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Law and the Colonial Economy

We quite properly think of the colonists as deeply concerned with matters of morality, sin, and crime, but legislators devoted much of their lawmaking power to rules affecting basic economic activities. So too did the courts. The majority of cases docketed involved civil rather than criminal matters, and the bulk of these disputes centered on economic issues.

The colonists did not believe that government that governs least governs best, nor did the rulers of Tudor and Stuart England from which they came. A quest for eco

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nomic opportunity motivated many colonists, and they expected government to facilitate their economic security and growth amid a harsh environment. As the colonies moved from settlements to societies and from colonies to provinces, an indigenous American capitalism emerged. It was characterized by market-oriented production, specialization, accelerated accumulation of capital, and an end to most price and wage regulation by the mid-eighteenth century.

 

Economic Regulation

Colonial economic regulation, while pervasive, was limited by the resources available to enforce compliance. It was most effective at the local level. To ensure the success of their markets, town officials oversaw the quality and price of goods and services. Edward Palmer, the carpenter who built the stocks in Boston, was the first person clamped in them because he charged an excessive fee.

Colonial legislators also sought to regulate the marketplace, especially where staple crops were involved. During the 150 years before the Revolution, the Maryland legislature promulgated statutes covering the growth, sale, and price of tobacco. The goal was to attain the maximum return to individual planters by limiting the flow of substandard tobacco while keeping a balance in the marketplace between buyers and sellers. In some instances authorities adopted drastic measures. The Maryland legislature once again ordered a halt to tobacco cultivation for a year in 1667-1668, although the colony's proprietor, Lord Baltimore, voided it for fear that the act would hurt the English.

Nonagricultural business was also subjected to regulation. In Massachusetts, for example, the Lawes and Libertyes of 1648 set forth in substantial detail the proper manufacture of leather goods. It empowered towns to appoint "searchers of leather" to inspect and to seize leather not tanned according to the law. 24

Services also received attention. Legislative regulation of taverns in Virginia offer a particularly good example of the interaction of economic and moral imperatives. The Virginia House of Burgesses in 1638 passed the first tavern statute. It required the licensing of all tavern owners and fixed the rates that they could charge. The ensuing 150 years of legislative intervention reflected how changing social attitudes affected colonial regulation quite apart from economic considerations. The short-lived government of radical Nathaniel Bacon, Jr., concluding that taverns contributed to "idleness and debaucheryes," outlawed all taverns except for those in James City and at the terminals of the York River ferry. 25 When Bacon was overthrown in 1677, a new tavern statute appeared. It expanded the limit on the number of taverns to two per county ("except where the general court shall be held"), toughened licensing standards, fixed rates, and then added that anyone operating a tavern also had to provide "for travellers good dyett, lodging, and horse meate." 26 This last requirement increased the capital necessary to open and operate a tavern, and it threatened the livelihood of small operators of "loathsome and unwholesom" tippling houses who sold only liquor by the drink. 27 In the eighteenth century, the legislature added new statutory provisions attacking gambling in taverns and ordering them closed on the Sabbath.



The enforcement of these measures through county courts produced often mixed results. Tippling houses remained open, gambling became a common feature of tavern

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life, and owners often flaunted legislative directions to close on Sundays and to renew their licenses yearly. Travelers deluged officials in Williamsburg with complaints about price gouging, both for drinks and rooms. In sum, Virginia legislators proved better able to devise than to implement their economic regulatory measures, at least when county officials--sensitive as they were to local sentiments--ignored abuses they perceived as unimportant, or unenforceable.

Throughout the colonies, the employers set maximum wage rates through the law. The same feeble machinery of the law that undermined tavern regulation in Virginia proved equally incapable of keeping labor from reaping the advantage of a market in which labor was dear. Wages were estimated by contemporaries to be two to three times greater than in England, leading Judge William Allen to conclude: "You may depend on it that this is one of the best poorman's countries in the world." 28 But even with higher wages the costs of land were so low that farming was a powerful attraction. Some of the southern colonies passed laws forbidding skilled laborers (such as carpenters and masons) to leave their trade for agriculture. The measures proved wholly unenforceable. By the early eighteenth century wage-price regulation was virtually at an end in most of the colonies, largely confounded by labor scarcity.

Regulatory measures were most effective in New England and the middle colonies. The nuclear settlements and strong communal habits of seventeenth-century New England made local control not only possible but desirable; it established as well the precedent of active participation by the government in the commercial growth of the economy. In the Chesapeake region, planters with vast stretches of land and control over county offices often went their own way. Regulation of the tobacco trade only became feasible beginning about the third decade of the eighteenth century. A long period of stagnation in tobacco prices finally convinced leading planters to accept a system of public warehouses, the inspection of plant quality and packing practices, and some regulation of prices. These planters understood that, in the face of widening economic competition in the eighteenth century, they could benefit from a formal certification of the quality of their goods by a seemingly independent colonial authority. Even in the low-level commercial economy of prerevolutionary America, legislators perceived the law as an essential instrument by which to further growth.

The English mercantile system (in which the colonies produced for the exclusive advantage of the mother country) operated increasingly at odds with colonial economic ambitions. The imperial system taxed colonial business transactions, regulated supply and demand, and dictated to whom the colonists could export. Mercantilism benefited the colonists because it guaranteed an overseas market. It also shackled creative entrepreneurs, who were quite prepared to make their own way in the growing world of commerce. Bad feelings ensued on both sides.

Typical was the furor raised in New England by the White Pine Acts. Parliament in 1722 and 1729 passed these measures that set aside timberlands in New England for the Crown's naval use. Some settlers, perhaps innocently enough, entered these lands and illegally felled trees. When the Crown confiscated the processed boards, residents took extralegal measures to restore what they believed to be their natural economic rights. In Exeter, New Hampshire in 1734, for example, a riot occurred when English officials seized contraband boards covered by the White Pine Acts. Like vigilantism, rioting carried the conduct of law and politics into the open, giving colonists an incentive to develop a popular will theory of law.

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Date: 2015-01-29; view: 966


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