The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution [Reprint 2014 ed.] 9780674182899, 9780674182882

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THE URBAN CRUCIBLE

THE

URBAN CRUCIBLE

Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution

Gary B. Nash

Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England 1979

Copyright © 1979 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Nash, Gary B The urban crucible. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. United States—Politics and government—Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775. 2. United States—Social conditions—To 1865. 3. United States—Economic conditions —To 1865. 4. United States—History—Revolution, 17751783—Causes. I. Title. E188.N38 309.173 '02 79-12894 ISBN 0-674-93056-8

To the memory of my parents

Preface

eighteenth-century America was predominantly a rural, agricultural society, its seaboard commercial cities were the cutting edge of economic, social, and political change. Almost all the alterations that are associated with the advent of capitalist society happened first in the cities and radiated outward to the smaller towns, villages, and farms of the hinterland. In America, it was in the colonial cities that the transition first occurred from a barter to a commercial economy; where a competitive social order replaced an ascriptive one; where a hierarchical and deferential polity yielded to participatory and contentious civic life; where factory production began to replace small-scale artisanal production; where the first steps were taken to organize work by clock time rather than by sidereal cycles. The cities predicted the future, even though under one in twenty colonists lived in them in 1700 or 1775 and even though they were but overgrown villages compared to the great urban centers of Europe, the Middle East, and China. Considering the importance of the cities as dynamic loci of change, it is surprising that historians have studied them so little. Even the fascination with urban history in the last few decades has done little to remedy this. We have at our disposal a shelfful of books on the early American inland villages, whose households numbered only in the hundreds, but have comparatively little to inform us about the colonial urban centers. Nothing written in the last generation, in fact, has gone much beyond Carl Bridenbaugh's Cities in the Wilderness: Urban Life in America, 16251742 (1938) and Cities in Revolt: Urban Life in America, 1743-1776 (1955). These were pioneering works, but while richly textured and elegantly written, they are descriptive rather than analytic, they deal primarily with institutional history, and they are based primarily on town records, newspapers, and personal accounts. This book proceeds from a different conception of how urban societies

ALTHOUGH

vii

Preface changed in the eighteenth century and is based largely on different sources. It stems from my interest in the social morphology of America's colonial cities and how it was that urban people, at a certain point in the preindustrial era, upset the equilibrium of an older system of social relations and turned the seaport towns into crucibles of revolutionary agitation. More particularly, I have tried to discover how people worked, lived, and perceived the changes going on about them, how class relationships shifted, and how political consciousness grew, especially among the laboring classes. What has led early American historians to avoid questions about class formation and the development of lower-class political consciousness is not only an aversion to Marxist conceptualizations of history but also the persistent myth that class relations did not matter in early America because there were no classes. Land, it is widely held, was abundant and wages were high because labor was always in great demand. Therefore, opportunity was widespread and material well-being attainable by nearly everybody. If being at the bottom or in the middle was only a way station on a heavily traveled road to the top, then the composition of the various ranks and orders must have been constantly shifting and class consciousness could be only an evanescent and unimportant phenomenon. Thus, our understanding of the social history of the colonial cities has been mired in the general idea that progress was almost automatic in the commercial centers of a thriving New World society. Only recently has the notion of extraordinary elasticity within classes and mobility between them begun to yield to a more complex analysis of how demographic trends, economic development, the spread of a market economy, and a series of costly wars produced a social, political, and ideological transformation. Historians have begun to create a far more intricate picture of social change by studying the extent of vertical and horizontal mobility, the degree of stratification, the accumulation and distribution of wealth, the social origins of the elite, the changing nature of economic and political power, and the shaping of class, ethnic, and religious consciousness. Historians are also coming to understand the need to retreat from discussing how the community was affected and to consider instead how different groups within the community were affected. Armies were supplied by some urban dwellers and manned by others, and those who gained or lost were not randomly selected. Price inflation and monetary devaluation caused problems for the whole society but the burdens were not distributed evenly. A sharp rise in overseas demand for American grain might increase the profits of inland farmers and seaboard merchants but could undercut the household budget of urban laborers and artisans. Much of this book is about those who occupied the lower levels of urban society, the people who frequently suffered the unequal effects of

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eighteenth-century change. This is no mere quest for aesthetic balance or for simple justice in recreating the past. Examination of the circumstances of life for the great mass of common people in every period and place and inquiry into their ways of thinking and acting are essential if we are ever to test and correct the hallowed generalizations made from the study of the select few upon which our understanding of history is primarily based. What is more, I proceed from the conviction that the success of any society is best measured not by examining the attainments and accumulations of those at the top but by assaying the quality of life for those at the bottom. If this be thought the maxim of a Utopian socialist, it was also the notion of an eighteenth-century English aristocrat whose writings circulated in Boston. "Every Nation," wrote Sir Richard Cox, "has the Reputation of being rich or poor from the Condition of the lowest Class of its Inhabitants."* In examining the lives of the lower classes in the eighteenth-century American cities I have repeatedly encountered evidence of social situations for which there is no accounting in the standard scholarship. Boston, I have found, was not only the commercial and intellectual center of New England Puritanism, as we have been taught, but also, by the 1740s, the New England center of mass indebtedness, widowhood, and poverty. By the end of the Seven Years War in 1763 poverty on a scale that urban leaders found appalling had also appeared in New York and Philadelphia. The narrowing of opportunities and the rise of poverty are two of the subthemes of this book. This is not to deny that compared with most places from which the colonists came—at least those who were white and free—the material circumstances of life were far more favorable than they had previously known. Comparisons between life in the colonial cities and life in Europe, however, like comparisons today between the plight of the urban poor in Chicago and Calcutta, miss the mark. An indebted shoemaker in Boston in 1760 took little satisfaction that for many of those who worked with hammer and awl life was worse and the future even bleaker in Dublin or London. People's sense of deprivation is not assuaged by referring them to distant places or ancient times. Like those above them, they measure the quality of their lives within their own locales and make comparisons primarily with the world of their parents. To study those who resided at the bottom of the seaport societies it is also necessary to study those in the middle and at the top. Whether it is the reaction of the poor to the new formulae for dealing with urban poverty or the role of the crowd in the Stamp Act demonstrations of 1765, nothing is explicable without understanding the ideology and conduct of *A Letter from Sir Richard Cox, Bart. To Thomas Prior, Esq.; Shewing from Experience a sure Method to establish the Linnen-Manufacture (Boston, 1750), p. 10.

X

Preface

men at the higher levels. It was, after all, with those who possessed economic, political, and social power that the lower orders ultimately had to resolve matters. All urban people were linked together in a social network where power was unevenly distributed, and one part of this social organism cannot be understood in isolation from the others. Above all, this book is about the relationships among urban people who occupied different rungs of the social ladder. The concept of class is central to this book. Therefore, it is important to specify that the term has a different meaning for the preindustrial period than for a later epoch. I employ it as both a heuristic and a historical category. It is a term which enables us to perceive that urban people gradually came to think of themselves as belonging to economic groups that did not share common goals, began to behave in class-specific ways in response to events that impinged upon their well-being, and manifested ideological points of view and cultural characteristics peculiar to their rank. This is not to say that all carpenters or all shopkeepers occupied the same position along the spectrum of wealth or that all ship captains or all caulkers thought alike or that merchants and shoemakers consistently opposed each other because they occupied different social strata. Nor can class be determined simply by notations on a tax assessor's list or by occupations given in inventories of estate. Moreover, evidence is abundant that vertical consciousness was always present in a society where movement up and down the social ladder never stopped and where the natural tendency of economic networks was to create a common interest among, for example, the merchant, shipbuilder, and mariner. Thus, we must recognize the problems in employing the concept of class in eighteenth-century society, for the historical stage of a mature class formation had not yet been reached. To ignore class relations, however, is a greater problem. The movement between ranks and the vertical linkages that were a part of a system of economic clientage did not foreclose the possibility that horizontal bonds would grow in strength. People who had always thought of themselves as belonging to the lower, middling, or upper ranks, but saw no reason that this implied social conflict, would gradually associate these rough identifiers of social standing with antagonistic interests and make them the basis for political contention. One of the main tasks of this book is to show that many urban Americans, living amidst historical forces that were transforming the social landscape, came to perceive antagonistic divisions based on economic and social position; that they began to struggle around these conflicting interests; and that through these struggles they developed a consciousness of class. This is quite different, as E. P. Thompson points out, than arguing "that classes exist, independent of historical relationship

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and struggle, and that they struggle because they exist, rather than coming into existence out of that struggle."* Hence, I am concerned with the evolving relations among different groups of urban people who were subject to historically rooted changes that may have been as perplexingly intricate to them as they have been to historians since. It is not my argument that by the end of the colonial period class formation and class consciousness were fully developed, but only that we can gain greater insight into the urban social process between 1690 and 1776 and can understand more fully the origins and meaning of the American Revolution if we analyze the changing relations among people of different ranks and examine the emergence of new modes of thought based on horizontal rather than vertical divisions in society. The shift in social alignments would continue after the Revolution, not moving with telic force toward some rendezvous with destiny in the industrial period but shaped by historical forces that were largely unpredictable in 1776. This book is also comparative in its approach. Examining concurrently the process of change in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia has enabled me to comprehend how particular factors intertwined in each city to hasten or retard the formation of class consciousness and to give a particular texture to social discourse and political behavior. I have chosen these three cities not only because they were the largest northern maritime centers, as well as the seats of provincial government, but also because their populations differed significantly in racial and ethnic origins, in religious composition, and in the legacies of their founding generations. It should be apparent in what follows that class consciousness developed according to no even-paced or linear formula. It emerged and receded depending upon conditions, leadership at both the top and bottom, cultural traditions, and other factors. The comparative approach has also convinced me that the Marxist maxim that the mode of production dictates the nature of class relations has only limited analytic potential for explaining changes during some historical eras. It is not different modes of production that account for the striking differences among the three port towns in the historical development of class consciousness but the different experiences of people who lived within three urban societies that shared a common mode of production. Thus, it is necessary to go beyond determining objective class structures and objective productive relations to examining "the specific activities of men [and women] in real social and economic relationships, containing fundamental contradictions and variations and therefore always in a state of dynamic pro'"Eighteenth-Century English Society: Class Struggle Without Class7" Social tory, 3 (1978), 149.

His-

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Preface

cess."* Bostonians, New Yorkers, and Philadelphians experienced their situations differently between 1690 and 1776 because discrete factors impinged upon them, ranging from their proximity to Anglo-French theaters of war to the development of their hinterlands to their cultural heritage. In inquiring into the history of the common people of the northern port towns I have adopted the term "laboring classes." I do so in order to take account of the fact that before the American Revolution—in fact, for more than half a century after the Revolution—there was no industrial working class composed of a mass of wage laborers who toiled in factories where a capitalist class wholly owned and controlled the productive machinery. My concern is with broad groupings of people who worked with their hands but were differentiated by skills and status. Thus, the laboring classes included slaves, whose bondage was perpetual, indentured servants, whose unfree status was temporary, and free persons, whose independence could be altered only in unusual circumstances. The laboring ranks also ascended from apprentice to journeyman to master craftsman. Likewise, there were gradations among illpaid merchant seamen, laborers, and porters at the bottom; struggling shoemakers, tailors, coopers, and weavers who were a step higher; more prosperous cabinetmakers, silversmiths, instrumentmakers, and housewrights; and entrepreneurial bakers, distillers, ropewalk operators, and tallow chandlers. There was, in short, no unified laboring class at any point in the period under study. That does not mean that class formation and the shaping of class consciousness was not happening in the era culminating with the American Revolution. Despite the importance attached to economic and social change, this book argues that ideology in many instances was far more than a reflection of economic interests and acted as a motive force among urban people of all ranks. But it needs to be emphasized at the outset that ideology is not the exclusive possession of educated individuals and established groups. Nor do I believe that those at the top established an ideology that was then obligingly adopted by those below them. Slaves, indentured servants, the laboring poor, women, and the illiterate also had an ideology, although many of these people did not express ideas systematically in forms that are easily recoverable by historians two hundred years later. What I mean by ideology is awareness of the surrounding world, penetration of it through thought, and reasoned reactions to the forces impinging upon one's life. People living in communities as small as the prerevolutionary port towns, linked together as they were by church, tavern, workplace, and family, exchanged views, compared insights, and through the face-to-face nature of their associations, arrived at certain "Raymond Williams, "Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory," New Left Review, no. 82 (1973), 5-6.

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common understandings of their social situations. The world for them may have always been half-seen and imperfectly comprehended, but, as is universally true, they acted upon reality as they understood it, whether they were university trained and rich or could barely keep their shop books by crooked hand in a rented room. It is not possible to fathom the subterranean social changes that transformed the urban centers of colonial America or to peer into the minds of the mass of urban dwellers who have been obscured from historical sight by consulting only the sources that are most accessible to the historian— newspapers, municipal records, business accounts, diaries and correspondence, and published sermons, political tracts, and legislative proceedings. As vital as these sources are, they are insufficient to the task, for they most often came from the hands of upper-class merchants, lawyers, clergymen, and politicians, who, though they tell us much, do not tell all. These sources are particularly silent on the lives of those in the lower reaches of the urban hierarchy and they are only occasionally helpful in revealing the subsurface social processes at work. This is not surprising, for on the one hand the gentry was not interested in illuminating the lives of laboring-class city dwellers and on the other hand they were often unaware of, mystified by, or eager to obscure the changing social, economic, and political relationships in their cities. Buried in less familiar documents, virtually all of them unpublished and many of them fragmentary and difficult to use, are glimpses of the lives of ordinary people. The story of how life was lived and conditions changed in the colonial cities can be discerned, not with mathematical precision or perfect clarity but in general form, from tax lists, poor relief records, wills, inventories of estate, deed books, mortgages, court documents, and portledge bills and wage records. This book draws extensively upon such sources as well as upon more traditional forms of evidence. It also infers lower-class thought from lower-class action, which is justifiable when the action is adequately recorded and is repetitive. I regret that I have not been able to deal more extensively with the history of urban women. As in the case of studying the lower classes, the problem of source materials is very great but not insuperable. Rather than plead the difficulties of research, I must affirm that after fourteen years of ferreting out and pondering the meaning of more sources than I had reason to believe existed, it seems better to leave this task to others. It should be obvious, however, that our understanding of the American cities before the Revolution must remain imperfect until questions relating to women's work, marriage patterns, roles in churches and social institutions, and behind the scenes involvement in politics are answered. myself in this book, I have accumulated many intellectual debts which I happily acknowledge. The encouragement Alfred F. Young has given and the conceptual rigor he has imparted in our correW H I L E ABSORBING

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spondence and conversations have been invaluable. This book, which he read and criticized in draft form, would not be the same without his generous assistance and good-humored goading. Joyce Oldham Appleby and John Murrin also read nearly every word I have written and through their deft criticisms helped me sharpen the internal logic and rescued me from a variety of errors. Richard S. Dunn, Aida D. Donald, and James A. Henretta offered valuable suggestions on the manuscript, and particular portions of it were improved through criticism tendered by Catherine Menand and Cynthia Shelton. I am also grateful to Lawrence Stone, who some years ago disabused me of the notion that this book might logically end in 1765. My debt also extends to a number of people, some anonymous, whose criticism of earlier articles and conference papers or whose own work, intersecting with my own, forced me to rethink my ideas or return to the archives for further digging. I doubt that the best scholarship is collaborative in a formal sense, but I am certain that this book owes much to the supportive criticism of a great many members of the profession, many of whom are of a different mind in interpreting the colonial past. I hereby extend my thanks as well to the graduate students at the University of California, Los Angeles, who, over the last fourteen years, have listened to my ideas, responded to them reflectively, and obliged me to discard, modify, or recast formulations which I tested on them. Elizabeth Suttell at Harvard University Press applied her considerable talents to preparing the work for publication; the final product is much the better for her attention. Financial aid from a number of institutions enabled me to visit archives in the cities I have studied, while living on the other side of the continent, and gave me time for writing. I hereby thank the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society, and the Research Committee of the Academic Senate at the University of California, Los Angeles, for fellowship and research funds. Grants from the latter committee also allowed me to employ the following graduate research assistants, whose contribution went far beyond the gathering and processing of data: Peter Ball, Theresa Corbett, Jeanette Gadt, Ruth Kennedy, Laura Margolin, Andrew Morse, Joseph O'Reilly, Sharon V. Salinger, Ronald Schultz, John W. Shaffer, Cynthia Shelton, Billy G. Smith, and Margaret Strobel. Sally McMahon of Brandeis University was also of great assistance in conducting research for me in Boston, and I wish to thank Noel Diaz for the preparation of the line drawings in the appendix. Research for this book has also been vastly facilitated by the courtesy and cooperative spirit of many archivists and librarians. Generosity was extended in Boston at the Massachusetts Archives, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston Athenaeum, New England Historic Genealogical Society, Boston Public Library, Suffolk County Courthouse, and Baker

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Library of the Harvard Business School; in New York at the New-York Historical Society, New York Public Library, Museum of the City of New York, and Municipal Archives and Record Center; in Philadelphia at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Library Company of Philadelphia, City Archives, American Philosophical Society, Presbyterian Historical Society, Friends Record Center, Pennsylvania Genealogical Society, Carpenter's Hall, Office of the Register of Wills, Philadelphia Historical Commission, and Philadelphia Contributionship for Insuring Houses; in Harrisburg at the Pennsylvania Archives and the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission; and in Washington, D.C., at the Library of Congress. The University Research Library at the University of California, Los Angeles, provided a superb home base for my studies. G.B.N. Pacific Palisades, California March 1979

Contents

PART ONE

GROWTH AND WAR, 1690-1740 1

The Web of Seaport Life

3

2

The Urban Polity

26

3

The Seaport Economies in an Era of War

54

4

The Rise of Popular Politics

76

5

The Urban Economies in an Era of Peace

102

6

Political Unrest in the Interwar Period

129

FART TWO

CONFLICT AND REVOLUTION. 1740-1776 7

The Renewal of War and the Decline of Boston

8

Religious Revival and Politics at Mid-Century

9

Prosperity and Poverty: The Seven Years War and

161 198

Its Aftermath

233

10

The Intensification of Factional Politics

264

11

The Stamp Act in the Port Towns

292

12

The Disordered Urban Economies

312

13

Revolution

339

Appendix: Notes

419

Index

531

Tables

387

Figures

409

ILLUSTRATIONS 1. Map of Pennsylvania ca. 1687 by Thomas Holme. Courtesy, Library Company of Philadelphia.

12

2. Plan of Boston in 1722 by John Bonner. 39 Courtesy, I. N. Phelps Stokes Collection, Prints Division, York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

New

3. Plan of New York in 1729 by James Lyne. 67 Courtesy, New-York Historical Society. 4. Southeast Prospect of Philadelphia ca. 1720 by Peter Cooper. Courtesy, Library Company of Philadelphia. 5. Southeast View of Boston in 1743 by William Burgis. Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society.

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116

6. South Prospect of New York (right-hand portion) in 1746 by William Burgis. 145 Courtesy, New-York Historical Society. 7. East Prospect of Philadelphia in 1754 by George Heap. Courtesy, Library Company of Philadelphia.

181

8. Plan of Philadelphia in 1762 by Nicholas Scull. 249 Courtesy, Library Company of Philadelphia. 9. Plan of New York in 1767 by Bernard Ratzer. 2 72 Courtesy, I. N. Phelps Stokes Collection, Prints Division, York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. 10. Plan of Boston in 1777 by Henry Pelham Courtesy, Library of Congress.

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11. View of Boston in 1774 by Paul Revere. 334 Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society. 12. The Bostonian's Paying the Excise-Man, or Tarring & Feathering, 1774, attributed to Philip Dawe. 353 Courtesy, The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. 13. The Patriotick Barber of New York, 1775, attributed to Philip Dawe. 373 Courtesy, The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.

TABLES 1. Occupational Structure of Philadelphia and Boston, 1685-1775 2. Mean Wages in Philadelphia and Boston, 1725-1775 392

387

Tables and Figures

xix

3. Distribution of Taxable Wealth in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, 1687-1774 395 4. Distribution of Personal Wealth among Boston and Philadelphia Decedents, 1685-1775 396 5. Distribution of Personal Wealth in Boston and Philadelphia by Occupation, 1685-1775 397 6. Median Personal Wealth among Boston and Philadelphia Decedents, 1685-1775 399 7. Range of Personal Wealth among Boston and Philadelphia Decedents, 1685-1775 400 8. Ownership of Real Property by Boston Decedents, 1685-1775 401 9. Slave Ownership in Boston and Philadelphia, 1685-1775 401 10. Poor Relief in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, 1700-1775 402 11. Taxes in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, 1695-1774 403 12. Value of Massachusetts Paper Currency, 1685-1775 405 13. Taxable Inhabitants in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, 16871775 407

FIGURES 1. Population of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, 1690-1776 409 2. Tonnage of Ships Clearing Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, 1714-1775 410 3. Per Capita Imports for New England, New York, and Pennsylvania, 1697-1775 412 4. Wages of Philadelphia Merchant Seamen vs. Commodity Prices, 1720-1775 413 5. Wages of Philadelphia Laborers vs. Commodity Prices, 1720-1775 413 6. Wages of Boston Merchant Seamen vs. Wheat Prices, 1720-1775 414 7. Mean Personal Wealth in Boston, 1690-1775 415 8. Mean Real and Personal Wealth in Boston, 1690-1775 416 9. Mean Personal Wealth in Philadelphia, 1690-1775 417

PART ONE

C^)

GROWTH AND WAR 1690-1740

Ti's the Lord, who has Taken away from you, what He has Given to others. Cotton Mather, Some Seasonable Advise unto the Poor (Boston, 1712) Idleness is the Dead Sea, that swallows all Virtues Be active in Business, that Temptation may miss her Aim The Bird that sits, is easily shot. B. Franklin, Poor Richard Improved (Philadelphia, 1756)

1

C ^ ) The Web of Seaport Life

the life of America's northern seaport towns in the seventeenth century, dictating their physical arrangement, providing them with their links to the outer world, yielding up much of their sustenance, and subtly affecting the relationships among the different groups who made up these budding commercial capitals. Boston was almost entirely surrounded by water. Built on a tadpole-shaped peninsula that jutted into island-dotted Massachusetts Bay, the town was connected to the mainland only by the mile-long causeway called the Neck. New York was literally an island, set in perhaps the finest natural harbor on the continent and separated from its hinterland by the East and Hudson rivers. At a time when steel bridge construction was still more than a century away, it was accessible only by ferry, barge, or small wind-propelled craft. Philadelphia was almost one hundred miles from the sea, but it was planted on a broad strip of land between the Schuylkill and Delaware rivers—the latter providing its access to the ocean.

W A T E R DOMINATED

The colonial seaports existed primarily as crossroads of maritime transport and commercial interchange. European cities had often grown up as centers of civil and ecclesiastical administration and by the early nineteenth century they would expand greatly as centers of industrial production. But Boston, New York, and Philadelphia served primarily as points of entry for immigrating Europeans and Africans and as commercial marts serving hinterland populations. T h e ocean was the highway connecting the Old World and the New and the seaport towns were the vital link between the two. They gathered in the timber, fish, and agricultural produce that came from the rural settlers who made up the vast majority of the colonial population, sending it off to West Indian and European markets and distributing finished European goods throughout the regions they served. 1 At the end of the seventeenth century the seaport towns were really only overgrown villages. Boston was the largest. Growing slowly for six

3

4

Growth and War, 1690-1740

decades after the Great Migration of English Puritans began in 1630, it reached a population of about 6,000 by 1690. New York, founded five years before Boston by the Dutch West India Company and known as New Amsterdam until conquered by the English in 1664, increased only to 3,500 by 1674 and to about 4,500 by 1690. Philadelphia, not planted until 1681, when William Penn received an immense grant from Charles II and promoted a movement of English and Irish Quakers across the Atlantic, was still in its infancy at the turn of the century, counting only about 2,200 inhabitants. 2 None of the American port towns could compare with even the secondary commercial centers of western Europe such as Lyon, which had reached 45,000 in the 1530s, or Norwich, which had grown to 19,000 by the 1570s. Nor could they claim equal status with the cities of the Spanish and Portuguese colonies to the south, where Bahia, Cartagena, Potosi, and Mexico City, built on the ruins of ancient Indian urban centers, numbered 50,000 or more by the end of the seventeenth century. 3 The insignificant size of these seaports in British North America did not indicate English backwardness or a preference for the pastoral, agricultural life. The port towns were small because they served regional populations that themselves were still very limited. The population of Massachusetts had not yet reached 50,000 in 1690, so it is not surprising that Boston counted only 6,000 souls. Similarly, New York and Philadelphia served agricultural populations that had grown to no more than 14,000 and 12,000 respectively. 4 The reduced scale of life in these late seventeenth-century ports made face-to-face relationships important. Craftsmen did not produce for anonymous customers or distant markets but labored almost entirely at turning out "bespoke goods"—articles made to order for individual customers. Nor would anybody long be a stranger in a town whose boundaries could be traversed on foot in a brisk thirty-minute walk. Bostonians did not spread out across their peninsula but crowded together between Beacon Hill, Copp's Hill, and Fort Hill along the southeastern shore that faced the harbor. New Yorkers did not range across the island of Manhattan but squeezed together at its southern tip, in the area known today as Wall Street. Philadelphia, where as late as 1750 the skyline was unbroken by a single building of more than three stories, covered a tract of about 1,200 acres. But its inhabitants chose their building sites along a one-mile stretch of Delaware River frontage, penetrating inland from the river no more than three blocks in the first quarter-century of settlement. Proximity to the harbor and wharves was on everyone's mind. 5 A byproduct of this mode of settlement, in what urban historians call "walking cities," was a mixing of classes, occupations, religious beliefs, and ethnic backgrounds in the early years. So personal were the relationships in towns of this kind that even by the middle of the eighteenth century,

The Web of Seaport Life

5

one prominent Philadelphian could remark that in his city of about 13,000 he "knew every person white & black, men, women & children by name." 6 Face-to-face relationships also reflected societies that were strongly familial in organization and still reliant upon oral discourse rather than the written or printed word for communications. Seventeenth-century American families were generally nuclear in structure, with each conjugal family unit living in a separate household headed by a father or his widowed wife. Indentured servants, slaves, and apprentices, as well as children, were integral parts of this family network, all living in close quarters where they worked, ate, and learned together, subject to the authority of the patriarchal father-employer. 7 Learning—whether religious, vocational, or concerned with the socialization of the young—was conducted typically through intimate human interchange, the mark of all oral societies preceding the modern era. 8 If the individual family, closely knit by affective bonds and parental authority, was the characteristic social unit, no less familial in form was the wider network that bound together individual households. Whether in the church, where individual families melded into a congregation that stood united in pursuit of a common goal, or in the organization of poor relief, where the community at large acknowledged care of the poor as a common responsibility, the kinship orientation was pervasive. The family, according to the Puritan leaders of Boston, was a "little commonwealth." 9 The town, a collection of families, was a larger commonwealth, recognizing the common good as the highest goal. And all the towns in the Bay colony made up the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The corporate whole, not the individual, was the basic conceptual unit. In probing the social dynamics of the early towns it is essential to recognize that these were preindustrial societies in which tradition held sway. Little about the late seventeenth-century towns would be recognizable to the twentieth-century urbanite. Cows were commonly tethered behind the crudely built wooden houses, for milk was a commodity that most householders could not afford to purchase. Hogs roamed the streets because, as scavengers of refuse, they were the chief sanitary engineers in an age when most household wastes were emptied into ditches running down the middle of the streets. Indian shell beads, called wampum, were still in use as a medium of exchange in New York at the end of the seventeenth century, and paper money was as yet unknown except in Boston where it made its first appearance in 1690. There were no newspapers printed in the colonies before 1704, when the Boston News-Letter was first published. Philadelphians would wait until 1719 to see a newspaper in their city and New Yorkers until 1725. Lawyers, another fixture of the modern city, were everywhere regarded with suspicion, and the few who practiced in the late seventeenth century were largely untrained, unorgan-

6

Growth and War, 1690-1740

ized, and little respected. "There was not such a parcel of wild knaves and Jacobites as those that practised the law in the province of New York," wrote Governor Bellomont in 1699, "not one of them a barrister, one was a dancing master, another a glover, a third . . . condemned to be hanged in Scotland for blasphemy and burning the bible." 10 We must consider the values that lay behind human behavior in the context of these premodern aspects of urban life. Superstition and belief in the supernatural were widespread, for though urban dwellers might be more worldly than their country cousins, they were still bound within an inherited mental framework that had been formed by the precariousness of life and the incomprehensibility of nature. The seaport towns were not traumatized in 1690 by the witchcraft hysteria that shook Salem, Boston's neighbor, but most town dwellers believed that witches were truly abroad in Salem. Witches were as real as the devil, and witchcraft was a crime "as definite and tangible as is treason today." 11 As late as 1727 an earthquake that shook most of New England was interpreted by the lettered and unlettered alike as evidence of God's displeasure with his people in this corner of the earth. In both Massachusetts and New York census takers met broad resistance because of the widespread belief that violation of the biblical injunction against enumerating the people would bring famine or plague—a conviction that was vastly strengthened in New York City when the census of 1703 was closely followed by a smallpox epidemic that carried away almost 10 percent of the population. 12 Another part of the value system was the prevailing orientation toward the proper arrangement and functioning of society. How should people in different social layers interact with each other? How should wealth and power be distributed? How much opportunity for advancement did ordinary town dwellers expect? What were the responsibilities of the rich for the poor and the poor to the wealthy? Was there a unitary body of thought on such questions, subscribed to by the affluent and indigent, by merchant, artisan, and common laborer alike? Implicit in all these questions is the assumption that the history of the seaport towns cannot fully be understood without fixing our attention upon the evolution of urban class structures. We need a social anatomy of these urban places, a comprehension of their component parts and the social relationships among them. In seeking this, it is well to be mindful of the advice of the English historian E. P. Thompson that "class" is a fluid not a static phenomenon, "a social and cultural formation, arising from processes which can only be studied as they work themselves out over a considerable historical period." "Class eventuates," writes Thompson, "as men and women live their productive relations, and as they experience their determinate situations, within 'the ensemble of the social relations,' with their inherited culture and expectations, and as they handle these experiences in cultural ways." 13

The Web of Seaport

Life

7

Virtually everyone of wealth or position in the port towns adhered to the axiom that rank and status must be carefully preserved and social roles clearly differentiated if society was to retain its equilibrium. This was a cast of thought inherited from the Old World, although some colonizers recognized that a new environment might call for alterations. Social stability was uppermost in the minds of most of these leaders and they believed that nothing counted for more in its achievement than a careful demarcation of status and privilege. John Winthrop, the leader of the Puritan occupation of Massachusetts Bay, echoed ancient thinking that social unity and political stability were the products of a hierarchical social system that preserved distances between occupational groups and limited movement between them. "In all times," he wrote, "some must be rich, some poore, some highe and eminent in power and dignitie; others meane and in subjeccion." 14 Winthrop's conception of the carefully layered society where mobility was limited was perpetuated in Boston by a long line of Puritan clergymen who exhorted their auditors in this vein for many decades to come. There was every reason for officialdom and the mercantile elite of the port towns eagerly to echo such thoughts, for they justified the position of those at the top and encouraged those at the bottom to believe that their lowly positions were divinely willed. Hence, John Saffin, a Boston merchant, wrote in 1700 that God "hath Ordained different degrees and orders of men, some to be High and Honourable, some to be Low and Despicable, some to be Monarchs, Kings, Princes and Governours, Masters and Commanders, others to be subjects, and to be commanded." If it were otherwise, Saffin concluded, "there would be a meer parity among men." 15 Where parity crept in, anarchy was not far behind. In New York and Philadelphia it was much the same. The religious impulse that reverberated so powerfully in Boston was more subdued in the Manhattan port, the least Utopian of the northern capitals, but it was widely believed by those at the apex of the social pyramid that all men, by God's design, were created unequal. In Pennsylvania, also, the "holy experiment" was thought by its founder to depend for success on orderly patterns of taking up land, economic regulation, and firm lines of authority. Equalitarianism within the Society of Friends has been much remembered by historians, but it was confined to a belief in the equal worth of each individual in the sight of God and the capacity of each person to find God within himself or herself apart from scriptural revelation or external authority. Quakers were not levelers, even though they opposed social deference when it fed arrogance and abuse of power by those who held it. Their quarrel was not with the need for a structured society but with its social conventions. "We design to level nothing but Sin," wrote an early English Quaker, and his sentiment was repeated by one of the Society's principal theoreticians, who wrote that "I would not have any

8

Growth and War, 1690-1740

judge, that . . . we intend to destroy the mutual Relation, that is betwixt Prince and People, Master and Servants, Parents and Children; . . . O u r Principle in these things hath no such tendency, and . . . these Natural Relations are rather better established, than any ways hurt by it." 16 This perpetuation of social hierarchy can be seen in many of the conventions of urban life at the end of the seventeenth century. Puritans did not file into church on Sunday morning and occupy the pews in random fashion. Each was assigned a seat according to his or her rank in the community. "Dooming the seats" was the responsibility of a church committee that used every available yardstick of social status—age, parentage, social position, service to the community, and wealth—in drawing up a seating plan for the congregation. In New York, whipping, the most common punishment meted out by the courts for minor offenses, was not permitted for men of rank, though the stripping away of the right to use "Mister" before one's name, or "Gentleman" after it, may have been more painful than the lash. In their dress, speech, manners, and even the food on their tables, urban dwellers proclaimed their place in the social order. While this replication of traditional European social attitudes regarding the structuring of society was widespread, and even regarded by many as God-ordained, it was not universally accepted; nor was it unaffected by the environment of the New World. Those already in positions of authority or possessed of economic advantage were the principal proponents of a paternalistic system that steadfastly advocated social gradations and subordination, for they, after all, were the chief beneficiaries of such an arrangement. Those below them in the social order were often less eager merely to recreate the past in the new land. As early as 1651 in Massachusetts the magistrates of the General Court expressed their "utter detestation and dislike that men and women of meane Condition should take upon themselves the garb of Gentlemen by wearing gold or silver, lace or buttons, or points at their knees or to walk in bootes or women of the same rancke to weare silke or tiffany horlles or scarfes, which though allowable to persons of greater estates, or more liberal education, yet we cannot but judge it intollerable in persons of like condition." 17 Here was a signal that many early Bostonians not only were able to improve their condition but also intended to use their newfound prosperity to enhance their wardrobes, thereby upgrading their class identification, of which clothes were a primary badge. Such upward striving might have been expected, for the immigrants who settled the early towns were generally recruited from the middling ranks of English society and had been drawn to the western edge of the Atlantic because they were motivated, among other things, by a desire to better themselves economically. The impressive quantity of late seventeenth-century jeremiads concerning the need for order and discipline in Massachusetts is one more indication that

The Web of Seaport Life

9

many colonists, especially those not at the top of the social pyramid, found the old hierarchical code out of place and out of time. To what extent hierarchical thinking pervaded the upper ranks of seaport society and to what degree it was resisted from below cannot be measured quantitatively. It is safe to say, however, that although almost every urban dweller knew instinctively his or her relation to those below and above, there was much crossing of lines between social layers and, even by the 1690s, a long history of undeferential behavior among plebeian sorts. We employ the term deference to describe the unquestioning acceptance of the superior wisdom of an elite by the broad mass of people. 18 It is easy, however, to overstate the operation of a well-oiled set of relationships between superiors and inferiors, and the unresentful acceptance of them as natural. Many urban people deferred because their economic security was bound up with a landlord, employer, or creditor. This was economic clientage and it doubtlessly produced social deference. But the obliging comment and passive demeanor of a journeyman carpenter or merchant seaman could melt away in moments of passion or collective action and often did not extend at all to other powerful figures whose control was less direct. Many vertical links bound urban society together and inhibited the formation of solidarities that were horizontal in nature. But these interrank bonds forged by vertical loyalties and obligations were by no means all-encompassing or unchanging. Time and circumstances altered social consciousness, wore away at deferential behavior, and gave rise to feelings of solidarity that were based on occupation, economic position, and class standing. Closely tied to attitudes about the structural arrangement of society was the urban dweller's sense of whether his or her community functioned equitably. The important gap to measure is the one between aspiration and achievement. We must tread carefully in approaching this question, for twentieth-century concepts of mobility and contemporary expectations of success will help us little in studying preindustrial people. 1 ' The rise from rags to riches cannot be taken as a universal expectation. In the late seventeenth century the limits of possibility had not yet been raised very high in the minds of most urban dwellers. Few Scots-Irish or German immigrants in Philadelphia, Dutch residents of New York, or English inhabitants of Boston dreamed of becoming wealthy merchants or country gentlemen. Nor did they regard themselves as "blocked" if they, or even their sons, could not make it to the top. They were coming from a society where intergenerational movement was almost imperceptible, where sons unquestioningly followed their father's trades, where the Protestant work ethic did not beat resoundingly in every breast, and where security from want, rather than the acquisition of riches, was the primary goal. It was modest opportunity (access to sufficient capital,

10

Growth and War, 1690-1740

land, and labor to produce material well-being) rather than rapid mobility (social ascendancy at the expense of others) that was most important in their calculations of whether equity prevailed in their society. Much of the urban laboring man's sense of what was possible was shaped by the distinctly premodern nature of economic life in the port towns. Routinized, repetitive labor and the standardized work day, regulated by the clock, were unknown in this preindustrial era. Even the Protestant work ethic could not change irregular work patterns, for they were dictated by weather, hours of daylight, and the erratic delivery of raw materials. When the cost of fuel for artificial light was greater than the extra income that could be derived from laboring before or after sunlight hours, who would not shorten his day during winter? Similarly, when winter descended, business often ground to a halt. Even in the southernmost of the northern ports, ice frequently blocked maritime traffic. In the winter of 1728-1729, 36 ships lay frozen at dockside in Philadelphia; several decades later a visitor counted 117 ships icebound in the Delaware. This meant slack time for mariners and dockworkers, just as laborers engaged in well digging, road building, and cellar excavating for house construction were idled by frozen ground. The hurricane season in the West Indies forced another slowdown because few shipowners were willing to place their ships and cargoes before the killer winds that prevailed in the Caribbean from August to October. 20 If prolonged rain delayed the slaughter of cows in the country or made impassable the rutted roads into the city, then the tanner laid his tools aside and for lack of his deliveries the cordwainer was also idle. The hatter was dependent upon the supply of beaver skins, which could stop abruptly if disease struck an Indian tribe or war disrupted the fur trade. Weather, disease, and equinoxial cycles all contributed to the fitful pace of urban labor—and therefore to the difficulties of producing a steady income. Food and housing cost money every day of the year, but in calculating his income the urban dweller had to count on many "broken days," slack spells, and dull seasons. 21 While resettlement in America could not change the discontinuous work patterns of preindustrial European life, shifting to the other side of the ocean did bring an adjustment in thinking about what was achievable. In Europe "the frontier zone between possibility and impossibility barely moved in any significant way, from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century." 22 But it moved in America. Hector St. John Crevecoeur, a literary Frenchman who took up the life of a country gentleman in New York late in the colonial period, wrote memorably about this. "An European, when he first arrives," he reflected, "seems limited in his intentions, as well as his views; but he very suddenly alters his scale . . . He no sooner breathes our air than he forms schemes, and embarks in designs he never would have thought of in his own country." 23 Crevecoeur romantized

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Growth and War, 1690-1740

the matter somewhat, but many other observers also noted these rising expectations in North America—a psychological transformation fraught with implications for notions about the structuring of society. Landhungry Europeans, turned loose on the western shore of the Atlantic, found river valleys spread before them beyond their wildest dreams. Their aspirations and their behavior consequently changed, and not always for the better in the view of their leaders. Roger Williams deplored the "depraved appetite after the great vanities, dreams and shadows of this vanishing life, great portions of land, land in this wilderness, as if men were in as great necessity and danger for want of great portions of land, as poor, hungry, thirsty seamen have, after a sick and stormy, a long and starving passage." 24 If this was true in New England, where religion acted as a brake on ambition more than in any other colony, what must it have been elsewhere? Williams saw the hunger for more and more land, symbolizing the raising of expectations, as "one of the gods of New England," and one "which the living and most high Eternal will destroy and famish." 25 Deplore it though he might, most would not listen, either in New England or elsewhere. In the seaport towns it was somewhat different. Open stretches of land meant nothing to the artisan or shopkeeper, but the availability of work, the relationship of wages to prices, and the price of a lot and house meant much. In all of these matters the seaport dwellers could anticipate more favorable conditions than prevailed in the homelands that they or their parents had left. Unemployment was virtually unknown in the late seventeenth century, labor commanded a better price relative to the cost of household necessities, and urban land was purchased reasonably. 26 Upper-class urban dwellers often complained of the high cost of labor, but none suggested, as did Henry Addison, that faithful reflector of early eighteenth-century manners in England, that wages for the laboring class be lowered to the subsistence level and the poor "be supported but never relieved." 27 Labor was in shorter supply than in Europe and therefore commanded greater respect. This goes far toward explaining why one of the English holidays that did not persist in the American port towns was "St. Monday," the English laboring class's way of creating a long weekend. If more work meant only lower daily wages, as was often the case in England, then shortening the work week made perfect sense. But in the port towns "St. Monday" fell victim to the belief that opportunities were greater and that men, by the steady application of their skills, could raise themselves above the ruck. 28 This did not mean that artisans and laborers worked feverishly to ascend the ladder of success. Craftsmen who commanded 5 shillings a day and laborers who garnered 3 knew that weather, sickness, and the inconstancy of supplies made it impossible to work more than 250 days a year, which would bring an income of about £35 to £60. Even if the

The Web of Seaport

Life

13

margin between subsistence and saving was better than in Europe, it was still so narrow that years of hard work and frugal living usually preceded the purchase of even a small house. Hence, laboring people were far from the day when the failure to acquire property or to accumulate a minor fortune produced guilt or aroused their anger against those above them. Most artisans did not wish to become merchants or professionals. Their desire was not to reach the top but to get off the bottom. Family and community still counted more than the acquisition of wealth, and their modest ambitions were fully sanctioned by the Protestant belief that every man's calling, however menial, was equally worthy in the sight of God. Yet they expected a "decent competency," as it was called, and did not anticipate the grinding poverty of the laboring poor everywhere in Europe. and aspirations we must turn to the actual structure of the late seventeenth-century port towns and reach some understanding of how they differed from the European commercial centers that the urban colonizers had left behind. At the bottom of the social hierarchy were black slaves. The common view that slavery in colonial America was overwhelmingly a southern plantation phenomenon must be modified, for slavery took root early in the northern port towns and persisted there throughout the colonial period. By 1690, in fact, slaves represented as large a proportion of the northern urban populations as they did in tobacco-growing Maryland and Virginia. Boston was only eight years old, a town with fewer than 1,500 inhabitants, when it began its connection with the "peculiar institution." Victorious in a war of extermination against the Pequot Indians, Massachusetts shipped several hundred captive Pequot women and children to the West Indies, where they were exchanged for African slaves. A few years later, in 1645, the brother-in-law of John Winthrop counseled war against another Indian tribe, the Narragansetts, and argued "if upon a Just warre the Lord should deliver them [the Narragansetts] into our hands, wee might easily have men, women, and children enough to exchange for Moores, which wilbe more gaynefull pilladge for us than wee conceive, for I doe not see how wee can thrive untill wee gett into a stock of slaves sufficient to doe all our buisines, . . . [for] I suppose you know verie well how wee shall mainteyne 20 Moores cheaper than one Englishe servant." 2 ' It was the calculation of relative labor costs that thereafter kept a small but steady flow of slaves coming into Boston. The number might have been greater if they had been more available, but Boston was at a considerable disadvantage, situated as it was at a greater distance from the source of slave labor than the West Indian or Chesapeake colonies. Even so, slaves made up about 3 to 4 percent of the population in 1690 and FROM ATTITUDES

14

Growth and War, 1690-1740

about one out of every nine families owned at least one slave.30 Most of them were held by well-to-do merchants and officials of the community, who employed them as house servants, or by the best-established artisans, who taught them their skills and turned them into mastmakers, bakers, blacksmiths, seamen, shipwrights, and the like. While the roots of slavery slowly penetrated the soil of Boston, they sank faster and deeper into that of New York. Boston's initiation to black slavery had been indirect, coming as a result of the enslavement of Indians; New York's introduction stemmed directly from the extensive early Dutch participation in the international slave trade to West Africa. Dutch New Netherland traded extensively with Dutch Curaçao, a sugar island off the coast of South America that produced a steady stream of "unworkable" slaves who were consequently transported for nonplantation labor to the mainland colony. In the last five years before the English takeover of New Netherland, more than 400 slaves entered its capital city. The English, in capturing New Amsterdam in 1664, were seizing a city whose population was 20 percent black, about four times the incidence of blacks in Virginia and Maryland at this time. 31 The English imported fewer Africans than the Dutch but they made no attempt to phase out slave labor. By 1698, when the first English census was conducted in the city, Negroes represented more than 14 percent of the population. Even more indicative of the extent to which the master-slave relationship was incorporated into the social structure was the number of slaveholding families in the society. In 1698, almost 35 percent of the heads of household owned slaves and five years later the percentage had increased to 41.32 It is not easy to evaluate the impact of this extensive involvement with chattel slavery upon the life of the society, but John Woolman's assessment of the connection between slavery and white personality development, made years later, deserves careful consideration. Slaveholding, wrote the northern Quaker reformer, even by the kindliest of masters, did "deprave the mind in like manner and with as great certainty as prevailing cold congeals water." The absolute authority exercised by the master over his slave established "ideas of things and modes of conduct" that inexorably affected the attitudes of children, neighbors, and friends. 33 Slavery, in short, was far more than a labor system. Beyond that, it was part of an evolving system of racial attitudes and child-rearing practices, and, ultimately, a manner of approaching human labor as something to be imported and exported, bought, bartered, and sold.34 In Philadelphia slavery also found its place from the beginning, although most historical accounts leave the impression that the institution was incidental to the city's development. The spirit of Quaker abolitionism was still half a century away when the earliest settlers gladly received a shipload of African slaves, who arrived only three years after the Delà-

The Web of Seaport Life

15

ware River capital had been established. Quaker settlers, engaged in the difficult work of clearing trees and brush and erecting crude houses, eagerly exhausted most of the specie brought from England to purchase the Africans. Extant inventories of estate indicate that about one of every fifteen families owned slaves in the last decade of the seventeenth century —a rate understandably below that of New York and Boston since Philadelphia was in its infancy and had not yet generated sufficient capital for the importation of large numbers of involuntary servants. 35 Above slaves in the urban social structure were indentured servants. Trading four to seven years of their labor for passage across the Atlantic and sold at dockside to the highest bidder, they were circumscribed so thoroughly by the law that most rights regarded as basic to the English heritage were held in abeyance until their terms of service were up. They formed an important part of the labor force in New York and Philadelphia but not in Boston. Urban indentured servitude was never so debilitating and exploitative as in the early Chesapeake tobacco colonies, where most servants did not survive to breathe the air of freedom they sought and only a few of those who completed their indentures matched legal freedom with freedom from want. 36 Yet it is evident from the considerable number of suicides and the great number of runaways that the life of the servant-immigrant, who was typically between thirteen and twenty years old, was frequently miserable and often unbearable. This was probably less true in the early years of urban settlement because many of the servants were actually nephews, nieces, cousins, and children of friends of emigrating Englishmen, who paid their passage in return for their labor once in America. 37 When John Bezar, a maltster from Wiltshire, England arrived in Pennsylvania in December 1681, for example, he brought along Joseph Cloud, the son of a friend, William Cloud, as an indentured servant. Of a sample of 788 settlers who arrived in Philadelphia between 1682 and 1687, 34 percent of all persons and 49 percent of the adult males were indentured; but a great many of these servants were related by kinship, religious ties, or prior association in small communities of England.38 These associative ties meant life under servitude, at least for the first generation, was laborious but relatively humane and the prospect for advancement after the term of indenture was bright. It would not always be so. Above slaves and indentured servants—bound laborers who occupied a kind of subbasement of society from which ascent into the main house was difficult or impossible—stood apprentices and hired servants. Apprentices were servants too, but they differed from indentured servants in serving in the locale where they were born, usually in a family known to their parents, and contracting out to another familial setting by consent of their parents or guardians. They were rarely bought and sold, as were indentured servants. Especially in Boston the apprentice system

16

Growth and War, 1690-1740

bolstered familial forms by training up the young in the families of friends and acquaintances who were usually coreligionists. In all the port towns the principal purpose of apprenticing was the same as it had been for generations in England—to educate the youth in the "arts and mysteries" of the various crafts, thus providing an adequate pool of skilled labor. 39 Free unskilled laborers occupied the next rank of society. In the preindustrial era they performed the essential raw labor associated with construction and shipping. Along the waterfront, they loaded and unloaded the ships and manned the vessels that provided the lifelines between the seaports of North America and the world beyond. Each of the northern port towns, even in the early stages of development, had hundreds of such laborers. They are perhaps the most elusive social group in early American history because they moved from port to port with far greater frequency than other urban dwellers, shifted occupations, died young, and, as the poorest members of the free white community, least often left behind traces of their lives on the tax lists or in land and probate records. Grouped with them in social status were common laborers who stayed on land. In the port towns, where house, wharf, road, and bridge construction was a major enterprise throughout the colonial years, they were the diggers of basement and wells, the pavers of streets, the cutters and haulers of wood, and the carters of everything that needed moving. It is difficult to assess how large a proportion of the working force they represented, but of the 304 estates inventoried in Boston between 1685 and 1699, they constitute nearly one-fifth of the decedents. 40 Together with apprentices, indentured servants, and slaves, these free laborers probably constituted as much as half the labor force at the end of the seventeenth century. Artisans—known also as "tradesmen," "mechanics," "artificers," and "leather apron men"—filled the wide social space between laborers and an upper-class elite. This is a group so large and diverse that historians have never quite been able to agree on how to define it in occupational or class terms. Most of them were self-employed, proudly so, and they included everyone from silversmiths and hatters to shoemakers, tailors, and mast and sailmakers. Within most of the occupational subdivisions a wide range of wealth and status existed. In part this reflected the age-old hierarchy within each craft, composed of apprentices, journeymen, and master craftsmen. 41 At each step along the way the economic security and material rewards could normally be expected to rise, so that the range of wealth that can be observed in the tax lists for carpenters in Boston or clockmakers in New York reflects to some degree the age of the particular artisan and the acquisition of skills associated with his work. Age was by no means the only or even the most important factor, however. Stephen Coleman, a Philadelphia glover, died in 1699 with an

The Web of Seaport Life

17

estate valued at £ 5 8 0 , including two houses, while John Simons, also a glover of about the same age, died in the same year with an estate of only JC51. In 1691 Thomas Smith, a Boston carpenter, left possessions worth £ 8 3 9 , including four indentured servants and a house valued at £ 3 1 2 . Seven years later, Richard Crisp, another carpenter, had personal possessions valued at only £72 and no real estate to leave his heirs. 42 Craft skill, business acumen, health, luck, and choice of marriage partner were all parts of the formula by which some prospered and others did not. The opportunities of the late seventeenth-century urban artisan varied considerably within crafts but no more so than variations between occupational groups. A hierarchy of trades existed in all of the towns—after the Revolution this was sometimes symbolized by the marching order of the various crafts at public celebrations—and to some degree the success of individual mechanics can be predicted by the trade they followed. Everyone knew that artisans working with precious metals got ahead faster than those who worked at the cobbler's bench and that house carpenters were far more likely to become property owners than tailors and stocking weavers. 43 Nonetheless, young men chose their careers far more with reference to that of their fathers—or their uncles, older brothers, or cousins—than to a rational calculation of future material rewards. Nathaniel Adams, a Boston blockmaker since the 1650s, died in the town in 1690 but passed his skills along to his son Joseph, also a blockmaker. Joseph's son John continued the family tradition as did his son Nathaniel, who was supplying ships with maritime pulleys on the eve of the American Revolution. Along the Philadelphia waterfront the name Penrose meant shipbuilding, for four generations of the family had plied the shipwright's craft before the Revolution. Such intergenerational artisan continuity was one more proof that urban dwellers who worked with their hands retained part of the traditional mentality which held that a decent subsistence or a slow inching forward was more the norm than the rapid aggrandizement of wealth. 44 Standing at the top of the urban pyramid were two groups, one distinguished by its high social status and the other by its wealth. The first of these was composed of the professionals—government officials, doctors, clergymen, schoolteachers, and, eventually, lawyers. Often they were rewarded more by the community's respect than by material benefits. Boston, for example, paid its public school teachers only about £25 sterling per year in the 1690s and forty years later New York had only £30 sterling to spare for a teacher's wages. 45 The congregation of Old South Church allowed its pastors, Benjamin Colman and Thomas Prince, only £73 sterling annually in 1725. Professional men sometimes did better but mostly when they drew upon social prestige to arrange a propitious marriage. 46 But nobody denied that these educated men performed vital functions in the community, and the fact that their wealth rarely ap-

18

Growth and War, 1690-1740

proximated their prestige serves as a reminder that parallel hierarchies of wealth, power, and prestige existed and did not precisely overlap. Held in lower regard but dominating economic life were the seaport merchants, and, to a lesser degree, the shopkeepers, who often aspired to merchant status. These were the urban dwellers who controlled the lifelines between the seaports and the hinterland and between the ports and the outside world. Without these importers and exporters, wholesalers and retailers, builders of ships, wharves, and warehouses there could have been no commercial centers. It should come as no surprise that those who controlled mercantile endeavors quickly gained a disproportionate share of economic leverage in the urban centers of colonial life, not only in dominating the flow of marketable goods but also in their control of shipbuilding, credit facilities, and urban real estate. Political power to match their economic influence was established early in all the northern ports; how this power was used would become one of the most enduring issues of the eighteenth century. 47 The differing opportunities and abilities of men to manipulate their economic environment and to operate within the urban occupational hierarchy were eventually inscribed on the tax lists of the community, which measured each person's wealth alongside that of his or her neighbors, and in inventories of estate, which set a value on each item of a decedent's personal estate, from the clothes in the wardrobe to the tools in the shop to the implements in the kitchen and furniture in the bedroom. Tax records must be used with caution because what was taxed in one city was not necessarily taxed in another, because some adult males were not included in the tax rolls, and because the lists were based on a regressive tax system that grossly underestimated the wealth of some, particularly those at the top of the social pyramid. Inventories of estate also have shortcomings because they were made or survive for less than 50 percent of the deceased heads of household in Boston, for a still smaller proportion of Philadelphians, and for only a statistically irrelevant number of New Yorkers. Also, it is widely suspected by historians that the estates of the wealthier members of society were inventoried more frequently than those of their poorer neighbors. In spite of these difficulties, tax lists and inventories are a generally reliable index to wealth distribution in the seaport towns and if the distortions inherent in them remained constant, they can be used to measure long-term secular change. 48 We gain confidence in the picture that these data present because of the general congruence between wealth profiles revealed by the tax lists on the one hand and the inventories of estate on the other. One of the most obvious conclusions to be drawn from these data is that the division of wealth in the three cities, despite marked differences

The Web of Seaport

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19

in their age, religious, and ethnic composition, differed only slightly at the end of the seventeenth century. Boston in 1687 and New York in 1695 were more than half a century old and had reached populations of nearly 6,000 and 4,700 respectively. Philadelphia had existed for only a decade and contained about 2,100 inhabitants. But wealth within the three communities was similarly distributed. In each of the towns the bottom 30 percent of wealthholders had only a slight hold on the community's resources, possessing about 3 percent of the total assets. On the tax lists, these were the men at the beginning of their careers, who had accumulated only meager taxable assets, and the older members of the town, such as seamen and laborers, whose wages were never sufficient to permit more than the necessities of life. In the inventories, these bottom layers of society included all persons, regardless of age or occupation, who at death possessed personal wealth from £ 2 to £ 7 0 sterling in Boston and £5 to £79 in Philadelphia.49 Some of them truly lived in penury, such as Boston mariners Robert Oliver and Henry Johnson, who died in the 1690s with the clothes on their backs, a sea chest, a Bible, and a few nautical instruments.50 But most maintained a rudimentary existence, renting a small, sparsely furnished house, and owning the tools of their trade and a few household possessions. About one in twenty had scraped together enough money to purchase real estate, usually a small lot with a rude wooden structure on it. Counted among them were a large number of merchant seamen and laborers, but there were also many widows and a scattering of carpenters, cordwainers, coopers, tailors, and joiners, as well as an occasional shopkeeper or merchant whose luck or business acumen had failed him. The second tier of society, made up of the fourth, fifth, and sixth least wealthy deciles, contained a broad spectrum of artisans, smaller numbers of mariners who had prospered modestly, merchant-shopkeepers who had not, and the inevitable widows. At death this middle range of persons left behind personal possessions worth between £72 and ¥

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