24 a short history of the united states
Colonies were therefore necessary to provide the goods the mother
country could sell abroad—selling more to foreigners than it bought
and thus producing the favorable balance. The American colonies
could supply raw materials such as tobacco, naval stores, cotton, rice,
indigo, furs, and sugar, which England could sell to other nations. At
the same time the colonies would provide a market for the mother
country’s manufactured goods. This program was called mercantilism,
and through a series of Navigation and Trade Acts, Parliament in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries acted to monopolize the trade of
its colonies and exclude foreign nations from that trade.
In Boston a mercantile class developed, transporting furs, naval
stores, and fish to other colonial and Caribbean ports. The Bostonian
merchants traded lumber and furs for West Indian molasses, which
could be distilled into rum. New England shippers took their wares to
England and the European continent and then sailed to Africa, where
they acquired slaves to transport to the southern colonies. This trian-
gular trade—Africa, West Indies, and North America—was carried
on in violation of the Navigation Acts, but these enterprising mer-
chants were an intrepid lot and managed to get away with it.
They were so successful that they soon acquired sufficient wealth to
displace the New England Puritan elite of the earlier generation. The
amount of money an individual acquired became the means by which an
American rose to the upper class of society. This became the norm
throughout America, not simply New England. Money or property de-
termined social rank. Material goods replaced birth and heredity as the
most important component in determining one’s position in society.
Religion had always been a prime factor in bringing settlers to
America. Some colonies were actually founded as a haven for adherents
of a partic ular creed or church. Puritans and Quakers were obvious
examples.
Puritans were governed along congregational lines, that is, the con-
gregation formulated the rules of society and its economy. But as the
commercial activity of New England expanded, ministers became
aware of the threat to their authority and sought to counteract it by
holding synods, which spelled out doctrinal errors and demanded con-