HTY 277

18th Century America

 

Economy

• Agriculture/rural (95% of population)
  • Very traditional, little innovation, and productivity remained stable.
• Artisan production/household production (master/apprentice)
• Infant manufacturing and finance: largely dependent on imports and external services
• North: mixed farm/merchant/artisan; Atlantic: grain belt; South: plantation agriculture/staple crop production
• Traditional notions of a moral economy (corporate notion of economic equity, licensing services and regulating prices) gradually began to move toward market economy.
• Boston, New York, and Philadelphia developed as centers of international commerce, brokering country products (grain, lumber, meat) to the Caribbean and Europe.
• Coastal trade increased intercolonial exchange (economic and cultural).
• 
• Cities were cosmopolitan, centers of finace and political action, but also remained "walking cities" that were actually a cluster of neighborhoods where people experienced life in a face-to-face intimacy.
• Economic goals were to achieve a "competence" and security while avoiding risk.
• By later standards, production and business was slow. The notion that time is money was a brand new concept emanating from Poor Richard's Almanac.
  • Before 1800, people of all classes drank rum, wine, brandy, various punches, and munched on biscuits and cheese for much of the morning while carrying on their business (Boston had a tavern for every 25 adult males)

Social Relations

• Hierarchical society, deference to one's betters; assumption of inequality as reflected in the unequal distribution of property and privilege; status was ascribed and inherited to a large degree. Social mobility was limited, though advancement through achievement was not precluded entirely.
• The South was dominated by a landed planter aristocracy; the North by merchant princes.
• Personal relationships and deference provided social coherence in a system of mutual obligations.
• Degrees of freedom: indentures remained commonplace as work relations.
• Gender: the "Goodwife," the Deputy Husband, "Remember the Ladies" and Republican Motherhood
• Slavery expanded throughout the 18th century, slowing from 1750-1790.
• People associated themselves in voluntary secular organizations: literary clubs, fire companies, hospital societies, and so forth (see Benjamin Franklin)

Material Life

• Rudimentary: first "consumer revolution" in mid-18th century

• Housing
• Furniture
• Gentile accessories

Religion

• Religious life: monopolistic, publicly supported churches were common.
• The Second Great Awakening democratized the religious landscape, a harbinger of change.
  • Itinerant evangelical preachers, non-traditional meetings, personal revelations
• Old: established Episcopols (Anglicans) and Congregationalists; New: Baptists, Methodists

Transportation and Communication

• Natural waterways improved and harbor facilities expanded.
• Postal service and post roads.
• Newspapers: major urban centers had papers by mid-century-though they were usually weeklies or monthlies and rather expensive.
• Travel was mostly limited to walking; horses were a luxury, travel by water was best. The accessible parts of the country were those with access to waterways.

Politics, local

• Dominated by personal favor and obligation, and loyalty.
• public voting, property requirements for voting and office holding.
• Political leaders were assumed to be drawn from the better sort, inherited wealth and education.
• Not what you knew, but who you knew (Family alliances).

Politics, Empire

• Semi-autonomy from Crown
• Wars of Empire
  • Three way contest: French, Indians, English
• Pride in British Constitution gives way to discontent, ending in rebellion and independence.
• Articles of Confederation; Northwest Ordinance; Constitutional Convention (1787).
• America: Rising Empire of Liberty.

Population

• 1700: about 250,000
• 1776: about 2,500,000
• 1800: about 5,300,000 (inc. 1,000,000 slaves) (all but about 300,000 lived in rural areas)

General: simple lives, precarious, mobile, capped by the revelation of indepence and popular sovereignty, liberal economics, and opportunities for change.