century and spoke of a time
above 20 years past when the woods was not pastured and full of high weeds and the ground light[,] then the rain sunk much more into the earth and did not wash and tear up the surface (as now). The rivers and brooks in floods would be black with mud but now the rain runs most of it off on the surface[,] is colected into the hollows which it wears to the sand and clay which it bears away with the swift current down to brooks and rivers whose banks it overflows.
Though he wrote of the mid-Atlantic colonies rather than New England, Bartram described processes which were unquestionably going on in both regions. Within a year or two after a forest was cleared, its soil began to lose the nutrients that had originally sustained (and been sustained by) its ecological community. Particles of inorganic matter in its runoff water increased perhaps five- or sixfold, and dissolved minerals also washed away more quickly. In pastures and meadows, both effects were aggravated by the presence of grazing animals; in planting fields, deeply stirred soils came into greater contact with both air and water, thus decomposing organic material and losing dissolved nutrients more rapidly. The result was to reduce still further the ability of soils to sustain plant life.35
Notes
1 1 Manasseh Minor, The Diary of Manasseb Minor (1915); Thomas Tusser, Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandrie (London, 1580); The Husbandman’s Guide, 2nd ed. (New York, 1712), pp. 3–15; Edwin Stanley Welles, The Beginnings of Fruit Culture in Connecticut (Hartford, CT, 1936), pp. 30–2; Darrett B. Rutman, Husbandmen of Plymouth (Boston, 1967), pp. 50–2.
2 2 Conrad M. Arensberg, “The Old World Peoples,” Anthropological Quarterly, 36 (1963), pp. 75–99.
3 3 Compare John Winthrop, Winthrop’s Journal, James Kendall Hosmer, ed. (New York, 1908); and William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, Samuel Eliot Morison, ed. (New York, 1952). (The quotation is on p. 141.) Other quotations are in Everett Emerson, ed., Letters from New England (Amherst, MA, 1976),pp. 110, 225; and William Wood, New England’s Prospect (1634), Alden T. Vaughan, ed. (Amherst, MA, 1977), p. 69. Plymouth had other livestock before it first obtained cattle: in 1623, it possessed 6 goats, 50 swine, and a number of hens. Emmanuel Altham to Sir Edward Altham, September 1623, in Three Visitors to Early Plymouth, Sidney V. James, Jr, ed. (Plimoth Plantation, 1963), p. 24.
4 4 Carl Bridenbaugh, Fat Mutton and Liberty of Conscience (Providence, 1974), pp. 27–60; Percy Wells Bidwell and John I. Falconer, History of Agriculture in the Northern United States (Washington, DC, 1925), pp. 18–32; Howard S. Russell, A Long, Deep Farrow: Three Centuries of Farming in New England (Hanover, NH, 1976), pp. 30–8, 151–69.
5 5 Winthrop, Journal, I, p. 64; J. Hammond Trumbull, ed., The Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut (Hartford, 1850), p. 19; Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, ed., Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England (Boston, 1853), IV, Part 2, pp. 512–13.
6 6 John Winthrop, “Reasons to Be Considered,” Winthrop Papers (Massachusetts Historical Society, 1931), II, p. 141.
7 7 Shurtleff, Massachusetts Records, I, pp. 121, 133; Franklin Bowditch Dexter, ed., New Haven Town Records, I, 1649–1662 (New Haven, CT, 1917), p. 193; Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, ed., Records of the Colony of New Plymouth in New England (Boston, 1855), III, pp. 21, 89, 106, 119, 132, 192; James P. Ronda, “Red and White at the Bench: Indians and the Law in Plymouth Colony, 1620–1691,” Essex Institute Historical Collections, 110 (1974), pp. 208–9.
8 8 Shurtleff, Plymouth Records, III, p. 192; Dexter, New Haven Records, I, p. 193; Shurtleff, Massachusetts Records, I, p. 99.
9 9 I am indebted to Edmund Morgan for the suggestion that colonial wolf populations probably rose after the arrival of English live stock; the anonymous author of the “Essay on the Ordering of Towns” (in the Winthrop Papers, III, p. 185) corroborates this, but for different reasons, with the claim that “I have often hearde (by seemeing credible men) that Wolves are much more increased since our Nation came then when the Indians possessed the same, and a Reason rendred, that they were dilligent in destroying the Yonge.” One can doubt the “Reason rendred” by wondering whether a people who kept no livestock would have troubled themselves so much over predators who lived off the deer herds, but perhaps they did. Colonial wolf populations are impossible to estimate accurately. One gets the feeling that, for colonists, wolves were either “very common, and very noxious,” or were nonexistent. There does not appear to have been any middle ground between these two conditions. Colonists, like many who keep cattle today, surely overestimated the damage done by wolves, and probably attributed to wolves livestock deaths which had nothing to do with the predators. On early responses to wolves, see Shurtleff, Massachusetts Records, III, pp. 10, 17; Winthrop, Journal, I, pp. 53, 67, III; Wood, Prospect, pp. 45–6.
10 10 On wolf bounties, see Shurtleff, Massachusetts Records, I, pp. 81, 102, 156, 218, 252, 304, 319; II, pp. 84–5, 103, 252; III, pp. 10, 17, 134, 319; IV, Part 2, pp. 2, 42; V, p. 453; Shurtleff, Plymouth Records, I, pp. 22, 31; III, pp. 50–1, 85–6; Town Records of Salem (Salem, 1868), pp. 107, 127. Most town records contain a number of entries similar to the ones I cite here.
11 11 John Josselyn, New-England’s Rarities Discovered (1672), Edward Tucker-man, ed., in Transactions and Collections of the American Antiquarian Society, 4 (1860), pp. 150–1; Dexter, New Haven Records, pp. 73–4, 92, 309; Shurtleff, Massachusetts Records, II, pp. 252–3; M. Minor, Diary, pp. 32, 48, 53, 81, 98, 105, 113, 119, 120; Jeremy Belknap, History of New Hampshire (Dover, NH, 1812), III, pp. 108–9; Benjamin Trumbull, A Complete History of Connecticut (Hartford, CT, 1797), p. 26; Herbert B. Adams, “Village Communities of Cape Anne and Salem,” Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science,ser. I, 9–10 (1883), p. 58; “Ordering of Towns,” Winthrop Papers, III, p. 184; Scituate Records, I, p. 48, as quoted by John Robert Stilgoe, Patterns on the Land: The Making of a Colonial Landscape, 1633–1800, PhD Thesis, Harvard University, 1976, p. 159; Timothy Dwight, Travels in New England and New York (1821), Barbara Miller Solomon, ed. (Cambridge, MA, 1969), I, p. 33.
12 12 Shurtleff, Plymouth Records, I, p. 6; Shurtleff, Massachusetts Records, I, pp. 215, 221, 272; II, pp. 14–15.
13 13 Charles J. Hoadly, ed., Records of the Colony of New Haven (Hartford, 1858), p. 579; Dexter, New Haven Records, pp. 65, 132, 234, 281; Shurtleff, Massachusetts Records, I, p. 333; III, p. 319; David Thomas Konig, “Community Custom and the Common Law: Social Change and the Development of Land Law in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts,” American Journal of Legal History, 18(1974), pp. 137–77. For a fine detailed discussion of how earlier English field practices fed into these colonial systems, see David Grayson Allen, In English Ways (Chapel Hill, 1981).
14 14 Rutman, Husbandmen of Plymouth, p. 49; Shurtleff, Massachusetts Records, I, pp. 106, 150, 157, 182, 219–20, 222, 238–9, 255, 265, 270; IV, Part 2, p. 322. It is quite likely that disputes over swine expressed a disguised class conflict. Because pigs were so cheap and easy to raise, they were favored by poorer colonists as a source of meat; wealthier colonists, who could afford to keep larger numbers of cattle, had less need of them. The evidence cited above in Shurtleff suggests that a number of colonists were decidedly unhappy about the swine laws, and spoke against them so vociferously that the Massachusetts Court felt compelled to mete out stiff fines. No study of this issue has been done for colonial New England, but Steven Hahn’s article on the nineteenth-century South is suggestive: “Hunting, Fishing, and Foraging: Common Rights and Class Relations in the Postbellum South,” Radical History Review, 26 (October 1982), pp. 37–64.
15 15 Shurtleff, Massachusetts Records, I, pp. 188–9; Roger Williams, The Letters of Roger Williams, John Russell Bartlett, ed., Publications of the Narragansett Club, 6 (1874), pp. 71, 78, 104; “Leift Lion Gardener His Relation of the Pequot Warres,” Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, 3rd ser., 3 (1833), p. 154; Roger Williams, A Key into the Language of America (1643), John J. Teunissen and Evelyn J. Hinz, eds. (Detroit, 1973), p. 182; Wood, Prospect, p. 57, Thomas Morton, New English Canaan (1637), Charles F. Adams, ed., Pubs. of the Prince Society, XIV (Boston, 1883), p. 227.
16 16 Salem Records, pp. 130, 137, 143, 152; Dexter, New Haven Records, pp. 19–20; Shurtleff, Massachusetts Records, I, p. 215.
17 17