History
Salem merchants defended the colonies during the American Revolutionary War through privateering. When the 13 colonies declared independence, the Continental Navy had only 31 ships. To support their efforts Letters of Marque were issued to private merchant ships to authorize them to attack enemy merchant ships. George Washington's Army numbered 11,000 men; there were 11,000 privateers at sea in the Atlantic, Caribbean, and between Ireland and England. One of the goals was to obtain gunpowder, outlawed for import by the British. Over 2 million pounds of gunpowder and saltpeter were brought in by the privateers and merchantmen. They also prevented British soldiers and over 10,000 seamen out of the British Navy, with the Continental Navy the total was 16,000 captured British.
Titus, a slave to Mrs. John Cabot of Salem, established a business and successfully recruited blacks as privateers during the war. Captain Jonathan Haraden was considered one of the best privateers, simultaneously fighting three armed British ships. His efforts resulted in the capture of 10,000 cannons.
During the late 18th and early 19th centuries made, international trade was conducted in Salem from the Atlantic coast "to the farthest ports of the rich east." Salem was one of the leading international ports by the end of the 18th century, importing ceramics, furniture, decorative arts, artificial flowers, textiles, spices and dye.
Read more about this topic: Salem Harbor
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Classes struggle, some classes triumph, others are eliminated. Such is history; such is the history of civilization for thousands of years.”
—Mao Zedong (1893–1976)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“All history attests that man has subjected woman to his will, used her as a means to promote his selfish gratification, to minister to his sensual pleasures, to be instrumental in promoting his comfort; but never has he desired to elevate her to that rank she was created to fill. He has done all he could to debase and enslave her mind; and now he looks triumphantly on the ruin he has wrought, and say, the being he has thus deeply injured is his inferior.”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)