Tariffs

Massachusetts was not the first state settled by Europeans. The first was Florida, then New Mexico, then Virginia. ¹ When the Mayflower finally arrived in Massachusetts in 1620, Jamestown was already celebrating its 13th anniversary.

Currier & Ives, Landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, Mass., 1878, Library of Congress.

Massachusetts was, however, the first state to industrialize. Before industrialization, it had some other North American firsts. It had the first college, first newspaper, first witch hunt, first tea party . . . But industrialization was something different. Before the 1830s Massachusetts was pretty homogenous. It was white.² It was English. It was Protestant. There were artisan craftsmen, farmers, merchants, and the extraction of lumber, quarried stone, and fish, but there wasn’t industry. Before the 19th century the principal Massachusetts manufactured good was rum.³

Beginning in the 1820s everything changed in Massachusetts. Wealthy Bostonians figured out that owning the means of production was better than not, and they invested heavily in factories and mills. Massachusetts became the nation’s principal producer of textiles–especially cotton cloth–and shoes, but everything was made there: buttons, rifles, musical instruments, candy, perfume . . . Farm laborers moved off the farm to factory towns like Lawrence and Lowell and Worcester. By 1865 only 13% of the labor force still worked in agriculture. And the jobs offered by industry brought immigrants from Europe and Canada. The Irish, the Italians, French Canadians, and Eastern Europeans, including large numbers of Jewish Eastern Europeans, came for the work.

Irish Immigrants at Constitution Wharf, Boston, Ballous Pictorial, October 31, 1857.

While things may have been worse back home, those manufacturing jobs weren’t the cat’s pajamas either. Pay was low, living conditions were squalid, hours were long. Children worked. If demand slowed–and from time to time demand slowed–workers were fired.

By the 1900s, Massachusetts was no longer principally English Protestant, and more than 100,000 new immigrants arrived each year. At the same time, industries started deserting Massachusetts. Textiles moved South. Shoemakers closed. You think the Great Depression was bad at your house? You shoulda been in Massachusetts. In 1933, the national rate of unemployment was 24.9%. Estimated unemployment in Massachusetts in 1932 was 34.8%.⁴

Later, led by technology, defense, and finance, the Massachusetts economy would revive. At $120,011 per annum, Massachusetts now has the second highest median household income by state. ⁵ Shoemaking, however, never recovered.⁶

Daniel Webster (1851), John C. Calhoun (1845) (portrait by George Peter Alexander Healy).

What has this got to do with tariffs? Beginning in the 1830s Massachusetts pushed tariffs as a means of protecting the state’s manufacturing. Daniel Webster, now largely remembered for his support of the Compromise of 1850,⁷ was also a shill for tariffs, and the first important sectional Constitutional crisis,⁸ the Nullification Crisis of 1832, was brought about because Massachusetts manufacturers were pitted against South Carolina planters. The South Carolinians wanted European goods, and they didn’t want to pay more for them to support factories in the North. Led by John C. Calhoun,⁹ South Carolinians decided that a state legislature had the right to nullify any federal law that they didn’t like, and South Carolinians proceeded to nullify the federally imposed tariffs. The then-President, Andrew Jackson, saved the union with a combination of threats and reduced tariffs.

I’m not certain how the tariffs affected the stock market.

Geography

Massachusetts Geography is simple. Everything west of Worcester is Western Massachusetts. Everything Worcester and east is the town you’re standing in. Nantucket sits out in the ocean, and everything further East is the Atlantic, at least until you get to England.

Now the first of December was covered with snow
So was the turnpike from Stockbridge to Boston
Now the Berkshires seemed dreamlike
On account of that frosting
With ten miles behind me and ten thousand more to go

James Taylor, Sweet Baby James, 1970.

When I was 14, two things happened. I was raising pigs in Texas in FFA,¹⁰ and James Taylor released Sweet Baby James. These two things may seem unrelated, but in FFA I had to memorize the breeds of pigs–Hampshires, Durocs, Chester Whites, and, of course, Berkshires. Until post-college I thought Taylor was singing about frosted dreamlike pigs, not a hilly region in Western Mass. Since I found out he wasn’t, I’ve sworn off learning any more about Massachusetts geography. I really liked the notion of frosted dreamlike pigs.

Dreamlike Berkshire pig, from Brett’s Colonists’ Guide, 1883, Auckland, New Zealand.

Dreamlike Berkshire Mountains, from Wikipedia, 2013.

Population

Massachusetts is the 16th most populous state at 7,001,399, which is roughly stable since the 2020 census population of 7,136,171. The non-Hispanic White population is 68.8%, Black is 9.6%, and Asians are 7.9%. Hispanics are 13.5% of the total. Boston is the largest city with a population of 653,833, and nine other cities have populations greater than 100,000.

Massachusetts urbanized early, right along with industrialization and immigration. By the end of the 19th century, more than 76% of its population lived in cities. As of 2024, the Boston-Cambridge-Newton statistical area had a population of 4,919,179, so slightly more than 70% of the Massachusetts population. Providence-Warwick is another 581,841 people, and Worcester 866,866. By population density, Massachusetts ranks third, with 899 people per square mile, but the population density of the Boston-Cambridge-Newton statistical area is 2,075 people per square mile. That’s dense.

Luckily they’ve got all those colleges and universities to keep things elevated. Otherwise they’d likely sink to the center of the earth.

In the first census of 1790, with a population of 378,787, Massachusetts was the fourth most populous state after Virginia (691,937), Pennsylvania (434,373), and North Carolina (393,751). By 1860, with a population of 1,231,066, Massachusetts trailed New York (3,880,735), Pennsylvania (2,906,215), Ohio (2,339,511), Illinois (1,711,951), and Indiana (1,350,428). At 10,554 square miles, it was also substantially smaller than the next smallest state, Indiana–with 36,419 square miles–so there was substantially less area to stack all those people. And states like Ohio were receiving substantial immigrants from Massachusetts.

Spenser

The Spenser novels by Robert B. Parker taught me everything I know about living in Massachusetts, and we re-listened to the first two novels in the series, The Godwulf Manuscript (1973) and God Save the Child (1974), while we were driving around looking for fish. They hold up well.

I was also very fond of The Scarlet Letter and Walden, and the Pequod sails from Nantucket. Massachusetts probably rivals Mississippi for important books per square mile, but The Scarlet Letter and Walden are probably a bit less informative about modern Massachusetts than the Spenser novels. For that matter, they’re probably less informative than Absalom, Absalom! remains about modern Mississippi.

Mary Hallock Foote, Hester Prynne before the stocks, 1878, James R. Osgood & Co., Boston.

Politics

Governors in antebellum Massachusetts were elected from time to time from various parties, including Federalist, Democratic-Republican, and Whig, but after the Whigs fell apart over abolition Massachusetts became predominately Republican and remained Republican from the Civil War until the 1930s. The Democrats made inroads by building coalitions with the Italians and Irish, and the first Irish mayors in Boston were Democrats. Patronage matters.¹¹

Everything changed with Franklin Roosevelt and the Great Depression. Since the 1930s, Massachusetts has been predominately Democratic. The current governor is Democratic, though Republicans are well-represented among recent governors, including a long period from 1991 to 2007. Even with the diverse governors, Democrats predominated. Currently both U.S. senators and all of the congressional delegation are Democrats. The Massachusetts General Court–their quaint name for their state (quaintly called the commonwealth) legislature (quaintly called the general court)–is overwhelmingly Democratic.

In the 2024 presidential election, Kamala Harris defeated Donald Trump 61.22% to 36.02%. Trump carried no Massachusetts counties.

From Wikipedia.

Fish

Ah, the pickerel of Walden! . . . They are not green like the pines, nor gray like the stones, nor blue like the sky; but they have, to my eyes, if possible, yet rarer colors, like flowers and precious stones, as if they were the pearls, the animalized nuclei or crystals of the Walden water. 

Henry David Thoreau, Walden, The Pond in Winter. 

Planning for Massachusetts, I thought seriously about trying to fish Walden Pond. There are apparently black bass and sunfish, and of course there are pickerel. But to fish Walden I would have needed to have a canoe delivered from Boston. It was complicated, so I gave it up. Simplicity! Simplicity! Simplicity!

We could also have fished the coast. There is famous striped bass fishing in Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard, Cape Cod, and even Boston Harbor, but we’d fished for stripers and blues in Rhode Island, and there’s never a guarantee of me catching coastal fish. I had visited Massachusetts several times before, and I did not want to return just to fish. Over a couple of days, I can usually come up with one trout in decent trout water, and our friend Jim Litrum had emailed that the Swift River in southwest Massachusetts was his favorite place to fish. We followed Jim’s advice and fished the Swift.

The Swift is a tailwater, with fairly constant water flows and temperatures. It’s stocked with browns and rainbows, and has a native population of brook trout. To get to the Swift, it’s an easy 50-mile drive from the Hartford-Bradley Airport in Hartford, Connecticut. And of course, I thought, Southwestern Massachusetts should fish warmer in April than fishing for stripers on a boat off the coast. I wanted Massachusetts done, and I also wanted to be reasonably warm.

Pickerel (Lucius reticulus), From a Pond in Massachusetts, First Annual Report of the Commissioners of Fisheries, Game and Forests of the State of New York, 1896, facing p. 124, Wynkoop Hallenbeck Crawford Co., New York, New York, from the University of Washington Freshwater and Marine Image Bank.

1. St. Augustine (1565), Jamestown (1607), Santa Fe (1610), These are more or less permanent settlements, so I’m ignoring Taos (the settlement of which seemed to come and go), and also ignoring the abandonment of Santa Fe during the Pueblo Rebellion. This is my footnote, so I get to do what I want. ↩︎
2. This is not completely true. In 1641, Massachusetts became the first English colony in North America to legalize slavery–another first! Enslaved Africans were landed in Jamestown earlier, in 1619, but their status as slaves was not clear, and there were African slaves in St. Augustine even earlier. The Dutch brought slaves to New Netherland by 1626. African slavery was a global trade, and it’s enough to say that Massachusetts played its part, both as owners and particularly as slavers. by the 18th century Massachusetts’ African population was as much as 12% of its total, mostly used in rum production. ↩︎
3. I think that’s right, but I haven’t double-checked. If it’s not right it should be. New England was the rum stop on the triangular trade that ran Molasses from the West Indies, rum from North America, and slaves from Africa. ↩︎
4. Michigan had the highest unemployment in the nation, at 45.9%. Weirdly, in the 1930s there were no unemployment statistics kept by state, and state statistics were estimated much later by the Social Security Administration. ↩︎
5. New Jersey is first at $124,487. Mississippi is last at $70,821. ↩︎
6. Alden and some New Balance shoes are still made in Massachusetts. ↩︎
7. The Compromise of 1850 prescribed how slavery would be decided in the new territories acquired from Mexico, and allowed slavery to spread beyond the existing slave states. It included stringent fugitive slave laws that required the return of fugitive slaves from free states. Webster’s reputation in his home state of Massachusetts was substantially damaged by his support of the Compromise. ↩︎
8. A sectional crisis is a crisis pitting the interests of one section of the nation against another. The Civil War, for instance, was also an important sectional Constitutional crisis. Our current Constitutional crisis is not particularly sectional. ↩︎
9. At the time, Calhoun was vice president, which seems to me like a conflict of interest. Calhoun was a hero of the South, and we keep our skiff in Port O’Connor, Calhoun County, Texas. ↩︎
10. Future Farmers of America. ↩︎
11. Allegedly among the important public jobs created by Boston Mayor John Fitzgerald, maternal grandfather of J.F.K., were watchmen to watch watchmen, tree climbers, and city watering crew inspectors. ↩︎