Times changed quickly for the seaport towns after the War of 1812. European competition and American intransigence over treaty terms with England slowly dried up the old profits. The size of merchant vessels doubled in a decade, and the new ones could no longer navigate shallow harbors such as those of Nantucket, Newburyport, and the Connecticut River towns. Even Salem began to lose its commerce, and by 1825 most of its merchants had left for Boston; by 1840, New York had cornered the China trade, leaving Boston the scrapings of lesser profits from the Baltic and South America.
In a semifictional romance written at that time, the heroine, on a visit to Salem (“Belem“) have a conversation.
Nathaniel Hawthorne characterized the old order as a “worm-eaten aristocracy” which, like potatoes, provided a declining return, “if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations in the same worn out soil.
No longer could these maritime cities afford to keep their eyes on the far horizon, ignoring the continent at their backs-save as a source of corn, beef, and firewood. Canal lines, with their placid ribbons of water, and railroads with their shining rails blessed cities like Boston, Portland, and Providence, allowing inland goods to be unloaded for transfer to waiting ships. The Industrial Revolution changed the measure of a town’s success from the safety of its harbor in storms to the convenience of abundant waterpower near navigable tidewater. The day had passed when wealth depended solely upon a good ship and resourceful trading. When Hawthorne became Salem’s Surveyor of Customs in 1845, the old wharf before the customhouse lay empty “except, perhaps, a bark or brig, half-way down its melancholy length, discharging hides; or, nearer at hand, a Nova Scotia schooner, pitching out her cargo of firewood. ” Hawthorne’s “charges,” an aged crew of Customs Inspectors.
In truth, many of the old towns along the shore faded because they no longer cared for the old maritime ways. The merchant sons put their money in railroad building or textile manufacture. The farmer sons went west to seek their fortune. This left no ready body of sailors and supercargos to man its ships, only the dregs and a few “born sailors.” No longer did the teenaged boy lie in his forecastle bunk studying navigation, dreaming of the day he would take his place in the captain’s cabin. By the 1840s, the “better” families of Cambridge were sending their more uncontrollable boys to sea as a punishment/cure. Only in the fishing and coasting trades were maritime traditions handed from father to son.
The shore region did not die altogether. Those locations with shallow harbors, or with inland region untapped by railroads, or without nearby waterfalls were the victims. There was still to come an Indian summer of more whaling and fishing, shipbuilding and town building. The Cape Cod skippers developed trade with Hawaii. Castine cornered the market on imported salt. Boston exported ice. Melville would write of New Bedford, of Ishmael, Queequeg, and Ahab. Houses of the most inspired beauty would appear along the Maine coast, designed by ship builders and seagoing men who had seen all the architectural wonders of the world. The coming of the steamship would drive shipwrights like Donald MacKay to create fast packets and evolve the clipper: the most classic Yankee embodiment of high art, combining greyhound beauty with utterly utilitarian ends.
The greatest success of the era after the War of 1812 was New Bedford, which around 1820 skyrocketed into becoming the world’s greatest whaling port.
New Bedford came into existence in the 1760s, after a Nantucketer obtained a license to import whale oil duty-free into France and England. Casting about for an alternative port to crowded Nantucket, he settled on sloping farmland along the Acushnet River estuary, in the township of Dartmouth, adjoining Buzzards Bay. The village of New Bedford grew slowly at first, just another of the many little whaling ports along the New England and Long Island shores. Like the others, it built its own ships, manned them with local lads, and sent them to roam the oceans. When the ships returned with casks full of raw blubber chunks, they were brought in broadside to the shore with the high tide, and when the ebbing water beached the craft, the casks were rolled off onto carts and drawn by oxen to the try works.
Like Nantucket, New Bedford was a somber, clean, little Quaker community. The sloping land drained well (although the soft, loamy soil made traveling a miry experience in bad weather). Marsh flats farther down the Acushnet provided good cattle fodder, and the rolling hills boasted many productive fields. It was a lush contrast to sand-blown Nantucket.
After the War of 1812, the larger ships could not navigate the sandy bar at the mouth of Nantucket Harbor. As Nantucketers transferred operations to the main- land, they gravitated toward New Bedford. By 1823 New Bedford’s fleet equaled Nantucket’s in size. For forty years, right up until the Civil War, the town enjoyed virtually continuous growth and prosperity. Twenty years before its peak in 1857, the registered tonnage of ships, including 300 whalers, from the Acushnet River (including those from Fairhaven across the inlet) was already fourth, behind only New York, Boston, and New Orleans.
By the 1840s the community had become a famed “City of Palaces” great Greek Revival mansions, the most opulent examples of antebellum architecture. The streets were laid out with fixed regularity, in contrast to those of most seaports, and visitors were surprised to discover that the streets actually crossed at right angles. The better sections of town had flagstone sidewalks, and barrel filled carts rumbled and clattered over cobblestoned streets.
The uphill part of town, as in Salem, was all splendid homes, newly built and reflecting the town’s increasing wealth. What impressed the traveler most about the residential neighborhoods was the freshness and the unhurried air.
The local society was gracious and democratic. One Englishman remarked how constant intercourse with the world’s great nations had rubbed off “many angles of national prejudice. He found the community surprisingly classless, as the opportunities in the whale fishery allowed men to rise quickly in fortune. This democratic predisposition, coupled with Quaker sobriety, caused the New Bedford gentry to judge each other on moderation, character, and manners. Fine dress, however, was not shunned, as on Quaker Nantucket. “The women of New Bed ford, they bloom like their own red roses,” wrote Melville. The more successful men appeared as portly nabobs, sporting broadcloth suits, beaver hats, and jeweled watch fobs.
For more follow blogs clamers.com