was peculiarly a New England creation. Another leading industry was the fisheries,

cod,

mackerel, and finally, as these bred an unrivaled race of seamen, the whale fisheries of both polar oceans.

New England, too, was preeminently the commercial section. Her schooners, often from villages like Gloucester, carried almost all the trade between colony and colony for the whole seaboard. And in centers like Boston and Newport (as also in New York and Philadelphia in the Middle colonies) there grew up an aristocracy of great merchants (in the old English meaning of the word), with warehouses, offices, wharves, and fleets of tall-masted ships on every sea, and agents or correspondents in all parts of the world. One favorite "circle of exchange" was the "three cornered route": (1) New England merchants carried rum to Africa, to exchange for Negro slaves; (2) these they sold largely in the West Indies for sugar; and (3) this sugar they brought home, to make into more rum.

207. All the colonies imported their better grades of clothing and of other manufactures from England. The southern

1 See cut on page 396.

§ 208]

TRADE AND MONEY

173

planters dealt through agents in England, to whom they consigned their tobacco. For the other colonies the "circle of exchange" was a trifle more complex. They imported from England more than they sold there. But they sold to the West Indies more than they bought, receiving the balance in money, mainly

French and Spanish coins, with which they settled the balances against them in England.

208. This drain of coin to England was incessant through the whole colonial period. No coins were struck in the colonies, of course, except for the "Pine-Tree Shilling," of Massachusetts (§ 141); and there were no banks, to issue currency. Trade was largely carried on, not by money, but by barter; and in all colonies, especially in the first century, debts were settled and

taxes were paid in produce ("pay") at a rate for each kind fixed by law. (Cf. § 164 for tobacco in Virginia.)

Wages and salaries were paid in the same way. The following record of a vote by a Plymouth town meeting in 1667 hints at the difficulty of getting "good pay" in such a method:

"That the sume of fifty pounds shalbee alowed to Mr. Cotton [the minister] for this present yeare (and his wood). To be raised by way of

Rate [assessed as a tax] to be payed in such as god gives, ever onely to be minded that a considerable parte of it shalbee payed in the best pay."

Toward the end of the colonial period the accounts of Harvard show that a student, afterward president of the college, paid his tuition with " an old cow which had to be accepted at the same value as a young and good cow.

In the need of a "circulating medium" (especially during the French and Indian Wars, when the governments needed funds), nearly all the colonies at some time after 1690 issued paper money. The matter was always badly handled, and great depreciation followed, with serious confusion to business. In consequence, the English government finally forbade any more such issues, to the great vexation of many people in America. 209. The South had few towns, -none south of Baltimore, except Charleston. The ordinary planters lived in white frame houses, with a long porch in front, set at intervals of a mile or more apart, often in parklike grounds. The small class of wealthy planters lived on vaster estates, separated from

§ 210]

NORTH, SOUTH, AND WEST

175

neighbors by grander distanees. In any case, a true "plantation," like a medieval manor, was a unit, apart from the rest of the world. The planter's importations from Europe were unladen. at his own wharf, and his tobacco (with that of the neighboring small farmers) was taken aboard. Leather was tanned; clothing for the hundreds of slaves was made; blacksmithing, woodworking, and other industries needful to the little community, were carried on, sometimes under the direction of White foremen. The mistress supervised weaving and spinning; the master rode over his

fields to supervise culti
vation. The two usually
cared for
for the slaves,
looked after them in
sickness, allotted their
daily rations, arranged
"marriages." The cen-
tral point in the planta-
tion was the imposing
mansion of brick or wood,
with broad verandas, sur-
rounded by houses for
foremen and other assist-
ants and by a number of
offices. At a distance was a little village of Negro cabins.
The chief bond with the outer world was the lavish hospitality
between the planter's family and neighbors of like position
scattered over many miles of territory.

THE "OLD SHIP" MEETING HOUSE at
Hingham, Massachusetts, built in 1681.
From a recent photograph.

210. A wholly different society was symbolized by even the exterior of New England. Here the small farms were subdivided into petty fields by stone fences, gathered from the soil. All habitations clustered in hamlets, which dotted the landscape. Each was marked by the spire of a white church, and, seen closer, each was made up of a few wide, elm-shaded streets with rows of small but decent houses in roomy yards.

And yet, even in New England, people were expected to

dress according to their social rank; and inferiors were made to "keep their places," in churches and public inns. The club room and the inn parlor were for the gentry only: the tradesman and his wife found places in the kitchen or tap room. 211. The symbol of the West was neither the broad-verandahed country mansion nor the town of elm-shaded streets

clustering about a white

spire. Rather it was a stockaded fort, with scat

tered log cabins, in their

clearings,

stump-dotted
spotting the forest for miles
about it.

As early as 1660, in Virginia, there was a difference noticeable between eastern and western counties. The great planters were not much attracted to the ruder frontier, and so the western districts were left almost wholly to a demo

FORT STEUBEN, 1787. A typical Western cratic society of small

center of settlement. From a recent restoration.

farmers. Bacon's Rebellion naturally took its rise

in these counties. All this was true before any non-English immigration appeared in Virginia.

So too in New England, where there was little non-English immigration until long after the Revolution. By 1700, good land was scarce in the settled districts, and the town "freeholders were less and less willing to admit " cottagers" (§ 107) to rights of wood and pasture on the town "commons." Accordingly, the more enterprising and daring of the landless men began to strike out for themselves in new settlements far up the rivers, usually at some point where good waterpower