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Economic Growth and the Standard of Living in Southern New England, 1640–1774

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2009

Gloria L. Main  and
Jackson T. Main
Gloria L. Main
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80390–0234.
Jackson T. Main
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80390–0234.
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Extract

This study draws upon a large sample of probated estates from early Connecticut and Massachusetts. It finds that total probate wealth per adult male grew slowly over the colonial period and its growth was confined entirely to real estate. The value of consumption goods per estate fell during the early eighteenth century which raises questions about the impact of economic growth on household life.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 48 , Issue 1 , March 1988 , pp. 27 - 46
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1988

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References

This project was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation, No. SES-8603565 and a grant-in-aid from the Council on Research and Creative Work of the Graduate School, University of Colorado, Boulder.

The authors would like to thank anonymous referees of this Journal and Barry W. Poulson of the Department of Economics and Zeke Little of the Data Analysis Center, Institute of Behavioral Sciences, both of the University of Colorado, Boulder, without whose advice and support this project could not have been completed. In addition we would also like to acknowledge the help of Djeto Assane, Eifiona Main, Jean Umbreit, and Debbie Ash.

1 Smith, Daniel Scott, “The Demographic History of Colonial New England,” this Journal, 32 (03 1972), pp. 165–183.Google ScholarPubMed

2 Rosenberry, Lois Kimball Mathews, The Expansion of New England (Boston, 1909);Google ScholarMain, Jackson Turner, Society and Economy in Colonial Connecticut (Princeton, 1985), chap. 1;CrossRefGoogle ScholarKim, Sung Bok, Landlord and Tenant in Colonial New York: Manorial Society, 1664–1775 (Chapel Hill, 1978), chap. 7;Google ScholarBailyn, Bernald, The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction (New York, 1986), p. 133.Google Scholar

3 Jones, Alice Hanson, Wealth of a Nation to Be: The American Colonies on the Eve of the Revolution (New York, 1980), p. 308.Google Scholar

4 James, Sydney V., Colonial Rhode Island: A History (New York, 1975),Google Scholar esp. chap. 10, “The Social Breeds and Others.” Imports per capita calculated from U.S Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States: From Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington, D. C., 1975), part 2, pp. 1168, 1176–77.Google Scholar

5 See the complaint about the paucity of economic information concerning New England in McCusker, John J. and Menard, Russell R., The Economy of British North America, 1607–1790 (Chapel Hill, 1985), chap. 5.Google Scholar See also Anderson, Terry Lee, The Economic Growth of Seventeenth-Century New England, 1650–1700: A Measurement of Regional Income (New York, 1975)Google Scholar and “Economic Growth in Colonial New England: Statistissance Renaissance,” this Journal, 34 (03 1979), pp. 243–57.Google Scholar

6 A number of historians have argued the economic and cultural importance to England and her colonies of the “Consumer Revolution” of the eighteenth century. Some of the more important are Fisher, F. J., “The Development of London as a Center of Conspicuous Consumption in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in Carus-Wilson, E. M., ed., Essays in Economic History (London, 1962), vol. 2, pp. 197–207;Google ScholarMcKendrick, Neil, “Home Demand and Economic Growth: A New View of the Role of Women and Childern in the Industrial Revolution,” in McKendrick, Neil, ed., Historical Perspectives: Studies in English Thought and Society in Honour of J. H. Plumb, (London, 1974), pp. 150–210;Google ScholarJones, Eric, “The Fashion Manipulators: Consumer Tastes and British Industries, 1660–1800,” in Cain, Louis P. and Uselding, Paul J., eds., Business Enterprise and Economic Change: Essays in Honor of Harold F. Williamson (Cleveland, 1973), pp. 198–226;Google ScholarThirsk, Johan, Projects and Policy: The Development of a Consumer Society in Early Modern England (New York, 1978);Google ScholarMcKendrick, Neil, Brewer, John, and Plumb, J. H., eds., The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (Bloomington, 1982).Google Scholar

7 Not included in our geographical sample are the islands of Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard, Cape Cod, the fishing towns of the North Shore, the timbering and trading settlements of New Hampshire and Maine and their hinterlands, the counties of southeastern Massachusetts, and the colony of Rhode Island. These are significant omissions, but our regional sample can be denoted quite reasonably as “Southern New England,” especially if areas within the sample are presumed fairly representative, as we suppose, of those outside the sample. We also did not include women's estates in this study, except for the consumer goods analysis below. We exclude them because the overwhelming proportion of women's inventoried estates belonged to elderly widows whose principal from of wealth generally consisted of life annuities which ceased with their deaths and therefore are not noted in the inventories.

8 Main, Gloria L., “The Correction of Biases in Colonial American Probate Records,” Historical Methods Newsletter, 7 (12 1974), pp. 10–28 and “The Use of Probate Records in Early American History,”CrossRefGoogle ScholarWilliam and Mary Quarterly, 3d series, 32 (01 1975), pp. 88–99.Google ScholarJones, Alice Hanson, American Colonial Wealth: Documents and Methods (Westport, 1977), pp. 1848–82Google Scholar and The Wealth of a Nation to Be, pp. 382–83 divided decedents into only two age groups and thus fails to capture the declining wealth of the retired elderly, a large group in New England probate records.Google Scholar

9 When year of birth could not be determined we used year of marriage or year of birth of the first recorded child plus age 25 or 27, respectively, which remained the median ages at marriage and at birth of first child for adult males in southern New England throughout the colonial period according to calculations based on the vital records we consulted. For about 10 percent of the inventoried male decedents outside of Boston, we failed to discover even approximate ages, although for many we could infer stage in the family life cycle and those were sorted into age classes: single men into the youngest, men with children not yet of age were classed with men aged 25–44, and men whose children included both minors and those of age were placed in the 45–64 group. Those for whom all information was lacking posed the greatest problem for age assignment. Since many, though not all, had wealth below the median yet did not appear to be young, it seemed safest to put them into the age group 45–64. Estimates of the age structure of New England's living population of adult males are based on those in Main, Jackson T., Society and Economy in Colonial Connecticut (Princeton, 1985), pp. 10–15.Google Scholar

10 A complete discussion of biases due to age and wealth in probate inventories of colonial Connecticut may be found in Main, J., Colonial Connecticut, pp. 37–40, 64–66. For Massachusetts, see below.Google Scholar

11 See the discussion of this problem in Jones, , American Colonial Wealth, vol. 3, pp. 1878–84. By applying reasonable ranges of adult mortality rates to estimated numbers of probate-type adults in the living population, she could compare expected with observed numbers of inventories. Of the three regions sampled, New England had the lowest recording rate and therefore posed the greatest danger to obtaining reliable estimates of wealth per capita based on probated estates. Her solution was to compare the results of alternative assumptions about the degree to which the wealth of the missing decedents varied from that of recorded estates, a reasonable approach given the geographical scope of her sample. To have attempted the use of tax lists for measurement of wealth bias would have required the services of a sizable corps of professional genealogists.Google Scholar

12 The towns of Dedham, Stoughton, Hadley, and Springfield provided the tax lists for this purpose.

13 The numerous tax lists of 1771 in Massachusetts come too late for this purpose and present special problems. An excessive number of men simply disappeared from the town records and cannot be located on the Revolutionary War rolls or in the 1790 census of Massachusetts. It is true that men of the same name appear in censuses of New Hampshire, Vermont, and New York, but they cannot be positively identified except by examining deeds in dozens of county courthouses, a procedure we elected to forego. The coming of the Revolution also disrupted record keeping in some areas. Worcester County's probate court, for instance, shut down entirely for close to a year in 1775 when the judge and clerk, who were Tories, had to flee for their lives.

14 McCusker, John J., Money and Exchange in Europe and America, 1600–1775: A Handbook (Chapel Hill, 1978), pp. 138–42, 153. Until the British government directly forbade issues of legal tender paper money in 1764, each colony went its own way in matters of money despite Queen Anne's proclamation early in the eighteenth century which had set the legal valuation of coins in Britain's North American colonies. The period between 1740 and 1764 is one of particular confusion in New England, as each colony struggled to control inflation and conform to British guidelines. There were other currencies besides “cash” or “lawfull money” in use from time to time and place to place, such as “country pay” in the seventeenth century and “old tenor” after 1750. Rural shopkeepers, farmers, and inventory appraisers all noted down values in the currency most familiar to them. Connecticut appraisers used “pay” until well into the eighteenth century, in which silver prices began at roughly a quarter higher than in Massachusetts currency but gradually converged to the Massachusetts level by 1712. Later on, old tenor remained the currency of preference over much of rural New England right up to the time of the Revolution, and court officials were accustomed to applying legally defined formulas for deflating prices expressed in it. If the currency in which the inventory was taken has not been indicated by the appraisers, the historian must use the valuations themselves to identify the currency and deflate accordingly.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15 Summaries of inventory prices for various commodities are available on request from the authors: for Connecticut alone, see pages 57–59 in J. Main, Colonial Connecticut. Commodities included are bushels of grains, pounds of pork and wool, barrels of cider, yokes of oxen, and cows for the farm products group. For land prices we collected valuations per acre of meadow, upland, plowland, pasture, salt marsh, and homestead and used the best series, or combination of series, available for each locale. Among consumption goods we traced the prices of silver by the ounce, pewter and other metals by the pound, warming pans, complete feather beds, and pairs of sheets. The problems posed by this category of goods were enormous. Very few rural inventories listed silver, and most valuations of pewter and other metalware were by the piece rather than by weight. Consequently we resorted to warming pans, for which we could find numerous prices, although differences in quality could not be ascertained, a problem also shared by beds and sheets. Insofar as the appraisers themselves indicated quality of condition, we excluded values of “worn” pewter or “old” bedding. Occasionally one finds prices of cloth by the yard or ell but one can seldom be sure about the kind of weave or its width. The names of different kinds of cloth in Boston inventories must number in the hundreds, each with its own price.

16 Price series currently available for colonial New England did not meet our requirements, since we needed prices on a broad range of commodities from both Connecticut and Massachusetts, particularly for the early period in order to develop exchange rates between the two currencies. See, however, Anderson, Terry L., “Economic Growth in Colonial New England: ‘Statistical Renaissance’,” this Journal, 39 (03 1979), pp. 243–57;Google Scholar and Rothenberg, Winifred B., “A Price Index for Rural Massachusetts, 1750–1855,” this Journal, 39 (12 1979), pp. 975–1001. Anderson compiled farm prices from a sample of Hapshire County inventories for the first half of the eighteenth century but for consumption goods used a British index based on sterling prices. Rothenberg's series for Massachusetts begins too late for our purposes.Google Scholar

17 If we excluded land from the commodity price index, positive trends for all components of probate wealth would result, but for “consumption goods” the positive slope of the regression would not be significant at the 95 level.

18 McCusker, and Menard, , Economy of British North America, pp. 97–102, 107–110;Google ScholarF. Shepherd, James and M. Walton, Gary, Shipping, Maritime Trade, and the Economic Development of Colonial North America (Cambridge, 1972), 210–27. The reason for such emphases comes from the availability of public records kept by custom officials and port officers. Many of Connecticut's exports went through New York, losing their identity, and swelling the statistics of this middle colony at the expense of New England's and obscuring the extent of Connecticut's economic prosperity.Google Scholar

19 Nineteenth-century town histories are very informative about the paths of migration of groups of settlers and of the actions of town proprietors, often quoting extensively from records which are otherwise inaccessible. The older town histories, written before or just after the Civil War contain many stories and anecdotes about the period of the French and Indian War taken from family traditions which were still quite fresh. People born around 1800 heard these stories from relatives who could vividly remember events and scenes and who were able to recall their own parents' comments at the time.

20 Trends are based on the estimates from least-squares regression lines fitted to total estate value and to its several components separately calculated for each subregion.

21 Strictly speaking, any increase in real income qualifies as an increase in the standard of living, all other things being equal. When income is not directly susceptible of measurement, as in the present study, other measures must be substituted. Increases in the total stocks of material goods, at least in our own culture, probably represent an improvement in welfare, but pursuing a broader range of measures is safer. Lorena S. Walsh discusses these issues in “Questions and Sources for Exploring the Standard of Living in the British Colonies of North America,” forthcoming in the William and Mary Quarterly.

22 Carr, Lois Green and Walsh, Lorena S., “Inventories and the Analysis of Wealth and Consumption Patterns in St. Mary's County Maryland, 1658–1777,” Historical Methods, 13 (Spring 1980), pp. 81–104CrossRefGoogle Scholar and “Changing Life Styles in Colonial St. Mary's County,” Working Papers from the Regional Economic History Research Center, vol. 1 (Fall 1978),Google ScholarEconomic Change in the Chesapeake Colonies, Papers from the Fall 1977 Regional Economic History Conference, Porter, Glenn and Mulligan, William H. Jr, eds. (Wilmington, 1978), pp. 73–118.Google Scholar

23 Non-specialists may not realize how very spare were the accustomed living conditions of seventeenth-century British rural villagers. That these also formed the standard for one set of immigrants to the New World is documented in Main, Gloria L., Tobacco Colony: Life in Early Maryland, 1650–1720 (Princeton, 1982).Google Scholar

24 The reason for this is simple. If they were boarding in another's house, which many of the elderly as well as young unmarried people did, one cannot judge the standard at which they lived solely on the basis of their own recorded possessions. Many other inventoried estates were also excluded from the study because their language was too vague, for example “indoor moveables” or “household goods.” In such cases we could not determine the presence or absence of targeted items. Fully a fifth of Worcester County inventories, for example, had to be discarded on these grounds. Other counties and probate districts participating in the sample include rural Suffolk and Hampshire in Massachusetts plus Hartford and New Haven districts in Connecticut.

25 Lois Green Carr and Lorena S. Walsh make this argument in “Changing Lifestyles and Consumer Behavior in Colonial Chesapeake,” given at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians, 1987 and forthcoming in the William and Mary Quarterly.

26 Poble physical wealth, rather than total estate, provided more stable class boundaries over the full period under discussion.

27 Supporting this interpretation of the tabular evidence from the subsample are the results of analysis of variance. After entering as covariates the year in which the inventory was taken and the deflated value of consumption goods, location ranked above occupation as factors predicting the index of amenities, although both were statistically significant at the 99 level. “Location” refers to the subregions. For occupational assignments we grouped decedents into these rough categories: laborers; fanners; farmer-artisans; artisans; mariners and soldiers; professionals; and those employed in commerce such as traders, shop-keepers, innkeepers, and merchants. Those whose inventories contained no identifying tools or stock-in-trade were classified as “other” or “retired,” if we knew they were elderly. These latter two groups were not included in the list of occupations in the analysis of variance of the index.

28 Accounts of administration occasionally provide information on expenditures during the deceased's last illness or at his funeral. Some farm account books also contain information concerning the circulation of consumer goods in rural areas.

29 Pruitt, Bettye H., “Self-Sufficiency and the Agricultural Economy of Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d series, 41 (07 1984), pp. 333–64;CrossRefGoogle ScholarRothenberg, Winifred B., “The Market and Massachusetts Farmers, 1750–1855,” this Journal, 41 (06 1981), pp. 283–314.Google Scholar

30 McMahon, Sarah, “Provisions Laid Up for the Family: Toward a History of Diet in New England, 1650–1850,” Historical Methods, 14 (Winter 1981), pp. 4–21,CrossRefGoogle Scholar and “A Comfortable Subsistence: The Changing Composition of Diet in Rural New England, 1620–1840,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d series, 42 (01 1985), pp. 26–65.Google Scholar

31 Mintz, Sidney Wilfred, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York, 1985);Google ScholarRoth, Rodris, “Tea Drinking in 18th-Century America: Its Etiquette and Equipage,” Contributions from the Museum of History and Technology, Paper No. 14 (Washington, D.C., 1969).Google Scholar

32 Unfortunately, many interesting questions of a comparative nature raised by these two studies cannot yet be answered. Causes for the differences between New England and the Chesapeake in the timing and extent of the rise in the index, for instance, remain unclear due to differences in sample design. In an experiment, we tailored our sample to moderate the demographic differences and also narrowed it geographically. Trends in the index in “tidewater” New England paralled those of tidewater Maryland and virginia, but other differences persisted which relate to the very different composition of personal wealth. The level of consumer goods per wealth class was higher in New England because the proportion in capital was lower. The index of amenities owned by each wealth class was also higher in New England since it is highly correlated with the value of consumer goods.