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Originally published in 1985.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691611556 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/14/2014 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #419 |
| Pages: | 414 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.10(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Society and Economy in Colonial Connecticut
By Jackson Turner Main
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1985 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-04726-3
CHAPTER 1
On Population
This chapter exists quite by accident. I was trying to discover how many of the men who died in early Connecticut turned up in the probate court, in order to judge the reliability of the records. Using the published estimates of population and a commonly assumed death rate, I found that, until 1720, we seemed to have inventories of the estates of almost nine out of ten. Indeed, during one decade the proportion exceeded 100 percent! Something was wrong: either the death rates were higher than we had supposed or the colony contained more people than the published estimates indicate. A fresh start on the problem was called for before I could proceed.
Tax lists for almost any time and place show a lot of people with little or no property, and we need to know whether such men were young, in which case their poverty was a (perhaps) temporary condition, or middle-aged. Partly for this reason we cannot interpret data on the distribution of wealth until we know the age structure of the society. Also, using estate inventories — our most important source — requires a knowledge of the age structure of both the "decedents" and the living population, because the former are much older. Half the men featured in the probate records had reached the age of fifty, whereas half of those still alive were in their twenties and early thirties. Older men are wealthier because they have been accumulating property for a longer time than average. So, to discover the wealth of the living by extrapolating from the wealth of the dead we must discover the age structure of both groups and adjust for the difference. Moreover, we should follow the changing situation of the people of colonial Connecticut as they move through a typical life cycle, from the child to the young single person to the newlywed, then the parent of youngsters, of teen-agers, of grown children, of grandchildren, and into old age. Social history demands that we study every sort of people with equal respect and in the same detail, especially if four-fifths of the population — the women and children — are almost excluded.
These reasons, and others as will appear, compelled an extensive though selective investigation of the colony's demography. Flaws in the sources kept enlarging the scope of the investigation. Thus where dates of birth were lacking a date of marriage or of a first-born might serve, but only if the average age at marriage was known for at least some of the people, so that fact had to be determined. Changing patterns of population over time required study of the demographic shifts during the whole period. The search for answers, far from being dull, was like a detective story, a piecing together of the evidence to solve a whole series of problems, the enterprise made the more fruitful because of the contrasts that appeared between the characteristics of colonial Connecticut's demography and those of other times and places. And some interesting facts emerged.
I started with the earliest settlers, to determine their ages upon arrival, estimate their number, discover the dates of their deaths, compute their life span and death rate, and compare the number of deaths recorded in probate with the actual frequency. These data would yield, among other inferences, the solution to our very first problem: why we find an unexpectedly large number of inventories. For this undertaking the records furnish reasonably complete lists of the settlers resident about the year 1640 for five of the eleven towns: New Haven and Stamford on the coast and Hartford, Windsor, and Wethersfield up the Connecticut River.
The first colonists of New Haven landed in 1638. The town contained some seventy "free planters" by the next June and in 1640 confirmed its survival with the erection of a meetinghouse. By 1645 about 340 men had resided in the town at least briefly. Of these, one-third simply disappear, probably among the two out of five immigrants known to have left the colony. The settlement reminds one of the early Chesapeake ventures or of a mining town. It was mostly male and among those whose ages we know, more than half were in their twenties and another couple of dozen were still teen-agers. If we classify the latter as men, 64 percent had not reached the age of thirty, leaving aside those who vanished. Few had married and no doubt the great majority were poor laborers.
Genealogists have spent a good deal of time on such of the survivors as founded families, but have discovered the exact birth dates of only forty-three, with approximations for another twenty-six. These dates enable us to estimate the men's average age at marriage, usually assumed to be twenty-five for the seventeenth century. New Haven's was thirty, reflecting the later age at marriage in Old England, where some men had already wed, but especially the shortage of women in the new colony. Using this figure, or the consequent assumption drawn from the birth date of a first child, we arrive at the following age structure of adult men in 1640: age twenty to twenty-nine, 59 percent; age thirty to thirty-nine, 24 percent; age forty to forty-nine, 12 percent, and over fifty, 5 percent. None had reached the age of sixty.
Since so many of the early settlers simply vanish, it may seem presumptuous to comment on the average age at death or the life expectancy of men at particular ages. However, we might forget about the transients and focus on those who remained to buy land, become permanent residents, and, in most cases, marry and die in the colony — the founding fathers of New Haven. Among these the age at death was high because they had already survived for nearly thirty years. We know the death dates for 130 individuals present in 1640, among whom the median age at death was fifty-eight, varying with the date of birth as follows: born before 1600, sixty-nine; born 1600-1609, sixty; born 1610-1620, fifty-five. The last figure records the life expectancy of men aged twenty to twenty-nine in 1640. It seems high, considering the problems of a new settlement, exceeding that of Maryland by a dozen years, but, as we will discuss later, Plymouth settlers apparently outlasted them. We cannot tell anything about the death rate at this point because of an excessive number of missing men. During the 1650s the death rate of those adult men we do know about was only eighteen per thousand. Of course most men were still young, which keeps the figure down. Since some of the transients surely died without record, we must suspect a higher death rate and a shorter life expectancy.
The first New Haven settlement, then, reminds us of the Chesapeake colonies in that both contained mostly young single men who either died soon or left: the colony. From 1638 to 1645 only a little more than a hundred women aged sixteen or more had arrived (that we know about), being outnumbered almost 3.5 to 1 by the male immigrants. In the latter year, since some men had left, the sex ratio was 2.2 to 1. Although some of these women had already produced children and the rest married young — under twenty — their small number prevented a boom in population. Worse, the town was an economic failure, and so many men gave up and left that the population was not growing at all. This situation began to change, however. Most of the men who survived married eventually, the proportion of men who died single declining from 37½ percent in the 1640s to 25 percent in the 1660s. The young girls soon became mothers and many children survived. Thus the unstable village dominated by young males gave way to permanent families, and New Haven came at last to resemble not her Chesapeake predecessors but her sister villages up the Connecticut River.
The lists of early settlers in Hartford, Windsor, and Wethersfield come from "taxables" in 1654-1655, an estimate of 150 "settlers" for Hartford in 1639, genealogies in extensive histories of Windsor and Wethersfield and a more limited one for Hartford, together with additions from probate records. These sources permit a reconstruction of the population in 1640. By that date the three communities, founded in 1634 and 1635, included nearly three hundred adult men. Forty percent were in their twenties and the median age was thirty-three. Only a litde over half of the earliest settlers had married. The young bachelors of Hartford had to wait until they were over thirty, on the average, before they found wives, though in Windsor they married at twenty-eight and in Wethersfield at twenty-seven. In the last, there was only one woman over sixteen for every two men. The situation was alleviated, however, by the removal of many of the men. One-fourth of the early emigrants into the three towns left the colony, usually headed north into Massachusetts, and another group moved to found new communities in Connecticut, so that their society was almost as mobile as that of New Haven.
So far we are struck by the resemblance between the colony's early settlers and those of the Chesapeake. Relatively more women had arrived, to be sure, but not nearly enough to go around, and young men, almost all with little property, predominated. But one big demographical difference appears: far more of them survived and their children, too, lived to have families of their own. In Maryland the young male — and presumably female — immigrant of twenty-one lived for another two decades or a bit more. The life expectancy in the West Indies was probably even less. In contrast, the New Haven women who reached age twenty-one survived into the fifties and their Wethersfield sisters even longer, while the men lived for thirty years after their arrival. The median age at death in Hartford was 62½ years and in Windsor, fully 70. These men, being mature when we meet them, would of course greatly exceed the population as a whole in longevity, but the figure is impressive, exceeding that in New Haven by a decade. The peculiar age structure helped to keep down the annual death rate, which during the 1650s was seventeen per thousand for adult men in Hartford and only thirteen in Windsor.
The pioneers of Connecticut, then, did not all arrive in family groups. Over half of even the adult men were single. It was a young population with over 40 percent in their twenties and only one-fifth having reached the age of forty. The shortage of mature women raised the men's average age at marriage to thirty. Unlike the British settlers in the Chesapeake and the West Indies, they did not die young of disease, malnutrition, or Indian attacks. Collectively they lived to be over sixty and the man or woman of twenty-five would survive another thirty-five years. While over one-fourth left the colony soon after arrival, those departures helped to dispose of young single men for whom wives and perhaps even jobs were lacking. Settlers who remained fared well.
The next adequate set of records comes a generation later, about 1670, when we can draw, first, on eight tax lists; second, data on New Haven from Jacobus; third, a modern census for the colony assembled from the foregoing and other records; fourth, the number of taxables reported to the legislature by the towns; and finally, probate records. Each of these contains flaws but all are essential sources.
The tax lists by law omitted some men: ministers, men over seventy, and soldiers on active service. The towns forgave others their rates, notably paupers, and also an occasional skilled worker whom the town wished to attract. Elisha Hart of Windsor never appeared on the lists although he lived there for many years, because he was both insane and poor. Also the names of servants, slaves, and males age sixteen through twenty do not appear, their rate being paid for them by their masters or fathers or guardians. The same was true of older men if they remained or became dependent on someone else. Furthermore, although the assessors tried to catch the migrants they sometimes failed. Thus the number of persons taxed, the so-called "polls" or heads that the towns reported to the legislature fell considerably short of the total population. In addition, from a colonywide point of view, newly established towns sometimes obtained an exemption for a few years.
My revised data suggests a total for Connecticut in 1655 of 1,200 men, or presumably 6,000 persons. Considering the number of men who supposedly had entered the colony during its first decades, probably not far from 1,000, the number seems low, with a growth rate of only 1.2 percent annually despite some continued immigration. The failure to grow between 1640 and 1655 reflected considerable emigration and a lopsided age structure, since many immigrants were young single men who did not produce adult sons for over twenty years. More seriously, women of marriageable age were in short supply.
Beginning about 1660, however, the second generation began to appear as taxables, emigration lessened after a brief exodus to East Jersey and Long Island, and a few more settlers arrived. The recorded adult male population abruptly spurted. New Haven town furnishes an exaggerated example. About 230 men were present in 1647 but only 170 remained ten years later, including relatively few young men. By 1668 the total had recovered to 219 (including Wallingford), the proportion of men in their twenties jumped, and there were numerous boys in their late teens. The same was true of women: the colony was ready for a population boom.
The course of this explosion is revealed not only by the taxables reported to the legislature but — in a sort of inverse way — the deaths recorded in the probate court. By the last third of the century these had become so numerous as to equal if not exceed the number predicted by the male population as indicated by the polls. We have now explained this miraculous completeness: there were more men than the tax lists indicate. Still, the probate court reported a very high proportion of the deaths, at least four out of five during the half-century after 1660. The researcher finds the appointment of an administrator or executor, the posting of a bond, the probate of a will, an inventory of the person's property, the settlement or distribution of an estate. From a demographic point of view, we can add to the population men not appearing on the tax lists, and by discovering the birth date of the decedents learn the longevity of the population. Thus the combination of probate records, assessment lists, and collective genealogies enables us to analyze the population of Connecticut during the late 1600s.
By 1670 the age structure of the colony's people had stabilized. At first, as we saw, young men predominated and old men scarcely existed. The population remained quite young — the high birth rate saw to that — but the median, among adult men, rose from thirty-two to nearly thirty-six and men over sixty now became common, though still scarcely one in twelve. The relative decline of men under forty reflected a continuing emigration of that age group, the diminished immigration, and the trend toward a "normal" age distribution as native-born residents replaced newcomers. The much larger proportion of older men resulted from the survival of the first settlers, since a man of thirty in 1640 would have reached seventy in 1670. A further slight increase in the septuagenarians, coming, so to speak, at the expense of men in their fifties, would presently complete the change in pattern.
The large population on this set of tax lists and other sources, with considerable information concerning the dates of death of these men, permits a discussion of how long Connecticut's settlers lived. If we consider only the people on the lists, the general age at death would be rather high because the men were in their thirties to start with. Those in 1640, taken together, lived to be over sixty — about thirty years for the "average" man (not for someone just turned twenty-one). This figure is certainly higher than the reality because so many youngsters vanished, some of whom must have died; an age at death of fifty-nine is more likely. By 1670, as the population aged, it had risen to sixty-three.
A better measure is the life expectancy of each age group. Probate records furnish this information because the death of every man who reached the age of twenty-one appeared there potentially, so that our population, or pool, should consist of all adult men. Actually, as we have seen, 15 or 20 percent of the estates did not enter the court, but these were spread over the entire age spectrum. There remains a catch: as entries in the probate records begin the data is distorted by the youth of the population. During the 1640s the median age at death was barely forty (N = 51) and if anything probably less, since half of the "unknowns" were single and only one is known to have left children. During the next decade the figure rose by three years, but not until the 1670s did the age distribution of the population raise the age at death to forty-nine, after which it stabilized at about fifty.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Society and Economy in Colonial Connecticut by Jackson Turner Main. Copyright © 1985 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- FrontMatter, pg. i
- CONTENTS, pg. v
- GRAPHS AND TABLES, pg. vii
- INTRODUCTION, pg. xiii
- One. On Population, pg. 1
- Two. On Property and Status, pg. 28
- Three. The Distribution of Property in the Seventeenth Century, pg. 62
- Four. The Distribution of Property in the Eighteenth Century, pg. 115
- Five. The Laborers, pg. 174
- Six. The Farmers, pg. 200
- Seven. The Craftsmen and Professionals, pg. 241
- Eight. On Traders, and a Summary, pg. 278
- Nine. The Leaders, pg. 317
- Ten. Conclusion, pg. 367
- Bibliographical Essay, pg. 383
- Index, pg. 385