Engerman S.L., Gallman R.E. The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, Vol. 1: The Colonial Era

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The Northern Colonies:

Economy

and

Society

trade, and tribal and colonial diplomacy, not to mention the cultural

peculiarities of the particular groups that contested the land. Invariably,

however, homesteading took place on what was politically contested

ground, where settler power eventually prevailed.

This was especially true in the farther reaches of the back country.

Trouble commonly resulted when settlers encroached upon territory that

Indians had not actually ceded, squatted on proprietorial lands without

paying for the privilege, moved into a stretch of country over which there

was a dispute between proprietors, or simply set out claims that over-

lapped their neighbors'. Thus, Thomas Penn ran into difficulty with

squatters who had invaded unsurveyed lands in Lancaster County during

the 17 30s and organized "claims clubs" when he attempted to coerce them

into signing warrants. Along the Pennsylvania-Maryland border, in East

Jersey, throughout the Green Mountains, and on the Maine frontier, the

indistinct claims of distant proprietors led to chronic conflict not only

between landlords and squatters but, in cases where proprietorial jurisdic-

tion was in dispute, between the occupiers themselves. Ultimately, the

trouble arose because there was no consensus over what created property

rights in conquered land. Was it defined in the terms of an Indian deed,

royal charter, or proprietary grant? Or, as one German tenant in Pennsylva-

nia argued before the Privy Council, was "the best Title a man can have"

in "new-settled Colonies" one defined by "Possession and Improvement"?

Even on a local scale, the founding of towns, manors, and townships, and

the assignment of undivided land within them was an intensely political

process, in which dozens of potential proprietors or landholders

—

great

and petty

—

attempted to lever the provincial governments or local authori-

ties into grants that they could either occupy and develop or hold for

speculative purposes. Although wildly complex and subject to all sorts of

local variation, the struggle that ensued over the establishment of private

property in frontier land generally resulted in a qualified victory for those

with connections within the colonial administration. As long as it lasted,

however, such conflict contributed to the risks and uncertainties of the

homesteading economy.

All of this mattered, of course, because on the homesteading frontier

the pace of development was so rapid. Even if families could convert no

more than a few acres of forest a year to European-style husbandry, it was

only a period of decades before towns acquired a settled appearance and

' Quoted in James T. Lemon, The Best Poor Man's Country: A Geographical Study of

Southeastern

Pennsylvania

(Baltimore, MD: 1972), 57.

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218 Daniel

Wickers

property values rose. Such development was purchased at the cost of

considerable initial poverty. Travelers into frontier regions were often

appalled at the meager diet, squalid housing, and near-absence of creature

comforts to which homesteaders subjected themselves while they sank

most of their own time and resources, plus whatever credit they could

obtain from relatives, neighbors, or merchant connections, into the busi-

ness of farm development. The levels of indebtedness that frontier families

assumed were high in relation to the productive capacity of their farms,

and this involved diverting considerable effort into making returns. One

obvious marketable commodity was timber and cordwood from the forest

they felled, and there was almost no region where new settlement did not

generate a flourishing, if not always long-lived, export trade in wood

products. Even agricultural produce was often pared from domestic con-

sumption and shipped downriver or carted into town very soon after the

first fields were cleared in an effort to sustain the vital injections of credit.

With an enthusiasm, then, not for commerce in and of itself but for the

comfortable independence that was impossible to achieve without an eye

to commercial opportunity, homesteading farmers brought one range of

frontier land after another into the domain of rural economies on the

model of the Old World.

THE RURAL ECONOMY

Had the families of immigrants who sailed for the American and Canadian

Northeast in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries landed in the trop-

ics,

the lure of plunder and plantation profits would undoubtedly have

proved irresistible, and their commitment to the household economy

employing male and female skills in combination would have been silently

shelved. That is what happened off the Nicaraguan coast at Providence

Island, where Puritan settlers of the 1630s abandoned the attempt to

reconstruct the economic institutions of home almost immediately and

turned their energies to privateering and the operation of slave-driven

cotton and tobacco farms. This also happened in the exotically cold climate

of the far northern colonies, where the few permanent residents shied away

from mixed husbandry and concentrated instead on fur and fish. New-

foundland in particular possessed too short a growing season to plant and

harvest grains or to raise enough fodder to see more than a handful of

animals through the winter. A small number of families persisted on its

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The Northern Colonies:

Economy

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219

cool, infertile shores throughout the seventeenth century, but since there

was little productive employment to be had outside of the fishery, female

skills were not an economic necessity, and the household economy never

flourished.

Newfoundland was in this sense, however, the exception that proved

the rule. All the way from the modestly more temperate country of Nova

Scotia southward to Pennsylvania, geography confirmed the early immi-

grants in their intention to transplant the household basis of production.

Although farmers adjusted the balance between pasture and tillage land

and in different regions gave preference to different animals and crops,

virtually all remained wedded in large measure to the principle of agricul-

tural diversity through the end of the colonial period. The Acadian settlers

around the Bay of Fundy raised small surpluses of cattle, peas, and wheat,

which they sold to Boston and to fishermen on Cape Breton, but the

general orientation of their husbandry was toward local self-sufficiency and

reflected the same mix of husbandry that prevailed in the west of France,

whence most of them hailed. New Englanders had to adjust their agricul-

tural expectations to the reality that neither wheat nor barley prospered

there, so they grew rye and Indian corn instead, and eventually they came

to depend more on animal husbandry than their English forebears. In a

few favored regions, certain specialties arose

—

sheep raising and cheese

making on the shores of Narragansett Bay, horse breeding in the Connecti-

cut valley and growing flax for seed by the Merrimack River in southern

New Hampshire

—

but rarely in New England did farmers stray far from

the principle of diversity. In the Hudson River Valley, and throughout

New Jersey and Pennsylvania, fertile soil allowed wheat to grow into an

important staple export very soon after settlement. Yet the men and

women who operated even the most commercial grain farms in the Middle

Colonies were hardly specialists, for they pastured cattle and sheep, cut

timber, boiled potash, ran dairies, and barreled meat on a scale no less

impressive than their counterparts in Connecticut or Massachusetts.

If mixed farming was nearly universal in the northern colonies, so was

the division by gender of the labor that powered it. By 1700, every

agricultural region north of Maryland (save possibly Pennsylvania, whose

population was still dominated by large numbers of young and indentured

male immigrants) possessed a sex ratio that was close to equal. Within the

gender-balanced households that composed this rural population, the west

European tradition by which most men labored in the fields and forests

producing raw materials, while women normally worked around the house

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220 Daniel

Vickers

and barn processing those materials into consumable items, survived the

trans-Atlantic passage reasonably intact. There was considerable elasticity

in these arrangements, of

course,

especially at busy seasons and in house-

holds where one sex outnumbered the other. Because of the complex mix

of German, Welsh, and Scots-Irish ethnicity that prevailed in the Middle

Colonies, the division of tasks between men and women there displayed

particular variety. As a general rule, however, the skills of domestic pro-

duction fell mainly within the female province, and with these the econo-

mies of the northeastern colonies were peculiarly blessed. In 1788, Brissot

de Warville remarked that a bachelor farmer he had met north of Philadel-

phia could not, without a family, keep poultry or pigeons, make cheese, or

"have any spinning done or collect goose feathers." It was, he added, "a

great disadvantage for him not to be able to profit from these domestic

farm industries, which can be carried on well only by farm women."

factor was more decisive in the northern colonies' long-term success in

diversification and import substitution than the roughly equal sex ratio

that prevailed there almost from their foundation.

The final element in the economic culture that migrated to the house-

holding colonies was the habit of

exchange.

To what extent was the rural

economy of the Northeast market-driven? Obviously, all farmers and their

wives dealt with others on a commercial basis from time to time. Most

farmers who kept diaries recorded several trips overland or downriver to

the market towns along the coast every year, and the accounts of shopkeep-

ers record the purchase of produce, at least in small quantities, from

people at all levels of rural society. Even the dealings that farmers con-

cluded in their own towns and villages were often competitive enough to

convince John Winthrop at times that it was "the common rule that most

men walked by in all their commerce, to buy as cheap as they could, and

to sell as dear."

At the same time, however, most rural production was

consumed at home and never entered the market at all. Even the highest

estimates of the agricultural surplus in typical farm households only place

it at between 25 and 40 percent of total output. Families did arrive at

decisions about the management of their farms

—

choosing whether or not

to replant a worn-out corn field in apple trees, or when to slaughter a

hog

—

with some awareness of

the

price at which these products could also

be bought or sold. But custom and a sense that family requirements came

Brissot de Warville, New

Travels

the

UnitedStates of America, 1788,

Joan M. Jensen,

Loosening the

Bonds: Mid-Atlantic Farm

Women,

17.50-1850 (New Haven, CT: 1986), 53.

Hosmer, ed., Wintbrop's Journal, vol. 2, 20.

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The Northern Colonies:

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first dampened their response; thus market forces impinged on farm man-

agement mainly in the broader considerations of long-run strategy. Much

of what men and women obtained around their neighborhoods to meet

their immediate needs changed hands in a system governed less by hag-

gling over terms than by unspoken reciprocity. The numerous petty debts

and credits that farmers built up with one another were rarely settled in

the commercial manner by payment in cash or in bookkeeping shuffles;

rather, they had to be repaid personally

—

sometimes in labor but more

often in equipment or produce. No farm family could prosper in utter

autonomy, or only with neighborly assistance, or simply through market

transactions. In their drive to preserve a modicum of competency and

confer it upon subsequent generations, men and women moved easily in

and out of all three tactical alternatives and, indeed, found the borders

between them to be rather indistinct.

None of these features set the northern colonies apart in any absolute

sense, for a numerical balance between the sexes and some economic

diversification came eventually to most of the New World, and a degree of

commercial production was common everywhere. The colonies north of

Maryland, however, were

born

with these characteristics and possessed in

their economic diversity a potential for constructive regional integration

that the southern colonies developed only hesitantly later on. Settlers in

the tobacco, rice, and sugar colonies did more business with consumers

and suppliers overseas than did their northern counterparts, but they did

less,

particularly in the early years, with one another. For one thing, most

regions of the Northeast were involved, however indirectly, in the provi-

sioning of seaports. As early as 1648, Edward Johnson observed that the

inhabitants of Ipswich on Massachusetts' North Shore had "many hundred

quarters" of beef to spare and "feed, at the latter end of summer, the

Towne of Boston with good Beefe." Some of this was for export and some

for consumption, but a significant proportion went into victualing, "both

for their owne and Forreiners-ships, who resort hither for that end."

Not

only in Boston but later in Philadelphia and New York, the rapid settle-

ment of a highly diversified service and manufacturing population hinged

on the ability of farm families in the country round to provision them.

Although some of the produce that farmers brought into the seaport towns

was simply grain and livestock to be warehoused and exported directly,

even more produce either had been processed in the countryside (like

" J. Franklin Jameson, ed.,

Johnson's Wonder-Working

Providence,

1629—1651, Original Narratives of

Early American History (New York: 1910), 71, 96.

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222 Daniel

Vickers

butter, smoked and salted meat, malt, flour, and boards) or would be

processed by specialists in town (like bread, clothing, furniture, and

leather products). With remarkable speed, a network of regional ex-

change, connecting mariners to outfitters, bakers, farmers, millers, mill-

wrights, and so forth

—

in a primitive but recognizable reflection of the

mother country - was reestablished in the northern seaports and their

hinterland. Marketing the mixed surplus of domestic farm production was

not a likely path to fortune, but in a thousand little ways it employed the

talents of housewives, and artisans in town and country, capturing busi-

ness that would otherwise have fallen to Europeans.

In spite of these trans-Atlantic similarities and the long-term advan-

tages that derived from them, the northern colonies did not instantly nor

entirely replicate the rural economies of their metropolitan parents, owing

mostly to the ease with which the unimproved land and natural resources

of the New World could be appropriated. This reorganized northern agri-

culture in part by pushing farming households to be extensive in their

exploitation of the natural environment and sparing in their use of labor.

The dominant method of forest clearance

—

stripping the trees of bark and

waiting till they toppled, while cultivating the ground around them and

planting it with crops

—

spoke clearly to the way in which other chores

placed competing demands upon people's time. Swine were the favored

livestock in the initial stages of settlement for the same reason: since they

could grub for themselves on unimproved land and defend themselves

against natural predators, they put minimal demands upon human assis-

tance. European travelers across the Northeast remarked on what they

perceived to be sloppy farming: the absence of crop rotation, an inade-

quate attention to manuring and fodder crops, insufficient housing for

animals, poor selection and quality of implements, unselective breeding,

and so forth. Farmers in New York were said to clear out tracts of forest

and then "crop their fields with corn, till they are absolutely exhausted;

then they leave them, what they call fallow, that is, to run weeds for

several years, till they think the soil has recovered somewhat of its fertil-

ity, when they begin again with corn."'3 In an agricultural regime where

so much of the land was periodically abandoned, fencing was sensibly

impermanent and consisted mainly of stumps and logs, then posts and

rails,

and sometimes stones, assembled along field boundaries in such

•» Anon.,American Husbandry (1775), quoted in Percy Wells Bidwell and John I. Falconer, History of

Agriculture in the

Northern

United

States,

1620-7860 (Washington: 1925), 86.

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The

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Colonies:

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223

haste that complaints about strayed animals became chronic everywhere.

Although the agricultural critics of the day attributed most of this to sloth

and ignorance, the simple truth was that, where the supply of land was too

vast to be exhausted in a future that any colonist could imagine, it seemed

foolish to squander scarce labor and capital on conservation or cosmetic

tidiness.

Another significant consequence of

the

easy access to land and resources

was that European immigrants found it possible to realize on the western

shores of the Atlantic a degree of independence that would have been

inconceivable at home. In a rural economy without a highly profitable

export staple, this had a number of peculiar consequences. First, it meant

that relative to the availability of unimproved land and resources, produc-

tive equipment and labor time were in limited supply. Within individual

households, tools and livestock were usually inadequate to the opportuni-

ties that one's holdings afforded; those holdings themselves were less than

fully developed; and the time needed to make the necessary improvements

was chronically short. Between households, it meant that there was on the

one hand relatively little labor available for hire and on the other hand

comparatively little capital to set laborers to work. Although the demand

for labor was high in the northern colonies, it was chiefly a demand for

help in farm formation, which provided no immediate paying returns

sufficient to meet the cost of a large wage bill. Where hands could be

obtained and well-to-do colonists could afford the cost, the scarcity of

labor drove the wages of common laborers on northern farms up to a level

that ranged from is. 6d. to 2s. (in British currency) per day - half again

as high as those that prevailed in England. Since large employers were

relatively scarce, however, the quantity of labor marketed at these hand-

some wages remained by the standards of the old country comparatively

small. Ordinary farm families could not depend on the free market for the

help and equipment they needed (at ploughing and harvest times, espe-

cially) if they were to raise the surpluses on which the achievement of

household competency depended. The very opportunities created by the

proximity of the frontier simultaneously saddled farming as a business

with an unusual potential for risk.

Accordingly, as elsewhere in the New World, the productive systems

inherited from Europe were inadequate to the altered balance in factors of

production, and they had to be adjusted. The adoption of slavery was a

possibility that some considered. Emmanuel Downing of Massachusetts

understood plainly that successive generations would "hardly see this great

224 Daniel

Vickers

Continent filled with people" and that servants would "still desire free-

dome to plant for themselves, and not staye but for verie great wages." By

procuring "a stock of slaves suffitient to do all our busines," he speculated,

the colony might resolve the problem.

* Yet bound labor was costly, and

most northern farmers did not produce valuable enough surpluses to jus-

tify the expense. The adjustments they undertook, therefore, were geared

toward accepting the scarcity of outside help and coping with it by intensi-

fying the burden on their own families. For one thing, rural households

continually sought for ways in which work could be spread across the year.

This reinforced the existing commitment to diversification by encourag-

ing the planting of orchards that could be picked after the grain harvest,

the woodworking and other handicrafts that could be pursued in the

winter months, and the hunting and fishing that could fit into the odd

day spared from agriculture. Another way in which families adapted to the

scarcity of labor was by extending the dependency of their own children.

Living and working at home until marriage had not been universal or even

normal among the rural youth of western Europe in the early modern age.

Most young men and many young women spent a good proportion of their

teen-age and early adult years away from home in service or apprenticeship

to other households needing help. This tradition - a central element in

the regional labor markets of the Old World - did not survive transplanta-

tion to America in anything like its original shape. Here, the interdepen-

dence between parents and children was prolonged until marriage and

even beyond.

In New England, where soils were generally thinner, the climate cooler,

and commercial agriculture seldom capable of supporting the cost of

indentured servants or slaves, family labor was especially important. Vir-

ginia might thrive "by keeping many servants" wrote one seventeenth-

century observer, but New Englanders "conceit that they and their Chil-

dren can doe enough, and soe have rarely above one Servant."

' Although

all young people took part in the local exchange of favors, very few

actually left home to labor for others, and those who did rarely spent more

than a few months away. By far the greatest portion of their young

adulthood was invested in improving the farms that their parents operated

and developing the property that would one day form the basis of their

'* Emmanuel Downing to John Winthrop, ca. August 1645, Winthrop

Papers,

1498-1649, 5 vols.

(Boston: 1929-1947), vol. 5, 38.

•> Anon., Egerton MSS, British Museum, quoted in Abbot Emerson Smith, Colonists in Bondage:

White Servitude andConvict Labor in

America,

1607-1776 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1947), 29.

The

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Colonies:

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225

inheritance. Even when they had grown up, married, and begun to work a

corner of parental lands themselves, young men found their fathers

reluctant - especially during the first century of settlement - to deed

them control over the property they used. The formal marriage portions

that had been normal in the mother country were exceptional in colonial

New England. This system of household reproduction was very effective

for the initial tasks of farm formation and allowed that process to fan

outward swiftly from the initial point of settlement around Plymouth and

Massachusetts Bay. True, there were local exceptions to this pattern.

Where the agricultural potential of the land allowed, wealthier farmers

did purchase slaves and indentured servants and did hire common labor-

ers.

With an eye to the provisioning market in the West Indies, John

Pynchon of Springfield raised wheat, barley, pigs, and cattle on the fertile

bottom lands of

the

Connecticut valley, using immigrant servants and the

paid labor of

his

dependent clients. On the western shores of Narragansett

Bay, where dairy and sheep farming proceeded on a large scale, many

planters kept Indian and African slaves. Still, in most of the New England

countryside, where commercial production was less important, farmers

could not afford this sort of help and relied on the more intensive exploita-

tion of family labor instead.

In the milder and more fertile Middle Colonies, where farms generated

more for export, especially in the way of cereal crops, household produc-

tion still dominated though not in quite the same form. For one thing,

the commercial potential of the Hudson Valley, the New Jersey lowlands,

and the rolling hills of eastern Pennsylvania attracted the attention of

many more wealthy developers, anxious to secure large tracts of land and

profit thereby. Much of this territory was carved up into proprietorships,

manors, and patents during the last quarter of the seventeenth century,

and these were then peopled with tenants. Although the leases that ten-

ants assumed ate into the income and independence they could enjoy, the

combination of modest annual rents (generally well below 4 percent of

farm value) and long credit on arrears (allowed by proprietors often more

interested in the speculative profits of having their uncleared land devel-

oped for future sale) permitted them to operate much like freeholders.

Whether leased or not, farms were larger in the Middle Colonies than in

New England

—

usually a hundred acres or more

—

and their operators

could afford more nonfamilial help. Some of them purchased indentured

servants, but in an agricultural system where the commercial crop was

wheat, the demand for hired help was highly seasonal, and most farmers

226 Daniel

Vickers

preferred to employ laborers by the day. In Pennsylvania, hundreds of

young men and women who had come to Philadelphia on indenture served

out their time in a craft or domestic workplace and then wandered into the

rural labor market. Although some moved in with farming households,

even more became "inmates" or "freemen," renting cottages with garden

plots on their employer's lands and selling their labor on a casual basis.

Many of those who moved to the Middle Colonies in family groups (and

disembarked for the most part in New York) would have been needy

enough in their earliest years to seek out similar arrangements. In this

way, the more productive economy of the Middle Colonies attracted the

flow of immigrants who, as free laborers, fueled farm development on a

larger and more commercial scale than was possible farther north. Yet the

difference is easy to overstate. Even on the best lands of eastern Pennsylva-

nia and the Hudson River Valley, farm production was sufficiently diversi-

fied and reliable farm labor sufficiently costly to cause agriculture to

remain distinctively a family business.

Although the structural features of the rural economy in the Northeast

remained fairly stable across the colonial period, there were shifts and

developments within that structure that are equally part of the region's

history. Preeminent among these, of course, was the pattern of rapid,

extensive growth. Immigration and natural increase, in a balance that

shifted decisively toward the latter over time

—

especially in New En-

gland, which received few new immigrants after 1645 - caused the popu-

lation of most regions to double, as Thomas Malthus observed, about

every twenty-five years. With a few local exceptions, demographic growth

combined with the favorable geography of the country and with the

colonists' military superiority and immunological advantages over the

Native Americans to allow settlement to spread and the economy to

experience more or less continuous extensive growth. Peculiar difficulties

in certain regions restricted colonial expansion. The severe climate and

thin soils of Newfoundland and the eastern shore of Nova Scotia caused

most potential colonists to think twice before taking up permanent resi-

dence there before the middle of the eighteenth century. French-English

conflict along the Atlantic Canadian coastline and in the Hudson and

Mohawk River valleys slowed settlement there until after the conquest of

New France in 1759. Certain Indian peoples - the Iroquois west of Al-

bany

and'

the

Abenaki in Maine, for instance - were politically powerful

enough to slow European infestation of their lands. Yet the general picture

of swift, extensive growth is undeniable; indeed, most of the economic