Salt (37 page)

One of the last Cape Cod saltworks still in operation in Yarmouth in the late nineteenth century with vats full of brine and rolling roofs open. An operating windmill is in the background.
The Snow Library, Orleans, Massachusetts

The small-scale Yankee entrepreneur, for whom New England was famous, found an opportunity in salt. By 1800, a small initial investment in a Cape Cod saltworks would quickly yield returns of 30 percent. Most of the stretches of virgin sand beach and upland dunes, land considered useless until then, were becoming marred with windmills, pipes, and huge vats with rolling roofs. The prices were high, and the market seemed endless. Whatever salt was not used by local fishermen was shipped to Boston or New York. As long as the profits were copious and easy, Cape Codders cared no more about their spoiled dunes than did the people in Cheshire worry about their blackened skies.

On Cape Cod they talked of “the lazy man’s gold mine,” and it seemed everybody wanted to get into salt making. The glassworks in Sandwich, famous in the nineteenth century for their little glass saltcellars, needed intense heat for glassmaking. The cooling fires still gave off enough heat to evaporate sea-water, and salt became a by-product of their glassmaking.

With an increased salt supply, the fishing industry grew.

T
HE AMERICANS DID
not forget the salt shortages of the Revolution. Several states, including Massachusetts, still paid bounties to salt producers. The new nation remained, in principle, determined to encourage salt production. In practice, this was not always the case. When the new government realized that there was an unregulated commerce in whiskey in western Pennsylvania, traded across the Allegheny for salt, it responded by taxing the whiskey in order to stop the trade. In 1791, the whiskey-producing farmers rebelled, and beloved President Washington shocked the public by calling out a militia to put down what has become known as the Whiskey Rebellion.

In 1787, the new Americans began producing salt in Onondaga, New York. Jesuit missionaries who had been with the Onondaga tribe in the seventeenth century, first told Europeans of the salt springs there. One French missionary, Father Simon Le Moyne, wrote in his diary: “We tasted a spring which the Indians dared not drink. They say it is inhabited by a demon who makes it fetid. I found it was a salt spring. In fact, we made salt as good as sea salt and carried a quantity of it to Quebec.”

The Onondaga are an Iroquois-speaking tribe, hosts to the annual meeting of the Iroquois. Like some, but not all, of the Iroquois groups, they had sided with the British during the Revolution. In 1788, New York State negotiated a treaty with the Onondaga establishing a 10,000-acre reservation with joint ownership. But in 1795, the treaty was renegotiated, and the Onondaga, a people that traditionally had not even used salt, gave up their rights to the land in exchange for the annual delivery to the Onondaga nation of 150 bushels of salt. In 1787, when the whites began producing salt there, it had been at a rate of only ten bushels a day.

The state is still delivering its annual salt payments, though some Onondaga now feel that they would rather have the land returned. The payments amount to a truckload of five-pound bags, which the state buys for the best price it can find—usually between $1,000 and $2,000, which is not a huge increase from the $900 that 150 bushels of salt cost at the time. Today the Onondaga use much of their salt for preserving deer and other game and making a great deal of sauerkraut, neither of which was a tradition before contact with Europeans. According to Audrey Shenandoah, a member of the Onondaga: “We make a lot of sauerkraut, that is, since the contact. We grow a lot of garden vegetables. A lot of cabbage and make sauerkraut. But we didn’t use salt for much but medicine before the contact.” Salt is still used by the Onondaga to draw out the infection from an insect bite or the prick of a thorn.

In 1797, the state of New York began granting leases for working the brine springs of Onondaga. The state fixed a maximum price of sixty cents per bushel with a four-cents-per-bushel tax. That year, production at the springs, centered in the town of Salina, was 25,500 bushels, but by 1810, Onondaga and Cayuga Counties were producing about 3 million bushels annually, using both solar and wood-fired evaporation. The brine springs had become the most important saltworks in the new United States.

T
HE FEELING WAS
strong in the United States that the British were not to be trusted. They had never withdrawn as promised from U.S. territory along the Great Lakes, they encouraged the hostility toward the United States of native Americans, including the Onondaga and Cayuga, and they refused any agreement that would be in any way helpful to the U.S. economy. John Jay’s 1795 treaty with Britain, which opened trade but on terms more favorable to England than the United States, was unpopular.

The British claimed the right to force into their own service any British sailor serving on a U.S. ship and boarded American merchant vessels in search of them. They frequently also took American sailors. In 1807, a British warship fired on the American frigate
Chesapeake
. President Thomas Jefferson responded with the Embargo Act, banning U.S. ships from foreign trade. This act was aimed at both the British and the French because both boarded American merchant vessels. Not only did the trade ban fail to change European policy, but it was an economic disaster for New England. The embargo was dropped, but there were calls for a retaliatory invasion of the remaining British colonies in North America, present-day Canada.

In a young country in which the North and South were increasingly at odds with each other, the cry for such radical measures against Canada usually came from Southerners. New Yorkers simply complained that Canada was able to attract the larger share of upstate commerce because it had better commercial waterways.

In 1808, a resolution recommending consideration of a canal connecting the Great Lakes to the Hudson River was introduced in the New York Assembly by Joshua Forman, from the salt-producing town of Salina. Forman believed that the canal was the necessary key to expanding the salt industry. It would offer the Onondaga salt region an inexpensive route for bulk shipment to New York City. From there, the world would be their market.

Despite considerable opposition to the proposal, $600 was appropriated to survey a possible route. Politicians and financiers in New York were distrustful of the project, fearing it would undermine the importance of the port of New York. The exception was the former mayor of New York City and current governor, De Witt Clinton. The leading advocate of the canal, Governor Clinton was from one of the most prominent New York families. His father, James, had been a Revolutionary War hero, and his uncle, George, served as vice president from 1805 to 1812 under both Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. But both of these presidents expressed their doubts about the project.

Governor Clinton appointed James Geddes to make the survey. Geddes, who lived in Onondaga County, was a lawyer, a judge, a former state legislator, and an amateur surveyor. The salt-producing town of Geddes was named after him, and he had been one of the pioneers of the local salt industry—the industry that needed the canal. He spent most of 1808 traveling between the Hudson River and Lake Erie, examining the topography.

In 1809, a New York delegation went to Jefferson, hoping to persuade him to consign federal funding for the project. The moment seemed auspicious. For the first time in the short history of the United States, the nation was solvent, had settled its huge debt, and revenue was expanding. But Jefferson said, “It is a splendid project and may be executed a century hence,” and concluded, “It is little short of madness to think of it at this time.”

Clinton then went looking for New York State funding for the project that was increasingly known as “Clinton’s ditch.” In 1810, the New York state legislature approved a “Board of Commissioners” with a $3,000 budget to investigate the feasibility of constructing a commercial canal connecting Lake Erie and the Hudson River. If this could be done, the United States would have a waterway from New York City to what is now the Midwest but was then thought of as the western frontier.

The public regarded this commission as a scam—a summer vacation at taxpayers’ expense to upstate New York, an area viewed in New York City as a scenic vacation ground. This suspicion was reinforced by the revelation that a number of the commissioners were planning to take their wives.

The commission was losing support and probably would have been canceled had it not been for a completely unrelated concern about a mud bar. The legislature assigned the canal commission to investigate the mud bar, which was of far greater public concern than the possible canal.

De Witt Clinton took part in the 1810 commission, which reported that the saltworks were producing far below their capacity but were limited by poor roads. Exploring alternatives, they asked locals what they felt would be the result if they built a good road from the saltworks to Lake Erie, only nine miles away. Locals gave Clinton his ideal response by agreeing that such a road would only profit the British. Canadian schooners on Lake Erie would pick up the salt and sell it in British North America.

The final argument for the canal was the inevitable war with Britain from 1812 to 1815. When this war broke out, the Americans were faced once again with a salt shortage. The British blockaded Massachusetts and tried to prevent Cape Cod salt from reaching Boston or New York, though wily New England sailors sometimes slipped through at night. In December 1814, the British landed a warship in Rock Harbor, on the bay side of Orleans, Cape Cod, and threatened to burn down the local salt-works. The summer before, the British had gotten to Washington, D.C., and burned most of the public buildings including the presidential residence, forcing President Madison to flee. So no one in Orleans doubted the British resolve to burn their little windmill-and-rolling-roof saltworks.

A Cape Cod militia was waiting on the beach when the British attempted to land, and reportedly shot and killed two British sailors in a brief skirmish that forced the British to withdraw. A month later, Andrew Jackson won the final battle, the Battle of New Orleans, in which 2,000 British soldiers died, and Cape Codders could not resist calling their own brief engagement over their saltworks “the Battle of Orleans.”

A
S SOON AS
the war ended, lawmakers pushed to approve the Erie Canal, and work began in 1817. The estimated cost of the project was $6 million—almost $5 per inhabitant of New York State.

Among the state’s plans to finance the completion of the canal was to tax upstate salt at a rate of 12.5 cents per bushel. It was one of the few salt taxes in history that was not resented. The canal would bring prosperity to the salt region.