for violations of child labor and immigration laws as well as the Clean Water
Act.^21
tWater pollution is hardly new. The term apparently appeared in English
North America in the eighteenth century. In Virginia and Maryland (and
doubtlessly elsewhere), people living downstream from sawmills and tan-
neries complained of sawdust and toxic wastes flowing past their properties
and sickening people and domestic animals. Another human-caused phe-
nomenon, obvious at least as early as the eighteenth century, was siltation
of creeks, rivers, and estuaries. Siltation clouds water, filtering or shutting
out the sunlight that nourishes subaquatic vegetation, which is the origin
of the maritime food chain. Subaquatic vegetation feeds phytoplankton,
which are fodder for larger creatures, and so on, to us. Great storms have
loosened soils hundreds of miles from Chesapeake Bay and the Mississippi
—from all watercourses—and carried loam, clay, and other terrestrial de-
bris down tributaries to the principals, disrupting wildlife sometimes for
more than a year. More often it is agriculture that pollutes in this fash-
ion. Seventeenth-century hoe cultivation of tobacco and grains may have
bared enough tidewater and upland landscape not only to cloud rivers but
to change rivers’ boundaries. Introduction of plows and slave labor, both
intensive by the first quarter of the eighteenth century, hugely enlarged cul-
tivated landscapes and, doubtlessly, increased siltation. By the time of the
Revolution, any number of early tobacco ports along the upper Chesapeake
system were isolated by receding shorelines. Everywhere, but especially in
lowlands with high water tables, privies must have leached into shallow
aquifers and then into watercourses. Where populations were concentrated
—Baltimore, Norfolk, and Charleston in early times—leaching and simple
dumping of many sorts of wastes were concentrated, too.
English riparian law, adopted everywhere in eastern North America, con-
veyed rights to use watercourses to all who dwelled by them. Individuals
might construct next to rivers parallel ‘‘traces’’ to power mills but were obli-
gated to permit streams to flow onward and supply people downstream. In
this sense every creek, river, bay, and sound was a commons as vital as the
South’s vast forests. Fishing the commons was no less a common right than
hunting, even though, of course, there was a protocol to obtaining permis-
sion to line-fish on a bank belonging to someone else. Commercial fishing
with seines was more problematic and best conducted on open waters.
Industrial-scale fishing came late and most disastrously (and famously)
to Chesapeake Bay. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, explorer