Engerman S.L., Gallman R.E. The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, Vol. 1: The Colonial Era
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The
Revolution,
Constitution,
and New Nation 397
scale. The truly interregional economic contact between this first post-
Revolutionary frontier and the settled southern, mid-Atlantic, and north-
eastern sectors awaited subsequent generations.
Still, developments in older areas were consequential for the pace of
westward movement. Southerners were in the envious position of having
ready markets for cotton exports beginning during the Napoleonic war
years,
especially with respect to bundled cotton for Britain's textile indus-
try. Cotton exports from the southern states accounted for nearly one-half
the growth of American exports from 1793
t0
1807. Although the main
story of a booming cotton economy is to be told after 1815, Eli Whitney's
introduction of the cotton gin, and its immediate adoption, permitted a
for greater amount of cotton to be processed for export. Moreover, cultiva-
tion of short staple cotton (a variety that adapted well to dry inland areas)
and the creation of plantations in the future states of Alabama, Missis-
sippi, Louisiana, and Tennessee was well underway by 1815. Slavery grew
and expanded with the cotton economy. In 1790, there were about
700,000 slaves, largely in the settled plantation states producing tobacco,
rice,
and indigo. By 1820, the number of slaves grew to 1.8 million,
nearly 20 percent of the American population, and had shifted to a very
great degree into the lucrative cotton lands of Alabama, Mississippi,
Louisiana, and west Tennessee. Annual cotton production rose from 3
million pounds in 1793 to
93
million pounds in 1815. Although southern-
ers exported almost no cotton over the 1780s, by 1800, American exports
amounted to 18 million pounds.
The East Coast also showed significant amounts of interregional reorga-
nization between 1790 and 1815, before eastern urban and industrializing
inhabitants were ready to absorb the commodities that would eventually
flow to them from the West. Already large numbers of mid-Atlantic and
Chesapeake farmers had shifted toward grain production, spurred by the
disruptions of the Revolution and the unprecedented opportunities to
export to other nations following it. Other eastern farmers began to special-
ize in those perishable goods that could be marketed locally - cheese,
milk, fruits, and vegetables. Some farmers gave up grain cultivation and
turned to grazing sheep for wool for the textile industry that was emerging
near them; others turned to raising cattle and pigs for both meat and
hides.
Some eastern rural peoples migrated out of their villages in these
early national decades, but probably an equal number combined tradi-
tional farming with home production for small amounts of cash, day labor
in the community, or apprenticeships to acquire skills. Thus, while some
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398 Cathy Matson
eastern farmers specialized, others diversified their forms of labor. Until at
least the 1820s, no particular trend characterized the majority of eastern
rural people from Maine to Maryland.
The Erie Canal, completed in 1825, epitomized the transition from
traditional agriculture to interregional capitalist markets that was occur-
ring in certain eastern areas. The steamboat, invented in 1807, made the
trip from New Orleans to Louisville against the river current regularly by
1820,
making another contribution to cheaper transportation costs and
more rapid conveyance of manufactured imports and urban crafts. The
return trip brought perishable goods to the southern states and eastern
coastal cities. In other ways, too, the local markets of
the
Northeast began
to expand, especially when one accounts for the proliferation of turnpike
companies and licenses for peddlers and tavern owners who doubled as
shopkeepers. But the majority of farmers were probably utilizing the same
tools and techniques, methods of fertilization, crop rotation, deep furrow-
ing, soil banking, and cross-breeding of crops that were known from at
least 1700 to at least the 1820s. Those farmers who exploited new opportu-
nities for exporting surpluses to long-distance markets often cultivated
fields without using fertilizers or permitting periods of fallow, thereby
maximizing short-term productivity but exhausting soil in the long run.
Although many contemporary political economists recognized that
America's future prosperity lay as much with manufactures
as
with agricul-
ture,
it was when the Napoleonic war years spurred commerce to new
heights that entrepreneurs could undertake the creation and operation of
many new. manufactures. After a period of indirect protection by European
and American wars that curtailed importation from roughly 1792 to
1815,
cotton textiles manufacturers appealed to Congress to legislate
protective tariffs for their "infant industries." Moreover, by 1800, numer-
ous iron furnaces dotted major eastern waterways, most of them represent-
ing a proliferating of traditional-style establishments that produced only
pig iron. Within the next decade, many foundries in New England and
Pennsylvania began to produce simple cooking or agricultural imple-
ments, a portion of which found their way to Europe. Whitney got a
government contract in 1799 to produce 10,000 muskets, in the making
of which he claimed he would use stamping and cutting machines to
create interchangeable parts. After 1802, the Du Pont family produced
gunpowder on the Brandywine River with large work forces and extensive
real estate and capital investments. Although inventors like Oliver Evans
of Philadelphia improved flour milling techniques as early as the 1780s,
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The
Revolution,
Constitution,
and New Nation 399
only after 1810 did rapidly rising export demand provide the impetus for
many commercial firms to adopt those innovations. The organization of
textiles production begun by Samuel Slater in Pawtucket, Rhode Island,
in the 1790s was replicated in at least thirteen other locations where the
correct combination of labor supply, numbers of spinning machines, and
entrepreneurial impetus existed.
But if it was foreign war that enhanced demand for some "infant manu-
factures," the Embargo of December 1807 to March 1809 affected small
producers and wealthy capitalists in uneven ways. The effect of the Em-
bargo was drastic for shippers and shipbuilders. It also brought down the
prices of farm goods and threw many urban artisans into unemployment
by mid-1808. Although the Embargo was repealed in March 1809 and
replaced with a Non-Intercourse Act, which permitted trade with all
nations except Britain and France, prosperity did not return. In 1810,
France agreed to repeal its decrees against American trade in return for
American refusal to trade with Britain. From that time until late 1813,
American shipping declined once again, especially once Britain declared
war and blockaded American traffic.
Although some small manufacturers suffered bankruptcy during the
embargo years, others were able to grow, especially those that were related
to the still predominantly agricultural economy. New textile mills were
appearing wherever there was a sufficient water supply; there were over
eighty such mills by 1809. In 1813, the largest establishment to that
date
—
the Boston Manufacturing Company in Waltham, Massachusetts -
was created with the capital of wealthy Lowell and Cabot family members.
Waltham was the first mill of its kind to integrate weaving and spinning
in one factory; it was also one of the few genuine factories to survive the
postwar depression and economic panic of 1819, perhaps because it drew
on an available labor pool of young women and minors.
The rate of growth in textiles, shoes, construction, furniture making,
and iron goods production should not be overestimated. In 1809, six
textile factories in Philadelphia produced 65,000 yards of material, but
nearby cottage spinners and weavers produced 230,000 yards. More and
more, women were setting up looms and undertaking the tasks that were
traditionally left to itinerant males; some villages had their own fulling
mills as well, where cloth, especially wool, was shrunk or thickened with
moisture, heat, and pressure. First spurred by the Revolution, and then
reinforced during the Embargo years, urban promoters encouraged rural
inhabitants to keep sheep for meat and wool and to build fulling and
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400 Cathy Matson
spinning mills along waterways. Still, there was little technological inno-
vation or business reorganization required to produce these home manufac-
tures;
indeed, treatise writers called them an ideal occupation for a rural
people.
Urban craftsmen often resisted the new market arrangements, especially
when they involved replacing the small craft shop with large establish-
ments controlled by merchant-manufacturers. Artisans who had earlier
attempted to exclude lower-priced foreign imports of comparable com-
modities now also struggled to establish uniform wage rates to be paid by
masters who owned shops or by merchants who marketed their finished
goods. Also, within crafts such as cordwainers (leatherworkers) and tai-
lors,
the increasing separation of traditional roles of master and journey-
man, brought on by a transition toward wage labor, led to frequent labor
quarrels. Nevertheless, by the 1820s, many artisans were being elimi-
nated from traditional sectors of the economy; some became self-employed
property owners, while many gravitated toward factories or became un-
skilled laborers.
The Panic of 1819, precipitated by the revival of European farming and
a sharp drop in world agricultural prices, marked the end of almost three
decades of commercial recovery. Peace was far less prosperous than war, as
many colonists in the eighteenth century would have agreed. The market
for American cotton fell quickly, as did those for grain and flour, thus
reducing incomes in both northern and southern states. The drop in farm
prices caused widespread default on loans from local and state banks -
especially in the Ohio River Valley - and defaults on credit from coastal
merchants. By the end of 1819, the credit system linking commercial
agriculture and banking had collapsed. As it recovered in the 1820s, the
export-centered economy would experience more orientation toward inter-
nal economic development.
Was there economic growth between 1790 and 1820? Evidence to date
suggests that although there was commercial recovery at particular mo-
ments, and although farm prices and artisans' regular employment may
have been satisfactory at certain times over these decades, per capita
incomes probably rose more slowly in these years than for the 1760s, and
long-term recovery was uncertain in all regions. Among mariners and
laborers, real wages fell dramatically in the 1780s and rose to prewar levels
during the late 1790s; for almost two decades after 1800, weekly wages of
semiskilled artisans barely kept up with the rising cost of
living.
Farmers'
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The
Revolution,
Constitution,
and New Nation 401
and large planters' prices rose and fell erratically within short cycles. Even
with significant activity in scientific societies, entrepreneurial investment,
and promotional government legislation, very few infant manufactures
survived the War of 1812. Although population continued to grow rap-
idly between 1790 and 1820, the rate of increase was slower than for the
1780s. America's economy was not yet fully integrated; regions and even
small locales continued to show distinct patterns of development for some
time to come. Moreover, within regions, the rapid changes in social
relations of poor and middling urban residents, farm laborers, and com-
mercial exporters were not yet accompanied by the more sophisticated
credit, consumption, and wage labor arrangements that integrated Ameri-
cans to a higher degree during industrialization.
Still, important transformations were beginning. Although export val-
ues per capita declined after 1815, this probably signaled a reallocation of
human and material resources into domestic channels. Ultimately, these
changes would lead to industrialization. Moreover, despite the setbacks
and slow-growth years of the Revolution and 1780s, Americans sustained
the highest standard of living known in the world during the 1790s.
Thus,
if they had not yet realized the economic promise of political
independence
—
the intensive economic growth that would raise their
standard of living - neither had they experienced the ravages of war and
agricultural famine that so many European nations had in the same years.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ESSAYS
CHAPTER i (SALISBURY)
The coming generation of basic reference works on Native American his-
tory is in the process of publication. When complete, the twenty volumes
of
Handbook
of North American Indians, gen. ed. William C. Sturtevant (9
vols.
to date, Washington, DC, 1978-), will provide exhaustive coverage
by region and topic. Especially relevant for economic history are many of
the essays in Vol. 4: History of
Indian—White
Relations, ed. Wilcomb E.
Washburn (1988). The
Cambridge
History of the Native
Peoples
of
the
Ameri-
cas,
Vol. 1: North America, ed. Bruce G. Trigger and Wilcomb E. Wash-
burn (Cambridge, England, in preparation), will consist of chapters cover-
ing the entire span of Native American history, from the earliest arrivals
via the Bering land bridge to the present. Two valuable historical atlases
are:
R. Cole Harris, ed., Historical Atlas of Canada, Vol. 1: From the
Beginning to 1800 (Toronto, 1987); and Helen Hornbeck Tanner, ed.,
Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History (Norman, 1987). The best overviews of
precontact archaeology are Brian M. Fagan, Ancient North America: The
Archaeology
of a
Continent
(London, 1991) and Stuart J. Fiedel,
Prehistory
of
the
Americas,
2nd ed. (Cambridge, England, 1992). See also Michael Coe
et al., eds., Atlas of Ancient
America
(New York, 1986), and Lynda Norene
Shaffer, Native Americans Before 1492: The Moundbuilding Centers of the
Eastern Woodlands (Armonk, NY, 1992). For a brief but illuminating
discussion of exchange in pre-Columbian North American, see William
A. Turnbaugh, "Wide-Area Connections in Native North America,"
American Indian Culture and Research Journal 1:4 (1976), 22-8.
General considerations of Indian-European interactions have been un-
403
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
404
Bibliographical Essays
dertaken from a number of perspectives. On epidemiology and ecology,
see two works by Alfred W. Crosby:
The Columbian
Exchange:
Biological and
Cultural
Consequences
of 1492 Westport, CT, 1972), and
Ecological
Imperial-
ism:
The Biological
Expansion
of
Europe,
900—1900 (Cambridge, England,
1986).
On demography, the survey by Russell Thornton,
American Indian
Holocaust
and Survival: A
Population
History
Since
1492 (Norman, 1987),
should be supplemented by Sheila Ryan Johansson, "The Demographic
History of the Native Peoples of North America: A Selective Bibliogra-
phy,"
Yearbook
of
Physical Anthropology
25 (1982), 133-52, and John D.
Daniels, "The Indian Population of North American in 1492," William
and Mary
Quarterly,
3d ser., 49 (1992), 298-320. On economic relations,
see Eric R.
Wolf,
Europe
and
the People without History
(Berkeley, 1982), ch.
6, and Ronald L. Trosper, "That Other Discipline: Economics and Ameri-
can Indian History," in Colin G. Calloway, ed.,
New Directions
in
American
Indian History
(Norman, 1988). See also Ian K. Steele,
Warpaths:
Invasions
of
North America
(New York, 1994); the relevant chapters of Howard Lamar
and Leonard Thompson, eds., The
Frontier
in History: North
America
and
Southern
Africa
Compared
(New Haven, 1981); and James Axtell,
The
Euro-
pean
and
the
Indian:
Essays in the Ethnohistory
of
Colonial North America
(New
York, 1981), chs. 9—10.
The very first contacts between Indians and Europeans remain the least
understood. Carl Ortwin Sauer,
Sixteenth Century North America
(Berkeley,
1971),
is still useful. Charles Hudson and Carmen Chaves Tesser, eds.,
The
Forgotten
Centuries:
Indians
and
Europeans
in
the American
South,
1521—
1704 (Atlanta, GA, 1994) greatly advances understanding of that region.
On the Atlantic coast and northeastern interior, see William W. Fitzhugh,
ed.,
Cultures in Contact:
The Impact
of
European Contacts on
Native
American
Cultural Institutions, A.D. 1000-1800 (Washington, 1985), and James
Axtell, "At the Water's Edge: Trading in the Sixteenth Century," in his
After
Columbus:
Essays in the
Ethnohistory
of
Colonial
North America (New
York, 1988). On the multifaceted debate as to Indians' motives in their
earliest interactions with Europeans, see Calvin Martin,
Keepers
of the
Game: Indian—Animal
Relationships
and the Fur Trade (Berkeley, 1978);
Shepard Krech III, ed., Indians, Animals, and
the
Fur
Trade:
A Critique
of
Keepers
of
the Game
(Athens, GA, 1981); Christopher L. Miller and George
R. Hammell, "A New Perspective on Indian—White Contact: Cultural
Symbols and Colonial Trade, "
Journal
of
American History
73 (1986),
311—
28;
Bruce G. Trigger, "Early Native North American responses to Euro-
pean Contact: Romantic versus Rationalistic Interpretations,"
Journal of
American History
78 (1991), 1195—1215.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Bibliographical Essays
405
Seventeenth-century contacts between natives and colonizers in the
Northeast are treated in Francis Jennings, The
Invasion
of
America:
Indians,
Colonialism, and the Cant of
Conquest
(Chapel Hill, 1975); Neal Salisbury,
Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England,
1500-1643 (New York, 1982); William Cronon, Changes in the
Land:
Indians, Colonists, and the
Ecology
of New England (New York, 1983); Bruce
G. Trigger, Natives and
Newcomers:
Canada's
"Heroic
Age"
Reconsidered^
(Mon-
treal, 1985); Daniel K. Richter, The Ordeal of the
Longhouse:
The
Peoples
of
the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (Chapel Hill, 1992).
On the Southeast, see J. Leitch Wright, Jr., The
Only
Land
They
Knew:
The
Tragic Story of the Indians of the Old South (New York, 1983). On the
Southwest, see Elizabeth A. H. John,
Storms Brewed
in
Other
Men's
Worlds:
The Confrontation of Indians, Spanish, and French in the Southwest, 1540—
1795 (Lincoln, NE, 1975); Edward H. Spicer,
Cycles
of
Conquest:
the
Impact
of
Spain,
Mexico, and the United States on the Indians of
the
Southwest, 1533—
1960 (Tucson, 1962); Allen H. Anderson, "The Encomienda in New
Mexico, 1598-1680," New
Mexico
Historical Review 60 (1985), 353-77;
John L. Kessell, Kiva, Cross, and Crown: The
Pecos
Indians and New Mexico,
1540-1840 (Washington, 1979), and Ram6n A. Gutierrez, When
Jesus
Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New
Mexico, 1500-1846 (Stanford, 1991).
During the eighteenth century, Indians east of the Mississippi went
from positions of relative autonomy to dependency and subjugation.
Among the highlights of the vast literature on this era, see especially
Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the
Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (Cambridge, England, 1991); Francis
Jennings, The Ambiguous Iroquois Empire: The Covenant Chain Confederation
of Indian Tribes with English Colonies from its Beginnings to the Lancaster Treaty
of 1744 (New York, 1984), and Empire of
Fortune:
Crowns, Colonies, and
Tribes in the Seven Years War in America (New York, 1988); Anthony F. C.
Wallace, The Death and
Rebirth
of
the Seneca
(New York, 1969); Michael N.
McConnell, A Country Between: The Upper Ohio Valley and Its
Peoples
1724-
1774 (Lincoln, NE, 1992); and Randolph C. Downes,
Council Fires on
the
Upper Ohio: A Narrative of Indian Affairs in the Upper Ohio valley until 1795
(Pittsburgh, 1940) on the Northeast. On the Southeast, see Wright, Only
Land They Knew (cited above); Verner W. Crane, The Southern Frontier,
1670-1732 (Ann Arbor, 1956); Peter H. Wood et al., eds., Powhatan's
Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast (Lincoln, NE, 1989); Timothy
Silver, A New Face on the Countryside: Indians, Colonists, and Slaves in South
Atlantic
Forests,
1500-1800 (Cambridge, England, 1990); James H. Mer-
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
406
Bibliographical Essays
rell,
The Indians' New
World:
Catawbas and Their
Neighbors
from
European
Contact through the Era of
Removal
(Chapel Hill, 1989); Daniel H. Usner,
Jr., Indians, Settlers, and
Slaves
in a Frontier
Exchange
Economy:
The Lower
Mississippi Valley
before
1783 (Chapel Hill, 1992); Richard White,
Roots of
Dependency:
Subsistence,
Environment,
and
Social
Change
among
the
Choctaws,
Paumees,
andNavajos (Lincoln, NE, 1983), chs. 1-5; and James H. O'Don-
nell, HI, Southern Indians in the
American Revolution
(Knoxville, 1973).
Eastern Indians and their relations with the United States are treated in
Francis Paul Prucha, The
Great-Father:
The
United States Government
and
the
American Indian, 2 vols. (Lincoln, NE, 1984); Reginald Horsman, Expan-
sion and American Indian
Policy,
1783-1812 (Lansing, MI, 1967); R.
David Edmunds, The
Shaumee Prophet
(Lincoln, NE, 1983); William G.
McLoughlin,
Cherokee
Renascence:
1794-1833 (Princeton, 1987); Theda
Perdue, Slavery and the
Evolution
of
Cherokee
Society,
1540-1866 (Knoxville,
1979);
Michael D. Green, The
Politics
of Indian
Removal:
Creek Government
and
Society
in Crisis (Lincoln, NE, 1985); Mary E. Young, Redskins, Ruf-
fleshirts, and
Rednecks:
Indian Allotments in Alabama and
Mississippi,
1830—
i860 (Norman, 1961); and Anthony F. C. Wallace,
Prelude to
Disaster:
The
Course
of Indian-White
Relations
Which Led
to
the Black Hawk War of 1832
(Springfield, IL, 1970).
The fur trade in eastern and central Canada during the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries has been studied from several perspectives. See, espe-
cially, W. J. Eccles, "The Fur Trade and Eighteenth Century Imperial-
ism," William and Mary
Quarterly,
3d ser., 40 (1983), 341-62; E. E.
Rich, The Fur Trade and
the
Northwest to 1857 (Toronto, 1967); Arthur J.
Ray, Indians in the Fur
Trade:
Their
Role
as
Hunters,
Trappers,
and Middlemen
in the Lands
Southwest
of
Hudson
Bay, 1660-1870 (Toronto, 1974); Ray and
Donald Freeman, "Give Us Good
Measure":
An
Economic
Analysis of Relations
between
the Indians and the Hudson's Bay Company
before
1763 (Toronto,
1978);
Daniel Francis and Toby Morantz,
Partners
in
Purs:
A History of the
Fur Trade in
Eastern
James Bay, 1600-1870 (Montreal, 1983); Shepard
Krech, III, The Subarctic Fur Trade (Vancouver, 1984); Jenifer S. H.
Brown, Strangers in
Blood:
Fur Trade
Company
Families in Indian Country
(Vancouver, 1980); Sylvia Van Kirk, Many
Tender
Ties:
Women
in Fur
Trade
Society,
1670-1870 (Norman, 1980). On Canadian government policy, see
Robert J. Surtees, "The Development of an Indian Reserve Policy in
Canada," Ontario History 61 (1979), 87-98; and John L. Tobias, "Protec-
tion, Civilization, Assimilation: an Outline History of Canada's Indian
Policy,"
Western
Canadian Journal of
Anthropology
6 (1976), 13-30.
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