Sweet Commerce
Adam Smith was a great fan of colonization. The opportunities available in the New World promised to increase the wealth of nations. Early immigrants struggled to gain a foothold; by the middle of the eighteenth century they could boast of considerable success.
Many rural areas enjoyed a high level of self-sufficiency, and many individuals, including some outspoken residents of Amherst, Massachusetts expressed distaste for avarice.6 Still, by 1776 evidence of the ‘‘market mentalite”, that so-called capitalist state of mind, was widespread—and not just in New England and New York.7The slave-based sugar and cotton plantations of the South were once described as the relics of a semi-feudal system antithetical to economic growth.8 Adam Smith himself argued that slavery could never be an efficient system precisely because it was not in a slave's own interest to work hard.9 But recent historiography offers considerable evidence that the planter aristocracy skillfully maximized its profits.10 It was not necessarily doomed to economic extinction. Had such evidence been available in the eighteenth century, it might have weakened the confidence of those who believed that commerce would always lead toward higher virtue.
The struggle to end slavery represented a moral and political effort to restrict one particular type of market—a market for human beings themselves. It represented an effort to impose new limits on the pursuit of individual self-interest. The growth of markets, in the abstract, excited little opposition. Governance and regulation of the market were at issue, along
with its cultural effects. How would markets and mobility affect the bonds of affection, the moral sentiments on which society relied?11
Then as now, that question was difficult to answer. But the centrifugal effect of new economic opportunities for men was particularly apparent.
Most immigrants to the New World had departed from patriarchal tradition by leaving their own parents behind. They did not always have a choice: more than half of all English emigrants between 1718 and 1775 were felons, mostly young unmarried men with no property to their name. Women were more likely to accompany family members to New England than to other regions. Still, at mid-century 1.5 men lived there for every woman. In the Chesapeake the ratio was 4 to 1.12When new families formed, they hoped their children would grow up happy to remain close at hand, contributing to a farm or family enterprise and providing mutual aid. Those hopes were often disappointed. The availability of land on the steadily expanding frontier, combined with the demand for hired workers in a labor-scarce environment, pulled many young men away from home. Fathers also became less dependent on their sons as a nascent labor market allowed them to hire substitutes. In New England in particular, men of the older generation complained bitterly of their reduced authority over the younger. 13 The growing sense that children had become less likely to defray their costs probably contributed to early fertility decline.14
Eighteenth-century women were seldom encouraged to develop any skills other than those that might complement their assigned roles as wives and mothers. The only occupation that invited their wage employment was domestic service, a luxury for most families in rural areas. Jobs as housekeepers and maidservants were more plentiful in more prosperous areas of early settlement. Daughters were more likely than sons to stay close to home, at least until they married. Sex ratios in New England were tilted due to the growing outmigration of young men from settled areas after 1800, making it harder for young women to find a husband.
At the same time, economic development reduced the relative importance of household production. The growth of factory-based cloth manufacture in Britain wrought a major transformation, rendering the traditional domestic responsibilities of spinsters largely obsolete.
Patriotic commitment combined with the stringencies of war led to increased production of homespun cloth during the war itself. Afterwards, however, imports from abroad made such inroads that young women were in danger of becoming unproductive in the home—an argument in favor of developing local textile mills to provide them with employment. As Alexander Hamilton put it in his Report on Manufactures of 1791, ‘‘The husbandman himself experiences a new source of profit and support from the encreased (sic.) industry of his wife and daughters.’’15 Hamilton’s enthusiasm was borne out. After the War of 1812, protective tariffs promoted the development of the U.S. textile industry and brought the term ‘‘mill girl’’ into common parlance.The American Revolution and what has been called a ‘‘market revolution’’ evolved hand in hand. Yet both revolutions affected women less powerfully than men because of explicit efforts to keep them in their place. Women’s non-market work ensured their husbands and their children a generous supply of domestic service. It also offered a buffer of sorts against the anxieties of the market. Women would provide a haven in an increasingly impersonal if not completely heartless world.16