Down and Out in Early America
by Billy G. Smith
Chapter
One: Poverty and Politics in Early American History
by Gary B. Nash
The contrast of affluence and wretchedness continually meeting and offending the eye, is like dead and living bodies chained together. —Thomas Paine, Agrarian Justice (1797)
Every society needs its myths, and the great myth of early American history is that scarce labor in a land-rich environment eliminated poverty. Poverty has not been a popular word in this country. It is offensive to the notion of a people of plenty, an insult to the bounteous natural resources of North America, a puzzlement to those who believe in the untrammeled equality of opportunity that provided a chance for everyone to succeed, and an embarrassment to those who trumpet American classlessness and exceptionalism. In her survey of history schoolbooks used in the twentieth century, Frances FitzGerald found that silence on the topic of poverty was general until the 1960s, when textbook writers began to discuss it gingerly as a problem first occurring during post–Civil War industrialization, then reappearing in the Great Depression, and once more raising its ugly head in the 1960s. The textbooks she consulted regarded poverty in the post–World War II era as “a disease, something like cancer. Its cause is unknown, its cure is hotly debated, and yet somewhere—somewhere in the regions yet unprobed by science—there is a vaccine against it.” Thoroughly depoliticized in these treatments, poverty has little to do with the interests of the rich and nothing to do with capitalism, coerced labor, industrialization, or urbanization. Nor does it have much to do with gender, war, or social stratification.1 Considering the rise of poverty rates in the United States over the last three decades (accompanied by a huge increase in income inequality that makes the United States now the leader in income inequality among advanced nations), a deeper understanding of poverty in early America may be useful in thinking about a problem that has always challenged our cherished notion of a shared citizenship.2
Defining and Measuring Poverty
Historians of early American life have known for a long time that poverty predated the advent of smokestack America, although the research on this topic was very sketchy before the late 1960s.3 As early as the 1920s, social welfare historians disclosed colonial poverty as a social problem by studying statute books and local officials who managed the poor in the first almshouses and workhouses. Somewhat later, in his three studies of colonial urban life published between 1938 and 1955, Carl Bridenbaugh pointed to the emergence of poverty in the colonial cities as a major concern, though he characterized elite responses to impoverishment as the work of kindhearted urbanites creating an “age of benevolence.”4 Working almost entirely with nonquantifiable sources, these historians established that poverty was a growing problem in the eighteenth century, but they were unable to make more than general statements about the extent, nature, or causes of impoverishment or about its connection to economic development and its effects on politics. None of these studies had the slightest effect on colonial American textbooks.5 Often beguiled by colonial promotional literature and personal reflections such as Benjamin Franklin’s—“I thought often of the happiness of New England where every man is a freeholder, has a vote in public affairs, lives in a tidy, warm house, has plenty of good food and fewel with whole cloaths from head to foot, the manufacture perhaps of his own family.”—historians in the main portrayed a rising people in an abundant land where “the colonies had no beggars, no poor, not even a genuine lower class.”6
Contributing to the rise of social history in the 1960s, and influenced by the war on poverty conducted by Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, historians began to search intensively for evidence about how early American society was structured and how “the other half lived.”7 Jackson Turner Main’s The Social Structure of Revolutionary America (1965), a pioneering study of social stratification and social mobility, reached the shocking conclusion that, even discounting slaves, as much as one-third of the population in the northern colonies and states in the revolutionary era was impoverished.8
Other historians excavated hitherto unused, or slightly used, sources that provided quantifiable data demonstrating that large pockets of poverty developed in most eighteenth-century communities: tax lists provided social profiles of large and small communities from top to bottom and sometimes detailed the stripping of householders from the tax collectors’ lists because of poverty; probate inventories particularized the spareness of life at the bottom, in effect peering through a narrow door into the shabby dwellings of the poor; court documents cast narrow shafts of light on vagrants, criminals, and the strolling poor; registers of churches and benevolent societies gave partial views of private charity; and administrative records of overseers of the poor and almshouse managers indicated what managers of the poor thought and intended and occasionally what the poor themselves had to say. From all these data, the extent of poverty began to take shape.9 By the late 1980s, poverty studies established eight major points indicating that if colonial America was “the best poor man’s country” it was still a poor man’s country for many of its citizens.10
First, the rate of indigence, as measured by increases in the poor tax and by the number of poor receiving public assistance, either in the form of outrelief payments or admission to workhouses and almshouses, rose in the eighteenth century as communities grew in size and some of the social and economic fluidity of the seventeenth century dried up. For example, in New York City, where members of the colony’s assembly could state firmly in 1699 that “there is no such thing as a beggar in this town or country,” the city teemed with paupers and vagrants by the eve of the American Revolution.11 Other communities, small as well as large, experienced growing poverty rates by the mid-eighteenth century. Boston confronted poverty earlier, more continuously, and with the most severity of any eighteenth-century seaport.12
Second, the age-old victims of impoverishment—widows, foundlings and orphans, the sick, aged, and disabled—were joined increasingly by ablebodied men and women. This became evident in small and large communities, North and South, by the mid-eighteenth century. Although the poor were concentrated in the largest cities, which were points of entry for often destitute immigrants and were magnets attracting the transient, able-bodied rural poor in search of jobs, the destitute were also becoming increasingly common in inland towns. Some historians have argued that the able-bodied poor suffered only age inequality—a condition where young adults began poor but escaped poverty as they grew older.13 It is possible that this was true in rural areas, but the only careful study of the relation between age and wealth in a seaport city—Philadelphia—demonstrates that social age accounted for little of the variation in tax assessments on the eve of the American Revolution and that those born into the bottom of society were highly unlikely to make Horatio Alger ascents to gentrified lives.14
Third, informal poor relief by family members, friends, and churchcentered private charity also grew in the eighteenth century. Most of the “respectable poor” favored private rather than public relief. Historians have not been able to examine this group systematically since records for many churches are not extant and aid from family and friends is nearly impossible to trace. Fragmentary records indicate, however, that private aid and church charity could no longer sustain all of the “deserving poor” in the major cities during cyclical downturns in the 1720s and 1730s and were all the more incapable by the 1750s and 1760s of coping with the large influxes of immigrants and the growing number of unemployed. One historian concludes that “the level of poverty in all urban centers greatly exceeded the estimates derived from the records of public assistance” because they do not take account of the impoverished who relied on churches and charitable organizations, on family and friends.15
Fourth, the “strolling poor,” hitherto nearly invisible to historians, multiplied rapidly in the eighteenth century, both in eastern and frontier towns.16 For example, in Boston the number of transients warned out increased tenfold between the 1720s and 1750s.17 This influx of poor people created pressure on town magistrates to strengthen and enforce more rigorously the residency laws that cut poor relief off from transients who took to the road in search of a job, a meal, or blind luck. By the eve of the American Revolution, warning out the transient poor became as important in the work of poor relief officials as administering to the resident poor in such towns as Boston, Providence, New York, and Philadelphia.
Fifth, responding to the increase in poor relief expenditures, which necessitated heavier tax rates, all major cities built large new workhouses and almshouses in the third quarter of the eighteenth century and constructed still larger ones in the first several decades of the new nation. Utilizing the more complete records of public assistance that have survived for the revolutionary and postrevolutionary cities, historians have shown that the ranks of the institutionalized poor were filled mostly with the sick, disabled, intemperate, and desperate urban dwellers, who, unlike the “worthy” poor, had no other options than to enter the almshouses where strict regimens were imposed.18 In a transitional period where management of the poor was moving from outrelief to institutionalizing the poor (which was the norm by the 1820s), poor relief in most towns and cities involved a patchwork system of charity involving intermittent withdrawal of outrelief amid a growing reliance on committing the poor to highly disciplined institutions.
Sixth, more than hitherto realized, many children of the poor in most cities and smaller towns were apprenticed out or indentured by impoverished parents or were taken by magistrates from parents for indenturing, either by private arrangement or public auction. In New England, the children of the poor may have been the main source of labor from outside the family. And, as John Murray’s essay in this volume argues, offspring of the poor also served an important labor function in Charleston. Everywhere in the North and upper South, the gradual emancipation of slaves during and after the Revolution put the children of free blacks at risk of growing up as servants in white middle- and upper-class families rather than in their families of nativity.19 Seventh, throughout the eighteenth century, poverty was particularly a feminine phenomenon, not only because women’s role as childbearers and nurturers placed differential responsibilities on them but also because law and custom hindered the economic advancement of single, abandoned, or widowed women. Moreover, in the light of this, poor relief practices had a gendered dimension.20 Recent studies, including the essays in this volume by Karin Wulf, Monique Bourque, and Ruth Herndon, have pointed to the disproportionate number of women (and their children) who were the recipients of outdoor relief or were institutionalized in urban almshouses. Particularly in New England, but also in Charleston, South Carolina, war widowhood strained poor relief resources from the late seventeenth century to the American Revolution. The “economic viability of women—shaky enough to begin with—declined” over the eighteenth century, leaving women in particular phases of their life cycle (abandoned or widowed with small children) vulnerable to destitution because their “half-wages” in low paying work were usually insufficient to sustain even a small family.21 The early American widow, it turns out, was not necessarily an old woman; in fact, she was typically a young woman—most often an immigrant in her thirties whose ability to scrape out a living had been compromised by sickness at some point after her husband’s death. Recent studies also show that the economic development of the new nation widened the inequalities between men and women. At the same time, the move in the major cities to end outrelief was particularly devastating to women because it drove them from the shelter among friends or family that outrelief payments permitted.22 Eighth, far more than once believed, impoverished tenancy existed throughout the colonies and early states, and lifelong landlessness expanded markedly in the eighteenth century. To point to these deep pockets of poverty—as does the essay in this book by Thomas Humphrey—is not to deny the success of a majority of free white male farmers to acquire land and achieve a decent standard of living, one that for many increased in the eighteenth century. It is only to indicate that sizable numbers were not included in gains that were widely made and that the proportion who could not acquire land was increasing.
It is possible that rural tenancy was more pervasive in the South, where slavery was deeply rooted by the 1720s, than in the Middle Colonies where coerced bondage was more an urban than rural institution. This seeming paradox cannot be resolved until comparative studies between, for example, Maryland and New Jersey or South Carolina and New York are made. But lacking such comparisons, it is clear that tenancy held large numbers of farmers in poverty’s grip. For example, the most thorough study of tenancy, in Maryland, describes tenants’ dwellings as “little better than hovels” and points to Chastellux’s postrevolutionary description of “the miserable huts inhabited by whites whose wane looks and ragged garments bespeak poverty.”23 Representing nearly half of the white householders in the older counties of Maryland on the eve of the Revolution, very few of these tenants were able to acquire land of their own, even after proprietary manors were put up for sale in the revolutionary era because they were unable to accumulate enough capital from small-scale agricultural tenantry to purchase a freehold.
Similar conditions prevailed in North Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey.24 Even in New England, where the usual picture portrayed is of nearly universal freehold land tenure that minimized inequality and dampened social tensions, social historians have found land tenancy prevalent in some towns where it divided communities “between rich and poor, creditors and debtors, landlords and tenants.”25 Especially on the Maine frontier (but also on the frontiers of New York and Pennsylvania), as Alan Taylor has shown, impoverishment, the fear of falling into poverty, and the feeling that the chance to acquire land was disappearing fueled tension that often burst into rampage and riot for several decades after the American Revolution.26 In studying the eight aspects of poverty and poor relief outlined above, historians have relied mostly on the public records relating to poor relief and taxation and the private records of churches and philanthropic societies. But recently, as many of the essays in this book demonstrate, only by expanding the definition of poverty from a condition requiring public relief and private charity to a condition of living impoverished without such relief can an appreciation be gained of how life was experienced in early America. This broader consideration of living poor as against requiring poor relief compels attention to how unfree labor was integral to the functioning of the early American economy and how the emerging market economy was not a neutral mechanism for sorting out work lives and life experiences but rather a force that introduced new levels of insecurity, as well as new opportunities, for working people.
For most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries about two-thirds of all white immigrants arrived as indentured servants, and a large fraction of them died before gaining their freedom. Adding enslaved Africans (nearly three of every four persons crossing the Atlantic), we can estimate that more than at least 90 percent of all people disembarking in North America arrived impoverished, and a large majority of them continued in penury for most of their lives. Nobody has argued that indentured servants and slaves were anything but poor and ruthlessly exploited, as Philip Morgan rehearses in his essay in this book, but most depictions of early America as a garden of opportunity airbrush indentured servants and slaves out of the picture while focusing on the minority of those who arrived free.27 At all times constituting about one-quarter to one-third of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century population, bound laborers occupied a capacious cellar in the social system and cannot sensibly be left out of any cross-national comparisons of poverty. In fact, escaping England’s dismal poverty of the early seventeenth century depended largely on keeping large fractions of colonial laboring people deprived of the fruits of their own labor. “The free sector of society could never have achieved its way of life without the support of the unfree,” writes an English historian of the colonial American experience. “To appreciate the force of this point it should only be necessary to consider the possibilities that would have been open to white ambitions if black labour had been unavailable. In all probability a much more massive unfree or limited service labour force would have been drafted into the plantation colonies from the ranks of white convicts and other social outcasts—in which case the planters’ privileges would unmistakably have rested on the labour of landless workers with small hope of advancement for themselves or their children.”28 In short, if most free immigrants escaped grinding poverty, and if most of them achieved a “decent competency,” one of the reasons was that they were able to benefit from the oppression of the unfree. The avid appetite for escaping poverty in England, Ireland, Scotland, and Germany had its corollary in “a voracious demand for bonded laborers throughout the colonial period.”29
Since the 1920s, historians have studied indentured servants and argued vigorously about where they came from, their social characteristics in their homelands, how much choice they had in choosing a colony in which to serve on the western side of the Atlantic, how many survived servitude, and how well the survivors fared.30 This is a pregnant topic because the fate of the indentured servant, beginning on the bottom rung on the ladder, can be seen as the perfect test of early America’s capacity for rescuing people from poverty and launching them into at least a secure material life. Some early studies, based on impressionistic evidence rather than careful studies of exservants, gave a picture of general success among the indentured once they gained their freedom. But Abbot Smith’s first quantitative measurements of this topic yielded the conclusion that out of every ten indentured servants, only one attained a position as a farmer in comfortable circumstances and one more achieved the status of artisan. The other eight died before they obtained their freedom or became propertyless day laborers, vagrants, or denizens of the local almshouse after completing their indentures.31
Careful studies in recent years confirm Smith’s findings about the life chances of freed servants. Although they enjoyed a better chance in the early decades of a colony’s development—in Maryland until the 1660s and in Pennsylvania until the 1740s, for example—their chances for acquiring property, or avoiding poverty, worsened as the early fluidity of society disappeared.32 A study of indentured servitude in Pennsylvania, one of the largest importers of servants in the eighteenth century, argues that “the most salient feature of the post-servitude lives of eighteenth-century indentured laborers was their obscurity.” This mirrors the data on Maryland that servants arriving in the late colonial period had more difficulty finding an economic foothold after serving their terms than had earlier servants. Almost three-quarters of late arriving servants in Pennsylvania ended up on the public dole at some point in their life, and only a handful ever became property holders.33 One reason why the plight of the indentured servant worsened in the eighteenth century is that a sizable portion of them arrived as convicts. Nearly 45,000 felons were sentenced to transportation to the American colonies between 1718 and 1775, most of them reaching Maryland and Virginia. This represented more than 20 percent of all British immigrants arriving in North America in this era. Desperately poor on arrival, purchased to serve longer terms than ordinary indentured servants, half of them arriving without skills, and most of them ruthlessly exploited as owners thought appropriate in dealing with England’s “offensive rubbish,” only a few who survived their term of service escaped poverty.34
Although textbooks still feature the rare servant who published an account of success after servitude or the handful of servants who prospered and achieved fame—for example, revolutionary leaders such as Daniel Dulany in Maryland, Charles Thomson in Pennsylvania, and John Lamb in New York—the statistical probability for rising even to the middle class was very slight.35 Among the mass of those who sought opportunity in the British American colonies, it is the story of relentless labor and ultimate failure that stands out. The chief beneficiaries of the system of bound white labor were not the laborers themselves but those for whom they toiled.
In thinking more broadly about the definition of poverty, historians have focused in recent decades on how closely the poor who accepted aid were connected to the laboring people in general. Mesmerized by the concept of upward mobility in the United States, historians have only lately contemplated the extent of downward mobility in particular eras and places. But in early America, most laboring people were poor at some time in their life, and large numbers fell from “a decent competency” to destitution. It took no more—in an age with no Medicare, Social Security, unemployment benefits, or workmen’s disability compensation—than a fire, hurricane, severe winter, serious work accident, disease, or drought to emphasize the reality that a hard-earned climb from poverty was no guarantee of escaping its clutches for more than a short time. That they were once poor and that they were haunted by the ghost of poverty makes laboring people in many ways indistinguishable from the officially poor who accepted either private or public aid.
Explaining Poverty’s Causes
Specifying the causes of poverty in a land presumed to be filled with opportunity is not difficult so long as historians are scrutinizing the lives of the helpless and hapless. Every society has its halt and lame, its genetically and emotionally impaired, its aged, widowed, and orphaned. But historians have had more difficulty in deciphering how large numbers of able-bodied men and women fell into poverty or were unable to climb out of it. Obstructing clear thinking on this is the hoary notion that labor was North America’s greatest scarcity and therefore that every able-bodied person could find available work—anywhere, anytime of the year, and unchangingly so at least through the first two centuries of European settlement. No doubt, there was a general scarcity of labor in the land- and resource-rich colonies, and this is one of the reasons why a vigorous demand for slave and indentured labor endured. But the steady availability of work at life-sustaining levels of pay over two centuries, during which the nature of work and the organization of labor underwent important transformations, is a myth.
Five main reasons, all of them inconvenient for a picture of an opportunityfilled environment, explain the poverty of the able-bodied: recurrent wars; economic fluctuations beyond the ability of colonists to control; personal crises related to sickness, death, and environmental disasters; the difficulty of many, even in good times, to move beyond a hardscrabble living in both undeveloped frontier regions and developed urban centers; and, after the American Revolution, the transition to commercialized agriculture and early industrialization.
The connection between war and poverty has not been sufficiently studied. The extent to which Indian wars impoverished communities is still unclear, but male casualty rates far greater than in modern wars, as in the case of the Pequot and King Philip’s wars in New England in 1637 and 1675–76 and the 1622 and 1715 Indian wars in Virginia and South Carolina, respectively, unquestionably produced large numbers of widows, orphans, and incapacitated men, many of whom became public burdens. The eighteenth- century wars against the French and Spanish also left large numbers of widows and orphans while at the same time pumping considerable money into the colonial economies, though with differential effects and sometimes with deranging repercussions. Boston stands as a prime example of a warravaged economy that inflated the ranks of the poor. Massachusetts’s successive assaults on French Canada left the economy of Boston crippled, its churches filled with impoverished widows and orphans, and its currency shattered by inflation. By mid-eighteenth century, Boston suffered population stagnation, a sharp decline in the number of rateable polls (householders worth ten shillings sterling), an alarming rise in almshouse admissions, and a sizable appetite for what might be called “economic cleansing”—the warning out of a flood of uprooted men, women, and children from outlying towns seeking employment in the region’s major city.36 Town officials in 1755, citing public aid for about one thousand residents, cried out that poor relief in Boston was double that of any town of similar size “upon the face of the whole Earth.”37 By the eve of the Revolution, as much as a third of Boston’s householders were in the grip of indigence, much of it created by a series of wars in North America against the French.
If war disfigured Boston’s society, a fluctuating economy, even in a period of generally lusty growth, produced frightening levels of poverty in Philadelphia, the capital city of pacifism. Although a house-building binge in the third quarter of the eighteenth century testified to the success of the city’s upper echelon in accumulating wealth, thousands of other Philadelphians ate bitter bread. For example, in the severe winter of 1760–61, it took the invention of a wood stamp system (where the desperate received stamps entitling them to free wood from local wood sellers) to keep a sizable fraction of the city’s population from freezing to death. This showed how close to the line the bottom quarter of urban populations lived. Even in kinder weather, a sharp downturn in the economy in 1761, when British troops and naval flotillas withdrew after defeating the French in the Seven Years’ War, drove hundreds of families beneath the subsistence line. If this was not permanent poverty, it was a gnawing economic marginality among those who had little cushion against even brief unemployment. For them, wood was often beyond their meager earnings, especially when unemployment afflicted them for many weeks of the year and their diets and health suffered for lack of proper sustenance. “For want of Employment, many of the laboring poor, especially in Winter, are reduced to great Straits and rendered burthensome to their Neighbours,” argued promoters of a Philadelphia linen manufactory in 1764. Two years later, the city’s grand jury argued on behalf of a large workhouse because many “labouring People & others in low Circumstances,” who were “willing to work,” could not find employment. In the difficult winter of 1770–71, lack of employment again led to the laboring poor “begging bread.”38 Other proponents of manufacturing after the American Revolution took up the same refrain, arguing that hundreds of the “starving poor” who were willing to work should be provided with “suitable objects about which they can be engaged.”39 In another difficult winter, in 1790–91, a newspaper correspondent reported that he found “many willing to work, but destitute and starving for want of employ.”40 The legions of merchant seamen and laborers, shoemakers, and tailors—the lesser skilled artisans and workers— who “often eked out a precarious existence during the second half of the [eighteenth] century” in Philadelphia were matched in nearly every other urban center.41
Still another cause of poverty, even in good times, were fires, severe winters, hurricanes, and epidemic diseases that especially smote densely populated seaport cities. Nine fires between 1653 and 1759 wiped out scores of families in Boston. The most terrible fire that Bostonians had ever experienced occurred in March 1760, tearing through the North End and burning to the ground the homes of about two hundred families, “three quarters of whom,” reported a town official, “are by this misfortune rendered incapable of subsisting themselves, and a great number of them are reduced to extreme poverty and require immediate relief.”42 Such conflagrations did not, of course, single out the poor, but they did tend to spread in the most densely settled parts of town and they wreaked the greatest havoc among those with no cushion of safety who in the best of times struggled to eke out a living. For middle-class urbanites, fire could wipe out assets carefully built over many years and plunge them suddenly into near-poverty. Hurricanes could be even more devastating, such as the one that brought terrible misery to laboring people in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1728.
Along with fire came raging diseases that increased medical expenses and burial fees while reducing employment. Nine “general” smallpox epidemics alone ravaged Boston between 1649 and 1730, and another wave of smallpox swept through North America during the American Revolution. Philadelphia and New York were repeatedly assaulted by yellow fever in the 1790s. As much as a staggering 20 percent of the population that remained at risk by not fleeing the city succumbed in a single year, putting today’s urban AIDS epidemics in perspective. In addition, thousands of others in the feverish cities lost wages for many weeks when the mosquito-borne fever shut down all employment.43 Such urban catastrophes, producing “universal terror” and “a total dissolution of the bonds of society in the nearest and dearest connexions,” as a contemporary account of Philadelphia in 1793 expressed it, left economic as well as emotional scars from which family members of the dead could not easily recover.44 Bitter winters also produced mass misery—and the misery increased as the deforestation of adjacent areas drove up the price of the firewood that was essential to survive a prolonged freeze.45
Personal crises likewise sent large numbers of people reeling into destitution. As Simon Newman’s analysis in this volume notes, in an age before OSHA, work-related accidents were common and frequently maimed mariners, construction workers, and others. The parade of laboring people through Philadelphia’s Hospital for the Sick Poor testifies to the frequency of on-the-job accidents that halted wage earners in their tracks. Without workmen’s compensation, the family of a permanently injured breadwinner could rarely recover its economic security. For women, abandonment was particularly a personal crisis—both emotional and economic. Deprived of her husband’s wages, the woman of an absconding husband was faced with living on what her own labor commanded—typically about half the male rate of pay for waged work. In addition, the abandoned woman did not control the property of her departed husband because desertion did not legally end a marriage.46
War, economic downturns, and personal crises account for much of the poverty in specific locales in certain years. But often they were only contributing factors to a problem whose roots lay more fundamentally in an economy that kept large numbers of rural freemen and even more urban workers teetering on the knife edge of poverty. As early as the 1740s, the Swedish visitor Peter Kalm observed a class of people in New York City (when the economy was healthy) “who lived all year long upon nothing but oysters and a little bread.”47 In Philadelphia in the early 1770s, when a building boom was in progress, tax assessors excused nearly five hundred able-bodied residents from even the smallest tax and extracted nothing from nearly one thousand mariners.48 Examples can be multiplied. But wherever historians have studied individual cities carefully, they have found that those who lived in or on the edge of poverty probably “comprised at least one third and probably closer to one half of the residents of America’s metropolitan centers.”49
Likewise, whenever historians have examined groups known to be on the bottom of the occupational hierarchy—female domestic laborers and field hands, lumbermen, fort and road builders, shoemakers, tailors, dockworkers, laborers, fishermen, and mariners—they tell us of how typical rather than unusual was the experience of living poor.50 If additional studies of smaller cities and rural areas confirm these estimates, then historians of early America will be obliged to speak of how “the other half lives” just as surely as historians use this term from Jacob Riis to describe industrial America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.51
A large majority of settlers lived in the countryside, not in the cities. But life on the frontier, where people had little capital, limited access to markets, often marginal land, and frequently poor health, was no Turnerian paradise. Charles Woodmason’s portrayal of the Carolina backcountry beggars description. While scandalized by “revelling, drinking, singing, dancing, and whoring,” he was shocked at the poverty that has plagued the region to the present day.52 Half a century later on the Maine frontier, one well-situated landowner described the settlers “as destitute of food and raiment as the Vagabonds of Africa” and believed that “a few families excepted, were all their goods thrown out into the streets many men would not think it worth their while to gather them up.” The very sober Reverend William Bentley of Salem, Massachusetts, described the Maine backcountry in 1787 as “inhabited by poor people, whose cottages could not be exceeded in miserable appearance by any of the most miserable in Europe.”53 To be sure, these were frontier areas, always scenes of painfully pinched existence at least in early years; but even in the most fertile and commercially connected regions, such as Philadelphia’s hinterland, the trend in the late eighteenth century was toward increasing landlessness, accelerating transiency, and growing rates of poverty.54
In the revolutionary era, processes of economic change, partly shaped by technological developments, ratcheted up the incidence of impoverishment while at the same time generating wealth that benefited merchants, speculators, rentiers, manufacturers, and many master craftsmen. The “consumer revolution,” which has claimed the attention of many historians, was real, as was the rise in the standard of living for broad swaths of the American population. 55 Inventories of wealth reveal that the ability to purchase many consumer goods beyond the wherewithal of earlier colonists was enjoyed by at least the top half of free white society. And nutritional advantages for colonists over their English cousins translated into several inches of superior height.56 But aggregate analysis of consumerism and nutrition mask what happened in the bottom third to half of colonial society because the household goods of people in these ranks were rarely inventoried. Moreover, for some parts of North America increase in stature was mostly a seventeenth-century phenomenon, flagging thereafter, and in some rural areas, middling and poorer farmers invested less in consumer durables in the late colonial period than earlier.57 Whatever further research may reveal on these questions, it seems clear that the American Revolution at least temporarily devastated the American economy and that commercialization and industrialization, especially in the fast-growing eastern cities, were engines for creating wealth and poverty simultaneously.58 In her essay in this book, Susan Klepp has analyzed infant mortality in Philadelphia to show that the increasing maldistribution of wealth and worsening health conditions in a burgeoning city undergoing commercial expansion and the early stages of industrialization produced infant mortality rates as high as in England. Her data on increasing infant mortality in the lower tiers of urban society stand as a kind of surrogate for “an economic crisis for the poor that begins in the 1780s.”59 Other studies indicate that by the 1820s and 1830s, average heights were falling in the United States at large—the result of “the maldistribution of wealth and dietary constraints in the early stages of industrialization.”60
Although much work still needs to be done, it is apparent that the intensity of economic cycles that caused periodic impoverishment for hefty fractions of urban populations escalated in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Mass misery in urban populations, with as much as onequarter to one-third of able-bodied workers lacking employment, would not arrive until the depression of 1816 to 1822. But even before that, the gradual spread of wage labor placed a growing proportion of artisans and workers at the mercy of economic fluctuations. “Periodic destitution,” as one historian put it, “was one structural result of the great social and economic transformations in American life” that began by the mid-eighteenth century and heightened greatly in the early nineteenth century.61 A close examination of late eighteenth-century Philadelphia concludes that the “widespread use of wage labor ushered in a period of intense job insecurity that widened the distance between masters and workers,” led to high job turnover and mounting artisan transiency, and consigned the lower tier of workers to intermittent and often incessant poverty.62 Without owning one’s labor, one courted poverty and chronic insecurity. In sum, research in recent decades indicates that what Henry George described in 1879—that whenever the highest degree of “material progress” has been realized “we find the deepest poverty”—existed before the industrial revolution.63
1. Frances FitzGerald, America Revised: History Schoolbooks in the Twentieth Century (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), 110–13. Among reasons to be placed on the Daughters of the American Revolution’s 1959 list of subversive textbooks were pictures of American slums and lines of unemployed citizens during the Great Depression. See Jack Nelson and Gene Roberts Jr., The Censors and the Schools (Boston: Little, Brown, 1963), chap. 1.
2. For contemporary poverty and secular trends, see Sheldon H. Danziger, Gary D. Sandefur, and Daniel H. Weinberg, Confronting Poverty: Prescriptions for Change (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994).
3. In 1956, Robert Bremner produced a major work on poverty in the United States but dates the advent of a poor relief problem to about 1830. See From the Depths: The Discovery of Poverty in the United States (New York: New York University Press, 1956).
4. For example, Robert W. Kelso, A History of Public Poor Relief in Massachusetts, 1620–1920 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1922); Marcus Wilson Jernegan, “The Development of Poor Relief in Colonial Virginia,” Social Service Review 3 (1929): 1–18; Jernegan, “The Development of Poor Relief in Colonial New England,” ibid. 5 (1931): 175–98; David M. Schneider, The History of Public Welfare in New York, 1609–1866, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938–41); Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness: Urban Life in America, 1625–1742 (New York: Ronald Press, 1938); Rebels and Gentlemen: Philadelphia in the Age of Franklin (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1942); Cities in Revolt: Urban Life in America, 1743–1776 (New York: Capricorn Books, 1955).
5. “Poverty” is not an entry in the indexes of any of the colonial history textbooks published from the 1930s to 1970s. The most widely used books were: Oscar T. Barck Jr. and Hugh T. Lefler, Colonial America, 2d ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1968); Max Savelle and Darold D. Wax, A History of Colonial America, 3d ed. (Hinsdale, Ill.: Dryden Press, 1973); Oliver Chitwood, A History of Colonial America, 3d ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1961); and David Hawke, The Colonial Experience (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966).
6. Franklin to Joshua Babcock, January 13, 1772, in Albert Henry Smyth, ed., The Writings of Benjamin Franklin (New York, 1907), 5:362–63. The quote at the end of the sentence is from Raymond A. Mohl, “Poverty in Early America, A Reappraisal: The Case of Eighteenth-Century New York City,” New York History 50 (1969): 5.
7. Michael Harrington’s The Other America: Poverty in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1962) indirectly influenced studies of early American poverty by showing how the commonly used label for post–World War II United States, “the age of affluence,” masked the extensive poverty and hunger that still held 40–50 million Americans in its grip. Harrington’s argument that the poor had always been present but had only disappeared from view is applicable to the historiography of early America.
8. Main, The Social Structure of Revolutionary America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), 41. James A. Henretta, “Economic Development and Social Structure in Colonial Boston,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 22 (1965): 75–92; and Allan Kulikoff, “The Progress of Inequality in Revolutionary Boston,” ibid., 28 (1971): 378–403, provided more precise analyses of Boston’s changing social structure in the eighteenth century. I examined poverty and poor relief in colonial Philadelphia in “Poverty and Poor Relief in Pre-Revolutionary Philadelphia,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 33 (1976): 3–30; and “Up From the Bottom in Franklin’s Philadelphia,” Past and Present 77 (1977): 57–83.
9. Raymond A. Mohl, “Poverty in Early America, A Reappraisal: The Case of Eighteenth- Century New York City,” New York History 50 (1969): 5–27.
10. The much-quoted phrase “best poor man’s country” was first used by William Moraley, an indentured servant in Pennsylvania and New Jersey in the 1730s. One of the rare indentured servants who published an account of his experiences, Moraley hedged his comments by noting that conditions were good for many of the poor but certainly not all of them. See Susan E. Klepp Poverty and Politics 29 and Billy G. Smith, The Infortunate: The Voyage and Adventures of William Moraley, an Indentured Servant (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 20, 89, 93, 96.
11. The New York assembly’s view is quoted in Robert E. Cray, Paupers and Poor Relief in New York City and Its Rural Environs, 1700–1830 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 34. Such official views should always be read with caution. A year later, New York City’s church wardens, in charge of poor relief, charged that “the Crys of the poor & Impotent for want of Reliefe are Extreamly Grevious.” Church Wardens Minutes, September 20, 1700, quoted in Mohl, “Poverty in Early America,” 9–10.
12. For early poverty and poor relief in Massachusetts, see Charles R. Lee, “Public Poor Relief and the Massachusetts Community, 1620–1715,” New England Quarterly 55 (1982): 564–85; and Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), passim. For the Charleston, South Carolina, case, where poor relief expenditures grew fivefold between 1755 and 1775, see Walter J. Fraser Jr., “The City Elite, ‘Disorder,’ and the Poor Children of Pre-Revolutionary Charleston,” South Carolina Historical Magazine 84 (1983): 167–79.
13. Arguments to this effect, especially by Jeffrey G. Williamson, Peter H. Lindert, and Jackson Turner Main, are reviewed in Billy G. Smith, “Inequality in Late Colonial Philadelphia: A Note on Its Nature and Growth,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 41 (1984): 629–31. For Main’s argument, see “The Distribution of Property in Colonial Connecticut,” in James Kirby Martin, ed., The Human Dimensions of Nation Making: Essays on Colonial and Revolutionary America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976), 54–104.
14. Smith, “Inequality in Late Colonial Philadelphia,” 629–45.
15. Billy G. Smith, “Poverty and Economic Marginality in Eighteenth-Century America,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 132 (1988): 98. See also John K. Alexander, Render Them Submissive: Responses to Poverty in Philadelphia, 1760–1800 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), 7–10.
16. Douglas Jones, “The Strolling Poor: Transiency in Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts,” Journal of Social History 8 (1975): 28–54; Ruth Herndon, “Women of ‘No Particular Home’: Town Leaders and Female Transients in Rhode Island, 1750–1800,” in Larry D. Eldridge, Women and Freedom in Early America (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 269–89.
17. Nash, Urban Crucible, 185; Ruth Herndon’s essay in this book examines warning out trends in Rhode Island towns from 1750 to 1800.
18. Important studies include Alexander, Render Them Submissive; Lynne Withey, Urban Growth in Colonial Rhode Island: Newport and Providence in the Eighteenth Century (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984); Cray, Paupers and Poor Relief; Steven J. Ross, “Objects of Charity: Poor Relief, Poverty, and the Rise of the Almshouse in Early Eighteenth-Century New York City,” in Conrad Wright and William Pencak, eds., New Approaches to Colonial and Revolutionary New York (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia,, 1988); Priscilla Ferguson Clement, Welfare and the Poor in the Nineteenth-Century City: Philadelphia, 1800–1854 (Washington, D.C.: Associated Universities Press, 1985); and Barbara L. Bellows, Benevolence Among Slaveholders: Assisting the Poor in Charleston, 1670–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993).
19. Benjamin J. Klebaner, “Pauper Auctions: The ‘New England Method’ of Public Poor Relief,” Essex Institute Historical Collections 91 (1958): 195–204; Barry Levy, “Girls and Boys: Poor Children and the Labor Market in Colonial Massachusetts,” in Nicholas Canny, Joseph E. Illick, Gary B. Nash, and William Pencak, eds., Empire, Society and Labor: Essays in Honor of Richard S. Dunn, special issue of Pennsylvania History 64 (summer 1997): 287–307; Holly Brewer, “Constructing Consent: How Children’s Status in Political Theory Shaped Public Policy in Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts before and after the American Revolution” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1996), chap. 6.
20. For conceptualization and context, see Linda Gordon, “The New Feminist Scholarship on the Welfare State,” in Gordon, ed., Women, the State, and Welfare (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990).
21. Elaine Forman Crane, Ebb Tide in New England: Women, Seaports, and Social Change, 1630–1800 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998), 114; Fraser, “City Elite”; Smith, “Poverty and Economic Marginality,” 106–7.
22. Lisa Wilson, Life After Death: Widows in Pennsylvania, 1750–1850 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), 90–100; Ruth Herndon, Unwelcome Americans: Living on the Margins in Early New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001); Karin Wulf, Not All Wives: Women of Colonial Philadelphia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000).
23. Gregory A. Stiverson, Poverty in a Land of Plenty: Tenancy in Eighteenth-Century Maryland (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 83–84.
24. An overview of tenancy, landlessness, and rural poverty is presented in the essays by Ronald Hoffman, Edward Countryman, and Marvin L. Michael Kay in Alfred Young, ed., The American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1976); for the growing reliance of eastern Pennsylvania landowners on landless wage laborers and artisans, see Lucy Simler, “Tenancy in Colonial Pennsylvania: The Case of Chester County,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 43 (1986): 542–69; and Paul G. E. Clemens and Lucy Simler, “Rural Labor and the Farm Household in Chester County, Pennsylvania, 1750–1820,” in Stephen Innes, ed., Work and Labor in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 106–43.
25. Stephen Innes, “Land Tenancy and Social Order in Springfield, Massachusetts, 1652–1702,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 35 (1978), 33–56. The quoted phrase is on p. 35. See also Kenneth A. Lockridge, “Land, Population and the Evolution of New England Society, 1630–1790,” Past and Present 39 (1968): 62–80; and John J. Waters, “The Traditional World of the New England Peasants: A View from Seventeenth-Century Barnstable,” New England Historical and Genealogical Register 129 (1976): 3–21.
26. Alan Taylor, Liberty Men and Great Proprietors: The Revolutionary Settlement on the Maine Frontier, 1760–1820 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); Taylor, “Agrarian Independence: Northern Land Rioters after the Revolution,” in Alfred F. Young, ed., Beyond the Revolution: Explorations in American Radicalism (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1993), 221–45.
27. Contemporary descriptions of servitude, such as that of William Eddis, give shocked portrayals of the wretched condition of indentured servants and note that their situation was as bad as in Britain. Eddis, Letters from America, ed. Aubrey C. Land (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969), 40.
28. J. R. Pole, The Pursuit of Equality in American History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978), 33.
29. Stephen Innes, “Fulfilling John Smith’s Vision: Work and Labor in Early America,” in Innes, Work and Labor in Early America, 10.
30. Marcus W. Jernegan’s Laboring and Dependent Classes in Colonial America, 1607–1783 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1931) is the first broad work on the subject. The long subtitle of Jernegan’s book—The Economic, Educational, and Social Significance of Slaves, Servants, Apprentices, and Poor Folk—is the first acknowledgment that the poor were significant in any book title that I have found. Jernegan produced the book for the University of Chicago’s Social Service Monographs Series, a series dominated by social worker scholars in the Hull House tradition. Sharon V. Salinger provides a comprehensive discussion of recent work on servant characteristics and their choice in selecting destinations in the Americas in “Labor, Markets, and Opportunity: Indentured Servitude in Early America,” Labor History 38 (1997): 311–38.
31. Abbot E. Smith, Colonists in Bondage: White Servitude and Convict Labor in America, 1607–1776 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1946), 297–300. A quarter century later, Richard Hofstadter reminded us that “it will not do simply to assume that freed servants, especially those from the tobacco fields, were in any mental or physical condition to start vigorous new lives, or that long and ripe years of productivity lay ahead of them.” Hofstadter, America at 1750: A Social Portrait (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), 61. Poverty and Politics 31
32. Russell Menard, “From Servant to Freeholder: Status Mobility and Property Accumulation in Seventeenth-Century Maryland,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 30 (1973): 37–64; Lorena Walsh, “Servitude and Opportunity in Charles County, Maryland, 1658–1705,” in Aubrey Land, Lois Green Carr, and Edward C. Papenfuse, eds., Law, Society, and Politics in Early Maryland (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977); Lois Green Carr and Russell R. Menard, “Immigration and Opportunity: The Freedman in Early Colonial Maryland,” in Thad W. Tate and David L. Ammerman, eds., The Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century: Essays on Anglo-American Society (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), 73–95; Gloria L. Main, Tobacco Colony: Life in Early Maryland, 1650–1720 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982).
33. Sharon V. Salinger, “To Serve Well and Faithfully”: Labor and Indentured Servants in Pennsylvania, 1682–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 115–36; the quote is on p. 115.
34. A. Roger Ekirch, Bound for America: The Transportation of British Convicts to the Colonies, 1718–1775 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). Parliament’s Transportation Act of 1718 was described by an English pamphleteer in 1731 as “Draining the Nation of its offensive Rubbish without taking away their Lives.” Quoted in ibid., 20.
35. The two most widely circulated memoirs of indentured servants give opposite views of the indentured servant’s chance for success. For one servant who arrived in Philadelphia in the 1720s and who “reeled from one misfortune to another,” see The Infortunate: The Voyage and Adventure of William Moraley, an Indentured Servant, ed. Klepp and Smith. For a success story, see John Harrower, The Journal of John Harrower, an Indentured Servant in the Colony of Virginia, 1773–1776, ed. Edward Miles Riley (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1963).
36. I have analyzed this in “Urban Wealth and Poverty,” 562–64, and at greater length in Urban Crucible. For a parallel study of this in Rhode Island, see Withey, Urban Growth in Colonial Rhode Island; and Herndon, “Women of ‘No Particular Home.’”
37. William H. Whitmore et al., eds., Reports of the Record Commissioners of Boston, 39 vols. (Boston, 1876–1908), 14:302.
38. Quoted in Alexander, Render Them Submissive, 14. For a broad view of the laboring poor in Philadelphia in the second half of the eighteenth century, see Billy G. Smith, “The Material Lives of Laboring Philadelphians, 1750–1800,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 38 (1981): 163–202; Smith, The “Lower Sort”: Philadelphia’s Laboring People, 1750–1800 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990).
39. Smith, “Lower Sort,” 14.
40. Ibid.
41. Smith, “Poverty and Economic Marginality,” 98–99.
42. Hamilton Andrews Hill, History of the Old South Church (Third Church) Boston, 1669–1884, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1890), 2:51–52.
43. For smallpox epidemics, Elizabeth A. Fenn’s Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775–82 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001) is a starting point. For recent investigations of the impact of the 1793 yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia, see J. Worth Estes and Billy G. Smith, eds., A Melancholy Scene of Devastation: The Public Response to the 1793 Philadelphia Yellow Fever Epidemic (Philadelphia: Science History Publications, 1997). Yellow fever struck Philadelphia six times between 1793 and 1805.
44. The quotations are from Mathew Carey’s A Short Account of the Malignant Fever Lately Prevalent in Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 1793), 17, 23.
45. For desperate conditions in Philadelphia in 1740–41 and 1761–62, see Nash, “Poverty and Poor Relief,” 6, 12–13.
46. The fullest study of desertion is Merril D. Smith, “‘Where She’s Gone to She Knows Not’: Desertion and Widowhood in Early Pennsylvania,” in Larry D. Eldridge, ed., Women and Freedom in Early America (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 211–28.
47. Quoted in Cray, Paupers and Poor Relief, 69.
48. Smith, “Material Lives of Laboring Philadelphians.”
49. Smith, “Poverty and Economic Marginality,” 99–100. In her study of Providence and Newport, Rhode Island, Lynne Withey finds that 30 to 45 percent of the householders in the late eighteenth century were “poor by any current definition.” Urban Growth in Colonial Rhode Island, 56.
50. The literature is growing rapidly. Among the most important studies are: Smith, “Lower Sort”; Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen Pirates, and the Anglo- American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Daniel Vickers, Farmers and Fishermen: Two Centuries of Work in Essex County, Massachusetts, 1630–1850 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Jeffrey Bolster, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); Taylor, Liberty Men and Great Proprietors; Ronald Schultz, The Republic of Labor: Philadelphia Artisans and the Politics of Class, 1720–1830 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Woody Holton, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Young, The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999); and the essays in Stephen Innes, Work and Labor in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988).
51. Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1890).
52. Charles Woodmason, The Carolina Backcountry on the Eve of the Revolution, ed. Richard J. Hooker (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1953), 15 or 33.
53. Taylor, Liberty Men and Great Proprietors, 71–73.
54. For a review of the literature on rural poverty, see Smith, “Poverty and Economic Marginality,” 108–15. For the New England case, see Kenneth Lockridge, “Land, Population, and the Evolution of New England Society, 1630–1790, and an Afterthought,” in Stanley N. Katz, ed., Colonial America: Essays in Politics and Social Development (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971), 466–91.
55. The scholarly literature on growing consumerism is large and growing apace; it can be glimpsed in Neil McKendrick et al., The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth- Century England (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985); T. H. Breen, “An Empire of Goods: The Anglicization of Colonial America, 1690–1776,” Journal of British Studies 25 (1986): 467–99; Breen, “‘Baubles of Britain’: The American and Consumer Revolutions of the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present 119 (1988): 73–104; Breen, “Narrative of Commercial Life: Consumption, Ideology, and Community on the Eve of the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 50 (1993): 471–501; and Richard Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992).
56. For convenient summaries of the literature, see Lorena S. Walsh et al., “Toward a History of the Standard of Living in British North America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 45 (1988): 116–70.
57. Lois Green Carr and Lorena S. Walsh, “The Standard of Living in the Colonial Chesapeake,” ibid., 135; and Billy G. Smith, “Comment,” in ibid., 165.
58. Even one of the most enthusiastic proponents of the wealth-generating economy of the late eighteenth century agrees that the Revolution “worked its havoc more upon the poor than the rich” and that the condition of the poor worsened in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. John McCusker, “Comment,” in “Toward a History of the Standard of Living,” ibid., 169. See also, Susan Grigg, “Toward a Theory of Remarriage: A Case Study of Newburyport at the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 8 (1977): 183–220; Susan Grigg, The Dependent Poor of Newburyport: Studies in Social History, 1800–1830 (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1984); and Clement, Welfare and the Poor in . . . Philadelphia.
59. For the most exacting study of changing rates of mortality, see Klepp, “Seasoning and Society: Racial Differences in Mortality in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 51 (1994): 473–506.
60. Susan E. Klepp’s essay in this volume. For data on declining average heights (which must have been caused primarily by sharp drops in height in the lower social ranks), see Dora L. Costa Poverty and Politics 33 and Richard H. Steckel, “Long-Term Trends in Health, Welfare, and Economic Growth in the United States,” in Health and Welfare during Industrialization, ed. Richard H. Steckel and Roderick Floud (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 47–90; and John Komlos, “Shrinking in a Growing Economy: The Mystery of Physical Stature during the Industrial Revolution,” Journal of Economic History 58 (1998): 779–802.
61. Michael B. Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America (New York: Basic Books, 1986), 4. For an examination of the Philadelphia case, see Sharon Salinger, “Artisans, Journeymen, and the Transformation of Labor in Late Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 40 (1983), 62–84.
62. Salinger, “Artisans, Journeymen, and the Transformation of Labor.”
63. Henry George, Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions, and of the Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth (San Francisco: W. M. Hinton, 1879).
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