Before the Harvest

SALEM AND THE INDIES (468 pp.)--James Duncan Phillips--Houqhton Mifflin ($6).

No one has done for other fields what Van Wyck Brooks did for New England letters. No one has written a comparable flowering of American industry, or of American military or naval life. It may be that such works will never be written, that the American achievement in other spheres has been too diversified and chaotic, its conflicts too bitter, its heroes too narrow.

But there was one period--between the Revolution and the War of 1812--and one place, the ports of New England, when the scene was small enough to be grasped and the time span not too great to be covered, when a kind of flowering of commerce took place, as wonderful in its own way as the literary harvest that followed it. Samuel Eliot Morison's The Maritime History of Massachusetts, touches on this period; Salem and the Indies covers it in detail.

James Duncan Phillips' book has none of the romance and the fresh salt air of Morison's unforgettable work; it is exact, down to earth, sometimes crabbed and partisan. Mr. Phillips is a retired businessman, for 25 years treasurer of Houghton Mifflin, and a local historian, the author of Salem in the Seventeenth Century and Salem in the Eighteenth Century, His prose is as clear and dry as a salary check. He has written what is probably the best history that there is, factual and authoritative, of an American port.

Phillips is perhaps the last advocate of that vanished conservative party, the Federalists. He believes that present-day attempts "to make Jefferson's reputation great by inflation may burst the bubble," and speaks of the explosive honesty of John Adams, the "underhanded tact and hypocrisy" of Jefferson, the "subtle and persistent venom" of John Quincy Adams. Such blunt historical editorializing has scarcely been seen in the U.S. since the days he writes about. But his partisanship for the Federalists is no greater than that of Morison and Brooks and Arthur Schlesinger for Thomas Jefferson and the Democrats.

Incredible Riches. A literal account of the prosperity, the civilization and happiness of life in Salem in the years of its prosperity seems not quite credible. The modern reader instinctively feels that there must have been some catch in it somewhere. Yet the truth is that historians have not glamorized Salem's past.

Mr. Phillips, for example, barely mentions the cruise of Nathaniel Silsbee in the Benjamin. Silsbee was her captain at 19, with a crew of boys. The cargo cost $18,000. They sold it at the Isle of France (Mauritius), converted the profit to gold, and made about $54,000 in six months, because of the inflation of the currency during an embargo. They sent perhaps $25,000 to Salem (to pay for their ship and cargo), bought $30,000 worth of wine at the Cape of Good Hope, sold it at the Isle of France for about $90,000, and returned to Salem with still another cargo--a return of perhaps $125,000 in all.

All over the world there were savages who believed, with some cause, that there was a great kingdom, somewhere beyond the sea, called Salem. Its subjects sailed small, fast ships, with crews of eight or ten men, laden with rice, butter, pepper, snuff, beer, rum, iron, earthenware, harnesses and shoes, which they traded for any commodity whatever that they could sell at a profit. They remained in port briefly. They sailed ships that bore the names of their wives and sweethearts--there were 45 Betseys, 33 Sallys and 26 Pollys registered in Salem. A year or two later they returned, often with a larger ship and a richer cargo.

King Derby's Rule. Actually, Salem was "just one long street and every side lane ran down to the water and stopped." Yet the savages were not altogether wrong. Salem was a kind of independent principality within the U.S.--her greatest merchant, who had one blue eye and one brown, was even called "King" Derby. It was a very democratic and hard-working kingdom, however, with its own politics, imperfectly understood elsewhere, its own court and almost its own state religion. The most princely merchant, like the simplest commoner, went to work soon after 6 a.m. each day.

The whole town participated in the profits of the voyages. The houses grew larger, the goods more luxurious, the ships bigger, the homes filled with rare and curious things--foreign objects, "ivories and porcelains, spices and teas, lacquered ware and lovely shawls and textiles." Every shipmaster and mate, many ships' carpenters and able seamen, shopkeepers, cabinetmakers and ironworkers, had shares in the voyages or sent their own products abroad. Profits on the voyages to Canton were often from 100 to 300%--a single voyage might net $200,000.

In its heyday the sixth largest city in the U.S. and the second in New England, Salem was always more worldly and sophisticated than the country at large. There was always something queer about the town, though of this side of Salem, Mr. Phillips' book has nothing to say. It had a deep New England tendency to seclusion and secrecy; narcotic addicts dreamed in the old houses; misers accumulated wealth and buried it; achievements and scandals alike were hoarded.

To some, Author Phillips' description of Salem's great moment may seem like a rather ill-timed assertion of the superiority of the past. Yet Mr. Phillips' account of the Salem Federalists is enlightening. Jefferson in maritime New England was about as popular as Sherman became in Georgia. At the very height of Salem's prosperity, Jefferson's embargo (his "moral equivalent" of war against Britain) destroyed it. The Federalists, sympathizing with England rather than with Napoleonic France, had no confidence in Jefferson's motives or in his economics. A hundred vessels lay in the harbor, while the crews lived on charity, the shipyards grew idle, the ropemakers and sailmakers went out of business, the stores closed, the blockmakers, pumpmakers, anchor smiths and chainmakers were out of work, the farmers could no longer bring their produce to town, the masts and spars and oak planks no longer came in from the forests. Phillips estimates that during the year it lasted, the embargo cost the country $80,000,000. If Jefferson thought he was punishing England and France for interfering with American commerce, why was the embargo extended to include the Far East?

Salem believed that Jefferson had imposed the embargo because of his visionary theories, that he persisted in it from pride of opinion, and eventually, that he was determined to ruin New England. Ten years passed before Salem shipping recovered from the effects of the embargo. The old spirit of adventure never came back. Salem crumbled, like one of the ships in her harbor. "It fell to atoms," said Oliver Wendell Holmes, "but never ceded itself to the new era."

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