Word: salem
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...Phillips' book has none of the romance and the fresh salt air of Morison's unforgettable work; it is exact, down to earth, sometimes crabbed and partisan. Mr. Phillips is a retired businessman, for 25 years treasurer of Houghton Mifflin, and a local historian, the author of Salem in the Seventeenth Century and Salem in the Eighteenth Century, His prose is as clear and dry as a salary check. He has written what is probably the best history that there is, factual and authoritative, of an American port...
Incredible Riches. A literal account of the prosperity, the civilization and happiness of life in Salem in the years of its prosperity seems not quite credible. The modern reader instinctively feels that there must have been some catch in it somewhere. Yet the truth is that historians have not glamorized Salem's past...
...with a crew of boys. The cargo cost $18,000. They sold it at the Isle of France (Mauritius), converted the profit to gold, and made about $54,000 in six months, because of the inflation of the currency during an embargo. They sent perhaps $25,000 to Salem (to pay for their ship and cargo), bought $30,000 worth of wine at the Cape of Good Hope, sold it at the Isle of France for about $90,000, and returned to Salem with still another cargo-a return of perhaps...
...some, Author Phillips' description of Salem's great moment may seem like a rather ill-timed assertion of the superiority of the past. Yet Mr. Phillips' account of the Salem Federalists is enlightening. Jefferson in maritime New England was about as popular as Sherman became in Georgia. At the very height of Salem's prosperity, Jefferson's embargo (his "moral equivalent" of war against Britain) destroyed it. The Federalists, sympathizing with England rather than with Napoleonic France, had no confidence in Jefferson's motives or in his economics. A hundred vessels...
...Salem believed that Jefferson had imposed the embargo because of his visionary theories, that he persisted in it from pride of opinion, and eventually, that he was determined to ruin New England. Ten years passed before Salem shipping recovered from the effects of the embargo. The old spirit of adventure never came back. Salem crumbled, like one of the ships in her harbor. "It fell to atoms," said Oliver Wendell Holmes, "but never ceded itself...