 My name is Doug Slebaugh, and I'm a retired history professor from St. Michael's College. And I wanted to say a few words about the history of the environment and then introduce our speaker today. As some of you may be aware, before the 1960s, the environment was still something of a niche interest for most Americans. But in 1962, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring became a best-seller and alerted Americans to the dangers of the casual spreading of toxic chemicals in the environment. One of the most spectacular confirmations of the dangers of pollution came in 1969, when the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, long beset by industrial pollution, caught on fire. The brewing environmental movement became national with the celebration of the first Earth Day in 1970. Environmental mobilization led to the passage of a series of landmark laws in early 1970s, including the Environmental Protection Agency, the Clean Water Act, the Strengthening of the Clean Air Act, and the Endangered Species Act. The blossoming of environmentalism was not lost on historians who were often affected by the changing currents in their societies to choose the subjects they study. Where political and military history had long dominated the profession, after 1970, the study of society and culture, including the interactions of human beings with the natural world became increasingly important. A book that grew out of this interest appeared in 1983. William Cronin's Brilliant Changes in the Land, Indians' Colonists in the Ecology of New England. Many historians, including me, found it revelatory in showing how conflicts over the use of the land were at the root of the settler native animosities of the colonial period. And because it works like Cronin's, the natural world has become an active, not just a passive factor in how historians have come to think about the past. For those of you who are interested in how this approach to history might apply to Vermont, let me recommend another book, Jan Albers' Hands on the Land, a landscape history of Vermont. It's interestingly illustrated and beautifully written. It's not just informative with a pleasure to read. Since the 1960s, threats to the environment have only grown, including the calamities associated with human-made climate change, which is why it is so important to have historians who can show us the roots of such changes in the past. I have the pleasure of hearing about one of the most recent studies of humans interacting with the national world. Professor Zachary Bennett will present his paper, Why We Should Blame New England's Fish for Capitalism. Let me say a little bit about Professor Bennett's background. He is now an assistant professor of history at Norwich University. He received his PhD from Rutgers University in 2019, and his research has been supported by the American Antiquarian Society, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the Omaha-Hundrow Institute of Early American Studies at the College of William & Mary. His publications have appeared in academic journals, such as Early American Studies and the New England Quarterly. Dr. Bennett's research enters lie in the environmental history of North America and the Atlantic world. Currently he is completing a book manuscript entitled Contested Currents, which reexamines the history of New England from approximately 1000 to 1800 from the perspective of the region's many rivers. So let us welcome Professor Bennett. The rivers are really the center of everything from an environmental standpoint and also from a larger human one. The thing is with George Perkins Marsh and I enjoyed the introduction about the early environmentalist movement here in the 20th century, but when we look at environmental change, it is usually at the earliest in the 19th century. But what I'm going to talk about today is that, especially in places like New England, the vast majority of the changes took place in the 16th and 1700s. And that's not looked at enough, and that's what I'll be talking about today. So, next slide, please. Okay, so the objectives today in terms of what I want to talk about are, first, why did New England's river fish disappear? When people think about fish in New England, we often think about the ocean. I'm not really going to be talking about that today. I'm going to be talking about the fish populations that migrated up New England's many rivers in the through, really up until the 19th century. New England is a very rocky, mountainous, hard place to live, but the one thing that it does have in abundance is water power and rivers. And these fish were central to people's lives through the early 19th century, and I'll talk more about that. Not so much in Vermont, but in other New England states and across the eastern seaboard, there's a lot of river restoration projects. And what they're trying to do is bring these fish populations back. And one of the questions is, why did they leave in the first place? Why do we have to restore them? So I'm going to be kind of looking at why these fish disappeared in the first place. And also in keeping with the title of what I'm talking about is what does this story about fish disappearing help us understand this much bigger story and much more important story, which is about how does this story tell us about the rise of capitalism? The creation of the society and culture that we inhabit in the 21st century. Because I think by telling this story about fish in New England rivers, which is kind of quaint, we actually get a better idea of how society transitioned from like a moral economy to like the capitalist society that we inhabit today. Okay, so first off, capitalism. What is it? Some people, I think it's in American politics or either hooray or boo, people have strong opinions about capitalism. It's also, but we never like actually try to define it. And capitalism is actually a really difficult thing to define. I think, and I don't think a lot of scholars have agreed that capitalism is not just an economic system, as which is the way that we might conventionally think about it, but it's also a political, ideological and cultural system as well. It's a mindset. When people talk about capitalism in the 21st century and how they don't like it, or how that we should move to a kind of political economy that is not capitalist, I personally don't have a lot of patience for those conversations because our society is so thoroughly capitalist and has been created by that, that there is no option to not be capitalist. Even if you are a socialist or something like that, it would still be framed in the very kind of capitalist system. That's not to say it's good or bad, it's just the world that we live in. It's just important to recognize that this world has only been around for like 200 years. When I think about capitalism and what it is and trying to define it, and it's a very difficult thing to define, I think of it as a world that has abstracted everything into numbers for the purpose of trade, specifically long-distance trade. We can see this in how we understand how many of us get paid in terms of fish or wheat anymore. It's a wage that we get paid in terms of when we think about retirement or investing. It's all knowledge of numbers. All material things in the world are kind of abstracted into this numerical system to facilitate long-distance global trade. That's the world that we live in. When a ship in the Suez Canal gets stuck for a couple of days, we can't buy toilet paper. This is the kind of world that we live in without question, but it's interesting to think about how weird that is. There is good parts of capitalism and bad parts of it. A lot of people look at this, the modern world that we live in, and say, what was it like before capitalism? How did we get to this point in the first place? The world that I'm going to be talking about, which was the world in which the early colonial America was in the 15th and 1600s, was something called a moral economy. That doesn't mean necessarily it was good. People were more moral then. Instead of, for example, the expression of, hey, it's not personal, it's just business. This is just a matter of the numbers. It's not a personal thing. That wasn't a thing before capitalism. This is the social hierarchy, the social value, and the social community that we have in all exchanges. The value is not so much the worth of the item, but also the social value of these exchanges as well. Something that's also in terms of that you can see in these pre-capitalist societies, in terms of how we would identify them, is that most things that people consume are locally sourced. Trade is local. The things that you eat and purchase are all made locally. You might have two or three degrees of separation from pretty much everything that you own or possess. This is what predates the capitalist system. The kind of image I have here is one of those items from Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, or it's kind of associated with it, which is the idea of a division of labor. It's like we all work in a factory and we make pens all day, and by trading those pens, we can live on them. You can't survive on making pens. You have to grow food and stuff. That was kind of an example of that. I think when we look at a lot of the people that we look at early economic thinkers like Adam Smith and Karl Marx, I think we mistake those people for having really clear ideas about capitalism. They were more people who were living in the 18th and early 19th century who were observing the changes that capitalism was wreaking on society. That's in general what makes capitalism hard to define because it's really hard to see its origins because it's only when it's there and already the decisions have been made that capitalism is there. The origins of capitalism is an interesting kind of question for historians, but a very important one because it's like the foundation of our world. Next slide. I'm going to talk about a couple of the characters that I'll be discussing in this talk. These are New England's anadromous fish, which the anadromous is a word for fish that live most of their lives in the ocean but spawn in rivers. This was a very big part of New England's ecology and economy in the Native American world and also the early colonial world. Basically when we think of like migrations of animals, especially very large ones, we might think of like the buffalo that were in the American plains or passenger pigeons. The migration of fish up New England's rivers every spring was so immense and awesome that first off people, Europeans who observe them, this is one account, is he says that one could not throw a stone in the river that he would not hit a fish and it seemed that the river was so full of fish that he could walk across dry shot. That was the image of these fish migrations in the 1600s and there are surviving and somewhat healthy fish migrations in places like Scandinavia and scientists have determined that we might think of like, oh those buffalo migrations, those were really big, these are just a couple fish. No, in terms of biomass and energy, these are much larger than the buffalo of the plains. We just, as human beings, notice the bison disappearing and not so much the fish because one is above ground and one is under water. But these were very important and I've included some of the species here that migrated or continue to migrate up New England's rivers. Atlantic salmon, which is a very politically contentious and probably the most iconic fish, very important in Vermont because they came all the way up the Connecticut River back in the day. Shad, I caught that shad actually on the left in the Kennebec River in Maine. Sturgeon and alewives or river herring, very, very small fish. So these are the major fish, they usually come up depending on whether in southern or northern New England in April and May. So even though dams have been brought down in a couple states in the last 20 years, it's not nearly what the migrations were historically, but already we're seeing millions and millions of fish recovering very quickly, which is a really kind of amazing thing to witness. And it's a very important part of their economy. One of the things that I want to mention too is that one-third of people's protein, meat supply through the early 1800s came from these type of fish. Also, New England's soil is very acidic. In order to fertilize it, to put nitrogen in the soil, these fish were essential for farming at this time. So people's lives, life and death was determined by the arrival of these fish in the spring, especially since in the spring, that's coming out of the winter, like the period we're in right now, people are in a month or two, your food reserves are at the lowest. So the arrival of these fish was really a matter of life and death for people who lived in New England before colonization and in the early centuries of it. Okay, next one, please. Okay, to give you an example of like the change, like historians, what we look at is change over time, right? So in my research in colonial America, at the beginning of the period I look at, the 1600s, we're in a fairly pretty capitalist moral economy. By the 19th century, we're really in a capitalist world, at least in my opinion. One of the ways you can see this is how people interact with fish. And I'll just go through this real quick. On the left was a petition from Dover, New Hampshire in 1644, where their river, which is the Coachecho River in New Hampshire, they made rules about the fish migrations and who would be able to harvest them and how they would be distributed. So first off, the people who are called weirsmen, the people that operated the nets on the river, they were paid, not in a wage, but in fish, right? A more kind of barter economy. The herring that they caught, the allies and Shad, they were sold at a common price, this idea of a just or fair price. So it's not the market that determines the price of the fish, but this idea of what is a just or fair price at that time. And then also these fish reinforce social hierarchies in the town. So for example, my favorite is the first salmon that is caught in the Coachecho River, goes to the pastor. And then people who get turns at the weir to harvest these fish is in a very, very social hierarchical base. It's not equal access. First town and church of fish officers get access to these fish and then settlers or townspeople, based on when you moved to Dover, okay? So it's not so much like, this is a very valuable resource, these fish, but it's not like a price or a market price that is determining their value, right? Massachusetts in 1808, you can see this transformation with a law that Massachusetts passes for all, if you're going to sell alwives or herring, it must be done in this way, and I'll read these quotes for you, they're kind of long. Boxes containing herring shall be made of good boards of not less than half inch boards and the ends of not less than three-quarter of an inch board securely nailed with caught or wrought nails and shall be 17 inches in length, 11 inches in breadth, and six inches in depth in the clear inside. All smoked alwives or herring shall be divided and sorted by the inspector or his deputy and denominated according to their quality. First sort and second sort. The first sort shall consist of the largest and best cured fish. Now, this might sound kind of boring and abstract, but really what this is, this process is they're creating a unified system to inspect and to package fish so that they can be exported. Really what capitalism has done here and critics of capitalism like Karl Marx would say that the fish is no longer a fish anymore. It has now been abstracted into a number, right? There is a process by which we capture these fish and they must be sorted and organized in a certain way so that they may be traded on an international market and these fish were sold to places like the Caribbean to feed enslaved people who worked on the sugar plantations down there. But you can see this whereas the people had a personal relationship to the fish to the point by 1800, the fish are a number that can be traded like anything else. And we live in this later world. We don't live in this in the 1644 Dover world. Okay, next slide. So the question is like what resulted in this change? Why did society transform into the way that we're recognizable to us today? Okay, so especially with what I do, a lot of people because this is a very big and it's a very important question which is like when did capitalism start? What were the decisions people made that resulted in creating the kind of the economic, cultural and psychological world that we inhabit today? A lot of historians believe it or not have tried to answer that question. It's a very complicated question. There's a lot of people who have very, very strong opinions on it. I'm sorry today, I'm not going to resolve that. I think that mostly the story that I'm telling today is a useful metaphor for understanding that process partially. But you can see here, here's some of the books that cover that topic and there are many, many more. But I want you to, next slide I have an animation up there, is that if you're familiar with the movie Good Will Hunting, there is a scene in a bar where Will Hunting encounters a history grad student. It's a very famous movie and they talk in this like a lot of academic jargon but fundamentally Ben Affleck and Matt Damon who wrote that movie, they took those names and that speech that you might be familiar from from like a review in the Boston Globe. But if you actually know what they're talking about, they're talking about this debate about when did America transition to a capitalist style economy. The fact that Ben Affleck and Matt Damon picked that debate to kind of demonstrate the kind of intractability of academic jargon kind of shows that historians have not been really able to answer this question very conclusively. It's a very complicated question and it's not really easy to kind of find the smoking gun of like when did society clearly transition from a pre-market society to a capitalist society. If we went back to 1720s Massachusetts or London, if we walk the streets would there be people who are anti-capitalist and pro-capitalist? What were the interests or the people who were trying to push this capitalist society? Historians have had a disagree on the nature of that and in general what we find is just like today, people are just trying to get ahead. They weren't really ideologically motivated in the ways that we might want to see them as. And I think this is one of the reasons that this story about fish that I'm going to talk about kind of maybe explains this process for us. Okay, next slide. Okay, so the big question is so that I've talked about fish right initially, why did they go away? Fundamentally it's because those fish ran into dams or they ran into the pollution that New Englanders threw into their rivers as largely as a result of the mills that were powered by these dams. To give you a sense, so I remember I mentioned earlier, these fish were very, very important, accounted for one-third of people's yearly meat supply. Very, very important, especially for poor folks. But on the other end of it, New England is a very mountainous, very wet place with many, many rivers and very steep rivers which can be dammed very easily. And one of the ways you can see the importance of water power in rivers in New England's history is our industrial history. The industrial revolution began here in the northeast. You can see the many old industrial buildings which have now been repurposed into very luxurious condominiums. But one of the ways you can see this is that in the 1880, in the U.S. Census, New England accounted for one-third of all of the United States water power despite covering only 2% of the nation's surface area. So New England was the kind of Saudi Arabia of water power at that time. And we now think of New England as a very kind of energy-poor area, but historically it was a very energy-rich area as a result of this water power. And this is important to understand because the fish are a form of energy in the form of calories that you eat, even if you use them for fertilizer. It's still a source of food. Water power or mechanical energy is also a form of energy. And when you look historically at societies in a general sense and look at how they're structured, your energy source is incredibly, incredibly important for understanding the structure of that society. So this debate about fish, whether we should have fish in the rivers or we should dam them and use them for mills, is not just an interesting question about rivers and the shape that they had in this period of time. It's a more fundamental question about what type of society do we want to live in, right? One that where people have access to this resource or one that can be kind of controlled and developed by a small group of people which can lead to economic growth, right? So this is what the larger debate over this issue is. And the thing is is that you can't have both. You can't eat your cake and have it too on this issue because even today you might be familiar with the issue of migrating fish, especially in the Pacific Northwest and like fish ladders. Fish ladders are just not good. They're just, none of them, even though there's been millions of dollars invested in researching them and building them, they're not really effective at getting fish upstream. And in this period of time people notice that as well. So you either have to pick the dam or the fish. And this was the real debate that people had in New England communities at this time. Okay, next slide. Okay, so I'm going to kind of briefly talk about the two arguments or two positions these groups had. One, the millers, the people who were fordaming these rivers and developing New England. First off, these mills, and if you go to like Old Sabruk Village or other places, we see these old colonial mills, they had a power capacity of approximately 10 horsepower. So not by our standards very, very powerful. But the thing is that we are incredibly spoiled energy-wise because we use fossil fuels, which is a much more efficient source of energy with a lot of interesting side effects that we're dealing with right now. But even though these mills had a horsepower of only 10, it cannot be underestimated the impact this had on people's lives. These small buildings were the engines that really transformed New England and really America's environment. More so than human hands. Especially in a place like New England where you had a hard time attracting people to settle here, there wasn't a lot of labor available or it was very expensive. Water power ended up being kind of the mode of force that transformed the environment. One of the ways you can see this in terms of these mills, again despite being very small, in a period of time, like when people lived in the Ethan Allen house, right? There was a world where people worked with their hands and got things done by the sweat of their brow, right? That was that world. These machines saved literally days in a week of labor. So for example, for like cutting wood, sawing wood, the big kind of commodity here, you can cut wood 10 times faster with a saw mill than by hand. Also, it's a lot less stressful. When it comes to grinding grain, in one hour in a grist mill, you can grind 75 pounds of grain in one of these grist mills. If you try to grind that with a hand mill or mush it by hand, you can get approximately a half pound done in an hour. So 75 pounds to a half a pound, right? Oh, that's 10 horsepower. My lawnmower is more powerful than that. Like sure, but in terms of during this period of time, incredibly, incredibly powerful. And one of the ways you can see this as well is that how effective this was. I think when we also look at like environmental devastation or change, we look at like the 19th century and people like Muir and Teddy Roosevelt. And the first clear cut in the United States happened here in New England. And it takes approximately 17, 15, 10 miles from the coast of New Hampshire has been entirely clear cut. So if you went in 1710, you went to the coast, you would see no trees. It had already been clear cut over 10 miles from the coast as a product of these saw mills. But that was for masts. And the colonists, as I'll talk about, just like they filed a law when they felt like it. They just cut those. They generally cut those up as well. So very, very powerful things. And the argument that Millers and people who were their defenders said was, these machines will develop New England, this colony. They will transform the environment into one more like Europe. It will create more money, more capital for New England in terms of these machines will allow us to grow. These fish are not going to grow. They just feed some people. There's not growth potential here like they are with the mills. And they were totally right about that. The other argument, too, is this early kind of capitalist argument about, and we kind of have this, one of the reasons you can see capitalism is like a, it's not just an economic system, it's like a psychological system. It's just the way in which we interact with the world through time. In terms of, you know, we showed up at 2 o'clock today. The clock is what determines our life. Also, the idea that you need to be efficient with your time, right? Because you can gather more resources and then grow, even if it's not even in a money standpoint, if you want to grow spiritually or in a fitness standpoint, it's all about efficiency. This is a product of the capitalist world that we live in. So here's a cool poem from 1772 where you can see people denigrating people who relied on fish. When Tom approached the homely door, his clamorous wife began to roar. You wealth of sin and hell, where have you been? Glanting horse or running into alive scores? The devil, and you can tell. Thus all day long and every day you squander time and wealth away. And at full freedom roam, whilst I must wallow like a sow, providing for you, your brats and you, and be a slave at home. So it's this kind of poem that's interesting about a wife yelling at her husband. But really what's central at it is this idea like, what are you doing? You're fishing? You're being lazy, right? That's something that Indians do. A man would work like in a factory and would do things with his time. So you can kind of see how millers denigrated people who depended on fish. Okay, next slide. So the fishermen had this idea of, they had lived, they came to New England, coming from Europe, where the fish had been destroyed in the medieval period from those rivers there. And they saw this source of fish and they said, this is an amazing, beautiful thing. And that not only the economic value of these fish, in terms of providing everyone with free meat, which is very important at a very desperate time of the year, there's just something wrong. There's something ethically wrong about destroying this beautiful thing in a way that I think is very much similar to how current environmentalists see that the environment should be preserved for its own sake. So there's this argument of early natural justice, this idea that doing this is fundamentally wrong on a basic level. And also in a similar way, although we're not in a kind of capitalist world now, maybe we would call this the kind of universal basic income of the early 18th century, but a notion of economic justice because it's the people who owned mills who invested in mills. These were the elites in colonial society. Yes, it was producing economic development. Yes, it was creating more opportunities for people, but at the end of the day, who benefited from it? From the perspective of many of these New Englanders, it was the upper class, not the poor people. And here's a petition from William Briggs in Taunton, Massachusetts in 1710. He says, Herring are a sort of fish appropriated by divine providence to Americans and most plentifully afforded to them. People buried them up, barreled them up, and preserved them all winter for their relief. The cry of the poor every year for the want of fish in Taunton is enough to move the bowels of compassion in any man that hath not a heart of stone. So again, this idea of these fish, they provided economic benefit especially to the least among us and especially for New Englanders in the late 17th century, very Christian people, right, this idea of Christian justice. Here's another petition from 1695 in Plymouth. The blessing of God hitherto had the benefit of the fish called Herrings, which come up the rivers near unto us, which are greatly beneficial for the raising of our Indian corn, which without we cannot subsist. Again, the language that people use at this time is that this is something that God has given to us and that to alter nature is to go against God's will, right? And this is the argument that people use today. And I would say as well for the many people who are environmentalists and are interested in reviving these fish species, I don't think many of them are eating alewives. It's a very bony, oily fish. We're using them to fertilize their flower beds. It's a very similar, although very different idea about the natural justice and the importance of nature being preserved for its own sake. Okay, so those are the two groups, people who are like pro-millers and people who are for the fish. Next slide. It's not that I don't like it. It's not as effective as like an open stream. I think go back one. I'll get to the conflicts. So we know that the fish go away. And if the more cynical among us might say that the elite capitalists got together and they pushed out the interest of these poor nature-loving people in New England, that's not actually the case. Because if you just looked at the archival record, what survives to us in the present day, you would see New England states very focused on preserving these fish. Because this is something that goes, the idea of natural justice that I mentioned. This is something that people in the medieval period recognized. This is an image of the Magna Carta. I was actually able to see it in person this summer at the British Library. So the Magna Carta actually mentions fish passage. And English common law also protects the right of people to have access to this resource because rivers were a commons space. And I just kind of, just to give you a sense of this, I had it a list here of all the various mill and fish acts that were passed by the various colonies. You can see with Massachusetts, I think, was it like eight different laws between 1700 and 1760 trying to preserve fish in the colony. So legal, like English common law, is based on precedent. And precedent dictated that people had a right to these fish and that dams needed to be opened to open them up. So if we just look at the archival record, right? Oh, it seems that these people really care about fish. Why did they go away? It's a kind of interesting kind of whodunit. And to be honest, there's not really much archival evidence to explain what actually happened. Next slide. So when we look, and the thing is that, especially in the 1700s and 1600s, the records are not nearly as good as they are in the 19th and 20th century. But I have compiled a list of confrontations and conflicts between fishermen and mills over these issues. Fundamentally, what happened was that the law was that you had to give passage for the fish. The millers were not interested in doing that because they needed the water power to run their mill. To open up a dam meant that they had less water to use for their own purposes. And frequently, they would get away with it or try to get away with it. And here's a couple examples of basically millers breaking the law and or like ordinary New Englanders using vigilante action to tear these dams down in the 1700s. So the first is Timothy Sprague from the 1720s in Moldon, Massachusetts. A really kind of interesting story. He was damming a river there and the local people did not like it. So in the middle of the night, an armored posse of people tore down his dam and also basically broke the machinery of his mill for good measure too, in opposition to his mill. So what he did was Sprague built a little cabin near the dam and actually hired somebody to watch it. That person was threatened with his life. His life was threatened when he caught the people who had weapons the next time Sprague rebuilt his dam. My favorite part about this is that destroying a mill was, mills were considered public buildings and in most New England colonies destroying them was a capital crime. So you did not want to be caught doing this. This did not apply to people who were juveniles or Indians. They could not be charged in a court of law. So in 1728 a group of 14-year-olds where Sprague caught these 14-year-olds tearing down this dam and when asked why are you doing this, they said they had been hired by other people who said they were so young nobody would hurt them for so doing. So if you want to do something illegal just hire some kids because they can't be prosecuted for it. Roger Hooker on the Farmington River in Connecticut in the 1750s, he bought an old mill that had been in disrepair and he repaired the dam and made a total wall across it and prevented the passage of fish. Local people did not like this. Initially a mob tried to burn down his mill. He was able to fend them off. But then again because the people who were opposed to the dam did not want to be prosecuted, they actually hired local Indians who also were not a fan of the dam. So one day Hooker comes out of his house and sees a group like 30 Indians with pickaxes and shovels destroying his dam. And there's nothing he can do about it because you can't prosecute Indians in Massachusetts court at this time. One of the reasons I think there is like so little evidence even though you know that these were super contentious issues in these communities is that when people are breaking the law they do not really want to leave any physical evidence of it. So finding these examples is really, really hard. The reason why ultimately even though the law was on the side of fishermen, the reason why they ultimately lost is because these migrations are incredibly delicate. They're very beautiful things but the fish are very vulnerable that they all have to go into this very narrow place where they can be easily caught. That's the benefit of it. But at the same time if you block a river at any point you can destroy the entire migration. And studies have shown so like we might think of like salmon, right? They're the most charismatic. They jump over obstacles. But like sturgeon, owlwives, herring, they rely on speed to get over obstacles. So they can't jump out of the water. So even studies have shown if you block a river and it's like even five feet high that will destroy an entire population. So we're not talking about like the Hoover Dam, right? On the Concord or Merrimack Rivers at this time. But even then these small pre-industrial dams have the potential to destroy them. And there's this great example of this guy of Chris Osgood and Bill Ricca who's a mill owner. And in defiance of the law, dammed the entire Concord River. And it's the one time like Fisherman overcame him. But that's only because over the span of like 15 years like in six different times they not only tore down his dam, they took Osgood to court, Osgood countersued. It was a whole mess. But only after 15 years of doing that were they able to open the dam up. The consequences of Osgood keeping his dam up for that long on those fish populations without question destroyed probably at least 50% of the original migration, right? So this kind of litigation really prevented that basically resulted in the fish declining over time. And also in general it kind of explains why the people who really depended on the fish, the poor couldn't really advocate for themselves. They're at least likely to afford or have access to going to legal recourse or going to court, hard to get them because they're trying to take care of themselves to organize politically at this period of time. So this really targeted disenfranchised people. There's a really interesting example of this guy named William Wetherill in the 16, in around 1700. He wrote this petition in Taunton because they were also having another debate about this dam issue. And he actually been arrested in 1664 for tearing down a dam. So he was like a pro-fish guy, in 1700. The people are multiplied and as many fish as ever there were it could not supply one-tenth part of the people. Instead of a source of relief the fish are now primarily a means to create quarrels and lawsuits declaring we are really better without them. So generally it was the right thing to do to protect these fish but it was real pain in the neck. And ultimately while people are having these debates the rivers are not open and the fish populations are continuing to suffer. Next slide. So what ultimately happens? When does this decision happen? I think when people also, when you generally learn American history like when does capitalism start or does capitalist revolution happen? It's usually in line with the industrial revolution in the early 19th century in New England maybe the 1790s. What I'm saying with my research is that this capitalist sentiment was basically this conversation was happening not in the 1790s or 1810 it was happening more like 1715 and that the decision more or less in my opinion based on my research is made by the 1740s. That New England, New England states or New England colonies are as a policy much more in favor of economic development and the kind of capitalist values that will result in creating the society that we're going to talk about. And so this is the way it happens. And this story was hard to find because again when people break the law or want to ignore the law they don't really write it down. It's only by looking at these events like in total as a region that I kind of saw this. First off, fundamentally the reason why the fish were not well preserved is because there was no authority to do so. There was no conservation network or system or authority in colonial America. What New England was very proud of was the autonomy of local communities. You know, town halls, right? Town meeting day in Vermont with something we still celebrate today that's coming up very soon. But anyway, so for example there was fish wardens were elected each year to enforce the fish laws to preserve the fish. You look very quickly that most of these fish wardens were often elected in certain towns that were more fan of mills because they promised not to enforce the law. They didn't take to bring that to Boston to bring any recourse. Also, if basically there's recourse for that in the law because basically saying well if the fish wardens don't do their job then you can bring local justices of the peace to adjudicate and enforce the law. The problem is that justices of the peace were largely an honorific position. It was basically a position of basically saying I'm an important popular person in the community. Enforcing the law, well, that's a bonus. And the justices of the peace in terms of effectively getting to a place when fish were blocked not very reactive to that. And also these guys didn't have any training in terms of understanding how these ecosystems worked. There weren't a lot of people, there weren't a lot of wildlife biologists in the 1700s but people intimately knew their environment and they knew what these fish needed. So if you have local people who are complaining saying hey this fish ladder is insufficient and you get a justice of the peace who's like from the same county people say well the fish ladder looks good enough to me. When in fact it may just be it may be totally not capable of rising the fish. The thing is that these ecosystems are very delicate even today like if you look at like when herring can go over obstacles like it has to be a precise type of speed for them to go up. People knew that at the time but the local law enforcement was not educated on this in a way that we might be familiar with like the department in Maine the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife is the one I, what's it called in Vermont? The people that law enforcement for nature Department of Fish and Wildlife there was no kind of system like that. For me the really important law that shows this shift legally and also this kind of demonstrates this larger shift toward capitalism is this the 1746 Mill Act there was like nine of them the 1746 Mill Act basically said that county court can first off determine if fish still pass up a river or not by that time it's basically acknowledging that in most places of New England the fish have already been destroyed right and that these laws are not do not go in effect should not be put in effect because the fish are already gone. Even then though a county court can determine if the fish are there or not which if the county court is politically more in favor of the Mill interest they're more likely to be persuaded than that than the other way so they're not necessarily an objective source. And also in the 1746 Mill Act local communities if so for example if I had a disagreement with one of you saying hey you're not following the law you're supposed to create passage for the fish if the miller could say well my mill is of more benefit for the fish and I'm going to go to court and then ultimately a judge can determine instead of saying like you have a right to fish like it goes all the way back to the Magna Carta you can now say which is of more benefit the mill or the fish. And the reason why this is important too is that these fish migrations go up rivers and they go through many towns so many people in many different communities share a single river and all it does is it takes one town to say we value the mill more than the fish and then the entire migration is destroyed right so it's kind of that leads to a cascade of changes so especially if we look at New England at this period of time people who live closer to the coast those are the older communities that are more developed they're more likely to be in favor of mills than fish as opposed to people who are further onto the interior and basically what happens is I don't think people realize when they passed the 1746 Mill Act that oh we're making this huge decision but by basically giving people the ability to ignore the law in this way it leads to the fish being destroyed across all of southern New England and next slide leading to the consequences that I'm going to talk about next so what's the consequences so if you're like in an up river town that values fish but a town down river you know stops enforcing it the fish go away that means you know one third of your meat supply that you dependent on for one of the year you need to replace that in your income or in your you know yearly salary somehow that means like just like today you need to get a second job you need to get a different job at this period of time it would be develop either working for someone else as a servant or kind of as an apprentice developing a skill where you make things where you get paid in a wage right this is again moving from this moral system moral economy to a capitalist system very important in that also is the beginning basically to of saying these laws allow for the destruction of fish so even though there are people through the American revolution and through the early 19th century in New England who are saying the fish should be saved they're a smaller and smaller group because the fish are slowly going away so basically what mill owners do is they kind of put their finger on the scale by saying like hey we gave the opportunity for you but they're dying somehow we don't know why therefore if there's fewer fish the argument to preserve them is less and less and the benefit of developing mills like the one you can like see here and you can see all throughout New England is greater and greater and this leads to I mean traditionally when people look at this issue like Horowitz's like transformation of American law which is like generally the text would people would give you on this topic say this transformation happens like in the 1820s where the US government or the US federal government really decisively sides with development over protection of commons rights I'm saying that this happened at least actually really 70 years before that but because of this this does lead to the transformation the interpretation of American law in the early 19th century which in essence privatizes rivers because it's this idea that if rivers are privatized people will be more incentivized to develop them which they are and this leads to you know the huge mill structures in places like Manchester, New Hampshire you can see it on the Manuski river here in Burlington all over New England and all over the United States so I've talked about this really quaint story and like Northern New England about little herring and how they help people like fertilize their fields and it's interesting but the real I think significance of this is that the reason why New England in particular is important is because the jurisprudence or the legal tradition of New England is replicated in the US federal government and then that the kind of precedent that is established here then goes across the United States so the legal justifications for damning rivers in Washington state in the 20th century follow the logic legally from this period of time right so the thing that's important to recognize too is it's not it's not like in 1746 these communities were just as divided as we are today about capitalism whether it's good or bad and I don't think in 1746 they really understood what they were doing the consequences of what they were doing which is why we should blame the fish right we should blame the fish for not being more resilient and able to survive this type of attack on their ecosystem but ultimately the argument I'm trying to make here is like who do we blame for capitalism who was it 1746 which guy was it it's much more complicated than that in many ways like nature made this decision that human beings were like hey we want to accommodate the fish and the mills let's see what happens and the fish disappeared right so in many ways nature kind of made the decision for people at that time and one of the reasons you can going back to like George Perkins Marsh and what I talked about at the beginning of this talk is that in the 1860s states like Vermont are hiring people like Marsh to it's like oh my gosh the fish are going away what was happening in Vermont was basically what was happening in Massachusetts just 60 years later and Marsh was one of the first people to recognize this in Massachusetts by a guy called Theodore Lyman and this really like I said sparks the environmentalist movement in the United States and one of the they recognize in the 1860s this is what we need to do to bring the fish back but these mills are so central to our economy and way of life that we can't restore the fish economically right there's the population in the 1700s was tens of thousands of people in college now we have millions of people these fish will not benefit us in that way so in the 1860s you couldn't really restore the fish because economically that was just insane the economy of New England was based on water power at that time last slide bringing us to the 21st century is river restoration which is a really popular thing throughout New England and really the United States where people are tearing down dams and bringing these fish populations back it's a really amazing story and when I learned about this as an undergraduate it actually sparked my interest in this larger project because people were saying oh we're bringing back allies to the Kennebec River the first time in like 200 years my question was what happened 200 years ago and no one could really give me a straight answer at that you know it's like colonialism you know stuff happened in the past fish are gone amazing story it's great seeing these fish come back but the people who are in favor of this thing usually environmentalists frame this as like restoring justice to fish that were taken away from people and that's a very cute story but really what I think is that we're not restoring like we're restoring the fish but we're creating rivers in a new way just in the way that Millers did because historically for all of human history rivers have been a source of work in history now rivers are sites of recreation they're largely spaces that are you know they're retired we go canoeing on them because they make us feel warm inside are we like looking at them because like oh nature doesn't look cute that's why we value rivers that we like the idea of fish coming up there's like ecological benefits which are great but they have like zero not zero but next to zero economic value right so what I'm saying I'm not opposed to that what we're doing is like going back in time I think what we're actually doing is actually creating nature in a new way just in the way that Millers were in the 18th century and I love if you're familiar with Winooski on the river there there's this amazing for me as an environmental historian sign that says power dam and then natural area right because nature is the is the falls on the left the dam that is not natural is on the right I mean I would just invite us to think like what is nature exactly is the dam not necessarily natural there's also natural to have like a falls like that where humans do not interact with it in any way other than looking at that is that that's what nature is to us in the 21st century which I think is something that we should probably interrogate a little bit more so great so that's that's my talk I just wanted to just kind of conclude by saying this is a really complicated story but I think by looking at this story of these fish and how they go away it's a story of people's actions in the environment and the unintended consequences that they had on the future I don't think people really really appreciated how the legacy the decisions people made in the 18th century would have in the future there's an economic term called path dependency about how decisions you make limit the number of decisions you can make in the future and this is an example of that the decisions people made in the early 1700s limited the options that their descendants had and created a world by the early 1820s that would have been utterly unrecognizable to them whether they would have been a fan of it or not I don't know but it's one of those things where I think in general we need to be much more self-aware of the ways that we interact with the natural environment and the consequences that we'll have in the future rather than doing it for political or economic experience in our own time great so that's all I got and if you've got some questions I'm happy to take I'm going to stand up here next to you so that I can try to manage the chat box so if you're on zoom and you have any questions please throw them in the chat box and then I'll be able to read them off from the chat box to you and if you're here in person you can just raise your hand if you have a question would you like to start the river has never and the groundwater has never and the surface water has never gone back to 18th century Vermont from what happened in the 19th century so how would you integrate land juice how would you integrate land juice into your talk and the other impact of the mill acts which wasn't only about that fish so yeah obviously for the purposes of making a talk here you'll have to buy my book when it comes out I'm not going to answer your question until you buy the book I'm just kidding so you're totally right in the sense that one of the things that Marsh observes in the 1850s is the reason why the fish are not returning is not just because of the mills it's because of the clear cutting of the surrounding area right which affects everything goes back to the point I did make though about how rivers right by looking at rivers you can understand the entire ecosystem and a big part of that was the water mills right that were powered by river power that enabled the clear cutting of those spaces so it's no it's you're totally right and it's totally interconnected and the mill acts were also like concerned with a lot of things such as like flooding of land and things like that so you're in there's a lot of people have looked at from that angle so you're totally right yeah you can help us with the next question somebody has a question on zoom they're wondering if we could invite them to unmute and ask the question on there while we're getting the technology set up for that there is another question that just came to the chat box by Elise Gayet who's actually our speaker next month so stay tuned for me to announce more about that but Elise is asking are you advocating that we keep dams or not I mean so this is a complicated issue and it's one that each community needs to like make for themselves about I think especially in the 21st century we need to ask the question about what are rivers and what are their value to our community and that's not for me to answer it so it's ultimately for people to decide what that is I would say generally speaking the northeast of most the vast majority of the dams that are out there are 150 plus years old and have literally no purpose in our own time so people I'm less sympathetic to people who say like well it's really cute looking it's like well it has a devastating impact on the ecosystem at the same time I mean one of my favorite environmental history essays is by Richard White it's called are you an environmentalist or do you work for a living and it's one of those things where it's like very easy for like Sierra Club people with you know very fancy college degrees saying that we need to bring in the fish while ignoring like the hundreds of jobs that they create in paper mills so it's really dependent on how should this river benefit our community and those are questions that people need to make for themselves right so it seems to me that the building of dams and what came with them is what is generally considered progress more people more wealth the society has more wealth more goods can be created and it's not that I'm advocating for that but it seems to me that was one of the major outcomes or the results of the building of the dams and other things like it and I wonder if it's possible to continue with that in that direction is it desirable to proceed in that direction and is it possible to continue in that direction without destroying nature even more than we have done so already so I mean the whole like zero growth is a really interesting movement and you know I mean as interesting as it is I do not have an answer for again the future of the planet and the direction we should take I hope like this what history should do is give people perspective on how we got from there to here and hopefully a richer sense of a more developed and more complete understanding to those very complex and deep questions but I think you're totally right because it was the whole transition from the moral to capitalist economy is this idea of a growth based kind of society which I mean apart from the environmental limitations you raise I mean totally true but on the other end of it too is like the quality of life for ordinary people is just not even comparable as a result of it I think one of the things especially with this story though is how this story is largely how rivers went from a common space where rivers were something where this should benefit us to as a result of these events by the early 19th century they're privatized by like corporations and I think the question of like should corporations have you know say on how rivers in the environment which has such a cascade of influences on other people is that's I think generally a bad thing so that's I think definitely a big part of that story I don't talk about land only rivers this isn't William Cronin I'm just kidding but no you're right no you're totally right I mean it's all interconnected for sure yeah so there's a question from a member on zoom Matthew and Matthew we've invited you to unmute so go ahead and ask your question hello thank you professor Bennett I really appreciate your talk there are a number of like fascinating threads in this I may give you the AHA presentation treatment here because there are just so many things that you've got into but I mean I'm fascinated fascinated of course by your kind of questions around the origins of capitalism and you allude to many historians kind of like trying to pinpoint the exact moment and really kind of coming up with different answers but largely I think a lot of historians kind of point to things like the establishment of private property which which really means private investment capital liberal democracy right Karl Marx said that capitalism will liberate capital from the feudal lords and the liberal democracy that came with the Civil War and the English Civil War and the closure and whatnot and then the resulting consolidation of labor into urban spaces and resulting industrialization and I think it's fascinating that your history kind of enters in at that point of industrialization and you know and so one question I have is what are the fish doing for industrialization because you know in one hand it's it supports it by sorting and organizing and so forth but on the other hand it needs to be it's against industrialization industrialization because rivers need to be preserved and so what do you think is the kind of the role of fish in the rise of industrialization I think it's really important because you say this actually starts back in 1715 rather than the middle of the 18th century and if that is the case I think that's like a really important revelation so I have a lot of other questions but I'll just I'll end it there First off Matt great to hear from you, shout out to the University of Michigan Go Blue so that's a great that's a great question I think you outlined it pretty well right this debate among historians about like when capitalism begins right you know is it the black death is it the bubonic plague or in the 1300s or is it you know then we talking about 1600s or you know advanced when capitalism moves into another phase you're right and it's like if we were telling this story in Europe right it would be a different one than the one that I would be saying now and it would be the timeline in chronology would be different so I think the way that I kind of frame it or think about it is that at this period of time where I think this story captures a moment when people like had a choice about a capitalist future which or a market future and like the moral kind of status quo that they had whereas like I kind of said at the beginning to talk like we don't have that option really in the 21st century people did have that option I really believe in the at least in colonial America in the early 1700s and the fish are a great example or kind of vehicle for understanding this thing that everyone kind of agreed was like this is a good thing but everyone also agreed that the mills were like a good thing too and ultimately how mills prevailed in that argument is a way of understanding like how these economic choices in a kind of like met a larger way were made because I think a lot of times like people look at like try to look at conclusive choices people made and I think put people into like oh Oliver Cromwell pro capitalist or not which are which are kind of generally a historical questions I think and lead to more confusion and misunderstanding than kind of understanding about the issue but I think I'm not trying to answer that question it's a huge one I just think it's a cute story that I think will hopefully I think add insight on this larger larger phenomenon but that's a great question email me any more questions Matt if you have them Thanks Matt thank you also Matt for pushing us to be able to offer you to ask the question yourself as we're trying to learn the new system so there's one last question from a member in zoom so we're going to invite them to unmute and ask it and then this is the last question for now and if you're live in person to have more questions you'll have the benefit of catching him at the end of the presentation and if you're remote we'll be following up with you via email with ways you might be able to contact the speaker with any other questions you have so the last question is from Brian it's actually can you hear me it's actually Beverly with Brian thanks for your talk I was curious about the absence of any attention to the native peoples of New England or the continent and your talk and wondered whether you've looked at all at the experiences of the native peoples as fish were extirpated from many of our rivers whether they orchestrated any attempts to take down dams as white settlers were moving into the region and what is known about what must have been absolutely devastating impacts on their livelihood, diets, communities, cultural practices everything great question and as I said earlier you're going to have to purchase the book because this is the what I talked about is like the last third and especially the first and second thirds of my book are very much about indigenous people in that process and one of the things that I'm very much interested in is the colonial wars that took place here and also the interactions between colonial people and indigenous people in the 17th century yes I mean these things it's not just these fish populations these river fish populations which were so central to Native American sense of self were being threatened already in the 1600s and one of the arguments that I actually make is that you know King Phillips war King Williams war if you're familiar with these early colonial conflicts one of the arguments I'm trying to make is that these wars were not necessarily fought about land which is traditionally how we see them they were actually to control rivers because in New England especially all the resources flow through the rivers whether it's communication whether it's trade or especially fish so there are many instances of in places like New Hampshire and Maine Wabanaki's telling colonists it's like hey why are you killing us and Wabanaki's will say it's because you guys block the river and we can't we can't fish although one of the things that's interesting that I mentioned very briefly that I definitely want to expand more on is that story about I think Roger Hooker in Farmington, Connecticut and how we hired local Indians or someone hired local Indians to tear his dam down I find several we think about I think in the 18th century you know conventionally the historiography talks about increased you know more developed conceptions of race more developed kind of apartheid state especially with not only peoples of African descent but also Native Americans undeniably true but in these like weird episodes that I've found it's really interesting to find how when in the interest of white settlers and Indians are the same for preserving fish how they're like working together a lot of the time and I think that's a really interesting phenomenon that I want to develop more but yes you're totally right Native Americans are a huge part of this story and the reason why they're kind of left out in this like later part is because politically in the early 18th century Native Americans have been pretty much entirely disenfranchised and they don't really have the ability to effect legislation in the way they might have in the century before but yes that's a great question and something I want to develop more in the future questions steal this from you so that I can say thank you and everyone here can thank our speaker Zachary Bennett one more time for his presentation thank you for that so if you could all just bear with me both online and in person for a couple more minutes I would like to make a few announcements about upcoming program that we have but first and foremost I realize I forgot to thank our sponsor at the beginning of this program so our all of our community enrichment programs we have local sponsorship from different organizations and right now Vermont AARP is our major sponsor for this program so thank you to AARP Vermont for that and so some of the upcoming programs that Vermont AARP is sponsoring is our next month's lecture so we do this monthly our next month's lecture is by Elise Gayet and I have one of her books here Discovering Black Vermont she's not actually going to be speaking about this specific book but about some newer research pertaining to Burlington's Black Trail Blazers in the early history from the 1790s up through the 1860s so work that I believe she hasn't yet like really publicly spoken about yet so some new research about Black residents in the city of Burlington so please join us on the third Sunday in March I believe that's the 19th but you could check our website to double check that March 19th is that what it is? March 19th thank you John at 2pm the other public program that I would like to announce everyone is our Quarterly Homestead Book Club so we meet four times a year and we read fun books and then talk about them and drink tea and eat cookies while we do so so it's a fun time the next book up is called The Whiskey Rebels by David Liss we do sell this book on our online gift shop and if you're here in person in our physical gift shop as well this is a historic fiction novel set in frontier Pennsylvania immediately after the Revolutionary War and the main characters are dealing with how the idealism of the American Revolution didn't live up to its name and how that particularly played out in frontier areas very similar to Vermont during that time so those are our upcoming programs and then I just want to thank everyone here for attending and thank our speaker one more time and also thank you to CCTV for being our partner here with all the technology as well we couldn't do this and share this program with everyone without you so thank you to CCTV as well okay thank you we hope to see you next month