Building Charleston: Town and Society in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World

Chapter 4: Urban Households, Economic Opportunity, and Social Structure

98  n Urban Households, Economic Opportunity, and Social Structure I n 1770 John Wyatt, an English house carpenter, disembarked at Charleston after the long journey from the Old World to the New. Despite his unfamiliar surroundings, and an apparent lack of family or friends, he quickly established himself on the urban scene. Marrying the daughter of a successful town blacksmith, he inherited a plantation and a number of slaves, but sold the rural land and put his slaves to work in his shop. Like the other building artisans in Charleston in this period, Wyatt used this labor to capitalize on the demand for his services in the growing town. By raising houses for town dwellers who contracted his services, and engaging in some speculative building, the carpenter made a comfortable living for his family. But although Charleston’s construction boom played an important part in Wyatt’s ascent, these activities only represented one facet of his family’s diverse business portfolio. Soon, the carpenter extended his interests by setting up a carting business and reexporting exotic woods from the Caribbean. At the same time, his wife, Violetta, contributed to the household’s income by hiring out skilled slaves, lending money at interest, and taking in boarders. Together, the Wyatts managed to make a good life for themselves by exploiting the many commercial possibilities on offer in Charleston. So plentiful were the opportunities of this growing town that the Wyatts Urban Households, Economic Opportunity, and Social Structure 99 had shown little interest in “turning planter.” Instead, they had explored Charleston’s potential to build a household economy that extended into every corner of the urban economy and far beyond the principal trade of John Wyatt as a carpenter. The Wyatts’ economic choices united them with a growing group of Charlestonians. Indeed, such people were so abundant that visitor Josiah Quincy noted their presence on his visit to Charleston in 1773, when he proclaimed that the town’s “middling order” were “odious characters,” quite distinct from South Carolina’s “yeomanry and husbandmen.” This “middling sort” was marked out by its members level of prosperity. Where the richest decile of the colony’s white population owned over half of all wealth, and the poorest quarter just 1 percent, there were 65 percent of whites in-between, with 45 percent of assets distributed among them. Although historians have fully acknowledged that early America’s cities developed a unique socioeconomic structure during the eighteenth century, existing works have given little space to families like the Wyatts, especially in the southern colonies. In Boston, Philadelphia, and New York, war eventually brought about rising poverty and a narrowing of opportunities. Those city dwellers that were in the “middle,” as the Wyatts were, began to experience increased economic insecurity as urban society adopted a binary structure of haves and have-nots. Additional groupings among the population of the colonial town centered on occupation, not socioeconomic status, and a powerful artisan or merchant identity often cut across any emerging strata. In Charleston, historians have argued, such cleavages between rich and poor in white society also appeared, but were superseded in importance by the racial divides of the region. However, the Wyatts’ experience clearly suggests that social differentiation came about not because of economic disadvantage, but because of urban opportunity. Whereas war took away possibilities for some, burgeoning markets in domestic goods, imports, and land opened up new horizons for others. What is more, the socioeconomic group born of this opportunity was not broken apart by strong professional identities, but was united by the lack of loyalty among its members to any particular trade. Not unique to Charleston, such trends were common in many provincial towns on the British side of the British Atlantic. Expanding rapidly, their flourishing commercial societies proffered new opportunities, supported entrepreneurship, and rewarded those who were willing to cast off “the chok- 100 building charleston ing blanket of corporation and fraternalism that [had] smothered . . . business lives” in earlier times. Thus, those who attained greater financial security and a place in the middle did so not because they had been prevented from rising to the wealthiest ranks of society by urban depression, but because they had been successful in reducing economic uncertainty by taking advantage of urban growth. After 1740, Charleston’s white population experienced shifts in its socioeconomic structure that resembled those taking shape in other Englishspeaking towns. Now that the...