At the end of the eighteenth century, approximately 90 percent of the American people earned a major portion of their living by farming (compared with about 3 percent today).Most production in the New World was for the colonists’ own consumption, but sizable proportions of colonial goods and services were produced for commercial exchange. In time, each region became increasingly specialized in the production of particular goods and services determined by particular soil types, climate, and natural bounties of the forests and ocean.AGRICULTURE AND REGIONAL SPECIALIZATIONS
The southern colonies present a good example of the comparative advantage that fertile new land can offer. Almost at the outset, southern colonials grew tobacco that was both cheaper to produce and of better quality than the tobacco grown in most other parts of the world. Later, the South began to produce two other staples, rice and indigo. For nearly two centuries, the southern economy was to revolve around these few export staples because the region’s soil and climate gave the South a pronounced advantage in the cultivation of crops that were in great demand in the populous industrializing areas of Europe.
Tobacco
Within a decade after the settlement of Jamestown, Virginia began exporting tobacco to England. The weed had been known in Europe for more than a century; sailors on the first voyages of exploration had brought back samples and descriptions of the ways in which natives had used it. Despite much opposition on moral grounds, smoking had increased in popularity during the sixteenth century; thus, even though James I viewed it “so vile and stinking a custom,” it was a relief to the English to find a source of supply so that tobacco importation from the Spanish would be unnecessary. Tobacco needed a long growing season and fertile soil. Furthermore, it could be cultivated in small areas, on only partly cleared fields, and with the most rudimentary implements.
All this suited the primitive Virginia community. But tobacco production had two additional advantages in the colonies: As successive plantings exhausted the original fertility of a particular plot, new land was readily available, and ships could move up the rivers of the Virginia coast to load their cargoes at the plantation docks. One challenge that lingered for most of the seventeenth century was that the colonists had much to learn about the proper curing, handling, and shipping of tobacco, and for many years the American product was inferior to the tobacco produced in Spain. Nevertheless, colonial tobacco was protected in the English market, and the fact that it was cheaper led to steady increases in its portion of the tobacco trade. The culture of tobacco spread northward around the Chesapeake Bay and moved up the many river valleys. By the end of the seventeenth century, there was some production in North Carolina.
The highly productive American tobacco regions swelled the supply of tobacco in British and European markets and, tobacco prices fell precipitously until the last quarter of the seventeenth century. By the turn of the eighteenth century, it was apparent that the competition in colonial tobacco production would be won by large plantations and that if the small planters were to succeed at all, they would have to specialize in high-quality tobacco or in the production of food and other crops. From the work of David Klingaman (1969) we have learned that, in the eighteenth century, substantial areas around the Chesapeake (especially in Maryland) turned to the production of wheat.
Larger production units were favored in tobacco cultivation because slaves worked in groups could be supervised and driven. To achieve the best results, a plantation owner needed enough slaves to ensure the economical use of a plantation manager. Supervision costs did not grow in proportion to the number of slaves owned and used; therefore, per unit costs fell as plantations grew in size (at least up to a point).
A plantation with fewer than 10 slaves intermittently prospered, but only larger units earned substantial returns above cost, provided they were properly managed and contained sufficient acreage to avoid soil exhaustion. Thus, the wealthy or those who were able to secure adequate credit from English and Scottish merchants attained more efficient scales of tobacco production and, in so doing, became even wealthier and further improved their credit standing. We should not conclude that slaves were held only by the largest plantation owners, however; the crude statistics available today indicate that in pre-Revolutionary times, as later, large numbers of planters owned fewer than 10 slaves. Nonetheless, there was persistent pressure in the southern colonies to develop large farms favored by lower per-unit costs.
Around 1695, the second of the great southern staples was introduced. Early Virginia colonists had experimented with rice production, and South Carolina had tried to cultivate the staple in the first two years after settlement, but success awaited the introduction of new varieties of the grain (Gray 1933). By the early 1700s, rice was an established crop in the area around Charleston, although problems of irrigation remained. It is possible to grow rice without intermittent flooding and draining, but the quality of the grain suffers. Rice was first cultivated in the inland swamps that could be flooded periodically from the rivers, but the flooding depended on uncertain stream flows. Besides, such a growing method could not be used on the extremely flat land that lay along the coast itself.
Before long, a system of flooding was devised that enabled producers to utilize the force of tidal flows. Water control, originally a Dutch specialty, had grown in importance and sophistication in England (to drain marshes), and this knowledge was transferred to America. Dikes were built along the lower reaches of the rivers, and as the tide pushed back the fresh water, it could be let through gates into irrigation ditches crossing the fields.
Flooding near tidewater remained capital was worthwhile because proper engineering permitted the two major tide-propelled floodings to occur at precisely the right times, and the water could be removed just as accurately. Such fixed costs added to the prospects of scale economies in rice production, and much labor was needed to build the dikes and to plant and harvest. Slaves were imported in great numbers during the eighteenth century for these purposes.
The “task” system of working slaves, which gave each slave a particular piece of ground to cultivate, was utilized. The work was backbreaking, similar to the “gang system” used in sugar production in the Caribbean, and it was carried out in hot, mosquito-infested swamps. Although contemporary opinion held that Africans were better able to withstand the ravages of disease and the effects of overexertion than were Europeans, the mortality rate among blacks in this region was high. Recent scholarship provides evidence that bears out this contemporary view. Blacks had disproportionately high rates of mortality in the northern mainland colonies, and whites had disproportionately higher death rates in the far southern and Caribbean colonies.
Phil Coelho and Bob McGuire (1997) explain these differences in terms of the races coming into contact with pathogens for which they had little or no prior geographic exposure. Tropical diseases were particularly devastating to Europeans, less so to Africans (Coelho and McGuire 1997). Despite production difficulties, rice output steadily increased until the end of the colonial period, its culture finally extending from below Savannah up into the southern regions of North Carolina.
To the profits from rice were added those from another staple—indigo, so named from a plant native to India. The indigo plant was first successfully introduced in 1743 by Eliza Lucas, a young woman who had come from the West Indies to live on a plantation near Charleston. Indigo almost certainly could not have been grown in the colonies without special assistance, because its culture was demanding and the preparation of the deep blue dye required exceptional skill. As a supplement to rice, however, it was an ideal crop, both because the plant could be grown on high ground where rice would not grow and because the peak workloads in processing indigo came at a time of year when the slaves were not busy in the rice fields. Indigo production, fostered by a British subsidy of sixpence a pound, added considerably to the profits of plantation owners, thereby attracting resources to the area.
Other Commodities
In emphasizing the importance of tobacco, rice, and indigo, we are in danger of overlooking the production of other commodities in the southern colonies. Deerskins and naval stores (pitch, tar, and resin) were exported from the Carolinas, and bulk unfinished iron in quantity was shipped from the Chesapeake region. Throughout the South, there was a substantial output of hay and animal products and of Indian corn, wheat, and other grains. These items, like a wide variety of fruits and vegetables, were grown mostly to make the agricultural units as self-sufficient as possible. Yet upland farmers, especially in the Carolinas and Virginia, raised livestock for commercial sale and exported meat, either on the hoof or in cured form, in quantity to other colonies. In all the colonies, food for home consumption was a main economic activity.
The Middle Colonies
The land between the Potomac and the Hudson Rivers was, on the whole, fertile and readily tillable and therefore enjoyed a comparative advantage in the production of grains and other foodstuffs. As the seventeenth century elapsed, two distinct types of agricultural operations developed there. To the west, on the cutting edge of the frontier, succeeding generations continued to encounter many of the difficulties that had beset the first settlers. The trees in the forests—an ever-present obstacle—had to be felled, usually after they had been girdled and allowed to die. The felled trees were burned and their stumps removed to allow for the use of horse-drawn plows. The soil was worked with tools that did not differ much from the implements used by medieval Europeans. A living literally had to be wrested from the Earth.
At the same time, a stable and reasonably advanced agriculture began to develop to the east of the frontier. The Dutch in New York and the Germans in Pennsylvania, who brought skills and farming methods from areas with soils similar to those in this region, were encouraged from the first to cultivate crops for sale in the small but growing cities of New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. Gradually, a commercial agriculture developed. Wheat became the important staple, and although there was a considerable output of corn, rye, oats, and barley, the economy of the region was based on the great bread grain. During the latter part of the seventeenth century, a sufficient quantity of wheat and flour was produced to permit the export of these products, particularly to the West Indies.
The kind of agricultural unit that evolved in the Middle colonies later became typical of the great food belts of the midwestern United States. Individual farms, which were considerably smaller in acreage than the average plantation to the south, could be operated by the farmer and his family with little hired help. Slaveholding was rare (except along the Hudson in New York and in Rhode Island) because wheat production was labor intensive only during planting and harvest periods and because there were no apparent economies of large-scale production in wheat, corn, or generalized farming as there were in the southern plantation staples, especially rice.
It was normally preferable to acquire an indentured servant as a hand; the original outlay was not great, and the productivity of even a young and inexperienced servant was soon sufficient to return the owner’s investment. The more limited growing season in the North also lowered the economic gains of slave labor in the fields. Finally, as Coelho and McGuire (1997) show, the northern climates had negative biological consequences for blacks relative to whites.
New England
Vital as the agriculture of New England was to the people of the area, it constituted a relatively unimportant part of commercial output for sale. Poor soils, uneven terrain, and a severe climate led to restricted commercial farming. The typical farm emphasized subsistence farming, growing only those crops necessary for family maintenance. Because it could be produced almost anywhere and because its yield even on poor land was satisfactory, Indian corn was the chief crop. Wheat and the other cereal grains, along with the hardier vegetables, were grown for family use.
By Gary M. Walton and Hugh Rockoff in the book 'History of the American Economy',Eleventh Edition, 2010, South-Western, Cengage Learning, Mason, OH USA, chapter 3, p.44-49. Adapted to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.
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