ected, through business or marriage, with the wealthy
merchant families of New York City--the Van Dams, Crugers, Waltons, and
Ludlows.

Elsewhere in America there were not, as in these provinces, great
estates ranging from two hundred thousand to more than a million acres.
But the thrifty Quakers of eastern Pennsylvania, engaging in less
extensive enterprises, were less often in debt than the planters of the
South, and no less shrewd at a bargain than the Dutch merchants of New
York. Possessed of the best land in the province, or engaged at
Philadelphia in the export of provisions to the West Indies, they built
up many respectable estates among them, and by effective organization
the leaders of the sect controlled the colony for many decades in the
interest of a Quaker-merchant aristocracy inhabiting the three eastern
counties of the province. And even in New England material interests
were transforming the structure of society. Slave-owning planters of
Newport now dominated the little colony which Roger Williams had
established as an experiment in democracy and soul liberty. Boston
shared with New York and Philadelphia the export of provisions with
which the farms of the Middle and Northern colonies supplied the West
Indies. It was the chief center of the New England fisheries.
Shipbuilding was there, as at Newport, a great industry; and there, as
at Newport, rum was extensively distilled from molasses procured in the
sugar islands. The vessels of Boston and Newport merchants, loaded with
rum and fish and tropical products, traded in many European ports, in
the Azores, or on the African coast, returning with wine and slaves and
every kind of English manufacture. In this material atmosphere the old
Puritan spirit was being strangely subdued to the stuff it worked in.
Wealth and shrewdness were more effective than orthodoxy in achieving
social and political eminence. A few names familiar to the seventeenth
century are still to be met with in high places--Sewall, Dudley, Quincy,
Hutchinson; but in the middle of the eighteenth century the names of
repute in the Old Bay colony are mostly new--Oliver, Bowdoin, Boylston,
Cooper, Phillips, Cushing, Thatcher; names rescued from obscurity by men
who had won distinction in the pulpit or at the bar, or by men who had
made money in trade, and whose descendants, marrying with the old
clerical or official families, had pushed their way, in the second or
third generation, into the soc