Cape Cod Bay by Theresa Mitchell Barbo

Author:Theresa Mitchell Barbo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.
Published: 2013-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

The British-American conflict over salt was not settled on a ruddy earthen field in Lexington, but the marine landscape of Cape Cod Bay during the War of 1812. The English commodore of the HMS Spencer extorted money from Cape Cod Bay towns in exchange for sparing each community’s saltworks. Brewster was no exception.

Cape Cod Bay in 1795. Courtesy of the William Brewster Nickerson Memorial Room, Cape Cod Community College.

According to Ragget, $4,000 would be the necessary “contribution to guarantee” that Brewster’s saltworks would not be destroyed. This “contribution” secured the British hold on the Cape’s economy during the English blockade. Vessels belonging to local captains—owned by either fishermen or merchants—rotted with few incoming supplies of food and daily necessities. Until the war was over, Cape Codders lived on what they could grow locally or smuggle in. Ragget’s “contribution” was brutally wise, because salt was to Brewster what fishing was to the Cape’s economy in those early decades of the nineteenth century: nothing short of its lifeblood.

Salt preserved large quantities of fish, meaning that people could eat off the sea long after the nets were hauled in. In 1837, one of the earliest years for which “harvest” information was available, sixty saltworks operating in Brewster yielded 27,400 bushels alone. After reading Ragget’s letter, nervous selectmen called a meeting for ten o’clock Sunday morning, September 18, at the Brewster Meetinghouse “on the very sudden and urgent occasion that had arisen,” according to town meeting records.

Elijah Cobb was picked to moderate and Reverend Simpkins led the assembly in prayer. Within minutes, an action plan was set in motion. Five Brewster men would leave town immediately to connect with neighboring villages and spread the word about Ragget’s extortion threat. Cobb hauled off to Orleans and Eastham, Solomon Freeman rode into Chatham and Captain Benjamin Berry took flight to Harwich, from which Brewster had seceded in 1803. Off to Dennis flew Captain Thomas Seabury. “Mr. Kenelm Winslow and Capt. Freeman Foster, to Yarmouth and Barnstable,” wrote Frederick Freeman in The History of Cape Cod in 1862.

Delegates from each town would be asked to Brewster’s meetinghouse at six o’clock that evening to compare notes and decide what to do. Brewster took no chances and folks hardly stood idle. Wrote Freeman, “The commander of Artillery in Brewster engaged horses to be in readiness for the ordnance; and that a committee, one from each school-district, ascertain promptly how many over 45 years of age and under 60, including others exempt, may be found who will join the artillery, as there is a deficiency in said company.”

Late that afternoon, Soloman Freeman and the other messengers reported back from Brewster’s neighbors and the news wasn’t good: “that the town of Brewster can make no dependence on any of our neighbors for assistance in our alarming and distressed situation.” Isolated by its municipal peers, Brewster caved and the selectmen came up with what they thought was the only solution.

Commodore Ragget, it would appear, had Brewster by the cannonballs. “After much consultation and deliberation, it was voted that the com.

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