Death of an Empire: The Rise and Murderous Fall of Salem, America's Richest City - Hardcover

Booth, Robert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312540388 ISBN 13: 9780312540388

Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books, 2011

Synopsis

Most readers know Salem only for the city's notorious witch trials. But years later it became a very different city, one that produced America's first millionaire (still one of history's 75 wealthiest men) and boasted a maritime trade that made it the country's richest city. Westward expansion and the industrial revolution would eventually erode Salem's political importance, but it was a shocking murder and the scandal that followed which led at last to its fall from national prominence.

Death of an Empire is a finely-written tale of a little-known but remarkably rich era of American history, drawing in characters such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Quincy Adams, and Daniel Webster.

About this title

About the Author:

ROBERT BOOTH's guidebook Boston's Freedom Trail has been in print for twenty-five years and he has contributed to the anthology Salem: Place, Myth & Memory. He is curator emeritus of the Pickering House in Salem and serves on the boards of several history organizations. He lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

1.
AT WAR
August 1814
 
Two years into America’s war with England, Salem was suffering. Death and loss stalked the famous seaport, transforming the once bustling waterfront into a forlorn landscape of empty wharves and gaunt warehouses and skeletal masts of unsailing ships. In the houses along the dirt lanes of the seafaring East Parish, men and boys were scarce, as in peacetime. But now, instead of sailing to foreign ports, hundreds were crewing on naval vessels and privately owned warships known as privateers, hundreds more were languishing in crowded, disease-ridden hulks and prisons overseas, and several dozen were dead, killed in action, or fatally wounded.
From time to time, a Salem privateer would make a run for the open sea; but such forays were now rare, and rarer still were the arrivals of prize vessels captured from the English. The problem was the British naval blockade, generally effective against the shipping of Massachusetts, including the Salem Bay towns of Gloucester, Manchester, Beverly, Marblehead, and Salem. Rumors of peace wafted in every week, blasted by alarms of invasion from Halifax, the Nova Scotian home base to 130 British warships and several regular army regiments. Invasion now seemed much more likely than armistice, as the United States faced defeat.
In the heat of August, British battleships cruised among the islands off Salem Neck.1 For the second straight month, neither privateers nor captured prizes arrived; and dark rumors and false reports buzzed in the sweltering air. The discouraged Republicans had not bothered to sponsor an orator or hold a parade on the Fourth of July, leaving the field to the antiwar harangues of the Federalists.
Most of the town’s large merchant vessels lay careened on the beaches and sat leaking in the docks, and the privateers rode at their anchors. Out at Salem Neck, Colonel Joseph White Jr., thirty-three, the jaunty leader of the militia regiment, was supervising the final phases of rebuilding Fort Lee and the construction of a new battery at the point called the Juniper, to command the mouth of the harbor. White doubted the ability of his men or the federal garrison at nearby Fort Pickering to resist a serious British attack. And the British were known to be on the move: their recent capture of Eastport, Maine, was an indication that London was out of patience and would authorize all-out aggression against New England to end this half-fought American war.
Colonel White, a staunch Republican, did all he could to prepare Salem for the coming confrontation. Others, not so brave, had left on long trips or removed to new homes in the countryside.2 White himself wished to join them; he was heartily sick of war and disease and death. In February 1813, his infant daughter, Charlotte, had died; and in July of that year, he and his brother Stephen and their brother-in-law Judge Joseph Story had jointly purchased a large tomb. Colonel White’s other two children had been sick all that summer, and he himself had fallen so ill as to have gone off to Saratoga Springs for a cure, returning via New York City “quite recovered” by September.
With Salem’s Republican leaders caught up in illness, military duties, and privateering, the local Federalists had managed to win the district’s congressional seat for their candidates since 1809, including the incumbent Timothy Pickering, formerly a senator and cabinet member. The seaport was hardly a Federalist stronghold—its (absent) sailors made up a majority, and most voted Republican—but that was not the view from the outside. Salem had long been envied as a bastion of wealth and privilege by the rest of the nation, in whose imagination its people lived like lords and ladies off the accumulated wealth of the world. But money seemed to have made them mad: the pro-British antiwar ferocity of the Federalists was regarded as verging on treason.
*   *   *
If the British stormed ashore at Salem Neck, Joseph White and his brother Captain Stephen White, twenty-seven, would do their best, although it would not be enough. They had no experience of combat, and their gunners were not particularly accurate, as they kept proving in rare target practice hampered by lack of ammunition. White had been watching the handsome British warships in the bay, one of them an immense seventy-four-gun ship of the line; through his telescope he could make out the colors of the sailors’ whiskers and count the muskets stacked on the deck. Two of these ships, a few frigates, and a dozen transports full of troops would reduce Salem’s forts to rubble in an hour—Essex County would be conquered, and he would be dead.
For Colonel White, who retired each day to a beautiful new mansion and his wife, Eliza, and little girls, death was not a welcome thought. He and his brother, colonel and captain, loved their lives and their shipping partnership, which they had managed profitably through some very difficult years. Joseph, a specialist in the importation of fine wines, was a lover of the high life and the elegance and gaiety of Salem’s social scene. His interest in the military arose more from a fondness for pomp and circumstance than a taste for blood. Not that he lacked resolve, or that Salem would not be defended honorably, for Joseph and Stephen White both lived in it as princes, fully partaking of its great wealth and imperial lifestyle, willing to fight as princes must.
More than anything, as they prepared for battle, they yearned for peace and a chance to resume the commerce of a place that now seemed only a dream of former magnificence. The people of that Salem had built an imperial capital with boulevards of brick mansions and beautiful parks and cobbled streets of handsome stores and high-steepled churches.3 From their grand houses, White and his fellow shipowners in high beaver hats and cutaway coats had headed downtown to the insurance offices to hear the morning news and perhaps find a cargo or lease space on a freighter before going off to their respective countinghouses. Salem had been the most relentlessly commercial place in the country, at a time that “commerce” meant “trade across the waters” and when “merchant” meant “shipowner importing and exporting goods.” Represented in the overseas markets by their shipmasters and supercargoes (business agents), these merchants had the knowledge and judgment to compete successfully in international trade, with its shifting markets and currencies, embargoes and wars, pirates, privateers, and rival merchant fleets. Great wealth had been their reward, and would be again, if only peace would come.
*   *   *
Two years before, in June 1812, as Congress had declared war, Salem had declared its own refusal to fight. At a town meeting, the voters of both parties had passed a resolution instructing Congress not to engage in an “unnecessary, impolitic and unjust” contest with England.4 The merchants’ great fear had always been war with either of the European superpowers, Britain or France, which had been fighting each other worldwide since 1793.
In Salem, neutrality meant prosperity. For twenty years, the American policy of neutrality had enabled shippers to extend their trade around the world. In spite of losses and insults, American merchants had the largest and most lucrative trading fleet on earth. Others might resent bullying by France or Britain enough to rattle sabers, but not the merchants: as long as profits were high, vessel seizures and ransom negotiations were acceptable parts of the game; and they gladly paid for insurance coverage, which they also underwrote, as their hedge.
The Federalists were, in fact, not opposed to war, but their preferred enemy was Napoleon’s France. Before 1812, the French had impounded hundreds of American ships and cargoes worth millions of dollars and had offered no reparations. Britain’s Royal Navy had also harassed and sometimes captured American vessels and impressed some of their crewmen. But London had apologized for its worst insults and had paid for its thievery; and the seaport Federalists excused the British as long as they thwarted Napoleon—no Federalist had forgotten the emperor’s 1802 invasion of the Caribbean with an army of sixty thousand fever-doomed French soldiers.
By the summer of 1812, Salem was out of business—its commerce had ceased. Regarding the war as a matter of partisan politics rather than patriotism, the Federalist merchants had withheld their ships and money from the war effort and had defiantly proclaimed that “no allegiance is due, where no protection is afforded.”5 Their position would not soften over time; they despised the fomenters of the war, their values, and their ambition to rule in America, and many hoped—some prayed—for a speedy British victory.
At first, people in other regions of the country had not understood, for British attacks on shipping had been cited as the main cause for going to war. But the Federalists had set them straight in speeches and newspapers, blasting away at mad President Madison and his suicidal friends. So deep was their antipathy that the Massachusetts governor, a Federalist, backed by the legislature, refused to place the state militia under General Henry Dearborn, federal commander in New England.
Salem’s Republicans dutifully answered the call of their country, and the richest—Crowninshields, Silsbees, and Whites—created partnerships to spread the risk of privateering. Their efforts soon paid off, as Salem became the terror of British commerce: in the first six months of war, eighteen Salem privateers captured eighty-seven English freighters and transports.6 These encounters resulted in few casualties and in much new property. The prizes, sent into Salem to be sold at auction, resulted in profit for the owners, pay for the sailors, and new vessels and valuable provisions for th...

About this edition

• Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0312540388
• ISBN 13: 9780312540388
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352