Engerman S.L., Gallman R.E. The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, Vol. 1: The Colonial Era
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Table 6.4.
Average
annual
value
of exports from
Maryland,
Virginia, and
North
Carolina,
1768-72,
by
destination
(in
thousands
of
pounds sterling)
Commodity
Tobacco
Grains, grain products
Naval stores
Wood products
Iron
Other
Total
Great Britain
763.8
10.6
35.4
7.0
28.3
20.9
866.0
Ireland
23.5
2.3
0.4
3.9
30.1
Southern
Europe
98.6
2.4
0.9
101.9
West Indies
75.5
23.2
0.5
16.7
115.9
Total
763.8
208.1
35.4
34.9
29.2
42.4
1,113.8
Source: James F. Shepherd
and
Gary M. Walton,
Shipping,
Maritime Trade, and
the Economic Development of
Colonial
North
America
(Cambridge,
1972),
213-25.
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268
Russell
R. Menard
depressions in the industry during the late 1720s to early 1730s and again
in the mid-i74os. Prices rose fairly steadily after 1750, although there
were periods of contraction in the later stages of the Seven Years' War and
in the aftermath of the British credit crisis of 1772. Rising prices joined
with growing output to push up incomes, bringing an era of unprece-
dented prosperity to the tobacco coast while extending cultivation of the
crop and tidewater social institutions into Virginia's southside and
piedmont regions.
The eighteenth-century expansion of the export sector led to some
modest urbanization in the area. The region had been almost entirely rural
before 1720. The extensive river system permitted decentralized trade,
while tobacco needed little processing and did not require elaborate stor-
age facilities or a highly developed internal transport network. Further,
the trade was controlled by metropolitan rather than colonial merchants,
which meant that transport and finance remained in English hands.
Changes in the organization of the tobacco trade led to a proliferation of
small towns in the plantation district after 1720 as the colonial legisla-
tures set up inspection and warehouse systems to control quality, and
British merchants centralized collection of the crop to reduce port times
for the fleet. The most important developments occurred on the periphery
of the plantation sector and reflected the diversification of
exports.
Grains
required more processing, storage, and transport facilities than tobacco,
and the grain trade was dominated by local rather than metropolitan
merchants. Baltimore and Norfolk, each with about 6,000 inhabitants in
1775,
were the two largest cities in the region by far. Each owed its
success more to the relatively modest business of supplying grains and
wood products to the Caribbean and southern Europe than to the much
larger tobacco trade with Great Britain.
The expansion of the export sector first stretched and then transformed
the Chesapeake system of husbandry. To take advantage of eighteenth-
century opportunities in grains, planters had to find ways around the land
and labor constraints that made it impossible to raise large surpluses of
corn or wheat without cutting back on tobacco. Some labor time was freed
up by the introduction of
plows,
a possibility once the region was defor-
ested and fields slowly cleared of stumps and roots. The change in the
work force also provided additional time since planters could push slaves
harder than indentured servants, making them work more intensely for
more hours in the day and more days in the year. Some of the new labor
time was used to pen and feed livestock, which meant that manure was
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Economic
and
Social Development
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269
made available to fertilize fields, permitting shorter fellow periods and
higher yields per acre. These changes were related in what has been called
"the plow—corn—livestock—manure complex."
11
The use of plows during
planting season released labor that could be used to grow more corn; the
corn was fed to animals, now penned, fed, and trained to the plow; and
the animals produced fertilizer, which permitted planters to add workers
without adding new land. While the new complex eventually exhausted
and eroded the soil, it allowed planters to respond to the rising prices for
food and tobacco and made an important contribution to Chesapeake
prosperity.
A remarkable set of probate records permit estimates of wealth per
capita on Maryland's lower western shore from the mid-seventeenth cen-
tury to the Revolution. These show a rapid increase at a rate of about 2.5
percent annually from 1660 to the early 1680s followed by a slight decline
to the beginning of the eighteenth century. Per capita wealth then leveled
out or perhaps fell gently until about 1750 before growing rapidly, again
at a yearly rate of roughly 2.5 percent, in the quarter-century preceding
independence. The pattern seems consistent with an export-led growth
process. The seventeenth-century expansion of the tobacco industry appar-
ently led to real gains in income and wealth, while the period of stagna-
tion around 1700 produced decline. The renewed expansion of tobacco
exports after 1720 ended or at least slowed the decline, but this growth
was achieved without major productivity gains and through the geo-
graphic extension of cultivation. It was not of the sort to produce rising
wealth per head. Beginning in 1750, however, rising prices for grains and
tobacco created new opportunities and drove per capita wealth to new
highs.
Apparently, incomes along the tobacco coast were driven by the
foreign sector.
Or
so
it would seem. However, there are difficulties with the argument,
at least for the seventeenth century. For one thing, income per head from
tobacco declined sharply until 1640 and then fell slowly. The staple placed
a floor under incomes, but it was an unstable floor with a gently falling
slope. For another, when wealth levels for the lower western shore are
disaggregated, it becomes clear that each neighborhood went through a
period of initially rapid increase lasting about 20 years followed by a
leveling out, with the timing of change related not to the behavior of
11
The phrase is from Lois Green Cart and Russell R. Menard, "Land, Labor, and Economies of Scale
in Early Maryland: Some Limits to Growth in Chesapeake System of Husbandry," Journal of Economic
History 49 (1989), 417.
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270
Russell
R. Menard
tobacco exports but to the date of settlement and to rising dependency
ratios as the population shed its early, frontier characteristics.
The increase in wealth during the seventeenth century occurred despite
falling income per head from exports and in the face of demographic
changes that reduced the share of the population in the work force. The
gains were a result of farm building. New settlements were poor and
living standards crude, but carving out farms provided opportunities for
saving, investment, and accumulation and pushed wealth levels up. Fami-
lies worked hard to clear land, erect buildings and fences, build up their
livestock herds, plant orchards and gardens, construct and improve their
homes. While these activities drove per capita wealth higher, there were
limits to the process. Once it had a farm in full operation, there was little
a family could do to further increase wealth. The early growth spurt was
followed by a long period of
stability,
perhaps by slight decline as depen-
dency ratios continued to rise, lasting until the mid-eighteenth century.
World food shortages, rising prices for tobacco, and shifts in the terms of
trade toward agriculture then pushed Chesapeake wealth levels up.
The wealth of the region was not evenly shared by colonists of European
ancestry. The early settlements at Jamestown and St. Mary's were marked
by high levels of inequality as both colonies were at first dominated by
ambitious, grasping men who used family fortunes and English connec-
tions to control development. Early inequalities diminished, however, as
rapid expansion under the constraints imposed by the Chesapeake system
of husbandry ushered in the small planter's age. Thereafter, inequality
rose in response to four largely sequential processes. First, farm building
created opportunities for accumulation and permitted some men to pull
ahead of their neighbors. Second, the rise of a native-born population
contributed to inequalities as inherited fortunes became a major source of
wealth and power. Third, slavery furthered the progress of inequality by
allowing some planters to command much larger work forces than had
been possible in the seventeenth century. Finally, while the diversification
of the export sector created new opportunities along the Bay, many small
planters lacked the resources to adopt the new methods and found them-
selves trapped in the old style of husbandry, unable to participate in the
wave of prosperity that followed 1750. The cumulative effect of these
processes was substantial. In the middle of the seventeenth century, at the
height of the small planter's age, the richest 10 percent of
the
families in
the tidewater owned roughly 40 percent of
the
wealth, a
figure
that was to
approach 70 percent by the eve of independence.
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Economic
and Social Development of the South 271
To some extent, the progress of inequality in the tidewater was coun-
tered by the extension of the Chesapeake frontier. From the middle de-
cades of the seventeenth century to the Revolutionary era, the area of the
colonial occupation increased steadily in response to a recurring process.
Frontier opportunities - cheap land, the possibilities of farm making, and
credit supplied by land developers and merchants - attracted migrants,
especially newly freed servants and the children of poor families, to the
edge of colonial settlement. Migrants both relieved the pressures produced
by growing population in the tidewater and re-created the social structures
of the yeoman planter's age. Initially, the prospects that poor planters
could establish households and acquire land were good and levels of in-
equality low. However, rapid population growth, differential success in
farm building and inheritance, and the arrival of planters of
means,
who
moved in with substantial slave work forces as the region's potential for
development became clear, transformed the new settlement in ways that
made it increasingly like the old tidewater. As population densities grew,
land prices and inequalities rose, tenancy became more common, and
young adults left the region with growing frequency to find better pros-
pects,
thereby further extending the Chesapeake frontier.
While this process operated as a brake on inequality and preserved some
measure of opportunity in the Chesapeake region throughout the colonial
era, there is evidence of strain as the eighteenth century progressed. By
the 17
50s,
more than half the households in many tidewater counties were
established on rented lands, often with short-term leases that offered little
chance to build equity and slowly climb the agricultural ladder. Tenancy
was less common and prospects somewhat brighter in the piedmont and
on the Virginia southside, but even those regions were filling up, with
little unimproved land remaining and that too expensive for poor men to
purchase. By the 1780s, there was no longer any place in the Chesapeake
region that could be described as "good poor man's country." Poor men
and women now had to leave the area altogether, strike out for the raw
frontiers of the southern backcountry, Kentucky and Tennessee, or the
Northwest to find land and opportunity.
Any discussion of inequality must consider the rise of slavery and the
lives of African Americans. Blacks were only 2 percent of the region's
population in 1650, but their share grew steadily over the next century,
reaching 13 percent by 1700, 25 percent by 1730s, and 40 percent by
1750,
where it hovered into the nineteenth century. The rise of slavery
contributed to the growth of inequality among whites by permitting the
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272 Russell R. Menard
accumulation of great estates while clearly separating planters who worked
their fields from gentlemen who supervised others. Evidence from Prince
George's County, Maryland, a prime tobacco region on the Potomac,
documents the emerging structure. During the initial decade of the eigh-
teenth century, when slaves were first brought into the county in large
numbers, roughly one-quarter of the households owned slaves. The major-
ity held only three or fewer blacks, and there were only a handful of great
planters; perhaps 5 percent of the masters (less than 2 percent of the
household heads) owned 20 or more slaves. Although tenancy was on the
rise,
small, owner-operated farms without slaves remained the typical unit
of production in the county. By the 1770s, conditions had changed. More
than half the households owned slaves, the average size of slaveholdings
more than doubled (although it remained small by lowcountry standards),
and the number and wealth of great planters rose sharply. Perhaps the
most striking development was the near disappearance of small landown-
ers without slaves, who by then accounted for fewer than 10 percent of the
households. Slavery brought sharp distinctions to Euro-American society
in the Chesapeake, dividing it into masters who owned both land and
slaves and those who owned neither, while at the same time permitting a
few great planters to pull far ahead of their neighbors.
More important was the impact of slavery on African Americans them-
selves. Uncertainties surrounding the status of blacks in the middle de-
cades of the seventeenth century permitted a few to acquire freedom and
modest estates, but as their numbers grew, racial lines hardened into a
rigid class system, and opportunities disappeared. By the late 1670s,
when Africans began to arrive in large numbers, their fate was sealed: they
would be slaves in a harsh regime. Like white immigrants, they faced a
severe disease environment and a skewed sex ratio that limited reproduc-
tion. But their situation was worsened by isolation on small plantations,
restrictions on mobility, more rigorous work demands, the degradations of
slavery, and masters harsh enough to use dismemberment as a regular
method of
discipline,
as with Robert Carter who boasted of having "cured
many a negro of running away" by cutting off their toes.
12
Despite these brutal circumstances, blacks experienced a demographic
transition similar to that among whites as the gradual growth of an
American-born slave population led to the beginnings of reproductive
increase in the 1720s. By the eve of the Revolution, most blacks had been
" Robert Carter to Robert Jones, 10 October 1727, Virginia Magazine of History and
Biography
101
(1993),
280.
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Economic
and Social Development of the South 273
born in the region, and the rate of natural population growth was high
enough to push the slave trade into sharp decline. Slavery remained harsh
and oppressive, but reproductive growth, rising population densities, and
increasing plantation sizes helped slaves to build ties of affection, family,
and friendship while permitting the articulation of a distinct African
American culture that shaped black identities and undermined the cul-
tural homogeneity of Chesapeake colonial society.
The growing inequalities in Chesapeake society are perhaps most evi-
dent at the top, in the rise of the gentry. A disruptive demographic
regime, high rates of immigration, rapid upward mobility, and con-
straints on wealth accumulation had forestalled the development of a
cohesive ruling class during the seventeenth century. Things began to
change around 1700, however, as demographic conditions permitted
longer lives, more stable families, and dense kin networks, as immigration
fell off and opportunities contracted, and as slavery allowed some to build
great plantations. The Chesapeake gentry slowly emerged as a cohesive
ruling class in the early decades of the eighteenth century. Its wealth was
based on land and slaves, its solidarity rested on shared interests nurtured
by family ties and a common culture that set them apart from the majority
of planters, its world view informed by an ideology that mixed racism,
republicanism, and patriarchalism, and its cohesiveness reinforced by the
need to control blacks and retain the cooperation of poor whites. By the
1730s, a powerful class of great planters was established in the tidewater
and was slowly extending its reach onto the Chesapeake frontier. Despite
occasional challenges to its authority - for example, the riots against to-
bacco regulation in the 1730s, and the evangelical revolt of the 1760s
—
the great planters were confident of their abilities and secure in their
position, sufficiently so to lead the region into rebellion and to play the
major role in the construction of the new nation that followed in the
rebellion's wake.
RICE AND THE RISE OF THE LOWCOUNTRY
By the beginning of the American independence movement, the rapid
growth of the lowcountry economy and the opportunities it provided had
assumed legendary dimensions. The lowcountry was "the most opulent
and flourishing" region in British North America, even "the most thriving
Country perhaps on this Globe." It was a place where a "frugal and
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274
Russell
R. Menard
industrious" white man was promised "a sure road to competency and
independence," where planters could "all get rich," and where merchants
rose "from humble and moderate Fortunes to great affluence." Contempo-
raries were amazed by lowcountry achievements, by "the rapid ascendency
of families which in less than ten years have risen from the lowest rank,
have acquired upward of £100,000, and have moreover, gained this
wealth in a simple and easy manner." Josiah Quincy's notes on Joseph
Alls ton, a Winyah Bay planter, are typical. Allston started just "a few
years ago" at 40 years of age "with only five negroes" but now had "an
immense income all of his own acquisition" resting on
five
plantations and
more than 500 slaves, which yielded a net income of £5,000 to £6,000 a
year. And, Quincy added, as if the story were not yet up to the legend, "he
is reputed much
richer.
"'3
Lowcountry wealth rested on the remarkable growth of its leading
exports, rice and indigo. Success was not immediate, however, at least by
the standards of the early colonists, many of
whom
measured their perfor-
mance against the incomes earned by sugar planters. Such expectations
were come by honestly, for the first English settlements in the lowcountry
were rooted in the Barbadian sugar revolution of the mid-seventeenth
century. By 1660, Barbados was overcrowded by American colonial stan-
dards:
its population density had reached 250 persons per square mile,
most of the arable land was occupied and cultivated, and entry costs into
sugar production were high enough to keep all but those with substantial
resources out of the planter class. Indentured servants who finished their
terms found few opportunities, and many simply left, sometimes signing
new indentures to
finance
the move - stark comment on island prospects.
By one estimate, roughly 10,000 Barbadians, most of them recently freed
servants, left the colony for other parts of British America during the
seventeenth century. An expanding market for provisions and timber
accompanied this outmigration as planters concentrated on sugar and
denuded the island of
trees,
creating opportunities for colonists elsewhere
to grow food for the large and increasing slave population and to supply
Barbados with wood for building, fuel, and cask making. By 1660,
entrepreneurs realized that by tapping the Barbadian migrant stream, the
North American coastline between the Chesapeake and Spanish Florida, as
•' For the sources of the quotations, see Russell R. Menard, "Slavery, Economic Growth, and Revolu-
tionary Ideology in the South Carolina Lowcountry," in Ronald Hoffman, John J. McCusker,
Russell R. Menard, and Peter J. Albert, eds., The
Economy
of Early
America:
The Revolutionary
Period,
'763-179° (Charlottesville, VA: 1988), 256, 268-9.
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Economic
and
Social Development
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South
275
yet unoccupied by Europeans, could be colonized, the imperial designs of
competing nations preempted, and the needs of the sugar islands for wood
and food met.
After several false starts, a permanent settlement was established on the
Ashley River in 1670, near the site of Charlestown. Although troubled by
food shortages and disease, the colony grew steadily: by 1700, it was home
to roughly 3,300 Europeans and about 2,600 African and Native Ameri-
can slaves. The first several decades were years of experimentation during
which Carolinians explored the local resource base and tested overseas
demand. In the process, they built a diverse economy by colonial stan-
dards.
Self-sufficient agriculture and form building were the major activi-
ties,
but settlers also produced exports that could be exchanged for manu-
factured goods, servants, and slaves. The early export trade centered on
the supply of provisions and wood products to Barbados (making early
Carolina a colony's colony) supplemented by a trade in furs to England.
The economy did not generate great fortunes, but it provided local mer-
chants and planters a variety of opportunities for small-scale production
and exchange.
The experimentation ended with the emergence of rice as the major
commercial product of the lowcountry early in the eighteenth century.
The industry grew rapidly at first, as exports of
a
mere 10,000 pounds in
1698 reached 6.5 million by 1720, and peaked at more than 43 million in
1740 before entering a decade of stagnation and decline. A reliable price
series is not available before the 1720s, but scattered observations suggest
a steady fall, indicating that productivity gains helped to fuel the initial
expansion. Exports rose more rapidly than prices fell, and the value of the
crop increased, from roughly £20,000 sterling around 1720 to about
£100,000 around 1740. By then, rice was one of the major exports of
British America and the dominant crop in the lowcountry, "the chief
support" of the region and "its great source of opulence," as much the
"staple Commodity" of the area "as Sugar is to Barbados or Jamaica, or
Tobacco to Virginia and Maryland."
1
''
While rice became the lowcountry staple in the early decades of the
eighteenth century, initially the growth of that industry was part of a
more general expansion, an export boom that began around 1700. Some of
that boom reflected continued growth in trades established during the
" Alexander Hewatt, An Historical
Account
of
the
Rise and
Progress
of
the Colonies
of South Carolina and
Georgia, 2 vols. (London: 1779), I, 119; [James
Glen],
A Description of
South
Carolina . . .
(London: 1761), 87.
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276 Russell R. Menard
seventeenth century, especially the production of food stuffs and timber
for the sugar islands and the shipment of deerskins to England. Much of
the boom turned on naval stores, a new set of products of little importance
before 1700. The English government, reacting to wartime disruption of
its supply from the Baltic, provided the incentive for the industry in 1705
in the form of bounties for products made in the colonies. The incentives
worked: Charlestown exports of pitch and tar exceeded 6,500 barrels in
1712,
50,000 in 1718, and peaked at nearly 60,000 in 1725.
The export boom continued until about 1740, but in its latter stages,
its character changed as planters concentrated on rice. Corn exports, for
example, reached nearly 95,000 bushels in 1735 before falling to only
15,000 in 1739. Exports of barrel staves fell by half
over
the same period,
while leather exports, a byproduct of meat production, fell by about two-
thirds from 1734 to 1739. The most important change, however, was in
the naval stores industry. Exports of pitch, tar, and turpentine peaked at
about 60,000 barrels worth perhaps £25,000 sterling in the mid-i72os.
By 1732, exports were at roughly 25,000 barrels worth £7,000; by 1739,
11,000 barrels worth less than £3,000.
The decline of the lowcountry naval stores industry is usually attributed
•
to shifts in British policy. In 1724, the government insisted that quality
standards be met before bounties were paid, and in 1729, it reduced the
premiums substantially. While it
is
true that high labor costs in
the
colonies
led producers to use methods that sacrificed quality for quantity, and that
bounties were important to the beginnings of the industry, the decline had
other
sources.
Naval stores were crowded out of the lowcountry, along with
foodstuffs and wood products for the sugar industry, being pushed to the
periphery of the plantation district, to the South Carolina backcountry, to
Georgia, and, especially, to the Cape Fear River Valley of North Carolina.
Lowcountry planters concentrated on rice, their most profitable staple, and
had little time for anything
else.
The consequences of that focus are appar-
ent in the increased specialization of the lowcountry economy revealed in
the growth of
rice
exports per capita, which rose from about 70 pounds in
1700 to 380 in 1720 and to nearly 1,000 in 1740.
The lowcountry export boom transformed coastal South Carolina, mak-
ing it into a plantation society more similar to the British Caribbean than
to the other mainland colonies. The extent of that transformation is
evident in the population of the region, especially in the growth of slavery.
The export boom led to a sharp increase in demand for labor, an increase
met largely by African slaves. Charlestown slave imports averaged 275 a
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