Colonial America

by Richard Middleton, Anne Lombard

  Changes in consumer behavior and attitudes had two consequences for colonial economies. One was a surge in demand. The other was an increase in production. Colonial people underwent what has been called an “industrious revolution,” spending more of their hours in labor so as to be able to buy new objects to improve their standard of living. The Protestant work ethic was now geared to the god of consumption.

  The contemporary statements of Franklin, Hutchinson, and others have encouraged the belief that British North America was the first society to banish poverty. Interestingly, Hutchinson did not say that no towns experienced any deprivation, and modern historians have shown that poverty was a growing problem in cities like Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. In the case of Boston the first serious poverty occurred after the 1690–1713 war. That conflict had precipitated a boom in shipbuilding and privateering; when it ended many seamen and carpenters were left in straitened circumstances. War widows were also badly hit. Indeed, the advent of peace ushered in a period during which the population of Boston actually fell. By 1740, 25 percent of the town's inhabitants were living below the poverty line. Responding to this catastrophe, prominent Bostonians constructed workhouses and a linen factory where the unemployed might work and repay the cost of their upkeep. Unfortunately, this attempt to use private capital to solve unemployment in Boston was not a success: the factory was unable to compete with low-priced imports and had to close after a few years. Other towns were similarly affected by the scourge of poverty, and by 1760 even Providence had a workhouse.

  Though Benjamin Franklin is known for his optimistic conviction that any man in British North America could become an economic success, Franklin's Philadelphia belies his claims by demonstrating the reality of urban deprivation in the eighteenth century colonies. Many artisans and laborers there were rarely above the poverty line. This was especially the case in winter, when perhaps a quarter of the workforce required relief. Many tried to avoid this humiliation, since recipients of public assistance had to wear a large letter P (for pauper) on their garments. Even when the economy was robust, many seamen, shoemakers, and journeymen tailors earned barely enough to feed, clothe, and house their families. As a result they were never able to amass enough capital to break out of their cycle of poverty, no matter how hard they worked or observed the aphorisms of Franklin's Poor Richard.28

  Document 15

  Benjamin Franklin on the Protestant ethic: the advice of Poor Richard, reprinted in Kenneth Silverman, Benjamin Franklin: The Autobiography and Other Writings (New York, 1986), 216–17

  The following maxims were published by Franklin in his Poor Richard's Almanac. Questions to consider: To what extent are the values Franklin espouses here still shared by Americans? To what extent is Franklin making fun of these values?

  The Taxes are indeed very heavy; and if those laid on by the Government were the only ones we had to pay, we might more easily discharge them; but we have many others, and much more grievous to some of us. Weare taxed twice as much by our Idleness, three times as much by our Pride, and four times as much by our Folly … However let us hearken to good Advice, and something may be done for us; God helps them that help themselves, as Poor Richard says, in his Almanack of 1733 …

  How much more than is necessary do we spend in Sleep! forgetting that The sleeping Fox catches no Poultry, and that there will be sleeping enough in the Grave, as Poor Richard says. If Time be of all things the most precious, wasting Time must be, as Poor Richard says, the Greatest Prodigality, since, as he elsewhere tells us, Lost Time is never found again; and what we call Time-enough always proves little enough: Let us then be up and be doing, and doing to some Purpose; so by Diligence shall we do more with less Perplexity. Sloth makes all things difficult, but Industry all easy, as Poor Richard says; and He that riseth late, must trot all Day, and shall scarce overtake his Business at Night. While Laziness travels so slowly, that Poverty soon overtakes him, as we read in Poor Richard, who adds … Early to Bed, and early to rise, makes a Man healthy, wealthy and wise.

  Nor was poverty limited to the towns. New England farming communities increasingly warned away strangers for fear they would become a charge on the inhabitants. In Virginia the House of Burgesses passed a law in 1723 against vagabonds who were becoming a burden on the parish and county authorities. According to the most recent calculations, 30 percent of the population in that colony were poor even by the standards of the time. A similar picture pertained for Maryland, while in South Carolina the governor calculated that 6,000 of its 26,000 white population lived in dire poverty, with another 10,000 possessing only the bare necessities of life.

  Historians are also now aware how large was the proportion of tenant farmers – perhaps 30 percent of all those engaged in agriculture. Since 20 percent of the population were laborers, this figure actually indicates that close to 50 percent of white males owned no land. Of course, tenancy could be the first step on the ladder to ownership; and many young men with no land were simply waiting to inherit from their parents or relatives. A study of conditions in Connecticut suggests that most males owned no land on reaching adulthood. However, by the time they were married they possessed an average of around 40 acres, which had typically increased to 100 acres by age 40. Only five percent remained permanently poor. On the other hand tenancy rates rose during the eighteenth century, especially in the South.29

  Finally, although optimistic European observers rarely acknowledged them, the African slaves who comprised some 20 percent of the colonial population lived in forced, permanent poverty. Slaves were permitted, even encouraged, to grow crops and raise poultry or hogs in order to supplement their own diets. Slaveholders in North America had an economic incentive to keep their slaves sufficiently well fed so that they would be able to work. But by the eighteenth century slaves had little or no legal right to any property of their own, and were rarely able to acquire the kinds of consumer goods that were becoming widely available to European farmers. African Americans' standards of living improved little, if at all, over the course of the eighteenth century. Their poverty offered a stark contrast to the growing prosperity of most whites.

  Thus it can still be asserted that most white persons in British colonial North America had a better chance of a comfortable existence at some point in their lives than did their counterparts in the mother country, which was why most of them, or their ancestors, had come in the first place. At the same time, poverty was growing in the cities and in parts of the South, and increasingly defined the lot of African slaves. Indeed its marks were probably now especially visible in a world where rising prosperity was coming to seem the norm.

  1. The 1707 Act of Union between England and Scotland created the United Kingdom of Great Britain. When discussing the period after that date, the noun “Britain” or adjective “British” is used in place of “England” or “English.” Too many writers use “England” when they mean Britain, to the annoyance of most Scots and Welsh.

  2. An additional 100,000 people from England and Wales migrated to Ireland during the period.

  3. The English population is estimated to have shrunk from 5.3 million to 5 million between 1650 and 1700.

  4. Figures may be found in Anthony McFarlane, The British in the Americas, 1480–1815 (London, 1994), 117, citing Russell R. Menard, “The Tobacco Industry in the Chesapeake Colonies, 1617–1730: An Interpretation,” Research in Economic History, 5 (1980), 109–77.

  5. See Nuala Zahedieh, “Economy,” in David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick, eds, The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (London, 2002), 57, citing Noel Deerr, The History of Sugar, 2 vols (London, 1949–50).

  6. The consumer revolution has been a relatively new topic for economic historians, who in trying to explain the rise of capitalism have more commonly focused on the production and distribution of goods rather than on consumer demand. For efforts to explain the rise of consumer demand in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, see, e.g., Neil McKendrick, John Brewer,
and J. H. Plumb, eds, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (Bloomington, 1982); Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (New York, 1987); John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds, Consumption and the World of Goods (London, 1993).

  7. It is estimated that from the introduction of sugar and slavery to Barbados in the 1630s until 1700, some 450,000 African slaves were imported into the English and French sugar colonies in the West Indies, while about 30,000 African slaves were taken to the North American mainland. Herbert S. Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge, 1999), 31–2.

  8. The debate is surveyed in John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, The Economy of British North America, 1607–1789 (Chapel Hill, 1985). See also David W. Galenson and Russell R. Menard, “Approaches to the Analysis of Economic Growth in Colonial British America,” Historical Methods, 13 (1980), 3–18.

  9. For the economics of the southern fur trade, see Kathryn E. Holland Braund, Deerskins and Duffels: Creek Indian Trade with Anglo-America, 1685–1815 (Lincoln, Nebr., 1993).

  10. The claim that slave-owning was relatively widespread in the Chesapeake is advanced by Allan Kulikoff, in Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680–1800 (Chapel Hill, 1986). His argument that large concentrations of Africans were rare is challenged by Philip D. Morgan and Michael L. Nicholls in “Slaves in Piedmont Virginia, 1720–1790,” William and Mary Quarterly, 46 1989, 211–51, who found that in many piedmont counties 30 percent of Africans lived on plantations of 21 slaves or more.

  11. Edwin J. Perkins, The Economy of Colonial America (New York, 1988).

  12. For the development of the Virginian piedmont, see Robert D. Mitchell, Commercialism and Frontier: Perspectives on the Early Shenandoah Valley (Charlottesville, 1977); and Richard R. Beeman, The Evolution of the Southern Backcountry: A Case Study of Lunenburg County, Virginia, 1746–1832 (Philadelphia, 1984). The commercialization of backcountry farming is also discussed by Allan Kulikoff in “The Transition to Capitalism in Rural America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 46 1989, 120–44; The Agrarian Origins of American Capitalism (Charlottesville, 1992); and “Households and Markets: Toward a New Synthesis of American Agrarian History,” William and Mary Quarterly, 50 1993, 342–55. In addition, see Winifred Rothenberg, “The Market and Massachusetts Farmers, 1750–1855,” Journal of Economic History, 41 1981, 283–5; and Richard L. Bushman, “Markets and Composite Farms in Early America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 55 1998, 351–74. The contrary view that community-oriented values dominated colonial economic activity is advanced by James A. Henretta, “Families and Farms: Mentalité in Pre-industrial America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 35 1978, 3–32; and The Origins of American Capitalism: Collected Essays (Boston, 1992). See also James A. Henretta and Gregory H. Nobles, Evolution and Revolution: American Society, 1600–1820 (Lexington, Ky., 1987).

  13. For the distribution of income, see Alice Hansen Jones, Wealth of a Nation To Be: The American Colonies on the Eve of the Revolution (New York, 1980); and section 5 of this chapter. Historians have traditionally seen the southern economy, with its concentration on a few staples, as an anomaly, compared to the diversification of the North. During the 1980s several scholars suggested that it was New England and the Middle Colonies that were anomalous in the wider context of the Americas, where cash-crop economies were the norm. See Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole, British Colonial America: Essays in the New History of the Early Modern Era (Baltimore, 1984), and McCusker and Menard, The Economy of British North America.

  14. On the Jeffersonian image of farming, see Joyce Oldham Appleby, “Commercial Farming and the ‘Agrarian Myth’ in the Early Republic,” Journal of American History, 68 (1982), 833–49. On the impracticability of being self-sufficient, see Bettye Hobbs Pruitt, “Self-Sufficiency and the Agricultural Economy of Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts,” William and Mary Quarterly, 41 1984, 333–64, and Bushman, “Markets and Composite Farms.” The continued glorification of farming has been greatly reinforced by the perceived decline in the quality of urban life.

  15. For a critique of the traditional view of the slave trade, see Gilman M. Ostrander, “The Making of the Triangular Trade Myth,” William and Mary Quarterly, 30 1973, 635–44. For its relative importance to Rhode Island, see Jay Coughtry, The Notorious Triangle: Rhode Island and the African Slave Trade, 1700–1807 (Philadelphia, 1981). By 1740, six percent of its shipping was clearing for Africa. For a summary of the most recent data, see David Eltis, “The Volume and Structure of the Transatlantic Slave Trade: A Reassessment,” William and Mary Quarterly, 58 2001, 17–46, esp. table at 43.

  16. Unsurprisingly, historians have not been able to agree when a true market economy emerged. See Chapter 7, n. 6 for the historiography concerning this topic.

  17. One of the earliest critics of the navigation system was George W. Bancroft, History of the United States, 10 vols (Boston, 1834–74). Bancroft was a member of the Whig nationalist school and was anxious to justify America's separation from Britain in 1776. Like most nineteenth-century writers, he was overly influenced by Adam Smith and the doctrines of free trade. In the early twentieth century, Progressive historians also criticized mercantilism, believing that its restrictions left the colonies in debt. See especially Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard, The Rise of American Civilization, 2 vols (New York, 1930); and Lawrence A. Harper, The English Navigation Acts: A Seventeenth-Century Experiment in Social Engineering (New York, 1939). This view was challenged by members of the imperial school. They, too, were products of the Progressive era but had more obvious Anglo-Saxon leanings which led them to emphasize the benefits of the British connection. See especially Charles McLean Andrews, The Colonial Period of American History, 4 vols (New Haven, 1934–8); and Oliver M. Dickerson, The Navigation Acts and the American Revolution (Philadelphia, 1951). Most recent writers have been favorable to the navigation laws as a system of economic management, notably McCusker and Menard, The Economy of British America; and Gary M. Walton and James F. Shepherd, The Economic Rise of Early America (New York, 1979). The latter emphasize the advantages of competitive shipping rates, capital investment, and access to technology.

  18. See Ian K. Steele, The English Atlantic, 1675–1740: An Exploration of Communication and Community (New York, 1986).

  19. However, as noted in Chapter 5, section 1, it is not clear that many French people would have immigrated even in the absence of government restrictions.

  20. For this estimate (as well as a discussion of the range of estimates in the historical literature), see Christopher Tomlins, “Indentured Servitude in Perspective: European Migration into North America and the Composition of the Early American Labor Force, 1600–1775,” in Cathy Matson, ed., The Economy of Early America: Historical Perspectives and New Directions (University Park, 2006), 146–82, esp. table at 176.

  21. For a discussion of Virginian indebtedness, see Warren M. Billings, John E. Selby, and Thad W. Tate, Colonial Virginia: A History (New York, 1986).

  22. See especially T. H. Breen, Tobacco Culture: The Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters on the Eve of the Revolution (Princeton, 1985). Similar resentments existed among the rice growers of South Carolina, according to Kenneth Morgan, “The Organization of the Colonial Rice Trade,” William and Mary Quarterly, 52 (1995), 443–6.

  23. The shift to the protection of Britain's manufacturing was first noted by George Louis Beer, British Colonial Policy, 1754–1765 (New York, 1907). For the thesis about special interests, see John J. McCusker, “British Mercantilist Policies,” in Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman, eds, The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, Vol. 1: The Colonial Era (Cambridge, 1996), 337–62. For a discussion of special interests before 1700, see Joyce Oldham Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton, 1978).

  24. For the old view about the imbalance of payments see Curtis P. Nettels, The Roots of Am
erican Civilization (New York, 1938). For more recent analyses see Walton and Shepherd, The Economic Rise of Early America; and McCusker and Menard, The Economy of British North America.

  25. For the accepted view that taxation was light, even during the final French and Indian War, see Lawrence Henry Gipson, Connecticut Taxation, 1750–1775 (New Haven, 1933). That Parliament by no means reimbursed all the costs of that struggle and that considerable taxation was necessary is argued by Harold E. Selesky in War and Society in Colonial Connecticut (New Haven, 1989).

  26. Considerable work is now being done on the eighteenth-century consumer revolution. See Carole Shammas, The Pre-industrial Consumer in England and America (New York, 1990); and Ronald Hoffman, Cary Carson, and Peter J. Albert, Of Consuming Interests: The Style of Life in the Eighteenth-Century (Charlottesville, 1993). Some historians have attempted to link the growth in consumption to the separation from Britain. T. H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (New York, 2004), argues that the growth of a consumer economy in the British colonies gave people a common set of experiences which facilitated the development of trust and a shared identity. Breen observes that the consumer economy also allowed colonists to employ consumer boycotts as a tactic for resisting British imperial policies during the American Revolution.

  27. For further information, see Alice Hanson Jones, Wealth of a Nation to Be.

  28. The issue of urban poverty is dealt with by Gary P. Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1979); and Billy G. Smith, The “Lower Sort”: Philadelphia's Laboring People, 1750–1800 (Ithaca, 1990).

  29. For the view that tenant farming was widespread and led to poverty, see Gregory A. Stiverson, Poverty in a Land of Plenty: Tenancy in Eighteenth-Century Maryland (Baltimore, 1977); Gloria L. Main, Tobacco Colony: Life in Early Maryland, 1650–1720 (Princeton, 1983); and Sharon V. Salinger, “To Serve Well and Faithfully”: Labor and Indentured Servants in Pennsylvania, 1682–1800 (New York, 1987). Salinger points out how difficult it was for servants to make the transition to owning property in Pennsylvania. For a more optimistic account of tenancy, see James T. Lemon, The Best Poor Man's Country: A Geographical Study of Early Southeastern Pennsylvania (Baltimore, 1972); Sung Bok Kim, Landlord and Tenant in Colonial New York: Manorial Society, 1664–1775 (Chapel Hill, 1978); and Lucy Simler, “Tenancy in Colonial Pennsylvania: The Case of Chester County,” William and Mary Quarterly, 43 (1986), 542–69. The details on Connecticut can be found in Jackson Turner Main, Society and Economy in Colonial Connecticut (Princeton, 1985).