§ 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 col

the first century,

debts were settled and

a bill in the collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

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 distances. 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 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

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 democratic society of small 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

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THE DEMOCRATIC WEST

177

suggested a mill site, and always where land could be taken almost at will. Long before the Revolution, men of New England birth had begun a new and more democratic New England in the pine woods up the Kennebec and Androscoggin in Maine, along the upper course of the Merrimac in New Hampshire, in the Green Mountains of what was one day to be "Vermont," and in the Berkshires of Massachusetts

Pittsfield on the upper Housatonic.

as about

Meanwhile, further west, beyond the first mountain range, in the long valleys from Georgia to New York, the Scotch-Irish and the Germans were building the true West (§ 180). No rivers made visits and trade possible for them with the older settled area - divided from it as they were by the bristling Blue Ridge; and so here difference of race and lack of intercourse added to the earlier distinction between eastern and western districts.

But in all the western regions, English or German or Irish, east or west of the Blue Ridge, compared with the tidewater districts, there was little aristocracy. There were few large proprietors, few gentry, few servants, almost no slaves. The gold lace and powdered wigs of the older sections were rarely seen, and only on some official from the eastern counties. Nearly every male settler was a free proprietor working his own land with his own hands, and eating and wearing the products of his own labor. There were fewer schools and fewer clergy than in the older region; and the hard conditions of life in the wilderness, and constant touch with savage enemies, developed a rudeness of manner and a ruthless temper. Both for good and bad, this new frontier had already begun to Americanize the old Europeanized frontier of the tidewater districts.

FOR FURTHER READING. Besides references in the footnotes, the attention of reading students is called to the following material: James Russell Lowell's essay "New England Two Centuries Ago" in his Works; Channing, II, 367-526; Alice Morse Earle's Customs and Fashions in Old New England and Home Life in Colonial Days. Fiction: Mary Johnston's Prisoners of Hope; F. J. Stimson's King Noanett. (Both these stories deal with White servitude.)