Salt (34 page)

The American colonies, especially the two most productive, Virginia and Massachusetts, became accustomed to selling their products around the Atlantic world. New England began by selling salted cod and salted furs but soon was selling manufactured goods, buying iron and Mediterranean products in the Basque port of Bilbao, selling cod for slaves in West Africa, slaves for molasses in the Caribbean, rum made from molasses in West Africa.

By the early 1700s, Boston merchants did not feel that they needed England anymore. In one important respect, they were wrong. Despite increasingly independent and sophisticated trans-Atlantic commerce, they still depended on England for salt. New Englanders occasionally imported salt from other countries. Ships selling cod to Bilbao would pick up salt from southern Spain at Cadiz or Portuguese salt at Lisbon. But in 1775, like exemplary British colonists, the Americans were still relying on British salt—either Cheshire salt from Liverpool or sea salt from the British colonies, especially Great Inagua, Turk Island, and Salt Cay.

Tom Paine’s contention that a continent obviously could not be ruled by an island was increasingly resonating among the merchant class. In 1759, the British, sensing that American trade was leading to American independence, started imposing punitive tariffs, taxes, and other measures designed to inhibit American trade. The Americans responded angrily, and the British responded with even harsher measures. In 1775, the atmosphere was so embittered that the British thought it necessary to place 3,000 troops in rebellious Boston under Major General Thomas Gage. When these soldiers attempted to spread out into the countryside, Americans went into armed rebellion, firing on the British troops at Concord and Lexington on April 19. The Continental Congress, first called in 1774 as a protest, reconvened in May 1775 to prepare for war.

In June, while the Congress was still meeting, the rebels marched on Boston and Gage committed all but 500 of his troops to a battle on Breed’s Hill above Boston Harbor. Although the British objective of holding Boston was accomplished, Gage lost more than 40 percent of his soldiers in this engagement. Incorrectly known as the Battle of Bunker Hill, this was to be the worst British loss of the war.

In the summer of 1775, the British declared the colonies in open rebellion and responded with a naval blockade, causing an immediate and serious salt shortage, not only for the fisheries but for the soldiers, horses, and medical supplies of George Washington’s Continental army. In addition to the blockade, British ground forces isolated the mid-Atlantic colonies from their two sources of American salt: New England and the South. They even attacked and destroyed mid-Atlantic saltworks.

A
FTER THE BUNKER
Hill debacle, Gage was replaced as commander of British forces in America by General William Howe, an illegitimate relative of the royal family. In 1758, Howe had been elected a Member of Parliament and had opposed measures against American commerce, fearing British policy would lead to a loss of the colonies. Now he was ordered to hold them by force. In August 1776, he took Long Island and then New York City. The next year, he drove Washington from Philadelphia. At this point in the war, he had successfully cut off Washington’s army from its coastal salt supply and even captured Washington’s salt reserves, despite the American general’s desperate dispatch warning, “Every attempt must be made to save it.”

The American colonists initially responded to the British blockade by boiling sea water. But boiling used up an enormous quantity of wood to make a very small amount of salt. About 400 gallons of seawater were needed to make one bushel of salt. In the winter, families would keep an iron caldron of seawater cooking over the household fire, which was not a great additional expense, since the fire was burning continuously anyway to heat the house. But only a small amount of salt was produced this way. Salt makers drove wooden stakes into tidal pools, and salt would crystalize on the wood as the pools evaporated. This technique was inexpensive but also yielded little.

The Continental Congress passed several measures addressing the salt shortage. On December 29, 1775, the Congress “earnestly recommended to the several Assemblies and Conventions to promote by sufficient public encouragement the making of salt in their respective colonies.”

In March 1776,
Pennsylvania Magazine
published a lengthy excerpt from Brownrigg’s essay on making bay salt. The article was reprinted as a pamphlet and circulated by the Congress. On May 28, 1776, the Congress decided to give a bounty of one third of a dollar per bushel, which weighs about fifty pounds, to all salt importers or manufacturers in the colonies for the next year. The moment the pamphlet and bounty offer were published, salt-works were started along the American coastline. New Jersey had contemplated establishing a state-operated saltworks, but so many private ones were built along its coast in 1777 that it canceled these plans as unnecessary.

In June 1777, a congressional committee was appointed “to devise ways and means of supplying the United States with salt.” Ten days later the committee proposed that each colony could offer financial incentives to both importers and producers of salt. Some of the thirteen colonies had already been doing this. New Jersey declared that any saltwork could exempt up to ten employees from military service.

O
NE OF THE
many sea salt operations to start up in response to the government’s publication of the Brownrigg pamphlet and bounty offer was the first saltworks on Cape Cod. Given the cod-fishing communities and the presence of sea and wind, Cape Cod was a logical place to make salt. The water both on the bay side and in Nantucket Sound is even saltier than that of the open Atlantic.

The first works was started in the town of Dennis by John Sears, who spent his days so lost in thought that he was known as “Sleepy John Sears.” The neighbors were skeptical of the 10-by-100-foot wooden vat Sleepy John built in Sesuit Harbor. The vat leaked, and after many weeks he had produced only eight bushels of salt.

The neighbors laughed, but Sleepy John Sears spent the winter caulking the vat as a ship’s hull would be sealed. In the summer of 1777, a time of great salt scarcity, he produced thirty bushels of salt and his neighbors stopped laughing, and Sleepy John became known as Salty John Sears.

The following year, the British man-of-war the
Somerset
ran aground trying to round the Cape. The coastline was poorly marked, and scavenging shipwrecks was a strong local tradition. Sears took the
Somerset
’s bilge pump to fill his vats. But even with the bilge pump, producing Sears’s salt required a great deal of heavy manual labor, and only wartime prices made this high-cost salt economically viable.

Then a man named Nathaniel Freeman, from nearby Harwich, suggested that Sears use windmills to pump seawater. The same thing had been done in eighth-century Sicily, in Trapani, but Cape Codders thought this was a brilliant new idea. Soon the wooden skeletons of rustic windmills were seen on the edges of most Cape Cod towns. The windmills, known as saltmills, pumped seawater through pipes—lead-lined hollowed pine logs—to the evaporation pans. But in a climate where solar evaporation was viable only in the summer months, the hardship of wartime made this operation profitable. And still these rebel colonies could not produce enough salt to meet their needs.

Fishermen with catches to be salted and farmers with pigs and cattle to slaughter and salt before winter hoped for a short war, but that was not to be. By the time it ended with the Treaty of Paris in September 1783, the American Revolution would be, until Vietnam, the longest war ever fought by the United States. A new nation was born with the bitter memory of what it meant to depend on others for salt.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Liberté, Egalité, Tax Breaks

I
N 1875, A
prominent German botanist named Matthais Jakob Schleiden wrote a book,
Das Salz,
which contended that there was a direct correlation between salt taxes and despots. He pointed out that neither ancient Athens nor Rome, while it remained a republic, taxed salt, but listed Mexico and China among the salt-taxing tyrannies of his day. It seems uncertain if salt taxes are always an accurate litmus test for democracy, but the French salt tax, the gabelle, clearly demonstrated what was wrong with the French monarchy.

The argument for the gabelle had been that since everyone, rich and poor, used salt more or less equally, a tax on salt would be in effect a poll tax, an equal tax per person. Throughout history, poll taxes, charging the same to the poorest peasant as the richest aristocrat, have been the most hated. The gabelle was not an exception. The tax performed the peculiar service of making a very common product seem rare because the complex rules of taxation inhibited trade. And even more infuriating, the gabelle made a basic product expensive, for the profit of the Crown.

Even the Crown’s claim that the gabelle was fair because it taxed everyone equally was not true. There were many arbitrary provisions, such as the exemptions for the town of Collioure; for some, but not all religious institutions; some officers; some magistrates; some people of note.

The gabelle, like France, was established piecemeal. The first attempt at a comprehensive salt administration occurred in the Berre saltworks near Marseilles in 1259, by Saint Louis’s brother, Comte Charles de Provence. The following century, this administration was extended to Peccais, Aigues-Mortes, and the Camargue—an area that became known administratively as Pays de Petite Gabelle. In 1341, Philip VI established a salt administration in northern France that was labeled the Pays de Grande Gabelle. At the time, these two areas included most of the territory controlled by the French Crown.

At first the gabelle imposed a modest 1.66 percent sales tax on salt. But each monarch eventually found himself in a crisis—a prince to be ransomed, a war to be declared—that was resolved by an increase in the salt tax. By 1660, King Louis XIV regarded the gabelle as a leading source of state revenues.

One of the gabelle’s most irritating inventions was the
sel du devoir,
the salt duty. Every person in the Grande Gabelle over the age of eight was required to purchase seven kilograms (15.4 pounds) of salt each year at a fixed high government price. This was far more salt than could possibly be used, unless it was for making salt fish, sausages, hams, and other salt-cured goods. But using the sel du devoir to make salted products was illegal, and, if caught, the perpetrator would be charged with the crime of
faux saunage,
salt fraud, which carried severe penalties. Many simple acts were grounds for a charge of faux saunage. In the Camargue, shepherds who let their flocks drink the salty pond water could be charged with avoiding the gabelle.