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The Emergence of Farm Labor Markets and the Transformation of the Rural Economy: Massachusetts, 1750–1855

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2009

Winifred B. Rothenberg
Winifred B. Rothenberg
Affiliation:
The author is Visiting Assistant Professor of Economics, Tufts University, Medford, MA 02155.
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Abstract

This article proposes to do three things: to test for and date the emergence and integration of regional farm labor markets in Massachusetts; to demonstrate their growth consequences for the preindustrial economy; and to present new wage and labor productivity indices for the agricultural economy of Massachusetts from 1750 to 1855. Together with my previous studies it makes the case that the economy of rural Massachusetts was transformed by and under the subtle dominion of commodity, capital, and labor markets, the simultaneous emergence of which by 1800 is observed in the behavior of relevant prices and ratified in the growth of labor productivity.

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Articles
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The Journal of Economic History , Volume 48 , Issue 3 , September 1988 , pp. 537 - 566
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Copyright © The Economic History Association 1988

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References

For their reading of successive drafts, their helpful comments, warm encouragement, and most of all for the standards they set, her enduring gratitude to Joyce Appleby, Paul David, Stanley Engerman, David Hackett Fischer, Robert W. Fogel, Gerald Friedman, Robert Gallman, Claudia Goldin, Daniel Scott Smith, Kenneth Sokoloff, and Journal referees. To thank them is, of course, not intended to implicate them.

The help of David Proper, chief librarian of the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association Library at Historic Deerfield, was especially valuable, not only for his library's extraordinary account book collection, but for his personal efforts to facilitate this research. Thanks also to the staffs of the Manuscript Collection at Baker Library, Harvard Business School; at the Essex Institute; and at the Old Sturbridge Village Library. The programming skills of David Garman and Bernard F. Cole are much appreciated. This research was partially supported by an Arthur F. Cole Grant-in-Aid from the Economic History Association for which the author is grateful.

1 For an instance of renegotiated terms, see Harvey, Barbara, Westminster Abbey and its Estates in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1977),Google Scholar table 10, “The Annual Dues Owed by a Tenant in Villeinage of a Virgate of Customary Land at Teddington in the Early Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Centuries,” pp. 220–22. One feudal manor, that of Battle Abbey at Marley, was unusual in that it was worked entirely by wage labor after 1348.Google ScholarSearle, Eleanor, Lordship and Community: Battle Abbey and its Banlieu, 1066–1538 (Toronto, 1974), p. 304.Google Scholar

2 Bloch, Marc, Feudal Society, Vol. 1: The Growth of Ties of Dependence (Chicago, 1961), p. 67.Google Scholar

3 See Biddick, Kathleen, “Medieval English Peasants and Market Involvement,” this JOURNAL, 45 (12 1985), pp. 823–31;Google ScholarBiddick, , “Missing Links: Taxable Wealth, Markets, and Stratification among Medieval English Peasants,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 18 (Autumn 1987), pp. 277–98:CrossRefGoogle ScholarAmbrose, Raftis J., The Estates of Ramsey Abbey: A Study in Economic Growth and Organization (Toronto, 1957);Google ScholarHarvey, , Westminster Abbey and its Estates in the Middle Ages;Google ScholarClark, Elaine, “Medieval Labor Law and English Local Courts,” American Journal of Legal History, 27 (10 1983), pp. 330–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Raftis, , The Estates of Ramsey Abbey, p. 201.Google Scholar

5 The phrase “interlinked, multiplex credit transactions,” is from Bardhan, Pranab K., “Interlocking Factor Markets and Agrarian Development: A Review of Issues,” Oxford Economic Papers, 32 (03 1980), p. 85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 The phrase, “latent threat,” is Polanyi, Karl's in The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (1st edn., 1944; reprinted Boston, 1957), p. 162.Google Scholar

7 According to the Farmers' Almanac published in Boston in 1810, there were 15 hours 6 minutes between sunrise and sunset in late June of that year; but only 8 hours 54 minutes between sunrise and sunset in late December—a difference of 6 hours of daylight between a summer and a winter work day.

8 Colonial currencies were converted to U.S. dollars and cents. In Massachusetts there were two moneys of account in use after 1750, Old Tenor and Lawful Money. Old Tenor is divided by 7.5 to convert to Lawful Money, which is multiplied by 0.1667 to convert to U.S. cents. I found no instance of wages recorded in Continentals during the Revolution.

9 Robert Wolfson used monthly wages of contract labor without board; Stanley Lebergott used monthly wages with board; Carville Earle and Ronald Hoffman used a yearly wage for farm labor based on monthly wages with board; Thurston M. Adams constructed two weighted indexes, one of monthly and one of day wages, both with board, but without reference to task; and the most recent study of farm wages by Donald R. Adams, Jr., averages daily and monthly wage rates without board for unspecified work. See Wolfson, , “An Econometric Investigation of Regional Differentials in American Agricultural Wages,” Econometrica, 26 (04 1958), pp. 225–57;CrossRefGoogle ScholarLebergott, , Manpower in Economic Growth: The American Record since 1800 (New York, 1964), chap. 6;Google ScholarEarle, and Hoffman, , “The Foundations of the Modern Economy: Agriculture and the Costs of Labor in the U.S. and England, 1800–1860,” American Historical Review, 85 (12 1980), table 3, p. 1086;CrossRefGoogle ScholarAdams, Thurston M., “Prices Paid by Vermont Farmers for Goods and Services and Received by Them for Farm Products, 1790–1940; Wages of Vermont Farm Labor, 1780–1940,” Bulletin #507, Vermont Agricultural Experiment Station (Burlington, 1944), pp. 84–100;Google ScholarAdams, Donald R. Jr, “Prices and Wages in Maryland, 1750–1850,” this JOURNAL, 46 (09 1986), pp. 625–45.Google Scholar

10 Widening seasonal differentials over this period attracted comment from T. M. Adams as well. “Significant changes took place during this period in the pattern of the seasonal differences in day wage rates. The extent of the seasonal changes increased from the last decade of the eighteenth century when July and August payments averaged 18 percent above the annual average, until 1870–79 when they were 38 percent above it.” Adams, T. M., Vermont Prices and Wages, p. 85.Google Scholar The changing crop mix of Massachusetts agriculture in response to western competition is documented in a comparison of the 1801 and 1855 weight-bases of my farm commodity price index. Rothenberg, , “A Price Index for Rural Massachusetts, 1750–1855,” this JOURNAL, 39 (12 1979), table 1, p. 980.Google Scholar

11 For a magisterial new study of Worcester County, see Brooke, John L., The Heart of the Commonwealth: Worcester County, Massachusetts, 1713–1861 (forthcoming).Google Scholar

I am aware of a tautology here. I am using the argument that region Central's economic development was retarded relative to regions East and West to explain its delayed market development, when, apart from its later settlement, my evidence for its retardation is its delayed market development.

12 Lebergott, , Manpower in Economic Growth, p. 245.Google Scholar

13 Earle, and Hoffman, , “Foundations of the Modern Economy,” pp. 1055–94.Google Scholar I cannot resist introducing at this point a provocative resonance from the ancient past. Paralleling the dual labor market of task-specific day laborers on the one hand, and general farm laborers on monthly contract on the other, was the distinction made in English feudal law between free and unfree tenants, a distinction that apparently had less to do with the tenure on which the land was held (those tenures being frequently lost in the mist of centuries) and more to do with what was called the “certainty” of the work. If the tenants must work at the will of the lord—if “when they go to bed on Sunday night they do not know what Monday's work will be: it may be threshing, ditching, carrying; they can not tell,”—then they are unfree. “The tenure is unfree, not because the tenant ‘holds at the will of the lord,’ in the sense of being removable at a moment's notice, but because his services, though in many respects minutely defined by custom, can not be altogether defined without frequent reference to the lord's will,” Pollock, Frederick and Maitland, Frederick W., The History of English Law before the Time of Edward I (1st edn., 1895; 2nd edn., 1898; reprinted Cambridge, 1978), vol. 1, p. 371.Google Scholar If modern Marxist historians are looking to date the transition to capitalism by the emergence of an agricultural proletariat in the rural economy of New England, medieval parallels would suggest that not the presence of wage labor but the increasing frequency of monthly labor contracts be used as the diagnostic.

14 The manuscript of Abner Sanger's journal is in the Library of Congress. A microfilm copy is in the Keene (New Hampshire) Public Library. A portion of it was published in Wilber, Clifford C., ed., The Repertory, 2 vols. (Keene, 1924–1927).Google Scholar The Sanger journal has now been transcribed, annotated, edited, and published in full as Very Poor and of a Lo Make: The Journal of Abner Sanger, Stabler, Lois K., ed. (Portsmouth, 1986).Google Scholar

15 Frost, Robert, “The Death of the Hired Man,” Complete Poems of Robert Frost (New York, 1960).Google Scholar Is Abner Sanger representative of wage earners on Massachusetts farms in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? If not, it is for the very reason that his journal is so valuable to us: he remained a farm laborer and tenant throughout the whole of his very long life. On the two occasions when he came into possession of a farm, he sold the land within months. In his old age he was imprisoned again, this time for debt. Upon his wife's death his children, still young, were dispersed among relatives, It is certain that he eschewed the opportunities wage differentials presented to specialize in the higher-paying farm tasks. Whether he was atypical in his improvidence, his dependency, or his bad luck, must wait until we know more about how the “agricultural ladder” actually functioned in Massachusetts in the period covered by this study. For new work on the “agricultural ladder,” see Atack, Jeremy, “Tenants and Yeomen in the Nineteenth Century,” Agricultural History (Summer 1988, forthcoming); and “The Agricultural Ladder Revisited: A New Look at an Old Question with Some Data from 1860” (unpublished manuscript, University of Illinois and Harvard University, 1988). Atack studied a subset of nearly 12,000 farm households out of the Bateman-Foust sample of over 21,000 northern rural households drawn from the Census of 1860. New Hampshire, Vermont, and Connecticut are the New England states in the sample. Massachusetts is omitted.Google Scholar

16 A prolonged effort to increase the #ber of observations for the early and late years doubled the sample size but left intact its bell-shaped distribution in time, for the fact is that the keeping of account books by Massachusetts farmers has a history, a time-shape of its own. There really are relatively few farm account books from the 1750s; and by the mid- to late 1830s they again became fewer, replaced, it has been suggested, by “cash books” which recorded transactions merely as inflows and outflows of cash “rather than [as] components of dyadic relationships between households.” See Larkin, Jack, “The World of the Account Book: Some Perspectives on Economic Life in Rural New England in the Nineteenth Century,” paper presented at the Symposium on Social History: Locality and Mentalité, Keene State College, 1984.Google Scholar The frequency distribution of observations is: 1750s, 6.0 percent; 1760s, 10.6 percent; 1770s, 8.7 percent; 1780s, 7.0 percent; 1790s, 13.2 percent; 1800s, 10.1 percent; 1810s, 12.2 percent; 1820s, 12.0 percent; 1830s, 9.0 percent; 1840s, 8.7 percent; 1850s, 2.5 percent.

17 Regressions were also run with the right tail of the distribution truncated at 1830, which, when compared with the 1840 cut-off, resulted in higher R−square values, earlier maxima, and higher t−statistics on the time variables in region West and all regions pooled. However, because 9 percent of the observations are from the 1830s, truncating at 1830 would eliminate, from both tails, 27.8 percent of the observations, while truncating at 1840 loses only 18.8 percent of the observations. I therefore chose the 1840 cut-off.

18 The inference that farm wages moved with macro-level price shocks is supported by the finding of a +.85 correlation between my (weighted) farmgate price index, which did exhibit synchronicity with macro-level events, and my (weighted) nominal farm wage index to be discussed below. For the price index, see Rothenberg, , “A Price Index for Rural Massachusetts, 1750–1855,” pp. 975–1001.Google Scholar

19 Coelho, Philip R. P. and Shepherd, James F. confirm that markets in areas recently settled were less developed. Higher transport costs, the absence of competition, and greater excess demand in frontier areas were some of the factors accounting for impediments to trade and distribution and barriers to market expansion. See their “The Impact of Regional Differences in Prices and Wages on Economic Growth: The United States in 1890,” this JOURNAL, 39 (03 1979), p. 73.Google Scholar

20 On the rising coefficient of variation of farm commodity prices and my argument for the abandonment of customary constraints on prices, see Rothenberg, Winifred B., “Markets and Massachusetts Farmers, 1750–1855,” this JOURNAL, 41 (06 1981), pp. 283–314.Google Scholar Examples of customary wage-fixing appear in the account book of John Burke of the western Massachusetts hill town of Bernardston. Burke in 1766 charged John Evans the same amount (15/ O.T. = 33 cents a day) for reaping, cutting stalks, picking corn, making a fence, mowing, clearing brush, husking corn, digging potatoes, threshing rye, threshing wheat, chopping wood, dressing flax, and haying. The following year Burke paid 20/ O.T. (= 44.4 cents a day) for mowing, haying, reaping, hoeing, chopping, raking, and clearing done for him. And as late as 1774, he again charged 44.4 cents a day (2/8 L.M.) to mow, hay, reap, and hoe. Burke is idiosyncratic in the tenacity with which he hangs on to the notion of a fixed wage for a day's work—any day's work.

21 Much of the debate during the last decade concerning the “capitalist” transformation of the rural economy of New England has concerned the character of these two worlds and the timing of the transition between them. On the debate, see my review of Steven, Hahn and Jonathan, Prude, eds., The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation (Chapel Hill, 1985)Google Scholar in Rothenberg, , “The Bound Prometheus,” Reviews in American History, 15 (12 1987), pp. 628–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The “market overt (or ouvert)” was not only a Christian institution, but—if I understand Maitland correctly—a judicial one as well. In the early medieval English economy, any transfer of moveable goods was, by presumption, theft; the burden rested on the first and all subsequent buyers to prove otherwise. The defense against the presumption of theft, or of defective transfer generally, was evidence of sale in a duly constituted open market, the openness of which testified to the presence of witnesses to the seller's voluntary surrender. See Pollock, and Maitland, , The History of English Law, 2, pp. 154, 164.Google Scholar For a discussion of the “market overt” in Massachusetts, and social regulation of the colonial economy generally, see Hughes, J.R.T., Social Control in the Colonial Economy (Charlottesville, 1976), chap. 9.Google Scholar

22 A brief discussion of wage fixing and some scattered seventeenth-century wage rates in New England agriculture appear in The History of Wages in the United Stares From Colonial Times to 1928, U. S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bulletin No. 499 (12 1929);Google Scholar and in Wright, Carroll D., History of Wages and Prices in Massachusetts, 1752–1883, Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor (Boston, 1885).Google Scholar

23 The account book of Henry Eames of Framingham contains this entry: “Mr. Bridg came into the town meeting and there declard that he Bought rie of me and was obliged to give 44 shiling a bushel and I tolld him that was not so for I never sold aney above 40 shillings a bushel. He Replied and said he had but 2 bushels of me because he found that they sold chepr at mill and that for 42 shiling a bushel. Deacon and Left. Sloan mad anser that thay never had more than 40 shilings a bushel. Mr. Bridge said that he might be mistaken. June 23, 1755. Henry Emmes atest.” See also Bernard, Bailyn, ed., The Apologia of Robert Keayne: Self-Portrait of a Puritan Merchant (New York, 1955).Google Scholar Farmers waged a continuing battle against town regulation of produce prices in Boston. Although a Market Day was set by Governor Winthrop in 1633, the first “market overt” at Dock Square was not opened until 1734, and was burned down by farmers disguised as clergymen three years later. Faneuil Hall Market opened as a regulated marketplace in 1742, but it was boycotted, closed, burned, gutted, and rebuilt many times in the next 15 years. See Brown, Abram English, Faneuil Hall and the Faneuil Hall Market (Boston, 1900), chap. 8.Google Scholar

24 Ziff, Larzer, Puritanism in America: New Culture in a New World (New York, 1974), p. 76.Google Scholar John Brooke, in his forthcoming manuscript, The Heart of the Commonwealth, traces throughout the eighteenth century the ebb and flow of two systems of thought: “the Harringtonian paradigm” and the “Lockean paradigm,” the former being a constellation of attitudes consonant with the idea of a corporate, covenanted “moral economy”; the latter being a constellation of attitudes consonant with “a language of interest rather than unity, analysis rather than covenant.” pp. 78–79. Thus he writes that “the transformative potential of the Awakening would surge to the surface in the mid-1740s, as separatists broke away from orthodoxy in a swirling series of local rebellions. Among the separates, the Lockean impulses which informed the Land Bank would flower in full form, free of any constraints of commonwealth and moral economy.” p. 84.Google Scholar

25 Henry, Sumner Maine, Ancient Law: Its Connection with the Early History of Society, and its Relation to Modern Ideas (London, 1861), p. 182;Google ScholarAtack, Jeremy and Bateman, Fred, To Their Own Soil: Agriculture in the Antebellum North (Ames, 1987), p. 71;Google ScholarPolanyi, , The Great Transformation, pp. 40 and 163.Google Scholar One scholar, writing in The New Paigrave, speaks of “the deplorable Polanyi debate” as “an aberration which suddenly flourished in the 1960s” and, on the basis of her knowledge of West African pre-colonial economies, describes as “preposterous” his “basic notion that uncontrolled exchange in the market place was peculiar to 19th and 20th century industrialism.” Polly Hill “ Market Places,” in Eatwell, John, Milgate, Murray, and Newman, Peter, eds., The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics (London, 1987), vol. 3, p. 333.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

26 Atack, and Bateman, , To Their Own Soil, p. 73 and table 5.1.Google Scholar

27 I refer here to Katherine Anne Porter's short story, “Noon Wine.”

28 For a vivid analysis of the traditional direction of wealth flows and the forces reversing its direction, see Caldwell, J. C., “The Mechanisms of Demographic Change in Historical Perspective,” Population Studies, 35 (03 1981), pp. 5–27.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMedSundstrom, William A. and David, Paul A., in “Old Age Security Motives, Labor Markets, and Farm Family Fertility in Antebellum America,” Explorations in Economic History, 25 (04 1988), pp. 164–97, and in “Bargains, Bequests and Births,” Working Paper No. 12, Stanford Project on the History of Fertility Control (June 1984) suggest that family limitation in the early nineteenth century was an adaptive strategy pursued by farm families as a consequence of the impact of labor markets.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

29 Rothenberg, Winifred B., “The Emergence of Capital Markets in Rural Massachusetts, 1730–1838,” this JOURNAL, 45 (12 1985), pp. 781–808.Google Scholar

30 “[He] assalts me & strikes me with a green large Beach Leaver on my Head & wounds me considerable & sheads considerable Blood. I rate ye damage at 40/.”

31 “August 6, 1794: Hardy Lieut Thos, Dr. to 3/4 of a day Reaping &c---2/3. Some say Reaping is valued at 4/ pr Day this summer.”

32 See Griliches, Zvi, “Agriculture: Productivity and Technology,” in The International Encyclopedia of the Social Science (Chicago, 1968), vol. 1, pp. 214–45.Google Scholar Labor productivity can be used as an approximation to total factor productivity “the smaller the relative weight of nonlabor resources in total input.” Stigler, George J., “Economic Problems in Measuring Changes in Productivity,” Conference on Research in Income and Wealth, Output, Input, and Productivity Measurement, Studies in Income and Wealth, vol. 25 (Princeton, 1961), p. 48.Google Scholar

33 Another way of formulating the productivity index is that the difference between an index of output prices and an index of input costs exactly equals the productivity growth of the inputs. See Griliches, ibid. Other ways of measuring labor productivity in agriculture are mentioned in Allen, Robert C., “The Growth of Labor Productivity in Early Modern English Agriculture,” Explorations in Economic History, 25 (04 1988), p. 118.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

34 Kenneth Sokoloff has compared my weighted farm wage index with the Margo-Villaflor index and with his own index of manufacturing wages in the Northeast. For his purpose he deflated all three by the David-solar consumer price index, and finds such substantial (and reassuring) agreement between the three as to constitute “a formidable body of evidence pointing to significant gains in the rate of compensation to labor in the Northeast between 1820 and 1860.” Sokoloff, , “The Puzzling Record of Real Wage Growth in Early Industrial America: 1820–1860” (unpublished manuscript, University of California, Los Angeles, 1986), p. 23.Google Scholar

35 Note that my estimate of 0.5 percent annual labor productivity growth in Massachusetts agriculture, 1780–1840, exceeds Robert Gallman's national estimate of 0.3 percent in grain and cotton agriculture, the magnitude John Komlos cites as evidence for his argument that American nutrition between 1840 and 1860 suffered a decrease in protein and caloric intake that he attributes to the failure of agricultural labor productivity growth to offset the exodus of labor from farming. See Komlos, , “The Height and Weight of West Point Cadets: Dietary Change in Antebellum America,” this JOURNAL, 47 (12 1987), pp. 897–927, and in particular fn. 35, p. 910.Google Scholar Gallman's annual growth estimate is built on data beginning in 1839. My “real cost of labor” indexes also show declining labor productivity after 1840. “The downturn in 1840 was one of the worst in American history. Evidently the brunt of the contraction fell most heavily on unskilled wages.” Margo, Robert A. and Villaflor, Georgia C., “The Growth of Wages in Antebellum America: New Evidence,” this JOURNAL, 47 (12 1987), p. 885.Google Scholar Komlos also enlists early unpublished work of mine in support of his argument. The labor productivity measures in the present paper supercede those in my dissertation.

36 Carman, Harry J. and Tugwell, Rexford G., eds., Jared Eliot's Essays Upon Field Husbandry in New England, 1748–62 (New York, 1934).Google Scholar For an excellent summary statement of these farming practices and their ecological consequences, see Cronon, William, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England (New York, 1983), pp. 150–51.Google Scholar

37 For a summary of the ecological consequences of these “improved” farming practices, see Cronon, , “The Growth of Wages in Antebellum America: New Evidence,” this JOURNAL, 47 (12 1987), pp. 159–60.Google Scholar

38 Close examination of nearly 900 probate inventories for eastern Massachusetts confirms the absence of technological innovation in agriculture before 1850. I found only one cast-iron plough, and that one did not appear until 1844. Confirmation of my observation appears in Kenneth Sokoloff's forthcoming analysis of patent rates by sector and by region between 1791 and 1846. With the exception of the period 1836 to 1842 (which is unusual for other reasons as well) southern New England lagged far behind New York in agricultural inventions, whether measured per capita or as a percent of total inventions. It also lagged behind northern New England for much of the period. Sokoloff, Kenneth, “Inventive Activity in Early Industrial America: Evidence from Patent Records, 1790–1846” (University of California, Los Angeles, 1988),Google Scholar table 1. Productivity growth in Massachusetts agriculture, then, bears this resemblance to the productivity growth in early manufacturing, that there too significant gains were achieved without the application of more or better capital, but by improvements in the organization of manufacturing processes, and, most relevant, the expansion of markets. In addition to the work of Paul Paskoff, cited below, see Sokoloff, Kenneth L., “Productivity Growth in Manufacturing During Early Industrialization: Evidence from the American Northeast, 1820 to 1860,” in Engerman, Stanley L. and Gallman, Robert E., eds., Long-Term Factors in American Economic Growth, National Bureau of Economic Research, vol. 51 (Chicago, 1986), p. 724.Google Scholar

39 Paskoff, Paul F., “Labor Productivity and Managerial Efficiency Against a Static Technology: The Pennsylvania Iron Industry, 1750–1800,” this JOURNAL, 40 (03 1980), pp. 129–35.Google Scholar See also his Industrial Evolution: Organization, Structure and Growth of the Pennsylvania Iron Industry, 1750–1850 (Baltimore, 1983), chap. 2.Google Scholar

40 Paskoff, , “Labor Productivity and Managerial Efficiency,” p. 135.Google Scholar

41 Thus, my findings controvert the position taken by Field, Alexander James in “Sectoral Shift in Antebellum Massachusetts: A Reconsideration,” Explorations in Economic History, 15 (04 1978), pp. 146–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

42 Sokoloff, , “Productivity Growth in Manufacturing,” p. 725.Google Scholar

43 A particularly vivid story of one such loser is told in Johnson, Paul E., “The Modernization of Mayo Greenleaf Patch: Land, Family, and Marginality in New England, 1766–1818,” New England Quarterly, 55 (12 1982), pp. 488–516.CrossRefGoogle Scholar A more significant group of “losers” were the Shaysites in the inland counties of Massachusetts in 1786. The timing of the turning points in both productivity and convergence prompts a reconsideration of Shays' Rebellion. Whatever its significance as an event in anti-Federalist politics or democratic populism, the rebellion seems now to loom as a deeply conservative impulse, a fist shaken at impending change. It was indeed a “confrontation between opposing social worlds,” but to define those worlds as “the cooperative communalism of farmers on one side and the competitive capitalism of merchants on the other” is, I believe, to misunderstand the issue. The evidence presented here suggests that the conflict lay within agriculture. The danger to the Shaysites came from within the farm economy, poised, quite literally in 1786, on the cusp of structural transformation. I have in this study emphasized the growth consequences of market integration. But along with markets came distributional consequences which inflicted real losses on groups who had benefited from traditional constraints. The quotations above paraphrase the position taken by Szatmary, David in Shays' Rebellion: The Making of an Agrarian Insurrection (Amherst, 1980), and appear in the prospectus for a conference on Shays' Rebellion at Historic Deerfield in 11 1986.Google Scholar

44 The 1801 Tax Valuations include acreages and per acre values of the following categories of land use: tillage, upland, meadow, salt marsh, pasture, woodland exclusive of pasture land enclosed, unimproved, unimprovable, owned by the town, owned by any other proprietors, used for roads, covered with water.