TRADERS

THOMAS WESTON SAW POTENTIAL for profit in southern New England and pursued various means to achieve it. He connected London investors to prospective migrants in Leiden, contributing to the founding of Plymouth but failing to benefit himself in the process. Deciding to establish his own trading venture near the new plantation, he dispatched sixty men in 1622 to set up an outpost north of Plymouth. Many of those men resided for the summer in Plymouth before moving twenty-five miles up the coast, to the site of what is today Weymouth, Massachusetts. Weston’s scheme fared poorly, as indeed all his undertakings seemed to do. After living off of Plymouth for some months, his men failed to apply themselves in Wessagussett (as his outpost was dubbed). Like the early arrivals in Virginia, his crew neglected basic tasks necessary to survival. Later Plymouth author Nathaniel Morton attributed their failure to the fact that theirs was “an unruly company, that had no good government over them.”¹ Soon desperate and hungry, the men either stole food from nearby Native communities or traded their possessions (including clothes and guns) for food. Having fomented their neighbors’ animus, the starving Weston men feared an imminent attack and turned to Plymouth for help. A company under Miles Standish journeyed north and there assailed Wessagussett’s long-suffering neighbors, an unjustified assault that prompted Leiden pastor John Robinson to chide his former parishioners.² With any chance of trade squandered, the men soon abandoned the site. Weston’s hopes for profit were dashed, rendering him nearly destitute.

Traders in early Plymouth have often been presented as problematic outsiders, like these Wessagussett men. The Weston men certainly caused numerous difficulties: depleting Plymouth stores during the early, lean years and sparking conflict with the local peoples (not to mention failing to set up the trading post Weston desired). His outpost was one of a number of lesser efforts that brought a scattering of mostly men to the area in the 1620s. These endeavors aimed to trade, and they were staffed largely by hired men or servants. Such outposts had little in common with Plymouth. Most of the men involved went as employees. Weston’s men seemed ill-prepared for the enormity of their undertaking and the work that would be needed to make it succeed. Plymouth’s complaints about the purported laziness of the Wessagussett men echoed similar criticisms aimed at the first English in Virginia, another group initially made up only of men and seeking immediate profit.³ These complaints suggested that the men involved were of a different sort, in this case not the hard-working planters of Plymouth but a dissolute band of lazy freeloaders. Although at least one of Weston’s men, Phineas Pratt, later lived in Plymouth—there marrying, raising a family, and pursuing a career as a joiner (or skilled carpenter)—most of the men disappeared from New England with the collapse of the endeavor, sealing their status as interlopers.⁴ Nathaniel Morton, noting that they departed without repaying any of the aid Plymouth had given them, further remarked that it was a providence of God that such strong and capable men (he used the contemporary equivalent, “lusty”) failed when Plymouth, burdened with women and children, succeeded. Morton’s implication was clear: God smiled on Plymouth but not on such men who neither pulled their weight nor paid their way.⁵ Traders in and around Plymouth are generally treated in exactly that light: as outsiders with a potential to create trouble.

The men associated with another trading attempt—that at Mount Wollaston—proved the point even more decisively. Captain Richard Wollaston established an outpost in 1624 or 1625, in what is now Quincy, Massachusetts. He staffed it with three or four gentlemen and a great number of servants. It too disappointed, and Wollaston decided to make a try in Virginia instead. Before he had a chance to move all his laborers south, Thomas Morton, one of the elite men involved, enticed many of them to join him in his own endeavor. His “Merry Mount” became a site of debauchery—according to the outraged William Bradford at least—and he irked all his nearby countrymen, not just those in Plymouth but also those living scattered in households that had sprung up in the vicinity of the future Boston. His critics cited gun sales to Native peoples as one reason to drive Morton away, but the whole tenor of his undertaking offended, assuming the stories of excessive drinking and sexually abusing Native women were accurate. English men with property feared servants out of control—the infamous problem of “masterless men”—and Morton, an elite man who encouraged rather than controlled these men, earned their particular ire. The trajectory from Mount Wollaston to Merry Mount confirmed in Plymouth leaders’ minds that trading outposts and the men who staffed them were potential sources of grave difficulties.

The Wessagussett and Mount Wollaston undertakings were launched on different terms than Plymouth, in that they focused on trade over plantation. In this respect, they bore more similarity to trading forts (often called factories because they employed merchant factors) in the Indian Ocean or other remote locations. To use their own language, whereas the Plymouth endeavor was a plantation since it intended to transplant people permanently, these neighboring projects used employees with only a short-term commitment to pursue profits through trade. Their residence in the area was incidental, a means to another end, instead of being the point of the undertaking. English men initially came to Virginia intending to trade rather than settle, and the investment company overseeing that effort moved only gradually toward colonization as residents began to produce and ship tobacco that required additional workers to make profits. Most trading outposts around the globe relied on an area’s original inhabitants to generate trade goods, leaving those in the factory simply to purchase and ship the items. They did not intend to take territory and institute their own land-use practices—as the Plymouth people did—and in many locations they would have been unable to do so had they wished to displace the inhabitants. Instead they aimed to extract things of value, working with the residents to acquire them. The best-known trading forts in the Atlantic world were those that marketed slaves on the coast of Africa, but that trading factory model also applied where the trade was in spices, silks, or other valuable items. New Netherland was initially organized around this model, with furs being the object in that case. The staffing of these outposts differed from the population of Plymouth, reflecting their different purpose.

Plymouth’s difficulty with traders arose not solely in regard to annoying nearby settlements, but also in relations with one of its own. Isaac Allerton’s business dealings eventually drove a wedge between him and his fellow Plymouth leaders, a fact that has been cited to suggest that Plymouth was uncomfortable with trade in general. Allerton came to Leiden in 1608, where he joined the church and married a fellow member. One of the better-off English men in Robinson’s church, he worked on the arrangements for the move and journeyed to New England on the first ship. When the settlers in 1621 decided their governor needed an assistant, they chose Allerton. In the same year, having been widowed, he married Fear, daughter of William Brewster, the church elder. Like Edward Winslow, he negotiated with local Native leaders and traveled back to England repeatedly on plantation business. He played a key role in replacing the large investment group that initially backed the migrants with a smaller partnership between a handful of London investors and a number of Plymouth men (including himself), designated as “Undertakers.”⁶ This term referred to the fact that they undertook to pay off the debt incurred in planting Plymouth, just as the investors who had risked (or adventured) their money were “Adventurers.” In subsequent years, he continued to oversee plantation business affairs.

Eventually his dealings led to a falling out with his fellow Plymouth Undertakers. Allerton may have been guilty of defrauding his friends or his failing may have been sloppy bookkeeping that made it difficult to separate his private affairs from his work for Plymouth. He certainly made commitments on behalf of Plymouth that his compatriots did not accept. Charles McLean Andrews long ago suggested that Allerton was at least “unbusinesslike and careless.”⁷ While Bradford and others came to suspect him of cheating, their own poor bookkeeping practices foiled their efforts to prove these suspicions. The culprit on their side was Edward Winslow’s newly arrived younger brother Josiah, who proved a disastrous choice as their clerk but never earned their personal ire as Allerton did. In fact, the younger Winslow became a longtime resident and leading magistrate.⁸ Allerton eventually left Plymouth, living in other parts of New England. He died insolvent in New Haven Colony in 1659, his commercial efforts having failed to bring him the financial success he sought even as it drove a wedge between him and the Plymouth community.

Adding Plymouth’s differences with their agent Allerton to their disgust with the Weston trading post and their outright hostility to the Thomas Morton endeavor, it seems possible that Plymouth leaders generally opposed commercial exchange. This idea ties into an older view that New England sought religion while other places—the primary example being Virginia—sought profit. This idea has long permeated college textbooks and popular understandings of regional differences in early America. Supposedly, Plymouth—and indeed all of New England—sought to separate from the wider world and avoid commercial interactions. In this view, a trader like Allerton could not long reside in Plymouth, since he rejected shared attitudes that bound the community.

This way of understanding Plymouth’s relationship to trade and traders is simplistic and, at root, incorrect. Plymouth eagerly engaged in trading activities. From the moment of their arrival, the first planters wanted to trade with local peoples. They appointed Allerton and others to act as agents because of their engagement in commerce. Trade served as means to two ends. Like any European residents in the Americas at this time, they wanted the ability to buy items from Europe—everything from clothing to books, guns to kettles—and for that, they needed money. At the same time, the plantation carried a heavy burden of debt to the investors who financed their voyages and sent supplies, and trade permitted them to discharge those obligations. Farming New England’s rocky soil could not generate the kind of income the plantation required, for no northern crop could hope to compete with the success of tobacco in Virginia. Nor was Plymouth well placed or its residents sufficiently skilled to exploit the region’s fisheries to the extent that would have been required. Hence, the Plymouth people turned to trade, and especially to the fur trade, to produce the needed income. Plymouth objected to outposts such as Weston’s not because they were hostile toward trade or unwilling to deal with outsiders, but rather because these enclaves competed for the very trade they themselves wanted to capture. Plymouth Plantation was indeed made up largely of planters, as its name implied, but the residents—most especially Plymouth’s leaders—pursued local trade to benefit the plantation.

Strategies for trade in Plymouth shifted over time. Initially, the first arrivals attended to the fact that the Native people they met sported beaver pelts, and they discussed trade with Massasoit as part of treaty negotiations. As the limitations of the Plymouth location became apparent—and as rival trading entities started to box Plymouth in—the plantation claimed distant sites that were better able to tap into Native networks. They set up satellite locations where trade could be regularly conducted away from Plymouth itself, including on the other side of Cape Cod (at what is today Bourne, Massachusetts), on Cape Ann (where they obtained a patent for a tract in 1624), on the Connecticut River, and on the Kennebec River.⁹ Through these various efforts, Bradford felt certain that they had sent hides sufficient to cover their debt by the mid-1630s, although it was not until 1641 that all parties agreed that the debt had been fully discharged. At first trade was conducted by whomever went out to treat with the local Native communities, but soon men were designated to staff outposts and manage transactions. Once responsibility for the debt fell to the eight men known as Undertakers, either one of them oversaw outposts or they assigned other men to do so. The Undertakers—of whom Allerton was one—did not object to trade. They simply wanted to harness its benefits.

If Plymouth was primarily a plantation (in 1620 terms), intent on transplanting English life in all its detail to a new location, then its satellite trading posts were akin to the trading factories that dotted the Atlantic and indeed the globe. These trading forts aimed merely to extract profit, using traders in residence to manage transactions with local populations. Using a combination of models, Plymouth both planted a settlement and extracted local resources for profit. Plymouth leaders objected to the activities of traders only when they threatened Plymouth’s success, either by siphoning off trade through rival factories or by mismanaging their own trading interests with ill-conceived deals or shoddily kept books. Far from objecting to trade and traders in principle, they eagerly embraced them. Trade would lead to economic viability for the plantation and an end to the crushing debt that threatened Plymouth’s future. For planters themselves, trade provided an opportunity to acquire necessities and, eventually, luxury items.

The Plymouth planters spent their first two and a half decades struggling to pay their debt to their London creditors. Self-confessed bad bookkeepers, the Plymouth leaders believed their many shipments of animal pelts should have paid off their debts long before their creditors agreed. In this passage from Bradford’s “Of Plimoth Plantation,” the governor recorded some of the relevant figures.

Plymouth’s location in New England limited its ability to succeed in trade. Its hinterland was not especially fertile; its harbor not particularly useful; its access to fish or to furs paled in comparison to that of other locations. For a short period, Plymouth operated the only sustained English trading venture in the area, but it was quickly displaced by others. It then made do with satellite outposts that kept it active in commerce until its debt was cleared. After that, Plymouth lapsed into backwater status, pushed to the margins by the advent of new colonies, especially the populous and well-located Massachusetts Bay. Its marginality as a trading center did not arise out of hostility toward trade or lack of interest among its residents. Rather, location tamped down Plymouth’s ability to become a foremost site of merchant activity: Rhode Island, Boston, and Salem all soon surpassed it in this sphere. Some Plymouth residents interested in pursuing a trading career, such as Allerton, moved to other locations. Many others remained to participate in regional economies, such as selling livestock to newly arrived settlers in Massachusetts. Later, Plymouth would join in the livestock trade beyond the region, especially in the West Indian islands. Never did anyone actively oppose these sorts of economic activities. Never was it the case that Plymouth planters, out of hostility to outsiders or fears that religion and commerce were incompatible, opposed trade and traders for their own sakes. Long before Boston became a leading center of Atlantic commerce, the first English arrivals in New England embraced trade (if not every trader) and tried to find profit in it.