A Tale of One Merchant in the Early United States

Let's begin with a tale of two early American farmers; we'll call one Smith Friedman and the other Marx Thompson. Smith Friedman is nothing if not industrious. She works morning, noon, and night cultivating every inch of her land. She constantly talks to other farmers and to merchants and reads the newspapers to gain the prescience necessary to ensure that she is growing crops that will fetch the most money at market. And she reinvests every penny she earns back into her farm, buying more land and paying (or buying) labor to work it. Marx Thompson, on the other hand, is far more leisurely. Interested in his family and community rather than making a buck, he grows only what his family needs, along with a little extra to trade with neighbors who might have some crops or be able to offer skills or tools that he doesn't happen to have. For a moment, each of our two farmers believes it is the best of times. But it doesn't take much knowledge of farming on the part of readers to realize that both farmers will sooner or later meet a winter of discontent. The Friedman farm will face exhaustion on the part of the farmer and the soil, and if Friedman is unlucky enough to pick a crop that is blighted or faces a glutted market, she will be ruined. Her neighbor Thompson will be barely better off. Sure, he has food on his table—but he rarely has enough money to pay for new equipment or land or to pay taxes. And what of John Doe, the local merchant? Is Doe Friedman's greedy enabler and Thompson's predator, or a man whose store is the equivalent of a community center and who is the victimized middleman between unreliable customers and rapacious big-city creditors?

The above caricatures offer a sense of the historiographic fault-lines concerning economic culture in rural colonial British North America and then the early United States. Scholars have been debating several interrelated issues, often talking past one another. When did the early American economy become a full-blown market economy, based primarily on money- or credit-based transactions with little inherent social significance?¹ Was there what some historians have called a "market revolution," and if so, what did it entail and when did it happen?² Peering from the angle of primarily economic history, and generally seeking the causes of economic growth, a series of historians have argued that rural Americans were essentially like Smith Friedman in that they were profit-maximizers engaged in intensive market behavior who longed for greater opportunities to market their goods. This line of inquiry relies upon a broad base of quantitative evidence reflecting individual and community behavior. Scholars have typically looked for price convergence and widespread investment in financial instruments that indicate broad local integration in regional or national markets. Meanwhile, historians emerging from a more cultural or Marxist-oriented point of view (though not necessarily Marxist historians) have asserted that farmers were more like Marx Thompson: interested in community, engaging in trade only as a necessity, and dragged reluctantly into a market revolution with, at best, mixed benefits. Considering the choices farmers made when planting their crops and other more qualitative measures, these scholars often tend to look at changes in the quality of economic and social interconnection. While the former set of historians look for opportunity and entrepreneurial behavior, the latter write about meaning and community.³ And whereas most economic historians have primarily looked at farmers—not surprising, given that they were a majority of the U.S. population at least until the Civil War—local merchants have increasingly been a subject of study as the interface between a rural population and the broader economy.⁴

Into this fray comes Diane Wenger with her fine new book, A Country Storekeeper in...