Conceived in Liberty Volume 2 - Ludwig von Mises Institute

place, a virtual monopoly of the naval mast contracts; they were also
habitually the appointed surveyor generals—the rulers of the royal woods
—and the governors of New Hampshire. Thus Benning Wentworth and his
nephew John Wentworth each in his time combined all of these offices.
By midcentury, the Wentworths were greatly helped in securing the contracts
by powerful connections in England, including the Marquis of Rockingham.
Governor Benning Wentworth, royal New Hampshire's first governor independent
of Massachusetts, did not, however, prove to be an efficient
enforcer of the royal timber regulations. For twenty years after his appointment
as surveyor of the King's Woods, Wentworth, secure in his naval
contracts, happily bothered little with enforcement, and complaints of his
laxity by his deputy surveyor came to the Board of Trade. Wentworth
made two sporadic attempts at enforcement in these two decades. In 1753,
Wentworth told his zealous deputy Daniel Blake to seize all cut white pine
lumber in his native Connecticut, whether on public or private land, in the
township or out. When Governor Roger Wolcott of Connecticut protested
this high-handed act in vain, the people of Connecticut decided to resort
to effective direct action. Blake was rudely thrown into a pond, which experience
served to discourage any further enforcement efforts.
Wentworth's other enforcement attempt turned out just as badly. In 1758,
Wentworth seized 1,500 white pine logs in New Hampshire and nearly
2,000 in Massachusetts. But the confiscated logs were in each instance repossessed
or destroyed by the angry citizens. In Massachusetts, the logs
were either retaken by the public or floated down to sea. In New Hampshire,
the populace burned down a saw mill at which Wentworth was busily
converting the captured pine logs into boards of lumber.
Nor were the substantial bounties able to create a flourishing navalstores
industry in the Northern colonies, as had been their design. We have
already seen the fiasco of the Palatine experiment, when the Crown shipped
hapless Palatine-German farmers to up-country New York in a vain attempt
to produce naval stores. When the bounties lapsed in 1724, the navalstores
industry in the North collapsed. Whereupon the bounties were resumed
on a reduced scale in 1729. Only the South, particularly South
Carolina, was able to develop a thriving naval-stores industry, even under
the impetus of a bounty.
The most important restrictive act of the first half of the eighteenth
century was the Molasses Act of 1733. Since the mid-seventeenth century,
trade with the West Indies had become vital to the Northern colonies.
Lacking the great staples of the South with their ready English market (for
example, tobacco, rice), the North could buy English manufactures only by
selling grain and provisions to the West Indies in exchange for sugar and its
molasses derivative. The North could not sell its products to England, to a
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