Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Mark Valeri is the Ernest Trice Thompson Professor of Church History at the Union Theological Seminary and Presbyterian School of Christian Education in Virginia. His books include "Law and Providence in Joseph Bellamy's New England: The Origins of the New Divinity in Revolutionary America and The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Volume 17: Sermons and Discourses, 1730-1733".

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"Heavenly Merchandize is a compelling original exploration of moral conviction and commercial culture in early New England. Boldly challenging the view that the demise of piety was a condition for the rise of opportunistic market behavior, Valeri finds that New England's ministers and merchants were neither traditionalists eclipsed by a secularizing Atlantic world nor easy protocapitalists rushing into modernity. He discloses a commercial community that was intent upon righteous trading and pious living."--Cathy Matson, University of Delaware

"Heavenly Merchandize is a magisterial account of the interplay of economics and religion in early America. In place of abstract theories of 'modernization' or 'the spirit of capitalism,' Valeri engages representative figures on the ground, and through their stories narrates the ways in which transformations in religious thought actually shaped a premodern market culture. Students of early American religion, economics, and imperialism will have to consult this seminal work."--Harry S. Stout, Yale University

"Heavenly Merchandize treats the interconnected transformations of theology and the market in New England from earliest settlement in the 1620s to the mid-eighteenth century. The brilliance of Valeri's presentation is that he grounds it in the biographies and extensive testimonies of Boston merchants. In thoroughness, depth, scope, and significance, I rank this among a very elite group of truly seminal books."--Mark A. Noll, University of Notre Dame

"An important and powerfully argued narrative. This work is large in scope and ambition. It assesses more than a century of change in the complex relationship between religious beliefs, practices, and disciplinary standards and the evolution of commercial and market behavior in colonial New England. Valeri takes his subject head-on and in full, knowing the pitfalls and the controversies that lie along the path."--Mark Peterson, University of California, Berkeley

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"Heavenly Merchandize is a compelling original exploration of moral conviction and commercial culture in early New England. Boldly challenging the view that the demise of piety was a condition for the rise of opportunistic market behavior, Valeri finds that New England's ministers and merchants were neither traditionalists eclipsed by a secularizing Atlantic world nor easy protocapitalists rushing into modernity. He discloses a commercial community that was intent upon righteous trading and pious living."--Cathy Matson, University of Delaware

"Heavenly Merchandize is a magisterial account of the interplay of economics and religion in early America. In place of abstract theories of 'modernization' or 'the spirit of capitalism,' Valeri engages representative figures on the ground, and through their stories narrates the ways in which transformations in religious thought actually shaped a premodern market culture. Students of early American religion, economics, and imperialism will have to consult this seminal work."--Harry S. Stout, Yale University

"Heavenly Merchandize treats the interconnected transformations of theology and the market in New England from earliest settlement in the 1620s to the mid-eighteenth century. The brilliance of Valeri's presentation is that he grounds it in the biographies and extensive testimonies of Boston merchants. In thoroughness, depth, scope, and significance, I rank this among a very elite group of truly seminal books."--Mark A. Noll, University of Notre Dame

"An important and powerfully argued narrative. This work is large in scope and ambition. It assesses more than a century of change in the complex relationship between religious beliefs, practices, and disciplinary standards and the evolution of commercial and market behavior in colonial New England. Valeri takes his subject head-on and in full, knowing the pitfalls and the controversies that lie along the path."--Mark Peterson, University of California, Berkeley

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Heavenly Merchandize

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

List of Illustrations..................................................................ixPreface................................................................................xiIntroduction Heavenly Merchandize.....................................................1Chapter One Robert Keayne's Gift......................................................11Keayne, the Merchant Taylors' Company, and Civic Humanism..............................14Keayne and the Godly Community in England..............................................26Chapter Two Robert Keayne's Trials....................................................37Boston's First Merchants...............................................................39Puritan Discipline in England..........................................................50Discipline and Trade in Early Boston...................................................57Chapter Three John Hull's Accounts....................................................74Hull and the Expansion of New England's Market.........................................76Hull's Piety and Changes in Church Discipline..........................................83Jeremiads, Providence, and New England's Civic Order...................................96Chapter Four Samuel Sewall's Windows..................................................111Sewall's and Fitch's Problems with Money...............................................114The Politics of Empire.................................................................122Political Economy, Monetary Policy, and the Justification of Usury.....................134Merchants' Callings and the Campaign for Moral Reform..................................157Religious Conviction in the Affairs of Sewall and Fitch................................168Chapter Five Hugh Hall's Scheme.......................................................178Hall and Boston's Provincial Merchants.................................................181Rational Protestantism and the Meaning of Commerce.....................................200Gentility, the Empire, and Piety in the Affairs of Hall................................220Epilogue Religious Revival............................................................234Samuel Philips Savage, Isaac Smith, and Robert Treat Paine.............................235Social Virtue and the Market...........................................................240Conclusion.............................................................................248Notes..................................................................................251Index..................................................................................321

Chapter One

IN 1653 ROBERT KEAYNE bequeathed a generous gift to the town of Boston: £300 for the construction of a public market building, or exchange, with a water conduit. His last will and testament also provided £100 to stock a granary at the marketplace and £40 to feed clergymen attending annual synods at the exchange. Keayne also donated an unspecified number of books—including his own three, handwritten volumes of commentary on the prophetic books of Daniel, Ezekiel, and Hosea—to establish a public library in the building. There was more. He bequeathed £70 to the poor fund of the town's church, £50 to a school for indigent children, £10 and two cows to the local artillery company (a volunteer militia), and, to be dispensed at the death of his wife, £300 to Harvard College. In sum, Keayne devoted over £800 of his total estate of £2,700 to civic and religious causes.

Keayne estimated the market building as the most important of his bequests; he intended it to "be a great ornament to the town as well as useful and profitable," and gave detailed instructions for its construction. He thought it should be prominently located in the Cornhill district, at a key intersection overlooking the harbor and wharves, near his house. He designed it as an imposing, rectangular structure. The ground floor was to be open-air. Protected from rain and snow in the winter and refreshed by breezes in the summer, merchants, shipmasters, and shopkeepers could gather in this semiprotected space, store their goods, and market their wares. Keayne wanted the second floor to have several rooms for civic and religious purposes, including a library (furnished with his works on divinity and military affairs) and a room for church meetings. Other uses came to Keayne's mind: courtrooms, a granary, and an armory.

Such a structure had first been proposed in town meetings in 1649, but Keayne was the first to step forward with a plan and the money for its construction. Less than a year after his death in March 1656, 163 residents of the town contributed a total of about £100 to complete the building. Subscribers to the project included the most prominent merchants in Boston—seventeen long-distance traders and seven local traders and shopkeepers. Among the more generous donors were Edward Tyng, who along with fellow merchant Robert Hull and minister John Wilson, was a witness to Keayne's will, and other worthies of Boston's mercantile community: Richard Bellingham, Peter Oliver, Hezekiah Usher, Thomas Clark, Jacob Sheafe, Thomas Brattle, and Joshua Scottow.

Boston's Town House, as it came to be known, was completed in 1658. The building committee followed many of Keayne's instructions while expanding the general purpose of the structure. The ground floor was open as Keayne suggested. The second floor consisted of one large room. It could be used for merchants to meet, rest, or negotiate, but its formal purpose was to hold town meetings. The third floor housed the library, two courtrooms, a council chamber, and meeting rooms for ministers and selectmen. The town rented space on the ground floor to shopkeepers. It became a favorite location for booksellers. A railed walkway and turrets graced the roof. The committee unfortunately omitted the water conduit that its benefactor had proposed as a safeguard against fire. The whole edifice burned to the ground one day in 1711.

As a public moral gesture, Keayne's gift conveyed mixed concepts of social exchange. The very plan of the structure evoked the humanist ideal that commerce should be an instrument for social cohesion. Its unenclosed first floor, rectangular shape, and central location expressed Renaissance conventions for civic-mindedness (figure 1.1). Open to all residents of Boston, the exchange encouraged merchants to view their activities as public duties, carried out on behalf of the town and commonwealth. It was a hub of social networks, where members of various trades and social classes gathered as neighbors. As if to certify this communal ideal, the small contributions of apothecaries and innkeepers, farmers, fishermen, bakers, and artisans such as tanners, shoemakers, coopers, and masons made up the bulk of the funding beyond Keayne's gift. The building symbolized business in the service of social integration. In this space merchants acted as citizens and plied their trade as a civic office. As Keayne put it, the Town House "is a work of charity and mercy"; its advantages would "redound to the whole town in general."

Keayne's design also reflected a puritan worldview in which religious discipline defined the proper bounds of commerce. The placement of the Town House allowed for supervision by the church. It was located in sight of wharves yet also across the street from the First Church meetinghouse and one of its pastors. Visiting merchants and ministers were to meet in the building, bringing material and spiritual exchange into the same space. We might surmise that the library, which Keayne thought more crucial than the courtroom, contained gazettes and almanacs that merchants found useful, but he wanted traders to read biblical prophecy as well as advice on foreign currencies.

Humanist and puritan convictions flowed together in Boston's Town House, symbolizing the possibilities of both integration and conflict. Humanists and puritans equally infused economic exchange with moral purpose directed to the common good. From this perspective, Keayne's building promised the coalescence of civil and religious criteria for economic exchange. Yet, as he learned throughout his career, many puritan leaders thought that these two conventions were fundamentally incompatible. Humanists prized trade as a means to national prosperity and happiness. Puritans prized it as a means of service to one's immediate neighbor and God. The civil order and the society of the godly were interrelated, but not identical. From this perspective, humanists and puritans held different understandings of the community to which merchants were ultimately accountable: the commonwealth or the church. The story behind Keayne's exchange, then, offers a particularly revealing account of a first-generation New England merchant compelled to negotiate between overlapping and sometimes conflicting moral discourses.

Keayne cannot stand for all New Englanders, but he does represent a dilemma common to many of them. Like many other Bay Colony merchants, he learned his trade and was converted long before he immigrated to New England. The following discussion of his encounters in the Old World probes the deep sources of an uneasy, even strained relationship between the mandates of commerce and the prescriptions of godliness in puritan America.

Keayne, the Merchant Taylors' Company, and Civic Humanism

A survey of Keayne's life on both sides of the Atlantic sets the context for probing his early career in England. He was born in 1595 in Windsor, Berkshire County, England, the son of the butcher John Keayne. We know little of his early life. In 1605 his father apprenticed him to the London merchant-tailor John Heyfield. He worked eight years in the Cornhill District of London, secured admission to the freedom of the Merchant Taylors' Company, a prominent guild, in 1615, and married Anne Mansfield in 1617. While in London, the young merchant also joined the puritan movement and established connections with dissenting leaders. Anne Mansfield was the sister-in-law of John Wilson, of later fame as one of the first ministers of Boston's First Church.

Keayne thereafter devoted himself to godly teaching. He collected books, regularly attended preaching events in London, and often took notes on sermons when he traveled for business. As his business prospered, he also assumed civic responsibilities. He joined the Honourable Artillery Company of London in 1623 and subscribed as an adventurer behind the Plymouth Colony. Eventually he became acquainted with John Winthrop, whose uncle was a leading vestryman in the parish church of Keayne's Cornhill residence. He advised Winthrop on procuring armaments for the Massachusetts Bay Company. In 1634 he invested £100 in the company. On July 17, 1635, when he was forty years old, he, his wife, and one surviving son out of four, Benjamin, departed England for Boston.

By the time that Keayne left for New England, he had established himself. He expanded his business until he had become a freeman and accumulated between £2,000 and £3,000 in estate. He saw himself as an adherent of Winthrop, Wilson, and Cotton, future mainstays of the governing party within Massachusetts puritanism. He also was the cousin of Edward Rawson, who would become secretary of the General Court. Keayne came to New England as one of the wealthier passengers on the ship Defence, a vessel loaded with the colony's future luminaries.

In Boston, Keayne's investment in the company netted him a choice town plot, once removed from the First Church, facing the market square. He built a house there and immediately made a donation to the town's defenses, a battlement on Fort Hill. He and Anne joined as full members of the church during his first year of residence, an act that testified to his conversion. During the next two years he was appointed to a committee on town lands and elected selectman. He held many public offices during the rest of his life; he was reelected selectman four times, elected deputy to the General Court seven times, and appointed to several minor positions such as surveyor of the highways. In 1638 he helped found the colony's militia, the Ancient and Honourable Artillery Company, and thereafter sat on several committees of military affairs. During his first three years in Massachusetts, the General Court awarded him two large land grants: 314 acres on Rumney Marsh and 400 outside the Boston area.

In November 1639, however, Keayne suffered the first of three public humiliations—small scandals, really—that marred his reputation and shaped his self-presentation throughout the rest of his life. A fellow merchant accused Keayne of selling six-penny nails for ten pence a pound. Other charges of overpricing followed. When profit margins on common goods were limited by custom, and frequently by law, to between 10 and 30 percent, Keayne was said to have taken 50, 75, and even 100 percent. In a split decision, the General Court ruled against Keayne and fined him the astonishing amount of £200, which it later reduced to £80. In parallel proceedings, the First Church formally admonished Keayne and placed him under disciplinary censure until the following May, when the merchant's penitence satisfied church elders. In 1642 the suit of one Goody Sherman brought Keayne into court again. She accused him of stealing and slaughtering her prized sow. Keayne successfully defended himself on the evidence that he had killed his own sow and she had merely misplaced hers.

When the dust settled from the nails and sow cases, Keayne's business and even public stature recovered until the third scandal a decade later. From 1643 through 1649 he engaged in lucrative trade with Bermuda and the West Indies. He was a prominent investor in New England's first sustained manufacturing venture, the Saugus Iron Works. In 1649 the General Court awarded him yet another land grant: more than a thousand acres at Pocusset Hill. In 1651 he was appointed judge in the Suffolk County Court. In 1652, alas, Keayne was again brought up to face embarrassing charges. Two former employees and two debtors accused him of habitual drunkenness. The General Court found him guilty, fined him, and removed him from his office as judge. Only a year after this scandal, he began to write his last will and testament, with its elaborate prescriptions for Boston's Town House. Also known as his apologia, this document contained Keayne's reflections on his controversial career.

We have few details about Keayne's business during his formative years in England, but we can infer that he closely identified with the Merchant Taylors' Company of London. The very first line of his apologia pointed to his civic responsibility as a member of the guild: "I, Robert Keayne, citizen and merchant tailor of London." To be sure, he immediately declared the other matrix of his self-understanding: "by freedom and by the good providence of God now dwelling in Boston." Yet he obviously took pride in his professional ascendance, from his move to London in 1605 and his apprenticeship under John Heyfield through his entrance to the guild as a freeman in 1615.

Master merchants such as Heyfield introduced apprentices to different aspects of merchant culture. Most fundamentally, they taught the techniques of exchanging credit, such as keeping books, maintaining accounts, and using bills of exchange (signed promissory notes that could be transferred from one merchant to another). They exposed apprentices to a repetitive, formulaic, mathematical, and contractual language. Merchants intended their accounts to quantify, and thereby certify or reinforce, relationships between creditor and debtor. Calculation protected the moral trust between buyers and sellers. Merchant Taylors required all members annually to present their ledgers to the guild, to be examined by senior members for accuracy and fairness.

Masters also exposed their apprentices to published advice manuals of the period, which instructed would-be merchants on accounts and, perhaps more important, protocols for trade. During Keayne's life in London the most popular of these manuals were Thomas Tusser's Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry (London, 1573), John Browne's The Marchants Avizo (London, 1589), and Gerard Malynes' Consuetudo: Vel, Lex Mercatoria (London, 1622). The manuals circulating in Keayne's London were quite different from an earlier generation of publications such as Antoine Marcourt's Boke of Merchauntes (London, 1539). Marcourt cast a critical glance at merchants. From his advice it appeared that they were prone to avarice and dishonesty. Writers such as Brown and Malynes portrayed merchants as mutual fellows, a true society, bound by codes of honor and trust that spanned oceans. While different kingdoms held to different "civil laws," Malynes argued, merchants followed the international and timeless "Law of nations," and in so doing they provided "the sole peaceable instrument to inrich Kingdomes and Commonweales, by the means of Equality and Equity."

Laced with this sort of self-assurance, advice manuals taught merchants to deploy their own rhetoric of honor and sociability. Browne's Avizo was the most widely used of these manuals among merchant apprentices at the turn of the sixteenth century; by 1640 it had gone through six editions. Keayne might well have looked on Browne as a model; like him, Browne worked his way up through the merchant ranks, professed to be something of a soldier and expert on military affairs, and expressed a deep religious devotion. Browne provided inexperienced traders with a lexicon of manners, even the exact words to use when conducting business. The Avizo included rules for keeping different ledgers, the proper terminology for bills of exchange or bills of attorney, and examples of letters to port keepers, friends, and fellow merchants. Every letter to another merchant, Browne suggested, should begin with "I pray for your good health and prosperitie," provide some interesting but not terribly valuable news about local market conditions, and end with expressions of piety that were oblique enough to avoid offending someone of a different religious tradition. The wise merchant not only stayed abreast of the commercial news but also voiced concern for honesty, courtesy, and the honor of fellow merchants. "Shewe yourselfe lowly, curteous, and serviceable unto every person," Browne advised.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Heavenly Merchandizeby Mark Valeri Copyright © 2010 by Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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