Town Born: The Political Economy of New England from Its Founding to the Revolution

INTRODUCTION

introduction In 1760, some fifteen years before the American Revolution, the young John Adams witnessed and became fascinated with, though somewhat frightened by, the exuberance of autonomous workers at play. Taking a break from his legal studies, Adams ‘‘rode to the Iron works landing’’ in Weymouth, Massachusetts, ‘‘to see a vessel launched.’’ These happy affairs symbolized the viability of the New England economy, the skill and cooperation of the empowered workers, and—assuming the ship floated—the profitable completion of a long job. Afterward, the workers and town folk celebrated nearby at Thayer’s tavern: ‘‘The rabble filled the house,’’ noted Adams, and ‘‘every room, kitchen, chamber was crowded with people.’’ He observed ‘‘negroes with a fiddle’’ and ‘‘young fellows and girls dancing in the chamber as if they would kick the floor thro.’’ The scene was untamed and joyous. Adams spent ‘‘the whole afternoon in gazing and listening.’’ ‘‘Fiddling and dancing, in a chamber full of young fellows and girls, a wild rabble of both sexes, and all ages in the lower room, singing, dancing, fiddling, drinking flip and toddy, and drams—this is the riot and reveling of taverns and of Thayer’s frolics.’’1 As an intellectual worker Adams was both with, and apart from, the male and female mechanics in the scene, yet he admired them and spent the whole day. These workers had many natural advantages: they were young, well paid, drunk, and animated by music. Yet much of their frolic stemmed from their political power. At least on this Tuesday evening, New England town democracy seemed to agree with its practitioners. Early American workers rarely frolicked gloriously around their completed work. In Virginia, slaves did not celebrate the tobacco harvest. In Pennsylvania, workers drank their rum during the wheat harvest, not after it. Elsewhere, in ‘‘townless’’ America, many people lived in secular heaven, or hell, with a clear, often intimate, view of the other condition. Outside of New England, as Allan Kulikoff has shown, white males had more good 2 introduction farmland than was available anywhere else and little political interference blocking their enjoyment of it. They came to own remarkably large farms and enjoyed an equality of condition among themselves unknown elsewhere.2 Because land was so readily available, however, labor was in short supply, wages were relatively high, and well-paid wage earners were quick to buy land. In these conditions, in order to produce staple export crops like rice, wheat, and tobacco, the privileged landowners in colony after colony constructed societies that violently stripped labor of human value and laborers of political power. Their main invention was racial slavery, in which white farmers treated Africans and their descendants like beasts of burden and allowed them virtually no rights. This brutal and violent labor regime dominated South Carolina, Virginia, North Carolina, and Maryland, and even important sections of New Jersey, New York, and Rhode Island.3 In much of the middle colonies, especially Pennsylvania, farmers came to rely less on African or Indian slaves than floods of white indentured servants and redemptioners who were obliged to work for a number of years in exchange for their passage to the land of fine farms and promised opportunity . Although the fate of these bond servants requires more study, crime statistics and tax lists show that by 1750 Pennsylvania was also becoming a society in which forms of coercive labor were becoming plentiful and hard to escape, and many farmers employed servants, slaves, and hirelings on their broad acreage.4 Massachusetts proved an important exception to this common American social organization. By the mid-eighteenth century, the average New England farm family occupied a remarkably small farm on marginal land with only an acre or two of tillage. New Englanders did not have farms about which poor European peasants dreamed. Few pictures of them remain. Yet in Massachusetts slavery was rare, labor was respected, and despite the pressure of a growing population on tiny landholdings, social and political restiveness was remarkably exceptional, while consumption of luxurious English goods was widespread.5 The explanation for New England’s distinctive and far more equitable and egalitarian, yet productive, order was less the challenge of its stony farmland than its unusual political organization: the political economy of the town. From settlement the English settlers divided their New England colonies into towns and insisted that no one could settle anywhere else. Each town was incorporated, and the town corporation (sometimes dominated initially by land speculators) owned the land and...