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Wealth and Growth of the Thirteen Colonies: Some Implications

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2009

Alice Hanson Jones
Alice Hanson Jones
Affiliation:
Professor Emeritus of Economics, Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri 63130
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Abstract

Private wealth of the inhabitants of three regions and of the Thirteen American Colonies as a whole, in 1774, estimated from a statistical sample of probate inventories and supplementary data, is the focus. The author's prior interest in consumption and levels of living led to these innovative estimates which supplement national wealth estimates for the United States in later centuries. Levels of wealth compared on a per capita basis with other times and places, as well as wealth inequalities among regions and among individuals, and rates of growth in real wealth per capita are all considered. Some complexities of intertemporal and interspatial wealth comparisons are indicated, in particular the implications of the striking North-South differences in 1774 with their fateful implications for the American dilemma.

Type
Papers Presented at the Forty-Third Annual Meeting of the Economic History Association
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 44 , Issue 2 , June 1984 , pp. 239 - 254
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1984

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References

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26 Jones, Alice Hanson, Wealth of a Nation To Be: The American Colonies on the Eve of the Revolution (New York, 1980). It compares results by region and for the Thirteen Colonies as a whole. It contrasts the assets of free wealthholders of high-, medium-, and low-wealth class, and also those in some occupation groups of major interest, those of men and women, and of older- and younger-age groups. It measures inequality both in numerical coefficients and in Lorenz graphs.Google Scholar

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29 The appropriate exchange rates to sterling are shown in a table.Google Scholar

30 Exact titles of books, some of considerable philosophical sophistication, are rather frequent and there was near universal ownership of Bibles. Women's extensive household production contributions without monetary reward are suggested by such entries as skimmers, butter tubs, cabbage planes, cutting boxes with knives, dough troughs, candle molds, soft soap, carding combs, and pounds of feathers. The presence of inventories for widows and “singlewomen” but not for married women and references to “the widow's thirds” in intestate cases (ones without valid wills) are clues to the legal status of women and their limited independent economic activities. But some inventories show that some women of wealth ran businesses and others owned and perhaps managed plantations of considerable size. For some southern widows, slaves whom they could rent out if they did not manage themselves were a major form of wealth bequeathed by their husbands. To compare with consumer goods available today, we find no entries of ready–made clothing or pre–packaged convenience foods and, obviously, no electronic gadgets. Instead there were casks, firkins, sacks, meal chests, gill to gallon measures, and whale oil lamps. A merchant's inventory includes “a pattern for silk trousers” and a wide array of imported fabrics. His or other merchants' inventories list “Persian cloth,” “India taffeta,” “striped Barcelona handkerchiefs,” “Holland tape,” “Swiss spotted lawn,” “India calico,” “Russian toweling,” and “German Dowlas,” to name only a few of the many fabrics they carried (although an occasional one was reported “badly moth eat”). The specific consumers' goods suggest quite clearly how opulently or simply each owner lived.Google Scholar

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34 There were some exquisitely crafted furniture pieces of quality as found today in museums, and also silk stockings, silver knee and shoe buckles, gold and silver buttons, gold watches, wigs, imported chinaware, sterling silver tea services and silver plated bowls and platters, gilt-framed mirrors, diamond jewelry, and other exotic items. Fifteen pages were required to list the possessions of Peter Manigault of South Carolina, the richest case in the sample, whose net worth was equivalent to 32,700 pounds sterling. He was an attorney, had been a provincial officeholder, and owned several plantations and many slaves. A large looking glass was valued at over 7 pounds sterling. He had a “suit of blue and white cotton bed furniture” consisting of four window and four bed curtains, head cloth, tester, valance and base with white chintz lining, valued at more than the looking glass. He also had mahogany bedsteads, mahogany dining and tea tables, china wash basins and stands, mahogany desks, damask table cloths anti napkins, Queensware dishes, French plates, “Jappaned tea waiters,” ivory-handled silver knives and forks, a gold watch, a gold-headed cane, as well as a coach, a post chaise with harness for four horses, clocks, paintings, several Scotch carpets and an India carpet. In contrast, the one-page list of Mary Dwinell, a widow in Topsfield, Massachusetts, had a looking glass worth less than a fifth of a pound sterling, 25 pounds of pork, a quilted petticoat, two old chairs, two pair of sheets and two pillow cases, three pewter platters, a pewter plate and pewter basin, two iron pots, an iron kettle, and “old books.”Google Scholar

35 We have, for example, Joseph Gillander, watchmaker, surprised by the grim reaper with an inventory on hand of 31 ½ dozen watch glasses, 26 watch springs, and 48 knots of “smal catgut.” John Gaudin, “marriner,” was possessed of a Hadley's quadrant, “one–third and two–ninths of the sloop Three Friends,” a feather bed, a duffel coat, a barrel of pork, and a silver watch. His fractional share in the sloop suggests not only joint ownership with possibly changing partners, but perhaps also joint trading ventures. For the importance for family survival of women's work in the household, see Carr, Lois Green and Walsh, Lorena S., “The Planter's Wife: The Experience of White Women in Seventeenth Century Maryland,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d. ser., 34 (10 1977), 542–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Also Main, Gloria L., Tobacco Colony: Life in Early Maryland, 1650–1720 (Princeton, 1982).Google Scholar