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Marblehead cod helped start a revolution, historian argues in Salem
This story connects Marblehead’s fishing past to the wider struggle that helped shape the American Revolution. Reader support keeps that kind of local history and civic context free to read, with reporting, editing and follow-up work supported by neighbors rather than a paywall. While this story is still fresh, membership is a direct way to keep that work available to everyone in town. 🟦 Become a member here.
Christopher Magra stepped out from behind the podium about five minutes into his lecture because he can't help it. He likes to walk when he talks, he shared on Thursday night. He had flown in from Knoxville that morning, his spring semester just wrapped, and he stood inside the Salem Maritime National Historical Park visitor center before a seated crowd with 20 slides and an argument he had been carrying since he was a college intern in Marblehead.
The argument is that the American Revolution did not start only on Lexington Green or in Boston meetinghouses. It started on salt water, with cod, and with the towns that caught it.
"I had no idea that Marblehead was the premier fishing port in all of the Western Hemisphere," Magra told the audience, recalling the moment in college when George Athan Billias' "General John Glover and His Marblehead Mariners" landed in his hands in a course on the Revolution. He drove up, asked the Marblehead Historical Society (now Marblehead Museum) for an internship and got one. He has been writing about fishermen ever since.
Magra is a professor of early American history at the University of Tennessee and director of the Center for the Study of Tennesseans and the War. His talk, part of the 250th anniversary commemoration of the American Revolution, was built around two unlikely villains and one underestimated fish.
The villains were the West Indian sugar planters and the West Country fish merchants. The fish was cod.
"Fish is an early modern resource, like modern oil, that nations go to war over," Magra said. New England did not have tobacco. It did not have rice. It did not have sugar. What it had was Atlantic cod, and by the Revolution it accounted for roughly 35% of New England's export revenue, a figure that measures the share of total regional exports.
Cod, he said, was built for empire. The flesh was firm, white and non-oily, which meant it could absorb a heavy salt cure and ride out months in a hold. A dried fillet ran up to 80-percent protein. The Catholic calendar required meatless days three quarters of the year, and Salem and Marblehead merchants sold cheerfully into Catholic Spain and Portugal. New England's first permanent commercial fishing station opened in Marblehead in 1631. Salem, Gloucester, Beverly and Ipswich followed within decades.
"It's almost like God himself gave us cod for the world to live on," Magra said.
That was the prosperity. The pressure came from London.
Two lobbies turn Parliament against New England
British sugar planters, Magra explained, did not live in Barbados or Jamaica. They lived in England, on country estates bought with sugar profits, many of them holding seats in Commons and Lords. They were furious that New Englanders kept selling cheap refuse-grade cod to French sugar islands instead of buying British. The West Country fish merchants, in turn, claimed the Grand Banks as English property and resented being outcompeted by larger, faster Massachusetts schooners, Magra said.
Both groups had Parliament's ear. The Molasses Act of 1733 tried to wall off the trade. The Sugar Act of 1764 made the duty permanent, lowered it from six pence to three pence a gallon and gave it teeth: Royal Navy patrols along the coast; a vice-admiralty court in Halifax that prosecuted without a jury; and customs officers who took a cut of any cargo they seized.
A Massachusetts fisherman named Benjamin Bangs opened his diary that October and wrote a sentence Magra still reads aloud to audiences. "Now we may date our slavery," Bangs wrote. "Men of war in every port."
The harassment moved offshore too. In July 1766, Captain Hamilton of HMS Merlin boarded the Salem schooner Hawke, struck its skipper Jonathan Millet in the face, seized the vessel and pressed a fisherman into the Royal Navy. The commercial rivalry, Magra said, had become militarized.
The fishery had also reorganized itself. In the 17th century, roughly 40 percent of working fishermen owned a share in their vessel, a figure that measures vessel ownership among working fishermen; by the eve of the Revolution Magra's slides put it at about 2 percent. Wealth had moved inland and uphill. Merchants built brick mansions, imported European luxury goods and sued their fishermen for debt in the Essex courts. The line between creditor and debtor had hardened.
The strange thing, Magra said, is that those two groups still ended up on the same side. The reason was a single act of Parliament.
In March 1775, Parliament passed the New England Trade and Fisheries Act, better known as the Restraining Act. It barred Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut and Rhode Island from foreign trade. More devastatingly, it locked New Englanders out of the Grand Banks entirely.
"They close the Atlantic Ocean," Magra said. "The British government makes it illegal for Americans to fish on the Atlantic Ocean."
Mariners answer with a navy of their own
The Marquis of Rockingham stood up in Parliament and warned that the act would force experienced mariners and their ship-owning merchants into war against the Crown. He was right. By that summer idle fishing schooners were being refitted with carriage guns. Prewar smuggling networks moved gunpowder. Committees of Safety filled with fish merchants — Jeremiah Lee, Elbridge Gerry. In September 1775, the schooner Hannah, owned by Marblehead merchant John Glover and manned by Marblehead sailors, sailed out under congressional commission.
People often call that fleet Washington's Navy. Magra wishes they wouldn't. "If George Washington were here in front of you all, he would be the first person to say, 'It's not mine, it's Congress',' Magra said. Washington's own sailing orders, he added, told every captain that Congress was paying them.
The Hannah is personal for Magra. As an undergraduate intern at the Marblehead Historical Society (again, now the Marblehead Museum), he pulled Glover's lease agreement with Congress for the schooner out of a file. No one, he said, had found it before. The lease, he argued, settles an old question: the Hannah is the first American warship, because Glover was not giving away his ship.
"That fleet of armed schooners is our first sea power," Magra said.
Salem provided the capital. Magra wove in Leslie's Retreat, the drawbridge standoff in February 1775 that came weeks before Lexington and Concord, and the Derby family that financed much of the resistance. Richard Derby Sr. had begun at 24 as captain of the sloop Ranger, bound for Cadiz, Spain, with salted cod. His son John Derby crossed the Atlantic in what Magra described as an astonishing 29 days on the schooner Quero in 1775 to deliver the American account of Lexington and Concord to London two weeks before General Thomas Gage's official report arrived. His other son, Elias Hasket Derby, personally outfitted at least 80 privateers. Salem privateers captured more than 450 British vessels during the war.
"Salem does not sit quietly at the start of the American Revolutionary War," Magra said.
In April 1783, John Derby sailed the Astrea back into Salem harbor carrying the official text of the Treaty of Paris. One Derby brother had carried news of the war's beginning across the Atlantic; another carried news of its end. Inside the treaty sat Article III, where John Adams – for five years – had refused any settlement that did not guarantee American access to the Grand Banks. Cod had helped cause the crisis. Cod was now a condition of peace.
By the end of the hour, Magra had carried the room from a Marblehead wharf to a Paris negotiating table, with the same fish swimming through both. The 250th anniversary, he said, is a chance to write fishermen back into a Revolution still mostly told as a fight between farmers and redcoats.
The war, he said, was not won only on land. Marblehead had been at sea the whole time.
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