Inequality Within Families?
Social Change in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War
Christopher Clark, 2006
This is an overview of American social history over the “market revolution” period Christopher Clark described in detail in western Massachusetts in The Roots of Rural Capitalism. In the introduction, Clark outlined six areas he thought held the most interest: families and households, work and labor, new social structures and elites that emerged “from the interactions of households, labor, and property,” regional differences, and the tension between “extensive” growth over new territories and “intensive” development in settled areas. He anchored the narrative in a “perspective that places regional social differences at the heart of an argument about national developments. These differences were not variations or exceptions to general trends,” Clark said; “rather, their interactions were the essence of social change” throughout this period.
Clark further suggested “that the inequalities of status between individuals within households played almost as significant a role in driving social change as conflicts and tensions arising from inequalities between social groups.” This is really interesting, but a difficult claim to sustain in a book of national scope, I think. Slavery was such a monumental problem, it seems likely to overwhelm local, family-based conflicts over paternalism and dependence. As William Lloyd Garrison said, “Poverty is not slavery.” While it’s true that political freedom and economic freedom are not the same, a nuanced analysis of “unfreedom” in families and the household’s role as a model of society might seem a bit trivial when compared with America’s big issue of the nineteenth century. It’s an interesting dilemma: how do you talk about smaller social issues that were more relevant to the lives of many Americans, when you have to keep jumping back to the big problem, and do it justice? The point, I suppose, may be that the same basic problem of power and inequality is at the root of all these issues.
This text would be a really interesting way to organize an undergrad class. Clark introduced ideas students could run a long way with: that “Households were the primary agents of social and economic organization,” and that “on the eve of the American Revolution, four of every five people” lacked the basic rights the Colonies were fighting for “because they held a status legally defined as dependent.” Interesting too, that John Adams recognized in 1790, that “the great question will forever remain, who shall work?”
In a sense, this book was a 296-page field exam prep. The undergrads wouldn’t notice, of course, but as I was reading, I was able to sort-of tick off (some of) the Historiography. There was “the best poor man’s country.” There were urban growth and seasonal labor demands influencing migration between country and city. But he also threw in some thought-provoking surprises: “in the late colonial period, the Mid-Atlantic region was supplying about one-seventh of the world’s rapidly-growing demand for iron.” Or: “When peace was signed in 1783, the British resettled thousands of black soldiers in eastern Canada.” And the narrative was shaped by ideas: “the existence of elites...shaped the geography of revolution and the initial boundaries of the new United States.”
Other interesting notes for me: “the population of New York State nearly trebled within twenty years, from 340,000 people in 1790 to 959,000 in 1810.” And, confirming my suspicion that women really pushed forward the “market transition” to get out of time-consuming, inefficient home textile production, Clark quoted an 1833 Dudley resident, Aaron Tufts, who said “Comparatively nothing is done in the household manufactory...a female can now earn more cloth in a day than she could make in the household way in a week” (from “the McLane Report,” Documents Relative to Manufacture in the United States, Doc. no. 308, 1833, I: 69). A good reminder that the new economy benefited rural people, and that they knew this and acted accordingly.
Immigration pressure during the 1840s depression is an interesting idea. “Irish immigration [increased from] 100,000 in 1847 [to] as high as 221,000 in 1851.” German migration, peaking in 1854 when the total of 215,000 immigrants “temporarily exceeded that of any other group.” Part of the answer to the question of settlement patterns could be based on the local economies at the time these people landed, especially the relative weaknesses of particular agricultural markets. On the other hand, land would have been cheaper.
Northeastern urban/rural differences in inequality were also interesting. “In Boston, 1 percent of the total population held 65 percent of aggregate wealth recorded in tax lists in 1860, and the richest 10 percent held more than 95 percent. The remaining 5 percent of wealth was held by the middling 40 percent and the bottom half of the city’s population had nothing at all.” That’s a big difference, even when compared with places like Northampton. A couple of pages later: “While there were about 1,800 clergymen in 1800...by 1845 there were almost 40,000.” I don’t often see descriptions of the Second Great Awakening that mention the rapid growth of the profession of preaching, so that was very interesting.
Good annotated bibliography, too. I found a couple of books in it that hadn’t been on my radar, that now are.