Money

When the cargo of religious zealots aboard the Mayflower realized that their ship had taken them not to the prospering Virginia Colony but instead to some God-forsaken place full of rocks, they did the only sensible thing they could; they drew up a set of rules.

Before they set one foot on the new and unknown land they’d stumbled upon, they took the time to have a big meeting and decide how the place (which place they had no idea) should be run. We celebrate this as the Mayflower Compact.

Unfinished, Gary Hamel

Imagine yourself in their situation. After a sea voyage of weeks, food running low, lost, you wash up on uncharted shores. Don’t you think someone might have gotten up a party to take a look around outside the ship? Was it really that important to have all the rules nailed down before you even figured out how you were going to eat? To the Pilgrims, it was. They really liked rules. And God. They believed that living by their rules would make them more acceptable in God’s eyes and that was the whole point of life on this earth. Full stop.

The big drama in Wallace’s history of Canaan is the story of Noyes Academy. But in Wallace’s writing about almost all the years before Noyes Academy (1834/35), most of the disputes were about how best to worship God.

The long parade of ministers and preachers and evangelists is detailed in Wallace’s history with much amusement. The following passage from the book is about Thomas Baldwin, Canaan’s first home-grown Baptist preacher:

Page 167

But in the blush of their pleasure at having a leader, and while they were congratulating themselves upon their unanimity, there was heard one little piping voice and then another very feeble, sounding much as if ashamed of its own weakness, and then another ­– until five men came haltingly forward and “descented” to raising the tax. They did not believe it Scriptural to support a man for doing nothing but preach,– it would be encouraging laziness. They liked for the brethren to have a chance to tell of the Lord’s doings, and not pay for a man’s speech when his hands were idle. “No, they wan’t a going to do no such thing.” Everybody in that hard working community ought to have a chance to free his mind in his own way. It was put to vote, and those dissenting fellows were excused from paying any part of the tax.

Each year thereafter, Wallace duly noted the names of the men who declined to pay the tax for preaching. Their religious differences were if not honored, at least tolerated.

Early citizens of the US had to develop a deft hand at managing the explosions of religious fervor that swept through the country multiple times. Sects from the old country came here to worship their way only to divide into more sects as they walked their paths. Founding Faith: How Our Founding Fathers Forged a Radical New Approach to Religious Liberty by Steven Waldman explores the religious life of colonial America.

Waldman documents that we have the bit in the Constitution about separation of church and state not because Americans were a bunch of atheists but because they were so devout that they argued all the time about how, when and where to worship. In order to hold his Army of Revolution together, General Washington had to declare an end to the arguments about religion. They were one, new country, and that country had no official religion. Now form a unit and fight like brothers!

Separation of church and state was a military necessity. When you read Wallace about the turmoil over preaching, you begin to get an idea of what General Washington had to deal with.

When I first read the Wallace book, I kept waiting for the part about money. It’s there, but it very much takes a back seat to religion and politics, and Wallace doesn’t focus much of his attention on it. If Wallace’s telling is to be believed, these people really thought more of their souls than their pocketbooks.

But they did also think of their pocketbooks. And when it came to making money, it didn’t matter what you thought about slavery, the South had to be part of the equation.

Unfinished, Gary Hamel

It is hard to comprehend the vast difference in wealth between North and South in the years before the Civil War. The reason was cotton. Cotton drove the wealth of nations and the South grew cotton.

This blog isn’t about cotton, but it you would like to see the world in a whole new way, read Sven Beckert's Empire of Cotton: A Global History. It’ll blow your mind. The point of detailing this is to emphasize how different the prospects for North and South were financially in the early 1800s. While the Canaan brethren were debating the finer points of infant baptism, the Southern planters were the center of the world economy.

I already had a good idea of what was going on in the South during the 1830s. Before moving to Canaan, I lived many years in Houston, Texas which was founded around the same time as people in Canaan were pulling Noyes Academy down the street. I created a walking tour for one of Houston’s parks. The tour explained that for at least 20,000 years before the arrival of Europeans, Houston was a tall-grass prairie which was completely plowed under and turned into money.

I began the tour by saying “Cities exist where they do for three reasons, ecology, geography and money. And the first two only count in relation to the third.” Houston is the country’s fourth largest city and second largest port despite being 40 miles inland. All that money is the result of favorable ecology and geography and cotton.

New Hampshire does not enjoy favorable ecology, if by ecology you mean soil that easily produces harvests. Between the rocks, the short growing season and the cold, Canaan’s early subsistence farmers were doomed to do little more than subsist. But geography came to their rescue.

New England is a fall zone – a geographic region where elevated bedrock meets alluvial plain. A fall zone has fast-moving water because the water is falling downhill, racing to the sea. Rushing water can turn a wheel and once that wheel is turning, you can make a lot of things. New England might not have been well suited to farming, but when it came to manufacturing, it had everything it needed.

Except a market for manufactured goods.

The South couldn’t manufacture a thing. They had no rushing water. The same geography that gave New England rocks and tumbling water gave the South amazing farmland. The farmland was deposited, over time as all that water rushed to the sea. Great for farming, but, the only rushing water was hundreds of miles away and getting there was all upstream. The South didn’t have many mills.

The cotton produced by millions of enslaved men, women and children in the South was shipped to the mills in New England for processing. Everything was manufactured in New England. The shipping industry was also in New England. But if anyone in New England wanted to make any money, they did business with the South.

The Wallace History details at least one trading expedition to slave country. In 1836, a year after the doings around Noyes Academy, one of the Academy’s founders, Nathaniel Currier financed two men to travel south to do business. Those men were James Burns Wallace (William Allen Wallace’s older brother) and Hubbard Harris (another of the founders of Noyes Academy).

Page 540

Nathaniel Currier had proposed to him [James Burns Wallace] to go to Louisiana with Hubbard Harris on a trading trip, with ready-made clothing, socks, etc. He was to carry $8,000 to $10,000 worth of goods. He left Boston on October 30 and reached New Orleans on November 19.[…]

On the 6th of December he reached Natchitoches by boat up the Mississippi. He made a trip of fourteen days to Washington, Ark., on horseback, and after his return went to David Pratt’s store in the Parish of Claiborne, traveling sixty-five miles through the wilderness to find only two buildings, – Pratt’s store and a house of entertainment kept by one Drew, a superannuated planter. The first man whom he met was Doctor Nelson, who had left Canaan the March before. David Pratt was Mrs. Nathaniel Currier’s oldest brother.

One of the founders of Noyes purchased $8-10,000 of manufactured goods in Boston and sent two young men to sell those goods in the South. They went deep into slave country, where one of the founders of Noyes’ brother-in-law had set up a store in Claiborne Parish, Louisiana. The Curriers, Wallaces and Harris’s were staunch abolitionists. But they weren’t allergic to money. There was a network of family connecting Canaan to Louisana. And a network of a different sort running through the Currier home – the underground railroad.

It seems always to be the case that money changes the rules. What is admirable and interesting about the abolitionists is that in many ways they argued against their own financial interests.

Donna Dunkerton, when I called her with questions about that trading expedition to Louisiana, raised a question I hadn’t thought of. How did Nathaniel Currier get $10,000 in the first place? That was a huge sum of money in 1836.

I don’t know where he got his money. But I know a lot of the money in New York and New England came from financing the slave-driven cotton industry and trading with enslavers. The United States, even then, was an interconnected entity. But the accidental landing of the Mayflower in stony New England led to the establishment of two very different cultures shaped by vast differences in ecology and geology, that played out over time.

In a 1785 letter to a friend in France, Thomas Jefferson referred to Northerners as “cool, sober, laborious, persevering … interested, chicaning, superstitious and hypocritical in their religion.” Southerners were “fiery, voluptuary, indolent, unsteady… generous, candid, without any attachment or pretensions to any religion but that of the heart.” Northerners were “jealous of their own liberties, and just to those of others.” Southerners were “zealous for their own liberties, but trampling on those of others.”

Jefferson referred to the North as hypocritical in their religion because they were always going on about the evils of slavery, but when they wanted to do business, nary a peep out of them.

It took over 200 years before the power of the rushing water, ingenuity, and an absurd devotion to following rules produced enough prosperity in the North that they could put their foot down about slavery and really mean it this time.

But for those first 200 years, the money was in the South and men interested in money curried favor with enslavers. Jacob Trussell was interested in money.

Unfinished, Gary Hamel

Jacob Trussell, for those who haven’t closely read the prior two posts, is the man who whipped up the crowd that tore Noyes Academy from its foundation. He’s the villain of the story because he led the campaign to shut down the country’s first interracial coed school. He led the campaign to stamp out an early dream of the abolitionist movement.

He did all that. But not because he was particularly racist. Everyone was racist. He did it because he was a businessman. And that’s why he fought the school. And why he made sure to send word of his work to his imagined betters in the South. He wanted to reassure the people with the money, that someone in weird New England was looking out for their interests, for the interests of money.

His name comes up again and again in Wallace’s History. Almost every civic institution had Jacob Trussell as one of the founders, and he was usually the one who handled the money. According to references in Wallace’s history, Trussell operated a lumber mill in Canaan Village and a Joiner shop on Canaan Street.  He was President of Goose Pond Bank, which was cited for counterfeiting, but the men arrested did not include Trussell himself.

Page 461

There was years ago a bank started in this town. It was called the Goose Pond Bank and its place of business was not far from the Rainey house. Jacob Trussell was the president. They proceeded to issue money, but the government got after them. Joseph Smith, Simon Blanchard and John Pearley were caught stamping money in Blanchard’s barn. Selden Pattee, a brother of Robert Wilson’s wife, and Rice Howard fled. Jacob Drew, who was a good deal at Trussell’s courting one of the girls, disappeared when the arrests were made. Daniel Follensbee of Grafton was also under suspicion of being one of the gang. John Pearley served eight years in state prison for passing counterfeit money.

I think Wallace is implying that Jacob Drew got a head’s up and beat it out of town before the cops could arrive, the sort of wink and a nod to the way the family of wealthy men often escape consequences.

Jacob Trussell can best be understood not as a troublemaker, but rather as a senior member of Canaan’s Chamber of Commerce. He kept his eye on the money, where it went and how to get more of it. If that’s your perspective, anything that interfered with New England’s ability to do business was bad. Anything that promoted business was good. He, like most of New England, worked very hard not to see how evil the enterprise of slavery was, because most of New England was making money on cotton.

When Southern planters needed to borrow money, they didn’t mortgage their land, it would be worthless after a few years growing cotton. They mortgaged their slaves. New York banks wrote those mortgages and then sold them as speculative investments to other Northerners interested in participating in the economic boom that was cotton.

Jacob Trussell wasn’t an outlier. He was a successful man of his time. And he displayed the arrogance of the wealthy who believe their fortune is the result of virtue. In his thinking, abolitionists were pie-in-the-sky imbeciles who would tear the country in half (leaving New England in the part without the money) over a bunch of inconsequential black people.

That's shocking to our ears. But it wasn't to Trussell's.

Coming to terms with the racism of our forebears is another of the problems encountered in Wallace’s book. Everyone in the book would be judged cringingly racist by today’s standards. Even our heroes.

Wallace’s book contains a letter from Nathanial Peabody Rogers (a leading light of the abolitionist movement) to Noyes founder George Kimball. In this letter, N.P. Rogers envies Kimball his freed slave, Nancy. Rogers laments that he can’t get good help because they all disappear as soon as trained. But he notes that Nancy, because of her color, is locked in place. He playfully asks if Kimball can bring him a woman like Nancy next time he goes to Bermuda.

Page 227

Wish we had as good a little Bermudese as Nancy, instead of the white bird of passage. They are as restless and troublesome as the French Jacobins. I can’t keep one a week. Our Lydia is about retiring to her Peeling and then we have got the whole planet to circumnavigate for another. This notion of having a president only one term is making these jades as restless as king birds. They want to keep in perpetual rotation. When you next go to Bermuda you must bring Mary a neat little Bermudean she-Othello, as black as a blackberry and as clean as a penny. Blind her when you start or she will find her way back in six weeks on foot. You are better situated than anybody on earth. Your dwelling is an elegant retirement in a truly original neighborhood. Your faithful servant is cut off by her ebony hue, and by the waves that wallup towards our shores and the “vexed Bermoothes” from all propensity to quit your service and run home among white clowns and send you polling after another witch, to run away as soon as you have got her half learned.

What do we do with that? For one thing, read Ta-Nehisi Coates Between the World and Me and Issabella Wilkerson's Caste. The world has changed for the better, but not quickly and not enough.

After a great deal of consideration, I have decided that I can’t hold someone individually responsible for beliefs that come ready-made in their time. How do you know what you don't yet know? We learn. We change. We are no better. We all know damned well that CO2 is making the earth unlivable, yet we go on in a quite normal way.

The abolitionists did their work by making it impossible for men and women of good intent to persist in their ignorance. Jacob Trussell was redeemed in his politics if not his character. Wallace’s late embrace of him demonstrates that. He was a man of his time, not the devil, and the men who tore Noyes Academy from its foundations were also not the devil. Their intent was not to reject the humanity of half the world (although they did so), they were simply in favor of normal. In their time, normal included barbarity.