British Peasants to Colonial Farmers

Field Reading Notes

From British Peasants to Colonial American Farmers, Allan Kulikoff (2000)

Synopsis: “Recent historians have turned away from master narratives such as this one to study small events intensively,” Kulikoff says in his introduction. (5) From British Peasants is intended as a master narrative of the capitalist transition in colonial America Kulikoff began developing in the essays of the Agrarian Origins. Although it focuses primarily on the material circumstances of British and German yeoman farm families (bypassing the cultural and intellectual, and even class formation, which he promises to cover in a second volume), the book tries to explain the several waves of immigration to the American colonies and their frontiers over a period of nearly two hundred years. Kulikoff takes us repeatedly back over the Atlantic, to the places these immigrants left, and explains how they came and where they ended up. In this trans-Atlantic view, and in his coverage of the entire colonial landscape over a broad span of time, Kulikoff is definitely telling a big story. It may be possible, based on his earlier work, to guess what the more interpretive, second volume may say about the significance of these changes. And significance may be the right word; there’s definitely some Turner in the narrative arc.

Kulikoff begins with Jefferson’s famous lines about “Those who labour in the earth.” (1) “Jefferson knew,” he says, “that a majority of white Americans belonged to families of these virtuous small farmers.” But the implications readers of his earlier work might expect to follow are largely missing from this book. This is not the story of how aristocrats seduced agrarians and manipulated them with rhetoric. This is a story of the farmers’ relationship with their material and economic environment. It begins in the mid-sixteenth century, with the “manifold complaints of men touching the decay of this [British] Commonweal” that drove men who “looked back on a supposedly more prosperous time and sought to remake it in America.” (quoting Sir Thomas Smith, 1549. 7,9) After the Plague reduced British population by up to a third, Kulikoff says peasants were able to cultivate much more land: “ten to about thirty acres...under secure land tenure.” (11) The resulting prosperity set the bar of expectation, resulting in widespread frustration when rebounding population and enclosure threatened rural people. Although the problem may have been partly based in perception (“only 4 percent of land in open fields was enclosed in the sixteenth century” 18), Kulikoff says “The proportion of cottagers and wage laborers among household heads grew from on-quarter before 1560 to two-fifths by 1620...[and] at least a third of late-seventeenth century rural families lacked even a cottager’s garden and survived exclusively on the wages of family members.” (22)

In the early seventeenth century, “Ireland gave the North American colonies strong competition,” possibly slowing the pace of emigration. (44) “As early as the 1630s,” Kulikoff says, “discontented New Englanders, unwilling to abide the rule of the saints, returned to England.” (54) The trip back was expensive, so it was only an option for those who hadn’t spent everything or indentured themselves to get to America in the first place. “The rapid development of commercial agriculture in the southern colonies, along with the failure of New Englanders to find an exportable staple, led recruiters to send most servants to the southern colonies,” so it’s unclear why people unhappy with the “saints” wouldn’t have moved south. (61) And furs and fish made up a substantial percentage of northern exports, so it may be more the social arrangements and labor requirements of the south that dictated where indentured servants and later slaves were sent, rather than a lack of commerce up north. But north or south, Kulikoff says “nearly all immigrants expected access to the land colonial promoters promised.” (71) When easily accessible coastal areas (many of which had lost their native populations due to disease, just before the colonists arrived) were all taken, colonists “insisted that the forests were wild and uninhabited [because] the woods contained no English-style towns, their churches and marketplaces emblems of civility.” (78) But this must have been propaganda. Inland colonists were well aware of the Indians living at their borders. Even “in the early 1640s, after smallpox killed thousands of southern New England Indians, 30,000 remained.” (87) King “Philip’s men raided villages ten miles from Boston [1675-6]. About 2,500 English died, a twentieth of the region’s people. Indians pushed the frontier back toward the coast...destroying towns...that were not to be fully repeopled by whites for forty years.” (99) Even in the South, there were “More Indians (130,600) than whites and blacks combined (79,600)...in 1700.” (105) Nonetheless, “Maryland planters in the 1660s typically owned 250- to 300-acre farms...[and] From 1650 to 1675 Virginians patented over 2 million acres.” (113)

In the next chapter, we’ve jumped ahead 100 years. Although aristocrats had dominated some colonial areas, like “William and John Pynchon [who] held a legal monopoly of the Connecticut Valley fur trade” in the mid-1600s, (91) by the eve of the Revolution, “two thirds of taxed men in East New Jersey owned land, [and] four-fifths of men over age twenty-seven--nearly all the household heads--did.” (131) “In 1771 Massachusetts farmers owned, on average, only twenty acres of improved land (perhaps half of their holdings)...a fifth held less than eight improved acres.” (130) Kulikoff presents this as a declension: these farmers are losing their self-sufficient edge. But it’s possible they were content to raise only part of their food needs on the farm, which may explain why they didn’t bring the other half of their land into production. Kulikoff says “In the early 1780s less than seven-tenths of the householders in eastern North Carolina owned land.” (133) He might also have said, nearly seven out of ten householders were independent land-owners. He says “as many as nine-tenths of Long Island recruits during the Seven Years War enlisted in their birth county,” as did 3/4 to 9/10 of rural eastern Massachusetts enlistees. And “four-fifths of Tidewater Virginia’s Revolutionary War recruits stayed in their birth county or moved to adjacent counties.” (135) This would suggest that land had not become so scarce and expensive in the original settled areas that son’s were giving up and moving west in the 1760s and 1770s.

“Between the 1730s and the 1760s, the number of transient single people and families ‘warned out’ of Essex county multiplied 8.5 times, from 200 to 1,700.” (136) The colonies were hemmed in: “Indians controlled Northern New England, central and western New York, northeastern and western Pennsylvania, the Carolina Piedmont and mountains, all of Georgia, and the Ohio country.” (138 ) It’s often difficult to reconcile the chronology in different parts of the narrative. Elsewhere, Kulikoff says “Georgia’s trustees...founded the colony in 1732 as a refuge for the poor,” so Indian control must have dated to the 1720s or earlier. (155) “The dispossession of Indians started when squatters trespassed on and cleared Indian lands, built cabins, and began to hunt and farm.” (140) Conflict followed, and the Indians lost their lands. “By 1775 about 380,000 Europeans and their descendants--70,000 families--had repopulated” the area taken from the natives. The number living in newly settled areas was “more than lived in all the mainland colonies in 1710.” (147) “During the pre-Revolutionary decades,” Kulikoff says, “colonies granted millions of acres to land companies organized by rich gentlemen.” (153) Many of these gentlemen would fight to see their titles upheld by the new American States, after the Revolution. But in 1726, “James Logan, secretary of the Province of Pennsylvania, complained that Palatine and Scots-Irish immigrants held ‘near a hundred thousand Acres...without any manner of Right or Pretense to it.” (159) And “during the early 1770s as many as a third of the taxpayers in Paxton Township--most of them tenants, squatters, or laborers--disappeared. Similarly, between 1792 and 1802 four-fifths of the householders without land left Turbut Township on the Susquehanna...as did two-thirds of those who held less than 150 acres.” (161) This picture of transience seems to contradict the earlier one of persistence. Kulikoff doesn’t comment on these differences, which may be based on the fact that the examples of persistence were from settled areas, and those of transience from the frontier.

“As many as 410,000 Britons and Germans came to a mainland colony between 1700 and 1775,” Kulikoff says. But he reverses himself almost immediately and explains “why so few Europeans came...Economic opportunities in Europe...abounded...cities grew rapidly; rural industries expanded; wars employed thousands of peasant soldiers; and frontiers in Prussia and eastern Europe beckoned.” (167) “Colonial policies and prejudices kept Catholic immigrants away.” (169) And “English families had good reasons for staying home.” (171) The 72,000 English emigrants were mostly single men, over half were craftsmen, and only 15 percent were farmers. (185) These were not the peasants of the title. Possibly those were the 150,000 Irish, the 60,000 Scots, 110,000 Germans or 25,000 Swiss. If so, the implications for theories of English agrarian cultural continuity are profound.

At the outset of the Revolution, Kulikoff says the anonymous author of American Husbandry put his finger on the pulse of the new nation by identifying “a new class of farmers, ‘the little freeholders who live upon their own property.’ In New England they made ‘much the most considerable part of the whole’,” (203) although this shouldn’t have been news to anyone. He noted earlier that “During the Seven Years’ War an English officer, amazed at the ‘levelling principle’ in Massachusetss, observed that ‘everybody has property, and everybody knows it.’” (150) Kulikoff attributes the long-standing tradition that ‘Northern farmers worked mainly for their own subsistence” to works like American Husbandry, but says “freeholders were not as predominant as the author believed, nor were eighteenth-century farmers self-sufficient.” Most Americans, he says, lived on “composite farms, providing for subsistence, trade with neighbors, and sale at market.” (204) But just because these rural Americans sold some produce at regional markets (even if the merchants they dealt with traded nationally and internationally), they were not part of “the market.” Kulikoff reserves the designation of capitalist farmers for those (like large southern tobacco planters) who produced solely for “the market” and showed “desire for profits over a competence.” (205) “Tobacco production rose from 100,000 pounds in the mid-1620s to more than 20 million pounds by the 1680s...[and] Chesapeake planters--no matter how poor--pursued commodity markets.” (207) In contrast, “By guaranteeing subsistence first, most colonial farmers participated in markets without being dominated by them.” (206)

This is an important section of the book, because Kulikoff tries to provide a chronology to support his idea (mostly unstated) about the American transition to capitalism. In some instances, the development seems forced. “the first farm families to arrive in an area,” he says, “bartered with their neighbors, but they soon craved regular markets.” (206) Why would they, if they had been expecting and hoping to live self-sufficiently? A more satisfying answer might be that most colonial farmers always intended to pursue a mixed or “composite” farming approach. Perhaps we’re projecting our own binary (virtuous self-sufficiency versus corrupt capitalism) onto them, based on a knowledge they didn’t have of their future. Similarly, he defines villages as places “where tavern keepers, storekeepers, and artisans set up shop, thus facilitating and increasing local trade.” (207) While not incorrect, this seems a little one-sided and deterministic. Weren’t these merchants and artisans usually the people who lived in these areas, rather than outsiders coming in, to change the economic reality of some preexisting substrate of farmers? In most places, didn’t villages and farms develop simultaneously?

The chronology includes a lot of details that are really useful, and should probably be clarified and expanded on (note to self...). “When immigration dwindled after 1640,” Kulikoff says, “grain, livestock, and land prices plunged.” The wheat blast that hit New England in the 1660s changed the game for farmers, and “warfare engulfed European bread baskets and English per capita grain production declined during the 1760s and 1770s,” opening new markets for wheat now produced in the mid-Atlantic colonies. (208) Kulikoff says “mid-Atlantic exports declined over the eighteenth century,” but he also says that “explosive growth in demand [was] thrusting mid-Atlantic farmers into international markets...Philadelphia flour exports grew as fast as the population in the 1730s and 1740s and a third faster than the population in the 1750s and 1760s.” (211) At about the same time, “New England’s agricultural surpluses declined during the century after 1650.” (209) “Eastern Massachusetts farmers put close to nine-tenths of the land they farmed into pasture rather than crops,” Kulikoff says, but doesn’t specify when (and the endnote for that paragraph cites five sources, but doesn’t specify which statements come from where). In the next paragraph, he says “Despite grain deficits, the number of farmers selling big surpluses grew in the eighteenth century.” (210) Again, this is great data, but it’s difficult to understand how it fits into the change over time (much less, the possible chain of causes or influences surrounding and springing from it).

It seems reasonable that causes of the decline in grain exports from New England include the wheat blast and the growth of cities. “The 25,000 to 30,000 people in mid-eighteenth-century Boston, Salem, Providence and other towns relied more and more on local farmers for meat, vegetables, fruit, butter, and flour.” (210) But hadn’t they always depended on local farms, whether inside the city limits or in the immediate “hinterland”? The volume of trade would have increased as city populations grew, but the change would have been gradual and probably seemed perfectly natural to the people who lived through it. Kulikoff also says “As farmers had dispersed during the seventeenth century, village centers had atrophied. Although New englanders continued to live on isolated farms, villages reappeared in the eighteenth century. Boston remained the largest market, but its population stagnated at about 15,000 after mid-century because it lacked a staple-producing hinterland.” (210) This is a very interesting and unusual claim. It introduces an element of cyclical growth and contraction tied to resource availability, that may be really promising for my research. I’ll need to dig further into Kulikoff’s sources.

In other colonies, experience was different. “New York...Tenants had little incentive to produce surpluses beyond what they needed for rent, taxes, and subsistence.” (212) In 1750s Virginia, “stores, gristmills, and inns clustered” by crossroads, “But no towns developed until after the Revolution.” (214) Carolina and Georgia rice exports “grew from 3 million pounds in 1715 to 70 million pounds in the early 1770s...Slaves, who made up two-thirds of the population as early as 1730, produced nearly all the rice.” (215) “When European demand for wheat skyrocketed in the 1760s, [Shenendoah] valley farmers exported more than 250,000 bushels or wheat and 2,900 tons of flour, over ten times more than in the early 1740s.” (216)

Credit is a crucial element of capitalism, so the development of financial borrowing (as opposed to gifts, mutual obligations, and payments in kind) is a necessary part of Kulikoff’s story. The growth of credit seems to fall into two basic types. First, sometimes external capital, held by “a single patron--such as the Pynchons of seventeenth-century Springfield, Massachusetts; the Hudson Valley Livingstons; or the Dulanys in eighteenth-century western Maryland--was the only source of local credit.” (217) A general contraction of international credit in the late seventeenth century is credited with slowing colonial growth. “From 1675 to 1700 the rate of dispersion of the European population (measured in square miles settled) declined by four-fifths from its 1650-75 level,” Kulikoff says, “despite settlement of Pennsylvania and the Carolinas.” (217) Of course, King Philip’s War began in June, 1675; and may have discouraged colonists from pushing into Indian lands, even beyond the conflict area.

The other source of colonial credit was the “book credit” most merchants gave their neighbors and regular customers. Whether these ledger transactions represent barter or credit (and thus describe pre-capitalist or capitalist economies) is a hotly debated topic. Frequently the argument centers on whether prices are standardized, based on a distant cash market, or valued in idiosyncratic local ways. Kulikoff seems to think of this in terms of rural community insiders, who relate to each other in a basically pre-capitalist way, and outsiders and their rich allies in the local community. “Farmers rarely saw...artisans, who lived next to them in the open country, as a separate class,” he says. But “local merchants and big farmers set up artisans in business and paid them a wage or received rent, a share of the profits, or the right to market their products in return.” (221) The slightly sinister undertone suggests first that these artisans are from somewhere else, and second that they are a wedge used by people interested in developing capitalism, to bring the market to the countryside. But, even if this was not the case, the distance between rich and poor was growing in rural areas. “The richest tenth of seventeenth-century New England and Long Island farmers owned one-fifth to one-third of the wealth of their communities,” Kulikoff says, “but the richest tenth of southern planters owned one-half.” (237) “Rising consumption helped divide rural society into sharply delineated classes.” By the eighteenth century, rich families “built ornate mansions, bought fine china, and wore elegant clothing, making themselves into gentlemen and ladies.” (241) This trend was obviously more prevalent in particular places, but it leads to a situation in the Revolutionary era where a group of rural people may have identified more with distant business and financial partners (creditors, customers, vendors) than with their neighbors down the road (cf. Richards’ Shays’s Rebellion). So, in spite of the “growing sense of well-being [that] permeated pre-Revolutionary America,” the seeds of conflict were in the ground.

Kulikoff calls the Revolution “The Farmers’ War.” (255) While it’s clear not all farmers wanted war, he says “Warfare tore apart the farm economy...[and] thrust farmers into subsistence farming and home production of manufactures.” (256) Even so, they may have been luckier than city-people, who had no immediate sources of food, fuel, and fiber. And, “Between 1777 and 1781...84,000 people served in military units. If mid-Atlantic farmers had provided wheat to make a pound of bread per day per soldier, they could have sold about 45 percent of prewar exports. Military demand...exceeded colonial surpluses.” (258) Many farmers were away fighting, so wives, children and grandparents had to bring in crops and tend animals. Many animals were taken, and a lot of farms were destroyed by battles, troop movements, and raids by Indians allied with England. “Farmers spent the 1780s and the 1790s recovering,” says Kulikoff, and “per capita income plunged from about $1,400 (in 1994 dollars) in 1774 to $800 in 1790.” (281) But “New England and Pennsylvania farmwives exported 2.5 million pounds of butter and 1.8 million pounds of cheese in 1796...far more than before the war.” (282) And the Indians, who had chosen the wrong side, lost their lands. “As many as 200,000 immigrants came during the 1780s and 1790s, half from Ireland and most of the others from England, Scotland, and Germany.” (283)

“In 1780 only one-fourteenth of...whites lived on frontiers...by 1790 the number of acres of improved land jumped 45 percent (to eight million). As this land grab continued through the 1790s, improved acres rose 29 percent (to 10.3 million)...By 1800 the white [frontier] population ...had reached 921,000, more than one-fifth of the country’s whites. In contrast to the frontier, “Rich men...took the bulk of Loyalist land state authorities sold...In New York, where officials seized 2.5 million acres...Speculators...wound up with most of it.” (285) And even on the frontier, “Land speculators and land companies held ownership rights to most unimproved western lands...Starved for funds, New York sold 22,000 square miles, almost half of the state’s land, to developers. Two land companies--Phelps and Gorham and the Holland Land Company--held 6.2 million acres, much of the western half of the state. Alexander Macomb bought 3.6 million acres in the state’s northwest corner.” (287) And in the Ohio territory, the “government sold 1.1 million acres to the Massachusetts-based Ohio Company and to New Jersey land speculator John Symmes.” (288)

“The ideology of the American Revolution.” Kulikoff says, “and the violence of the war together created a democratic class of small property holders.” (291) Farmers had “joined the Revolutionary movement enthusiastically where gentlemen had treated them well before the war; they stayed loyal to Britain when Tory gentlemen they respected adhered to the motherland; they engaged in bitter, violent civil war in every place--the Hudson Valley, New Jersey, and the Carolinas--where rural uprisings had taken place.” (290) America’s urban population was only 8.5% of the total in 1840, and “two-thirds of Americans still labored in agriculture.” (291) “The defet of yeoman popular democracy,” Kulikoff concludes rather abruptly, led to a situation where “small farmers dominated numerically and where--as voters--they helped shape public policy on contested issues such as Indian removal, the distribution of land, and banking.” (292)

Critics: Generally praised the book as a successful “grand narrative” and a valuable overview of rural history. A few reviewers challenged Kulikoff’s implicit use of Turner’s frontier thesis, and several remarked on the separation of narration and interpretation into two volumes.

I think From British Peasants opens many interesting questions, which Kulikoff has to move too quickly through the narrative to be able to close. But that’s good news for me, because many of the issues he raises may be candidates for a slightly more detailed, in-depth coverage that retains a clear connection to a “master narrative” and communicates to a wider audience. Kulikoff uses an incredible amount of information, which deserves to be looked at more closely, and reconciled so that a clear story emerges (even where facts or interpretations may be contested). There are 177 pages of notes and bibliography for 292 pages of story; in a real sense, this is an outline that Kulikoff and others can use to build a whole set of rural histories.