But it was trade and the merchants who provided the means of livelihood for the great majority of the towns’ populations – the shopkeepers, artisans, mechanics, day laborers, carters, longshoremen, sailors and so on. Directly and indirectly, commerce and shipping was what turned the wheels of most communities. Though colonial commerce was always conditioned by the fact that the British acts of trade conceived of America as a market for their own manufactures and a source of raw materials, until the end of the Seven Years’ War the British regulations as a whole had little impact on colonial America. The American people bought the manufactures they needed to import more cheaply from England than elsewhere, and always preferred English wares in any case; and Parliament provided bounties and other incentives to the production of such raw materials as tobacco, rice, and naval stores. Whatever articles were curtailed were those which would compete with British industries, and the high cost and scarcity of skilled workers in America had already rendered large enterprise in such fields questionable. Men of capital, therefore, found safer and surer returns in commerce and such enterprises as staple agriculture, the fisheries, ship building and rum distilling.
One of the results of British mercantilism, however, was that the colonies were always in chronic debt to the mother country, spending considerably more in England than they could get there in return for their own products. This unfavorable balance had stood at £ 200,000 as early as 1721, and over the years it became steadily greater, making hard money a rare commodity in the colonies. To make up for this deficiency, the merchants began to develop alternate channels of commerce, and the West Indies soon became their center. In these tropical islands the merchants exchanged their own native products, in part for hard money, which they kept, in part for sugar and cotton, which was resold in Great Britain, and in part for molasses. The molasses were distilled into rum, bartered on the coast of West Africa for slaves, which, in turn, were then sold again in the West Indies for coin. Needless to say, the shrewd Yankee traders made a tidy profit on every step along this route, known as the triangular trade.
Such colonial enterprise, however, could not always have withstood close investigation; much of the wealth and influence of these merchants, in fact, was usually the result of active smuggling. Basically, each colonial region had its specialty exports – rice, indigo, naval stores from the Carolinas; tobacco and cotton from the Chesapeake area; cereals and meats from the Middle Colonies; fish, rum, and timber from New England. But common to all, and usually carried on by the same merchants, was a lucrative and thoroughly illicit import and export trade in more or less open defiance of those British laws meant to keep the colonies profiting the mother country exclusively. From Portsmouth to Savannah, dislike of England’s Acts of Trade, combined with corruption at all levels, made lawlessness bulk large in colonial development.
The Yankees may have been the first. By the late 1600s, their coasting shallops and ketches appeared in the Carolina sounds and the creeks of the Chesapeake, taking tobacco in payment for hardware, wooden ware and salt; the tobacco was then exported to Spain in return for Canary wine for the thirsty colonial gentry. A rewarding trade, but unlawful at every step, for England required all colonial tobacco to go to England, and the colonies were forbidden to trade for wine directly with any nation but Portugal, England’s ally of the moment. To Yankee traders, however, the law was one thing, profit another. Lax enforcement made it easy enough to land their tobacco after dark at some Boston wharf, and reship it as salt fish bound for Portuguese Madeira with no official check on what they really contained. In the Spanish Canaries, this tobacco was then traded for Spanish wine, while a brief stop at Madeira picked up a few casks of local wine for customs inspection. Canary wine was said to be plentiful in Boston as early as 1690, and sixty years later it was reported that in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, illegal Canary wine was the wine most drunk among the colony’s citizens.
There were many variations on this pattern, all of them illegal, and all of them usually profitable. As Americans grew more West Indies- minded, the Dutch and French sugar colonies proved as likely customers as British Barbados and Jamaica for their salt fish and meats, cereals and lumber. No mere laws of Parliament could ever deter the Yankees, Philadelphians, or the rising Scottish merchants of Norfolk from exploiting the situation. Back from Surinam or Martinique came small but highly welcome sums of silver and gold and illicit molasses, illicit sugar, silks, brandy and dutch gin. Much of the wealth that Peter Faneuil put into the civic hall which still honors his name in Boston, came from smuggling operations so extensive that the only proper comparison would be with the Prohibition rum runners of the 1920s – and even that bulked smaller relative to the total economy of the time. The few Crown customs officials that were assigned to colonial ports usually understood well enough that their function was not so much to block illicit imports as to take some ten percent of the value to line their own and their superiors’ pockets and then look the other way. One reform-minded governor of New York in the early 1700s reported that under his predecessor smuggling had been so extensive that, although the port’s trade had risen three hundred percent, His Majesty’s revenues had fallen by fifty percent.