Town Born: The Political Economy of New England from Its Founding to the Revolution

Early American Studies

by Barry Levy

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, British colonists found the New World full of resources. With land readily available but workers in short supply, settlers developed coercive forms of labor—indentured servitude and chattel slavery—in order to produce staple export crops like rice, wheat, and tobacco. This brutal labor regime became common throughout most of the colonies. An important exception was New England, where settlers and their descendants did most work themselves.

In Town Born , Barry Levy shows that New England's distinctive and far more egalitarian order was due neither to the colonists' peasant traditionalism nor to the region's inhospitable environment. Instead, New England's labor system and relative equality were every bit a consequence of its innovative system of governance, which placed nearly all land under the control of several hundred self-governing town meetings. As Levy shows, these town meetings were not simply sites of empty democratic rituals but were used to organize, force, and reconcile laborers, families, and entrepreneurs into profitable export economies. The town meetings protected the value of local labor by persistently excluding outsiders and privileging the town born.

The town-centered political economy of New England created a large region in which labor earned respect, relative equity ruled, workers exercised political power despite doing the most arduous tasks, and the burdens of work were absorbed by citizens themselves. In a closely observed and well-researched narrative, Town Born reveals how this social order helped create the foundation for American society.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Economics

360 pages, Paperback

First published July 31, 2009

Reviews

[David Bates]

“Historians have looked at New England towns in a variety of ways,” explains Barry Levy in his 2009 work Town Born, “as survivals of age-old English customs, as centers of consensus and peace, as traditional communities in transition to modernity, as centers of sustainable agricultural practices. Historians need first to understand that they were chiefly political economies and labor systems.” A proponent of the wave of historical thought that calls for “bringing the state back in,” Levy’s account of colonial New England reconceptualizes town governments as the creators of a system that made their workers better educated, wealthier and more politically equal than any in the expanding English world. By bringing together political and economic details that are usually treated separately, Levy assembles a picture of a system which was essentially a three-fold. Rather than a permanent underclass of unfree labor, New Englanders expected servants and the young to perform the difficult, menial work of their farms and shipbuilding industries. In schools and in the rough gangs of seaside towns, young Puritans were violently socialized into difficult lives of difficult labor disciplined by public whippings. Both in education and punishment town governments maintained the upper hand over families, ensuring discipline unsoftened by paternal considerations. If the work was difficult, the wages were high and allowed the young to accumulate capital to invest in their own farms and businesses. The high value to labor was maintained by the second element of the system – strict labor regulations set in the interests of town workers by democratic town meetings. Drawing on the mechanisms developed in England in the late 16th and early 17th centuries to deal with growing numbers of displaced peasants, practices like warning indigents out of town and requiring that a townsman post bond for strangers discouraged labor competition. At the level of the colony, large groups of immigrants were refused entry to ports. The third leg of the system was constituted by town management of economic production, exhibited by management of the timber resources necessary to shipbuilding, coordination of agricultural work and the creation of a local textile industry by mandating that children and women spun and weaved on pain of fines.

“By melding servants and children into one laboring class,” Levy tells us, “propertied Massachusetts folk wounded themselves emotionally but took the souls of all laborers seriously and developed a labor system that was far more egalitarian and gave far more dignity to the laborer than other early American economic systems, which typically distanced leisured, pampered children from menial slaves.” Indeed, “[t]his severe socialization made New Englanders effective at doing the worst work available, the men becoming mariners and soldiers, and women capable of having many babies, producing textiles and livestock, and suffering their sons’ deaths in early adulthood at sea. Massachusetts was a ‘Christian Sparta,’ as Samuel Adams described it.” While Levy engages Atlantic World scholarship by linking the traditions of labor management to the history of the countryside English immigrants left behind, and tying the economic priorities of towns to their position in the Atlantic economy, his main engagement is with the paradox of developing traditions of slavery and freedom in the New World. Through the intrusive instruments of democratic town governance, rather than the happenstance of rocky soil and short growing seasons, the town born men of New England found an alternative solution to African slavery of the South and the waves of indentured servitude that Levy suggests were becoming an all too prominent piece of the labor picture in the middle colonies.

[John]

Very important for people interested in early New England. The main argument here is that town governments in Massachusetts were incredibly important and powerful, and were able to carefully control the labor market in the towns. They went very far- to the point of conducting yearly surveys of households to determine where children were not being worked to their potential, and taking children away from parents to distribute them to homes that would give them work to do. They also constantly ordered newcomers to villages to leave town, even when the people they were ordering out had relatives in the town, or were brought to the town and given a job. The point was to regulate the labor market and keep 'town born' citizens gainfully employed. Levy also points out that this system meant the British were bound to butt heads with people in Massachusetts, as when they would try to impress sailors in Massachusetts ports and were faced with empowered sailors making good wages who were willing to fight back. All the material here adds up to a very convincing argument about the importance of town politics in early New England.
The best part in terms of anecdotal, sharing-with-friends material, was the recounting of eighteenth century Pope's Day (a.k.a Guy Fawkes Day) celebrations in Boston. Rival street gangs would build dueling floats with giant effigies of the Pope and the Devil, and then there would be gang fights in the streets, to the delight of the crowds. Little boys would make Pope's heads out of potatoes and use them to collect coins. That is crazy. Potato Pope heads and street fights.