America's Maritime Legacy

A History Of The U.s. Merchant Marine And Shipbuilding Industry Since Colonial Times

Robert A. Kilmarx

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429727184
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

This book presents a comprehensive historical analysis of merchant shipping on the high seas and associated shipbuilding under sovereign U.S. jurisdiction from precolonial times to the present. It identifies U.S. policy developments that have affected the merchant marine and shipbuilding industries.

1
The Rise of the Shipping Industry in Colonial America

John J. McCusker

Our forefathers, mindful of the linkages between the private sector and the public sector, felt the colonists' interests were best served when the government took an active role in promoting private enterprise to the advantage of all.¹ Colonial businessmen and legislators, for instance, quickly discovered that their prosperity was linked to the carrying of trade: the more colonial shipping involved in the import and export of goods at colonial ports, the higher the level of economic benefit for everyone. American leaders throughout the colonies realized the need not only to produce goods for export but also to carry those goods to market themselves in their own ships. Acting upon this premise, colonial governments did all they could to support and promote the shipping industry.

Origins of Mercantilism and the U.S. Maritime Industry

English maritime policies during the colonial period of American history had their origins in the very policies that gave birth to the colonies themselves. Later writers gave the name mercantilism to a series of programs and legislation that had a unity of purpose, if not a uniformity in their planning and execution. The overall intent of English mercantilism was to build and strengthen the nation, to allow it to enter the ranks of the rising European nation-states along the Atlantic seaboard, and to maintain itself among them as an independent power. The immediate goals were political and military, but the means to attain them were financial and commercial.

A strong, self-sufficient England required money for the national government to answer to all the requirements of the monarch, including an army and a navy. Wartime emergencies could best be served by loans—forced or voluntary—from a wealthy commercial class. Regular revenues could best be raised from duties on imports and exports. To cultivate both trade and traders and to generate both customs revenues and a class of well-to-do capitalists required that the rulers of England protect and promote English commerce and shipping. Since in policy and in law English colonists were Englishmen, and English colonial ships were English ships, the merchants, ships, and sailors of the American colonies were also protected and promoted.

Colonies played an important part in the world-view of English mercantilism. The colonists established overseas markets to which the mother country could export goods. This stimulated English trade and, it was expected, English manufacturing. The colonists went abroad to improve their standard of living. They presumed that this would be reflected in a higher level of consumption of the goods of the mother country. They then would require the services of merchants, ships, and sailors to carry the goods they needed.

Colonies also provided imports for the mother country. The colonies became for the mother country a source of supply for commodities that the English had previously had to import from outside the empire, transferring a trade that had previously enriched foreign merchants and shippers to English hands. To the degree that the demand at home for those commodities was less than the entire supply imported, there remained a surplus for reexport abroad. Colonial commodities required English hands to process or otherwise prepare them for market, and Englishmen began to work in manufacturing as well as in trade. Colonies fit well into the purposes of mercantilism.

Recognition of the beneficial nature of protectionist policies for England preceded both the founding of colonies and the passing of statutes embodying the principles of mercantilism. Our understanding of the benefits that could be attained during the colonial period can be more clearly articulated if we employ some twentieth-century terminology. It is useful to define a few terms. Mercantilism sought, in effect, to create a permanent, indeed lopsided, surplus in a nation's balance of payments. Economists, looking back on this period, can delineate three separate accounts within that balance. Credits are earned in one or all of the accounts through exports; debits are earned through imports. One account balances debits and credits in the shipment of bullion: the bullion account. Another account deals with capital: the capital account. The third, the current account, concerns the exchange of commodities and the mercantile services—freight charges, insurance, handling costs—involved in moving those commodities.

In the period of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, writers often omitted calculating the credits and debits from mercantile services, now called for that reason the "invisibles" in the current account. Nor did they pay much attention to either the bullion or the capital accounts. Instead, most concentrated on the import and export of commodities and spoke only of the balance of trade. It is obvious to us now, even as it was to some people then, that the balance of trade excluded important transactions involved in international trade. Regardless of the manner in which they accounted for it, some writers, merchants, and government officials began to appreciate that the invisibles were an important factor in the balance of payments. A country's trade was even more advantageous if it were carried in its own shipping. Mercantilism was as much a set of policies to promote shipping as it was to stimulate trade.²

The perceived need to control and thereby to profit from the shipment of goods—as contrasted with the goods themselves— was an early and continuing feature of mercantilism. While we might indeed be more interested in the expressions of this policy during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as the pattern which had a major impact upon the colonies, it is appropriate to note that the earliest of such governmental efforts to promote English shipping can indeed be traced back to the subsidies offered by the legendary King Alfred. He is reported to have given rewards to those of his subjects who carried on at least three overseas ventures in their own vessels. Alfred is remembered, not coincidentally, as the founder of the English navy.

A series of similar measures, all with the purpose of inducing Englishmen to own and to use English shipping, litter the statute books down to the time of Elizabeth I at the end of the sixteenth century. The repetition was necessary simply because the measures enacted were never sufficient, either as threats or as inducements, to overcome the competitive advantage enjoyed by a succession of European rivals. The rights and privileges of aliens trading with England had an ancient origin in the financial needs of successive English monarchs who frequently permitted the foreign merchant even lower duties than those applicable to English merchants. Those measures were not abolished until 1598 when Elizabeth I withdrew the last of the privileges of the Hanseatic merchants. Only then could subsequent monarchs and parliaments frame efficient legislation promotive of English shipping.³

The major English mercantilistic legislation dates from the middle of the seventeenth century. That it took another fifty years after the reign of Elizabeth I for these laws to be promulgated is as much a testament to the increasing inability of monarch and parliament to work together as to anything else. Fifty years of quarreling finally ended with the Civil War, the beheading of Charles I, and the rise of Cromwell and the Protectorate in the middle decades of the century. The key acts were those passed in 1651 (which were modified and passed again by the Parliament of Charles II in 1660), in 1663, and in 1673. A later act of 1696 clarified and sharpened some procedures in the system set up in the earlier acts, just as other acts added to or subtracted from their provisions. These English acts of 1651-60, 1663, and 1673 were the core of a mercantilistic system that incorporated maritime and commercial policies under which English colonists grew and prospered. They established a pattern for the mercantile and commercial policies that Englishmen abroad repeated in miniature in colonial, and, later, in state and national laws. In working as well as they did, those policies also contributed to strains within the empire that were resolved only with the destruction of the transatlantic extension of English national interests.

The Colonial Maritime Industry

During the mercantilist period, the key factor for the colonists was that the navigation laws considered them Englishmen and their ships, English ships. In promoting English trade, Parliament promoted colonial trade. In promoting English shipping, Parliament promoted colonial shipping. In promoting English seamen, Parliament promoted colonial seamen. The acts of 1651-60 and 1663 had the effect of closing colonial ports to all but English ships, which were defined as ships owned by, under the captaincy of, and manned by Englishmen.

History emphasizes the restrictive aspects of this closed system for the colonists. The major colonial exports could be sent only to England in English ships. The act of 1663 established bonding procedures and heavy penalties to insure compliance; the act of 1673 set up customs authorities in the colonies to enforce its provisions. The act of 1696, among other things, instituted formal ship-registration procedures, akin to modern measures, that required a formal license to trade within the empire. Yet by "England" and "English" in all of these acts, the law explicitly included not only the residents of England, Wales, and—after 1707—Scotland, but also the residents of the English colonies in America. As shipowners, shipmasters, and sailors, they shared in that same exclusive license to trade within an empire which by 1775 was the richest and the strongest in the world. In the very restrictions and exclusivity of these Navigation Acts, the colonists found considerable opportunities for economic gain.

The growth of English trade and commerce over the century and a quarter after 1650 has been seen by Ralph Davis as a commercial revolution based on the rise of the English shipping industry. Englishmen moved rapidly to take over control not only of the trade to their own country and between England and its colonies, but also a goodly portion of the whole of European waterborne commerce. English builders soon learned to pattern their vessels on the Dutch flute, or flyboat, the most efficient carrier of cargo known, to increase their capacity. English captains and seamen contributed an increasing ship-handling ability and a knowledge of winds, currents, and tides to the expanding commercial scene. English merchants evolved networks of correspondents and agents to buy and sell goods in advance of a ship's arrival, to minimize time in port. English brokers and financiers organized credit and insurance techniques that made London the financial capital of the world by the late eighteenth century.

All of these developments served to lower costs and to increase profits for English shipowners and merchants—and to increase the numbers of merchants, ships, and sailors engaged in trade. The English commercial revolution of the seventeenth century set much of the stage for the nation's industrial revolution of the eighteenth century. And the English colonists learned from, patterned themselves upon, and took full advantage of the incentives and opportunities offered them by the commercial revolution in their mother country. As England prospered, so did the colonies.⁴

English maritime policy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries varied in its impact upon the colonies depending upon local circumstances. Nevertheless, they may be grouped for purposes of discussion, and we can organize the English colonies in North America roughly into four regions in order to analyze the impact of imperial policies and the colonists' responses to them: the New England colonies of Massachusetts (which after the 1690s included the modern state of Maine), New Hampshire, Rhode island, and Connecticut; the Middle Atlantic colonies of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware; the Chesapeake Bay colonies of Maryland and Virginia; and the Southern colonies of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia.

They can be grouped even more for ease of analysis, with New England standing as surrogate for all of the northern colonies and Virginia and Maryland for the southern colonies. A...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• About the Contributors and Editors
• 1. The Rise of the Shipping Industry in Colonial America
• 2. The Golden Age
• 3. The Civil War and the Period of Decline: 1861-1913
• 4. World War I Maritime Policy and the National Security: 1914-1919
• 5. The Years between the Wars: 1919-1939
• 6. The Contribution of U.S. Shipbuilding and the Merchant Marine to the Second World War
• 7. American Maritime Power since World War II
• 8. The Shipbuilding Industry: A Summary of Developments and Commentary