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The Market and Massachusetts Farmers, 1750–1855

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2009

Winifred B. Rothenberg
Winifred B. Rothenberg
Affiliation:
American economic history at Brandeis University.
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Abstract

This paper attempts to make a contribution, both in method and in substance, to the debate about the timing and extent of market orientation in pre-industrial New England agriculture. The method consists in testing five quantifiable hypotheses, with data from manuscript account books and daybooks. The results, in repeated trials, confirm the influence of the market on the rural economy of Massachusetts from very early on.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 41 , Issue 2 , June 1981 , pp. 283 - 314
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1981

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References

1 Bidwell, Percy W., “Rural Economy in New England at the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century,” Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts & Sciences, vol. 20 (04 1916), 241–399;Google ScholarBidwell, , “The Agricultural Revolution in New England,” American Historical Review, 26 (07 1921), 683–702;Google ScholarBidwell, and Falconer, John I., History of Agriculture in the Northern United States, 1620–1860 (New York, 1941, rpt.).Google Scholar

2 Hofstadter, Richard, The Progressive Historians (New York, 1970), p. 439.Google Scholar

3 Ibid., p. 444n.

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9 Battis, J. Emery, Saints and Sectaries: Anne Hutchinson and the Antinomian Controversy in the Massachusetts Bay Colony (Chapel Hill, 1962).Google Scholar

10 Ziff, Larzer, in Puritanism in America: New Culture in a New World (New York, 1974), p. 76, put it this way: “Free grace struck a responsive, if inarticulate chord among those who felt the attractions of free trade.”Google Scholar

11 Hofstadter, Progressive Historians, p. 443; emphasis added.Google Scholar

12 Hofstadter, , The American Political Tradition (New York, 1948), p. viii.Google Scholar

13 Bernstein, Barton J., ed., Towards a New Past: Dissenting Essays in American History (New York, 1967);Google ScholarHenretta, James, “Families and Farms: Mentalité in Pre-Industrial America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., 35 (01 1978), 3–32;Google ScholarMutch, Robert E., “Yeoman and Merchant in Pre-Industrial America: Eighteenth Century Massachusetts as a Case Study,” Societas, 7 (Autumn 1977), 279–302;Google ScholarMerrill, Michael, “Cash Is Good To Eat: Self-Sufficiency and Exchange in the Rural Economy of the United States,” Radical History Review, 3 (winter 1977), 42–71;Google Scholar Michael Merrill, “Agricultural Output, Innovation and Market Relations in the Hudson River Valley, 1785–1855,” paper presented at the Newberry Library Conference on Economic Growth and Social Change in Early America, Chicago, April 1980, Clark, Christopher, “Household Economy, Market Exchange, and the Rise of Capitalism in the Connecticut Valley, 1800–1860,” Journal of Social History, 13 (Winter 1979). Clark appears to be writing about the early and rapid transformation of the Connecticut River Valley from a “household economy” to capitalist agriculture and industry, but his emphasis throughout is on the “bifurcation” between those who “continued willingly” in the quest for profits and those who “began to draw back,” seeking refuge in what was left of “household values” from the repellent acquisitiveness of the new society.Google Scholar

14 Merrill, “Cash Is Good To Eat,” 56.Google Scholar

15 Henretta, “Families and Farms,” 16.Google Scholar

16 Merrill, “Cash Is Good To Eat,” 53.Google Scholar

17 Danhof, Clarence H., “The Farm Enterprise: The Northern United States, 1820–1860,” Research in Economic History, 4 (1979), 127–191.Google Scholar

18 Bateman, Fred and Atack, Jeremy, “The Profitability of Northern Agriculture in 1860,” Research in Economic History, 4 (1979), 109–113;Google ScholarCallahan, Colleen M. and Hutchinson, William K., “Antebellum Interregional Trade in Agricultural Goods: Preliminary Results,” this Journal, 40 (03 1980), 25–31.Google Scholar The method used by Callahan and Hutchinson to measure North-West trade was used earlier by Hutchinson, and Williamson, Samuel H. to measure South-West trade, in their “The Self- Sufficiency of the Antebellum South: Estimates of the Food Supply,” this Journal, 31 (09 1971), 591–612.Google Scholar

19 For the list of manuscript sources used, see Appendix.Google Scholar

20 Rothenberg, Winifred B., “A Price Index for Rural Massachusetts, 1750–1855,” this Journal, 39 (12 1979), 975–1001.Google Scholar

21 Thus, Joseph Lee of Newton wrote: “11. 4, 1823: R.S. went to Boston in the carriage and… bot 113 lb beef @ 3, 28 lb Pot ashes @ 10. Bot at City Mills 2 bu rye meal 68, 2 bushels Indian meal 65.” Emphasis added.Google Scholar

22 I assumed that all trips in which livestock were being hauled were to markets. Some of these, the daybooks make clear, were rather to winter the cattle or to have them mated.Google Scholar

23 Fogel, Robert W., Railroads and American Economic Growth: Essays in Econometric History (Baltimore, 1964), p. 67. Unfortunately, the 1789 Survey of the Roads of the United States of America, by Christopher Colles, is nothing of the sort: it contains no Massachusetts roads.Google Scholar

24 The periodization is not arbitrary. The first is the Colonial period, followed by the second, the years of Revolution and post-war depression and Constitutional crisis. The third, identified by David Hackett Fischer as the period of “Deep Change” in virtually every measurable social indicator, acquires thereby its coherent character as a time of pivotal transformation. The years 1806–1820 were dominated by the domestic consequences (among them, the so-called “first industrial revolution”) of war in Europe—of isolation and neutrality from it, of involvement in it, and of panic and depression after it.Google ScholarAlthough Bidwell himself dates the earliest transition to market agriculture at about 1810 (in his “Rural Economy,” 245), most other writers use 1820 as their benchmark date, hence the fifth period begins in 1821. The year 1836 (actually the last half of 1835) marks the beginning of full-time freight and passenger railroad service from Boston to worter, a giant step on the road to Albany, an event of significance for Massachusetts agriculture. The sixth period is when the railroad came to most of the towns from which our farmers come. See footnote 26.Google Scholar

25 Clarence Danhof in his book, Change in Agriculture: The Northern United States, 1820–1870 (Cambridge, MA, 1969), suggests a maximum distance of 12 to 15 miles. In his “The Farm Enterprise,” he puts it a bit differently: “Land lying within a few miles—a half-day return trip by road or water—of an urban market offered an acceptable cost of transportation …” (162).Google Scholar

26 I am grateful to Prof. Charles J. Kennedy of the University of Nebraska for giving me the dates the railroad appeared in several Massachusetts towns. Framingham, 1835; Ipswich, 1839; Braintree, 1845; Westborough, 1835; Biddeford (now Maine), 1842; Oxford, 1840; Middleborough, 1846; Marlborough, 1855; Graflon, 1835; Springfield, 1841; Acton, 1844. Pred, Allan R., in his Urban Growth and the Circulation of Information: The U.S. System of Cities, 1790–1840 (Cambridge, MA, 1973), pp. 280–84Google Scholar, refers to a study by Julius Rubin that throws light on the late appearance of the railroad in Massachusetts. Contrasted with Philadelphia, which quickly built its own canal, and with Baltimore, which quickly built the B & O Railroad, Boston, says Rubin, met the challenge of the Erie Canal by “the common strategy of procrastination to cope with the uncertainty of the situation,” a strategy conditioned by the history and traditions of Boston's conservative elites. Salsbury, Stephen, in The State, the Investor and the Railroad: The Boston & Albany, 1825–1867 (Cambridge, MA, 1967), pp. 35–37, takes sharp issue with Rubin, claiming that the railroad in Massachusetts was not a response to the Erie Canal as much as it was a response to a developing need for markets and factory sites for Boston manufacturers. As such it was neither tardy nor conservative.Google Scholar

27 The persistent importance of Boston, the emergence of Concord and the retreat of Salem will come as no great surprise, but the importance of smaller towns may. In Shrewsbury, for example, Artemas Ward had a general store in the 1750s to which farm produce came from all over Worcester County and beyond. In Rainbow, Connecticut, there were, in the 1820s and 1830s, at least four grist mills, and it was to one of these mills that Horace Clark of East Granby sold about 500 bushels of corn and the same amount of rye each year. For a single mill regularly to buy such a large quantity from a single farmer suggests that trips to that tiny town (near the Connecticut River, midway between Springfield and Hartford), were not idiosyncratic, but that Rainbow had access to, or was itself, a regional entrepôt of importance for flour, meal and grain.Google Scholar

28 Twenty cents in McClelland, Peter, “Railroads, American Growth, and the New Economic History, A Critique,” this Journal, 28 (03 1968), 102–23. 30¢–70¢ for 1800–1819Google Scholar in Taylor, George R., Transportation Revolution (New York, 1951), p. 133;Google Scholar 15¢ for 1853, ibid., p. 442; 30¢–70¢ in Allan Pred, Urban Growth, p. 112; 25¢ for 1906 reduced 17.6 percent for 1890 in Fogel, Railroads and American Economic Growth, p. 71; 12¢ during the cyclical decline in 1822, in Allan Pred, Urban Growth, p. 112; 50¢–20¢ by turnpike, 10¢–15¢ by macadam road in 1839, Pred, ibid., p. 112; 23½¢ Boston to Providence in the late 1820s, Pred, ibid., p. 113; 18¢ Boston to Worcester in 1832, Salsbury, The State, the Investor, and the Railroad, p. 122.Google Scholar Some account books reveal ton-mile rates to have been just as high when a farmer is acting as teamster Isaac Bullard of Dedham was a teamster and charged 20¢–25¢ between 1789 and 1803, but then so did John Baker of Ipswich in the 1790s (19¢–22¢), Robert Craig of Leicester in 1778 (21¢), and John Heald of Pepperell, in 1808–1813 (20¢).

29 Danhof, “The Farm Enterprise,” 162.Google Scholar

30 See Greenhut, Melvin L., A Theory of the Firm in Economic Space (New York, 1970), chap. 4.Google Scholar

31 See Fogel, Railroads and American Economic Growth, p. 71.Google Scholar

32 I am engaged in a study of wage rates for hired farm labor, using farm account books.Google Scholar

33 Not all farm families had their own teams. A survey of the 1771 Valuations reveals that in most rural communities (that is, omitting Salem, Danvers, Newburyport and Boston), between 20 and 35 percent of farmers (defined as those reporting tillage acreage and bushels of grain) had no oxen, and that proportion went as high as 40 percent in Ipswich and 48 percent in Hadley.Google Scholar

34 Taylor, P. E., The Turnpike Era in New England, Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1934, p. 173.Google Scholar

35 Parks, Roger Neal, The Roads of New England, 1790–1840, Ph.D. dissertation, Michigan State University, 1966, p. 193.Google Scholar

36 Schumacher, Max George, The Northern Farmer and His Markets During the Late Colonial Period, Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1948, P. 68.Google Scholar

37 Marshall, Alfred, Principles of Economics, Eighth Ed. (London, 1946, reprint), p. 324.Google Scholar

38 Danhof, in Change in Agriculture, p. 43, footnote 61, says that the demand for higher quality both from abroad and from an increasingly urbanized population at home led to quality grading. Our butter, flour, cheese, wheat, pork, wool, and tobacco became graded, Danhof says, as early as the 1820s.Google Scholar

39 In an attempt to explain the rising portion of these time trends in the early years, I eliminated four Revolutionary War years with the greatest price variance and reran the regressions. A positively sloping time trend in the early years persists. I cannot explain it, unless it is that fewer price observations exist for the beginning of the period than for the later years. I am, in any case, loathe to reverse the argument, that is, to find in the increasing coefficients of variation evidence of withdrawal from markets.Google Scholar

40 The 54 account and daybooks (footnote 19) come from 48 separate towns. The 1855 data for all 48 towns come from “The State of Industry in Massachusetts” (Boston, 1856), which is in effect a State Census. Only 45 of those towns appear in the 1801 Valuations. Although potatoes are counted in 1855, they were not enumerated in 1801.Google Scholar

41 Metzer, Jacob, Some Aspects of Railroad Development in Tsarist Russia, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1972, p. 133. I am grateful to Professor Fogel for bringing this thesis to my attention and giving me access to it.Google Scholar

42 Nerlove, Marc, The Dynamics of Supply: Estimation of Farmers' Response to Price (Baltimore, 1958).Google Scholar

43 Ibid., p. 25.Google Scholar

44 If Pt* is the expected normal price in period t1 then: (1) P*1 – P*t−1 = β[Pt−1 – P*t−1 where β, the coefficient of expectation, lies between 0 and 1. (2) Xt = a0 + a1 P*t + Ut, where ut is a random residual and Xt is output in period t. By substituting from equation (1) for P*t, the term [βPt−1 + (1 – β)Pt−1 and introducing longer lags, Nerlove can, as it were, push back into insignificance the unobservable P* term: (3) X = a0 + a1[βPt−1 + β(l – β)Pt−2 + β(l – β)2Pt−3 + β(l– β)3P*t−4…] + ut.

45 For the months in which butchering occurred, see Rothenberg, “A Price Index for Rural Massachusetts,” 999.Google Scholar

46 Bidwell and Falconer, History of Agriculture, p. 111.Google Scholar

47 The fact that many small pigs were butchered at a very early age is certainly relevant to this inquiry, but because their presence would distort the results, pigs had to be removed from the sample. There is no line that separates pigs from hogs, and the decision had to be arbitrary: all swine whose live weight equaled or exceeded 200 pounds were included as hogs.Google Scholar To the issue of the timing of market-orientation in slaughtering decisions, it is relevant to state that only about one sixth of the hog weights in the sample appear before 1820; five sixths of the observations postdate 1820.

48 In all the calculations, a dressed weight-live weight ratio of 0.70 has been used, midway between the 0.75 or 0.76 used by Gallman, Atack and Bateman, and Battalio and Kagel, and the 0.65 used by several of my account books, and by Jay Adams, farmer at Old Sturbridge Village, whose job it is to replicate to the minutest detail the farming practices of central Massachusetts in 1800.Google ScholarThe procedure outlined here for distinguishing between dressed and live weight was generally followed, but exceptions were made. We know from records of a large-scale slaughterer in 1838–1839, that larger animals could command a higher per-pound price than smaller animals simply because they were fatter, not because they were dressed. That is, the higher price reflected a quality differential. Therefore, to avoid biasing the sample upward, swine weights were treated as live weights if to treat them as dressed would produce hogs weighing 700 pounds or more.Google Scholar

49 There are regional differences in the explanatory power of these variables as well as temporal differences, and, in fact, the regional differences are more consistent. The time variables account for a smaller proportion of the change in hog weights, and price variables for a larger proportion, in the West than in the East. In view of our earlier findings of a slower pace of market development in the West than in the East, this deserves comment. We may be picking up the early pecialization of Connecticut River valley farms in livestock raising. According to Bidwell and Falconer, farms in and around Hadley were stall-feeding oxen for the Boston market as early as 1700 (Bidwell and Falconer, History of Agriculture, p. 109). Even if swine were not shipped to Boston, one imagines that the habit of responding to market signals would spill over from cattle raising to swine raising.Google Scholar

50 Although cattle weights may be more nearly a function of the hay cattle consume than are hog weights of the corn hogs consume, it does not follow that a regression of the slaughter weights of cattle on hay prices would have given better results. Cattle, even if stall-fed in winter, grazed free for most of the year, free in the sense that pasture land was of such poor quality that it had virtually no alternative uses and therefore zero opportunity cost. In addition, cattle perform a wide variety of services throughout a long lifetime. It is unlikely that they were slaughtered for “light and transient causes” like a change in the relative prices of hay and beef.Google Scholar

51 Thomas, Isaiah Jr “Agriculture: Killing of Beasts,” in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Vermont Almanack for the Year of Our Lord 1804 (Worcester, MA, 1803), n.p. I am grateful to Sarah McMahon for bringing this to my attention.Google Scholar

52 This paragraph is a brief recapitulation of pp. 981 and 985 of Rothenberg, “A Price Index for Rural Massachusetts.” In that article, in order to isolate cyclical movements, I fitted trends to all three indexes and plotted deviations from trend. At Professor Engerman's suggestion I have revised these figures using first-differences instead of deviations from trend. It was his opinion that because I had used different trends for each of the indexes I had “implicitly assumed an independence of trend and cycle which is somewhat dubious.” This is only one of his many suggestions for each of which I am deeply grateful. Also, my index of Massachusetts farmers' prices required some smoothing by a three- year moving average before first-differences were taken.Google Scholar

53 Russell, Howard S., A Long, Deep Furrow: Three Centuries of Farming in New England (Hanover, NH, 1976), P. 58.Google Scholar

54 Boston was a special case in that the issue of establishing a market remained a heated controversy for well over a century. From Governor Winthrop's first declaration in 1633 setting Thursdays aside as market days, efforts were repeatedly made, but just as repeatedly foiled by opposition from several quarters. There were the country farmers who recognized the downward pressure such a market would place on prices, the householders who preferred the convenience of sellers coming to the door, the hucksters and other unsavory types who chafed against the regulations, and, lastly, there were the Puritan zealots who could not abide the association, from English days, of markets with Market Crosses. Unlikely as this last may sound, it is interesting that whoever it was that burned down the market in 1737 disguised themselves as clergymen (“stole the livery of heaven”) to do so. See Brown, Abram English, Faneuil Hall and the Faneuil Hall Market (Boston, 1900).Google Scholar

55 The same thing, apparently, happened in England. By the early eighteenth century, “Private bargaining between individuals characterized the [grani] trade; the regulated or ‘open’ market was in-significant” Baker, Dennis, “The Marketing of Corn in the First Half of the 18th Century: North-East Kent,” Agricultural History Review, 18 (1970), Pt. 2, 139. Alan Everitt dates the privatization of trade in “corn” back to the early seventeenth century, with “yeomen, brewers, maltsters, millers, and the like negotiating and reaching agreement in numerous farmhouses, mills, barns, warehouses, corn- chambers, and inn”Google Scholar (quoted in Baker, “The Marketing of Corn,” P. 139).Google Scholar