Public History in Historical Perspective

A Cultural History of the Nation's Great Maritime Museums

James M. Lindgren

• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781613767078
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The United States has long been dependent on the seas, but Americans know little about their maritime history. While Britain and other countries have established national museums to nurture their seagoing traditions, America has left that responsibility to private institutions. In this first-of-its-kind history, James M. Lindgren focuses on a half-dozen of these great museums, ranging from Salem's East India Marine Society, founded in 1799, to San Francisco's Maritime Museum and New York's South Street Seaport Museum, which were established in recent decades.Begun by activists with unique agendas—whether overseas empire, economic redevelopment, or cultural preservation—these museums have displayed the nation's complex interrelationship with the sea. Yet they all faced chronic shortfalls, as policymakers, corporations, and everyday citizens failed to appreciate the oceans' formative environment. Preserving Maritime America shows how these institutions shifted course to remain solvent and relevant and demonstrates how their stories tell of the nation's rise and decline as a commercial maritime power.

Chapter 1

“That Every Mariner May Possess the History of the World”

A Cabinet for the East India Marine Society of Salem

On October 14, 1825, “a vast concourse of citizens” in Salem, Massachusetts, watched a procession of the East India Marine Society (EIMS, 1799), whose shipmasters had opened rich Asian markets. Dedicating a new building and museum, the cavalcade included President John Quincy Adams, many dignitaries, and one hundred smartly attired EIMS members with dress swords. Joined by the Boston Brigade Band, they received “repeated cheers and greetings” as they passed brightly decorated buildings. A lavish palanquin in which sat a Salemite dressed as “a young Hindoo potentate” was “borne by Salem Negroes” in Indian garb; their “faces glowed in the joyousness of the occasion.” Clothed in Chinese gowns, other mariners carried trade goods, weapons, or curiosities for their museum. That night, a banquet at the museum “was served in a style of magnificence heretofore unequalled in this town.” Joining Adams were U.S. Supreme Court justice Joseph Story, Salem congressman Benjamin W. Crowninshield, and Boston mayor Josiah Quincy. They shared forty-four toasts, including Adams saluting “The Trade to India–No commercial nation has been great without it, may the experience of ages induce us to cherish this rich source of national wealth.”1

As the economy shifted, however, the banquet was Salem’s last hurrah. Its merchants and masters had won tremendous fortunes during the French War (1793–1815); as Britain warred against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, Salem took advantage of America’s neutral flag, intermittent British cooperation, and Europe’s inability to control its colonies. Salem’s success led to, said historian James Fichter, “one of the most significant recombinations of wealth” in capitalism’s creative destruction. But the glory was short lived: Salem’s losses from Thomas Jefferson’s embargo in 1807–9 and James Madison’s war in 1812–15, together with the return of European rivals to world trade in 1815, undermined its brief dominance and forced its ships into less profitable markets. Outside forces contributed to Salem’s decline: its mediocre harbor; Boston’s better financial, cultural, and trade opportunities; New York’s boom with the Erie Canal and its hold on European and southern commerce; and the higher return on factory investments. Adams, who quit Federalism to join the National Republicans in the 1824 election, was also trying to heal the three-decades-long partisanship that had riven Salem. Making a toast at the banquet, Federalist diehard Timothy Pickering recognized that political harmony was “important to the prosperity of all.”2

Fostering harmony, the EIMS had developed a cabinet in 1799. As its collection and membership grew, it opened East India Marine Hall in 1825. Melding commerce and culture, it rented the ground floor to the Asiatic Bank and the Oriental Insurance Company, while the society occupied the spacious second floor. There it showed curios from all continents, but most spectacularly from the Orient and the South Seas. Sprinkled in between were ship models, paintings, and display cases of mementos gifted by mariners. It resembled London’s East India House, where, said scholar Richard Davis, “the downstairs business rooms envisioned British sovereignty” and the upstairs India Museum (1799) “offered a synecdoche of India as colony.”3

While the EIMS was spurring mariners to explore, develop trade, and bring wealth home, its museum linked America’s rising land and sea empires. Offering a visual medium to those reading about Asia’s mysteries, the cabinet encouraged visitors to imagine faraway worlds. Although Cornish traveler James Silk Buckingham suggested in 1841 that it would help break down “prejudices and antipathies” and build “kindly feelings and sympathies” toward foreign peoples, museum artifacts, when removed from their original contexts, became representations or symbols of a strange, sometimes savage, place awaiting Western uplift. But, as the museum rose in popularity, EIMS’s membership fell with declining trade. In 1865, it sold the building and its holdings to George Peabody of London, a philanthropist. Adding the anthropological holdings of Salem’s Essex Institute, in 1867 he created the Peabody Academy of Science, an ethnological and natural history museum; its “marine objects” were mostly “relegated to the attic.” The EIMS survived for another forty years until its last member died.4

Later writers have had difficulty making sense of the EIMS. In 1916, one ascribed its museum to the wish of globetrotting mariners to tout their superiority over ordinary coasting captains. Equally dismissive was Peabody’s assistant director, Walter Muir Whitehill, who claimed in 1949 that the museum resulted simply from “the human foible of wishing to be admired for irrelevant reasons.” As an ethnology and natural history museum, it amassed such an odd mix that it was dismissed as a “Glory Hole” by the naturalist Thomas Barbour. Beginning in 1905, however, the Peabody also displayed a small maritime collection, which took center stage in 1941 with the museum’s reorganization. Today, after another shift, the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) is a hybrid emphasizing global art and culture. The EIMS cabinet once offered a window into the making of empire, consumerism, and identity, but PEM’s evolution now shows how the mariner’s empire has become an imperial collection.5

“A sailortown from stem to stern”: Salem’s Maritime World

Creating much misunderstanding, twentieth-century observers usually separated the EIMS from its context in the decades after American independence. After the Treaty of Paris (1783) and the opening of Canton (1785) by New York’s Empress of China, Salem masters pushed their reach beyond the confines that Britain had allowed. Paving the way was Salem’s leading merchant, Elias Hasket Derby. In 1785, besides inaugurating the Russian trade, he sent Grand Turk around the Cape of Good Hope, becoming the first New England vessel to do so (fig. 1). Grand Turk pushed on to Isle de France (Mauritius), Batavia (Jakarta), and Whampoa Reach (Canton). Returning to Salem, its cargo of tea, china, and cloth was sold to the likes of Governor John Hancock. In 1788, Derby first showed the U.S. flag in Calcutta and Bombay, while India was coming under the control of the British East India Company. His ships also opened Siam and Mocha (Arabia). During the French War, when global conflict restricted the trade of French and British merchant fleets but led their navies to capture U.S. ships in the West and East Indies, Salem’s barks, brigs, and ships became global tramps. More U.S. trade originated in India than in China.6

Figure 1. Ship Grand Turk, in Ralph D. Paine, The Ships and Sailors of Old Salem (New York: Outing, 1908), 204–5.

Because the tea market was glutted, the pepper trade was most profitable. After Captain Jonathan Carnes secretly sailed to Sumatra in 1795, and later gave the EIMS its first curios, Salem monopolized the trade until 1799, but it profited over the next half century by reshipping pepper globally. That pulled youth to the sea. As the pioneering maritime historian Samuel Eliot Morison wrote, “A Salem boy in those days was born to the music of windlass chanty and caulker’s maul; he drew in a taste for the sea with his mother’s milk; wharves and shipyards were his playground; he shipped as a boy on a coaster in his early teens, saw Demerara [British Guiana] and St. Petersburg before he set foot in Boston, and if he had the right stuff in him, commanded an East-Indiaman before he was twenty-five.” Nathaniel Silsbee lived that tale, ultimately serving as a U.S. congressman and senator. Knowing that officers could use their “privilege” (carrying personal cargo for profit), he toasted his EIMS colleagues in 1825, “May their success as masters of good ships enable them to become owners of better ones.”7

Whether in the British, French, or Dutch empires, Americans practiced “hitchhiking imperialism,” whereby they established a trade niche by taking advantage of cracks in the empires of stronger powers. Trade with the Caribbean and South America was still vital for Salem’s access to silver, which Asian merchants demanded but upset the specie-starved U.S. economy. In 1800 Salem’s fleet included 1,325 vessels, while its Custom House duties soon accounted for up to 15 percent of the national tariff. That commerce led a Salem minister around 1800 to claim: “After a century of comparative quiet, the citizens of the little town were suddenly dispersed to every part of the Oriental world, and to every nook of barbarism which had a market and a shore.” The town’s few wharves jumped to forty by the 1840s, but they caused the buildup of silt, which thwarted deeper-draft ships by midcentury.8

Of all factors, it was Derby’s death on September 8, 1799, that most shook the town’s trade and pushed the founding of the EIMS. Named “King Derby” by Salem’s Nathaniel Hawthorne, he was, said Fichter, “among the wealthiest 1 percent of the wealthiest 1 percent of the population.” His death reconfigured what historian Daniel Vickers called Salem’s “chains of personal dependency.” Rival merchants, including his brother-in-law George Crowninshield Sr., capitalized on his passing. So, too, did captains who sailed under the Derby flag. At a time when a master’s rise to merchant depended on skill, luck, and a market, those captains formed the EIMS. Besides Carnes and Silsbee, Derby’s nephews, Benjamin and Jacob Crowninshield, joined.9

Beginning their discussions in August 1799, over thirty captains established the EIMS in October. To create opportunities and networks for rising men and to share information about distant lands and peoples, they opened their ranks only to those Salem captains and supercargoes who had navigated the seas at or beyond the Cape of Good Hope (and later Cape Horn). That excluded not only such wealthy global merchants as William Gray but also most Salem masters. Because the majority of Salem ships traded with the Caribbean, and 222 of their captains had already joined the Salem Marine Society (1766), the EIMS was the most select. The EIMS chose Benjamin Hodges as president and Jacob Crowninshield as treasurer. The Committee of Observation managed its affairs and included founder Benjamin Carpenter. Incorporated in 1801, EIMS had three stated purposes: to encourage navigation, to aid the widows and children of deceased members, and to create a cabinet. That third goal occurred well before the Boston Marine Society formed its own “collection of rare and valuable curiosities” in 1832. The EIMS asked the Reverend Dr. William Bentley, pastor of Salem’s East Church (Unitarian), to sketch a plan, and he even gave “his own well-stocked cabinet of specimens and curios.” Within a year it had fifty-three members, fifty being past or present captains in the Indies.10

The EIMS prospered as Salem’s empire expanded. Salem and Boston ships were so prevalent in East Indian ports that Asian merchants regarded the two as powerful countries. But, gaining at the expense of the Europeans, there was “nothing intrinsically American” about their success, noted Fichter, who disputed the claim of U.S. exceptionalism. “No cultural trait, no Protestant ethic distinguished American businessmen from their Dutch or British cousins.” With mariners present in all neighborhoods, especially in Bentley’s East Parish near the docks, Salem was, said Vickers, “a sailortown from stem to stern.” In 1796, it was the second largest town in Massachusetts and sixth largest in the nation with a population of almost 10,000. A French duke called it “one of the handsomest small towns in the United States,” and it had the greatest wealth in proportion to its population of any U.S. town. As a result, said a southern journalist in 1826, “You find few gentlemen in Salem, who have not visited almost every part of the world, and who do not possess more general knowledge than those of any other town in the Union.”11

As Salem accumulated “the largest fortunes ever made by trade in America,” it split geographically. Its more prosperous merchant captains moved from the waterfront to (or built residences on) Chestnut, Essex, and Federal Streets, often by builder-craftsman Samuel McIntire, “the architect of Salem.” That neighborhood near McIntire’s resplendent Hamilton Hall became an elite Federalist enclave. In 1817, Martin Van Buren called Chestnut Street “the most beautiful street I have ever seen.” Hawthorne later complained about “the sway of [Salem’s] aristocratic class,” but its merchants were divided politically. In the early nineteenth century, Democratic-Republicans and Federalists read different newspapers and even staged their own separate Independence Day festivities until 1824.12

The EIMS united those factions, as in its yearly parade beginning in 1800. Still, there was dissension. For its annual dinner in 1802, for example, EIMS secretary Nathaniel Bowditch previewed all toasts to cool the tensions created by inviting two extreme Federalists of the Essex Junto, Benjamin Goodhue and Timothy Pickering. Said Bentley, Bowditch “omitted a part of some [toasts] & the whole of others,” but those who were censored demanded “a publication of the Toasts for the public judgment.” That “ebullition of party spirit” led Bentley to warn that “the Society will undoubtedly be injured.” Soon after, the EIMS (like the Boston Marine Society) issued a gag order. It resolved that “politics shall not on any occasion be introduced into the Society.” Then, in what one historian called “Salem’s bitterest year since the witch trials,” Jacob Crowninshield defeated Pickering in the 1802 congressional election.13

Tensions abated, temporarily. At a dinner in early 1804, the toasts were “without any offence,” while the November banquet was proceeded by a cavalcade with the palanquin, a band, and the Second Corps of Cadets, which was primarily Republican. The 1805 parade was escorted by the Salem Light Infantry, which was Federalist. “Everyone approves of your public festivals,” a correspondent said, “for they give consequence to your society; and a generous pleasure to yourselves—a pleasure arising from consciousness of past and a determination of future endeavours.” Its dinner in 1806 emphasized unity before an intensifying storm. After a sixteen-gun salute was fired from its nine-foot model of the 342-ton East Indiaman Friendship (1797), a member toasted, “Improvement ‘ahead,’ Harmony ‘on the beam,’ and Party Spirit ‘astern,’ hull-down.” Another toast railed against “the enemies of our country,” though Federalists and Republicans had different enemies, “May they be blessed with Leaky clamps, Choak’d pumps, Sails rent, Grog spent, Wormy bread, Wind ahead, Cloudy noon, At night no moon, Compass lost, Tempest tost, A winter’s coast.” But unity was fleeting in the rising partisanship, which was keen in the Federalists’ Gazette and Democratic-Republicans’ Register. The Gazette called Democratic-Republican head George Crowninshield Sr. “the leader of the Jacobin party,” though he was joined by Nathaniel Silsbee and merchant Joseph White. They had taken control of the town in 1805, defeating Federalist Bowditch and William Gray.14

The European war shaped those feuds. While Barbary pirates preyed on Salem’s Mediterranean trade, the British were capturing more U.S. ships overall. Still, Salem’s trade was reaching its zenith, especially in pepper. In 1807, 236 Salem ships entered the port from distant markets. That number and the associated duties were, said local historian George G. Putnam, the greatest of any year. Federalists feared President Jefferson’s response to British attacks. But when he declared an embargo on December 29, the town’s selectmen split. With the trade stoppage, said a visitor, “the streets near the waterside were almost des...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index