The Standard of Living in Southern New England, 1640-1773

T has always been something of a mystery how the people of rural J New England made a living on that rocky land. Alice Hanson Jones depicted the region on the eve of the Revolution as America's poorest, while Kenneth Lockridge has argued the stark Malthusian logic of too many people trying to occupy too little space. Robert A. Gross documented the erosion of family life in Concord that followed, equally logically, on the increasing necessity of sending away each generation's surplus of sons.1 There is no denying the facts of the situation: prolific Puritans had taken to heart God's injunction and proceeded to populate at near-maximum rates of human fertility the lands so tragically vacated by plague-ridden Indians. After a short check to the whites' biological juggernaut at the end of the seventeenth century, the torrents again poured forth in the eighteenth: towns were founded at an average rate of 6 per year prior to I760, with a total of 264 between then and the outbreak of the Revolution, a rate of i8 per year.2 When lowlands were occupied, pioneers moved to the uplands; when the south was fully taken up, immigrants moved north into New Hampshire and Vermont, and west into New York: beginning in the I750s, the proprietor of Livingston Manor found himself trying to fend off hordes of New Englanders hungry for prime agricultural land.3 This continuing exodus of New England families is an old story, but its relevance here is that the act of emigration delivered them from the Malthusian trap and this, in turn, helped to ease the pressure on the land at home. I will focus on those who stayed behind and ask how they fared in their most unpromising land, particularly by comparison with more favored regions in British North America

American Constitutional Law and Politics · American Environmental and Regional History · American History and Culture · History

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