Their Industries and Commercial Restrictions

The Maryland settlers were greater formalists in religion and less restrained in their conduct than the New Englanders or the Dutch. They were generally more refined than the colonists of the East, and equally industrious, but they lacked the unwearied perseverance in pursuits of the latter. As in New England, so in Maryland, the peculiarities of the inhabitants had been greatly modified by inter-migration at the middle of the last century. Religious intolerance had been subdued; and when common danger called for common defenders of the soil and of the chartered rights of the colonists, they stood shoulder to shoulder in battle-array and in legislative halls.

The principal pursuit of the English-American colonists was agriculture. At the time we are considering, commerce and manufactures were struggling here against unwise and unjust laws for existence. With forced self-reliance, the people had been compelled, from the beginning, to make their own apparel, their simple furniture, and their implements for labor, which they could not buy from the looms and workshops of Old England; and manual labor was regarded as honorable and dignified, especially in New England and the immediately adjoining provinces. The evil example of an idle privileged class was never before the settlers in the forests of America.

The commerce of the English-American colonies had a feeble infancy, and was stunted in its growth by oppressive navigation laws. Indeed, their trade may not properly be dignified with the name of commerce before the Revolution. So early as 1636, a Massachusetts vessel of thirty tons made a voyage to the West Indies; and two years later another vessel went from Salem to New Providence, and returned with a cargo of cotton, salt, tobacco and negroes. This was the beginning of negro slavery in New England. It was recognized by law in Massachusetts, in 1641; in Connecticut and Rhode Island, about the year 1650; in New York, in 1656; in Maryland, in 1663; and in New Jersey, in 1665. There were but a few slaves in Pennsylvania. Some were there as early as 1690, and were chiefly in Philadelphia. At about the same time a few appeared in Delaware. In Virginia, as we have seen, they were introduced in 1619; and in the Carolinas, at the time of their settlement. By an evasion of law they were taken into Georgia about the year 1752.

The successful voyages of these vessels from Massachusetts were regarded with joy, as the harbingers of a flourishing American commerce; and the New England people, especially, looked forward with expectations of much wealth to be derived from the ocean, for they were then quite extensively engaged in fishing. But a navigation act passed by the republican parliament in 1651, gave them warning of English jealousy; and its restoration, with more stringent clauses, by the royal parliament in 1660, satisfied the colonists that their commerce was doomed, because it seemed to be regarded as a promising rival of that of Great Britain. After that the attention of parliament was called from time to time to the industries of the American colonies, and laws were made to regulate them. In 1719, the House of Commons declared that "erecting any manufactories in the colonies tended to lessen their dependence on Great Britain, " and they were discouraged. A little earlier a British author had written: "There be fine iron works which cast no guns; no house in New England has above twenty rooms; not twenty in Boston have ten rooms each; a dancing-school was set up here, but put down; a fencing-school is allowed. There be no musicians by trade. All cordage, sail-cloth and mats, come from England; no cloth made there worth four shillings per yard; no alum, no salt made by their sun."