www.UsHumans.net: Chapter 15
The changing way of life in the United States during the 19th century as we switched from working our own family farm within the neighborhood to being factory workers
The description of everyday life in the following pages is a summary of Jack Larkin's The Reshaping of Everyday Life 1790-1840. Occasional details are from Firsthand America, A History of the United States by Virginia Bernhard, David Burner, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, and John McClymer. When you are in the area of Worcester, Massachusetts you can see Larkin's book come to life at the Old Sturbridge Village, see www.osv.org. (The Sturbridge website has many images of everyday life, machines, and buildings and some 360-degree panoramic images of the grounds and buildings.) Visit www.memorialhall.mass.edu for images through the last few centuries. See also www.loc.gov/exhibits/treasures and http://louisdl.louislibraries.org and http://memory.loc.gov/ammem. Visit www.pbs.org/wnet/colonialhouse for information about the Colonial House project along with panoramic displays. At www.hti.umich.edu/m/moagrp you will find the Making of America digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction. The details of crafts, technologies, and procedures summarized here were taken from Colonial Craftsmen and the Beginnings of American Industry by Edwin Tunis. The summary of the growth of business comes from Industrializing America, The Nineteenth Century by Walter Licht. As you read each sentence below, you might like to compare the aspect of life it describes to that of your own today and to those of the other times and places encountered in this book. For many persons who live in the U.S. today, these were the ways of their great-grandparent’s great-grandparents great-grandparents.
Larkin says that the everyday life consists of everything that is taken for granted. Politics, the wider economy, and the more-powerful are never completely ignorable but are of concern to us only sporadically. What concerns women, men, children, farmers, laborers, and artisans are the routines and seasons of work, their home and the moments of marriage and birth, sickness and death, traveling, sex, singing and dancing, visiting and social gatherings. In Firsthand America the authors quote Mr. Dooley, who said in 1906 that "History is all about what people died for but not what they lived for."
In Chapter 9, we saw that gatherer-hunter individuals make their own clothing, utensils, and decorations from raw materials that are readily available. In this respect, each person is a "jack of all trades." Gatherer-hunter societies are egalitarian in that each person has equal access to the tools needed for life.
The quality of goods is seen to increase when states develop because specialists have the luxury of spending their entire lifetimes making a particular item. We saw that trainer-apprentice relations began with the first cities of Mesopotamia. For thousands of years, these handmade items were very expensive so that only the wealthiest members of society could afford to buy them. Our museums are full of the gold, silver, and gemstone items of the wealthier of the past. Most of us instead make do with anything that is handy.
The previous chapter contained a brief discussion of the Industrial Revolution. We saw that after the year 1760 or so, our Industrial Revolution's factories began to make inexpensive, mass-produced items. The long-term relation between apprentice and trainer began to disappear as the need for skilled artisans decreased since less skill was needed to monitor and operate the new machinery. The factory workers were also the consumers of the items being made in the factories and this meant that the number of utensils, clothing, and decorations in the average home grew from 20 to 200 or even 2,000 items. However, the ups and downs of the business cycle meant that factory workers held less control over their continued well-being than had been the case while they were farmers. The efforts of farmers directly impact the quality of their own lives, which depends on no one else.
Our Industrial Revolution involved the related processes of industrialization, urbanization, commercialization, and capitalism in what Licht describes as "the expansion of the marketplace to include the buying and selling of everything." Licht explains that the market society is as old as the first farming villages. What changed with the emergence of our Industrial Revolution's factory was the "pervasiveness of the market."
Handmade items are expensive and are made in low quantities. The mechanical capacity of the factory to produce large quantities of low cost items both created and then responded to an increased demand. As we began buying more manufactured products, the number of factories increased to provide them. Keep in mind that manufacturing output and consumer demand remain closely related and that unemployment levels and the business-cycle are due to both demand and output levels.
We will see that in the United States, business organizations grew to cover state-sized regions by the year 1850, nation-sized regions by the year 1900, and by 1950 they began to operate globally. We will also see that "Big Government" came as a delayed response to the social consequences of our switch from farming to factory work, and we'll see that Big Business has always been decades ahead of Big Government's attempt to govern them.
Nothing about today's big business, big government, community, and neighborhood makes any sense until we read Larkin's description of the changes in our way of life that occurred as we switched from being farmers to factory workers. The books by Frans De Waal, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, the Gies, and Larkin (plus that of the Miringoffs, which we'll meet in Chapter 22) should be the next books you read.
We have seen that there are endless differences in the details of the way of life of each group of persons around the world. The cultural details of different groups of us humans are sometimes different even if one compares two groups separated by the short distance of a day's travel, which is the range of quick communication. The cultural details of one group of persons are also seen to change through time. In brief, one might say that cultures change about every one hundred miles (sixty km) and every one hundred years. For example, the ways of the people of the United States in the year 1800 were different than they were in the year 1900, and that differed from its form in the year 2000.
When cultural details change in a single generation it makes grown persons feel uneasy. But children think that the only culture that is "natural" and makes any sense or seems "real" is the one in which they grew–no matter how different it is to that of their parents' childhood. For the people of the northeastern U.S., the magnitude of the farmer-to-factory-worker changes was greatest during the years 1820 to 1850–a time span of little more than a generation.
Still today, the cultures of each of the world's industrialized nations are very much unique, but they also share many things in common, including wage work, urbanism, commercialism, capitalism, big-business, job-hopping, big-government, welfare-states, and relatives living in distant cities. To better understand today's commercial and industrial way of life we will next have a look at how we lived before we became factory workers. We will see that many changes occurred as we moved from life on the family farm to life as factory workers. We want to understand this important transition period of our past.
The transition to industrialization is occurring in many regions of the world today. Understanding the magnitude of the cultural changes that occurred during this transition in the U.S. may also help you understand the magnitude of the transitions occurring in those in regions industrializing today.
Colonial beginnings and immigrants from the world
Throughout history, kings, queens, and city-states have created trading posts in foreign lands. For example, Carthage in Africa began as a Phoenician outpost. In the sixteenth century, European nations and kingdoms began to create foreign plantations that would produce large quantities of a locally-available crop or product. For example, large plantations were making molasses and rum in the West Indies, while rice and tobacco were grown in the southern area of the future U.S. In this "mercantile" system, a charter would be drawn bestowing a monopoly to a person or group for the trade of a certain product or for the land of a colonial region. The products of each colony were mostly to be sold in the home nation while some was sold throughout Europe and in the other colonial areas. Part of the profit went to the crown. In the colonies, goods made in Europe typically cost triple the price paid in Europe. At this time in history, the wealth of a nation was being measured in terms of the amount of gold that its ruler possessed.
To avoid competition, the colonies were forbidden to make the same products made by its home nation. Tunis says that England forbade the export of tools to make cloth from wool. Wood was scare in England but not in the North American colonies. It takes acres of forest to melt iron ore and obtain pig-iron, which is free of most impurities. The colonies were allowed to make pig iron but could not further refine it into wrought-iron, or make any final iron products, such as pots or tools; that was to be done only in England.
Bargain-seeking colonists illegally traded with other nations and with pirates. John Hancock was that signer of the U.S. Declaration of Independence who wrote, he said, "in letters large enough for the King to read." (Still today, we say "sign your John Hancock here.") Tunis says that the fact that John Hancock was wanted in England for smuggling didn't hurt his reputation in the colonies.
Instead of solely attempting to extend the crown's wealth, people were also moving to the colonial regions in search of a better personal life. (Still today, about seventy million persons–1% of the world's population–are moving around the globe for the same reason.) Throughout the years 1700 through 1900, typically 2 percent of the population were leaving a handful of European nations for the American colonies.
In Everyday Life in Early America, David Freeman Hawke says that different persons chose to go to the colonies for many different reasons, all having to do with their pursuit of a better life. Some sought their chance to own their own farmland, others went in search of religious freedom or adventure, and still others were after relief from a broken heart. (You might like to visit www.virtualjamestown.org for a virtual tour of Jamestown. Be sure to see the PBS video Colonial House at www.pbs.org/wnet/colonialhouse.) Very few emigrants were peasant farmers or unemployed workers. To choose to make the move required some financial resources in addition to a certain sense of adventure–just as it still requires today. About half were workers or farmers. The other half were urban artisans who could afford the cost of passage and often became farmers in the New World though they had no previous experience in farming.
When we moved from Europe to the New World during the seventeenth century we could take few possessions. When these items wore out they could not be easily replaced because only a portion of the old society and its techniques had yet been taken to the New World. Since the initial colonists did not constitute an entire economy, many industries were absent in the New World for many decades. It cost too much to obtain these items from the homeland. Forks disappeared from the early, North American colonies for several decades. In his book The Pueblo Revolt of 1680, Conquest and Resistance in Seventeenth-century New Mexico, Andrew L. Knaut describes how one Spaniard left for the mission lands in New Mexico dressed and equipped like every other Spaniard but when he returned just five years later he was dressed and equipped like every other New Mexican.
During the 1700s, the people of New England, which is the northeastern area of the future U.S., were trading wood, fruit, butter, cheese, and cows to the people of the sugar plantations on the islands of the West Indies. These islanders had no wood and were not self-sufficient in the production of food. The islanders exchanged rum, and molasses to make into rum, for the wood and transportable food of the New Englanders. It was about a one-week long boat trip between these two regions.
There were many merchant ships trading items between various regions of the world. For example, in 1784 Robert Morris sailed with a load of ginseng from the U.S. to sell in China. There he picked up tea, silk, chinaware, and cotton cloth to sell in the U.S. He made a profit of $40,000 for the year's journey. Other merchants would sail up the Pacific coast to pick up furs and hides while selling other goods to the people of that area.
The population of the English colonies in the area of the future United States was 4,600 persons in the year 1630, 65,000 twenty years later in 1650, 105,000 in 1670, 215,000 in 1690, 600,000 in 1730, and 1,250,000 in 1750. This means that the population grew from zero to one million through its first century. The population of the U.S. was two million in 1770, four million in 1790, 5.3 million in 1800, sixteen million in 1840, and 76 million in 1900. In 2002 the U.S. population was 290 million persons. In 1800, half the population of the U.S. were immigrants from England, but by 1900, the population consisted of more Irish and Germans than English.
Europe's population increased from 140 million in 1750 to 260 million in 1850. Between 1815 and 1860, about five million persons (or 2%) of those of us living in Europe moved to the U.S. Notice also that the transplanted Europeans' children grew up in a culture that was a bit different from that of their parent's childhood.
As the U.S. population increased by a factor of four through the years 1790 to 1840, the urban population grew by a factor of eight. Half the increase was due to immigration. For example, in 1820 a wave of Celtic persons left their homeland seeking industrial jobs in the northeast. Many Irish immigrants took jobs building the canals and railroads of the Northern U.S., just as many Chinese persons would arrive to build the Western railroads forty years later. The number of immigrants grew between the years 1840 and 1900 as the U.S. population increased by another factor of five. In the last fifty years our population has increased by 85%. Typically, half the population increase of the U.S. is due to immigration while the other half comes from births within the borders. Both halves drive the expansion of the economy.
By 1900, there were large German and Scandinavian populations in the mid-western plains, Chinese and Japanese communities existed in the Pacific West, and the southwestern U.S. had a significant Spanish population. The Southwest had been a Spanish colony and then belonged to Mexico until it became part of the U.S. due to the war between the U.S. and Mexico (se www.history.vt.edu/MxAmWar/INDEX.HTM) during the years 1845-1848. In the early 1900s, many immigrants came from Eastern and Southern Europe, included Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Italy. (You might like to visit the Library of Congress website at www.americaslibrary.gov/cgi-bin/page.cgi/jb/progress/ellis_3 to see part of the 1903 film Emigrants Landing at Ellis Island. You might also try http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mbrsmi/lcmp002.m2a10987.)
This wide mix of peoples from throughout much of the world is readily apparent whenever we glance at a list of names, such as occurs in a set of mailboxes, membership tables, the name-lists in the backs of books, and in movie credits and such. A list of just fifty names will contain some from each of many different nations. But a list of fifty names, for example in England, will contain almost nothing but English names.
Nineteenth-century European travelers often commented that the cities of the U.S. had a familiar appearance but strange ways were found just outside town. They were surprised by the size of the nation and the diversity of people and languages: German in Eastern Pennsylvania, Maryland, and New Jersey; Dutch in New York and New Jersey; English in New England, and Gaelic in Western North Carolina and in South Carolina. By 1840, the Dutch and Gaelic languages largely disappeared from the U.S. The $15 million Louisiana Purchase of 1803 added Spanish and French languages to the U.S. mix.
Weber explains that Napoleon had just acquired the state-sized region of Louisiana from Spain when he in turn sold it to the U.S., and that the U.S. instead interpreted this transaction to involve the nation-sized region from Louisiana clear to Montana. In Firsthand America, the authors explain that Napoleon was thinking of growing a colonial empire in Louisiana but lost interest after losing a large part of a 30,000-man army that was trying to put down a western Hispaniola slave uprising, which created the Republic of Haiti. Without this uprising there might have been French-speaking regions in both Quebec and Louisiana.
Already by the year 1800, the spoken English of the U.S. was being pronounced differently than in England. For example, the word missionary is pronounced mis-sion-ry in England but mis-sion-air-ee in the U.S. This is similar to the differences between European Spanish and American Spanish. Going backward in time, spoken English from the 16th century is only 10% incomprehensible but 12th century English is a wholly foreign language. For example, my friend Hester Amstel explains that the one-syllable word "knight" was pronounced with two syllables as "ka-nicht," which explains something about why it's spelled this funny way today.
Differing agricultural economies of the early U.S.: northern family farms, middle commercial farms, and southern tobacco and cotton plantations
We have seen that humans first began farming in Ancient Mesopotamia about 10,000 years ago. Our subsequently invented cities required many new occupations but usually 90%, have continued to be occupied as farmers. This was still the case for those of us in the United States in the year 1800 but increasingly less so in each subsequent decade. In the United States in 1800, about 10% of us were self-employed artisans and shopkeepers and another 10% of us were hired laborers but 80% of us were farmers; this number would become 40% by the year 1900, and 1% by the year 2000. As we industrialized, the percentage of us living in urban areas would grow from 10% in the year 1800 to 40% in the year 1900.
As has been the case for every farming family in the previous 10,000 years, our activities were tied to the local agricultural seasons of planting and harvesting. Weddings and births were clumped around those months of the year that allowed a break in agricultural activities. For 10,000 years, much of the daily conversation between farmers has involved the weather and crops and sometimes the health and multiplication of livestock.
Each season, most of us spent many hours behind the plow. One farmer in Connecticut, Horace Clarke, wrote in his diary in 1837: "I have followed that plow for more miles than any man ever did or will ever do." (See www.memorialhall.mass.edu/collection/itempage.jsp?itemid=2287 for a photo of men plowing.) For the last 10,000 years–until the last century–everyone knew what the purpose of a plow was and what it looked like. Many of us big-city residents aren’t too sure of its purpose. (Visit http://www.agclassroom.org/gan/ for time lines of the history of U.S. agriculture.)
Initially, the U.S. existed only along the Atlantic coast but there were differing economic systems within this geographical strip. The northeast had single-family farms that consumed most of what it produced while the South had large plantations that produced a single cash crop but little food of its own. The middle states contained commercially-sized farms that provided food for the Southern plantations.
The northeastern or New England area consisted mainly of small family farms that consumed most of what they produced; the rest was bartered at the local General Store. There were no plantations or tenant farms in New England. One important factor in hampering the development of large scale farms in New England was the lack of navigable east-west rivers that would have connected the inland areas to the sea.
The Mid-Atlantic region, which includes New York, Pennsylvania, and Delaware, was already producing 15% of the world's iron by the year 1800. It also contained commercially-sized, grain producing farmsteads. These farms were selling food to the single cash-crop plantations of the South who were not growing much of their own food. Later, the westward expansion of the nation brought commercially-sized farms to Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Wherever farmland could be profitably used this way, there would be both increasing land prices and land speculation.
These commercial farms were worked by the family members. Before the practice was outlawed in 1776, the family was often helped by one or more indentured servants. From 1600 to 1776, half the immigrants arrived as indentured servants. Mainly, these persons worked on the commercially-sized farms of the Mid-Atlantic area rather than on the single-family farms of the northeast or on the large-scale, slave-labor farms of the South.
Indentured servants came from all walks of life, but most were young and poor–75% were male, see www.nps.gov/hamp/lancaster1.htm. An indentured servant agreed to work for seven years for a person who would pay the boat-fare for his or her travel from Europe to the Americas. The numbers of European's moving to the Americas as indentured servants rose and fell in reaction to the ups and downs of the European economy and with the occurrence of war. In the colonies, indentured servants sometimes ran away for one reason or another, as did Benjamin Franklin. Newspapers typically contained ads offering rewards for their return.
The people of the urban centers of New York City and Philadelphia obtained their food from the surrounding farmers, as we saw has had to be the case for every city since the first ones of Ancient Mesopotamia. These port cities were filled with merchants who handled various items. For example, Robert Henderson shipped Pennsylvania flour to Charleston, South Carolina which he traded for rice and indigo. (The use of indigo to make blue dye was developed a few thousand years ago in India.) These seaport cities were handling imports and exports between the U.S., the Caribbean, and Europe. In colonial times, these port cities prospered most whenever the plantations of the West Indies were able to buy their products.
Maryland and Virginia contained large tobacco plantations that were selling their crop both locally and abroad. The economic prosperity of the tobacco states rose and fell with the price of tobacco. Tobacco was a local crop within the colonies so it was cheap and duty free. For the early history of tobacco, visit www.nps.gov/colo/Jthanout/TobaccoHistory.html, www.nps.gov/colo/Jthanout/TobaccoCultivation.html, and www.lib.ncsu.edu/exhibits/tobacco/thistory.html.
Tobacco is cured by hanging its broad leaves to dry in a barn. It is then taken to a tobacconist who ages it for several months, twists it into ropes, and adds molasses, honey, licorice, mint, lemon, vebena, salt, roses, or potash, which is a poisonous insecticide. (Visit www.rjrt.com/smoking/ingredientsCover.aspx for a very long list of ingredients in today’s cigarettes!) One of the first techniques for curing tobacco was to bore a hole in the end of a log and then fill it with tobacco. After some months had past, the log would be split open to recover the tobacco "plug."
People would either squeeze a piece of tobacco between their cheek and gum for "chewing," smoke it in a pipe–which was done by both men and women–or it would be "snuffed" into the nostrils. Some snuff was packaged for sale in either dried cow bladders or esophagi. Much attention was given to the fashions of snuff boxes, which were made from any and all materials and in many shapes and sizes. Tunis suspects that chewing and snuffing were done because of the difficulty of lighting a pipe, which could be done only when near a fireplace.
Almost everybody was chewing. Every tavern floor in the nation was stained with tobacco. One British traveler said that even courtrooms were full of tobacco. The defendant was spitting, as were the lawyers, the judge, the audience, the witnesses, and the jury, too. He says that "Everywhere, from Congressional halls to church rooms, was filled with incessant and remorseless spitting." (You might like to visit http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/DETOC/europeans/habits.html to read descriptions of tobacco habits written by contemporary–and contemptuous–Europeans traveling the U.S.) Women stopped using tobacco in the Northeastern U.S. around 1820, but grandma still smoked her pipe in the South and the West until about 1840. Wealthy gentlemen began smoking Havana cigars in 1762 when Israel Putnam brought three donkey loads of Cuban cigars to the English colonies. Cheaper and more pungent cigars were soon being made in Maryland and Kentucky. The first cigar factory in the U.S. was built in Connecticut in 1812 and produced 1,500 hand-rolled cigars per day.
The large plantations of the South (the states of North and South Carolina and Georgia) more closely resembled the mercantile plantations of the West Indies than the small family farms of the northeast, but the South also had some small family farms while the West Indies had none. Many settlers came to this region after having lived for some years on a plantation in the West Indies. The plantation owner often lived in a distant city and hired a manager to oversee the operations of the business. These Southern plantations were producing tobacco and rice for export. Since cotton was increasingly being used by the English textile factories, it would soon become the South's major crop. All farming efforts were devoted to this commercial activity. Instead of growing their own food, plantations relied on imports from the Mid-Atlantic region. The South didn't import finished clothing and such because the people of the plantations were making their own. Being self-sufficient in these items meant that the region did not have the village commerce centers that existed in New England, as described below.
Rapid westward expansion of twenty miles per year
The area of the U.S. grew by a factor of three during the years 1790 to 1840 by continually expanding westward. During this time, the portion of the U.S. population living east of the Appalachians decreased from one in seven to one in four. Through a span of one hundred years–which is only four generations–the nation's western frontier moved about 2,000 miles (3,200 km) in total, which is equivalent to twenty miles per year. This was about four hundred miles (640 km) per generation. (Since central and western states typically have a width of about four hundred miles, each represents a generation of expansion.) At first the "West" occurred in Western New York and Pennsylvania but it soon moved to Ohio, then Indiana, and then Illinois. It also moved from Virginia to Kentucky and Tennessee, and then to Missouri and Arkansas. To preview a documentary about the expansion into Ohio during the 1780s, visit either the PBS website at www.mariettaonline.com/ohiocompany or www.openingthedoorwest.com. The expansion consisted of people moving from the Eastern U.S. and from Europe. They were often in search of farmland because it was considered to be the source of life for a family. We can almost envision this expansion in a sort of leapfrog manner, as family after family moved just west of the previous family to obtain their own farmland. Many families who moved westward would linger a while and then move again further west.
This westward expansion occurred by continuing the two-hundred-year-old practice of forcing the resident Indians off their own land through violent means, see www.colorvisiontv.org/programs/rage/dreamer. Remember that, depending on a region's climate, those of us humans who are natives of North and South America were living in either urban cities, farming villages, or gatherer-hunter bands. Some examples of American cities in various times and places include Cahokia, the Incan City of Machu Picchu, and the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan. There had been many farming villages in the region of the Southern U.S. The people living there were referred to as “the civilized tribes” but were murdered just the same. For example, in 1811 General William Henry Harrison fought a battle against the Shawnee natives of Florida at Tippecanoe, who were lead by Chief Tecumseh. Hundreds of persons were killed but the action brought glory to Harrison who became president in January 1841. Harrison died just three months later–after catching pneumonia during his lengthy inaugural speech. John Tyler was Harrison’s vice president. During his presidential campaign, Harrison used the “catchy” slogan "Tippecanoe and Tyler too." Tyler succeeded Harrison as president and was later elected to the Confederate House of Representatives in 1862.
Smallpox and other Old World diseases arrived with the first European explorers and conquistadors and killed 50 to 90 percent of many previously-existing, local populations. The total population of the continent fell from one hundred million persons in the year 1500 ad to thirty million persons by 1600 ad. We can hardly imagine its disruptive effects on a social group and the misery of losing so many family members. The area of the future United States contained at least five million of us Native Americans before the arrival of Europeans, but our population shrank to just one-half million by the year 1800 and one-quarter million by 1900. Already by 1830, few native Americans remained in the Eastern U.S. along the Atlantic.
The Cherokees of Georgia wrote a Constitution and declared themselves to be an independent nation. An 1831 Supreme Court decision suggested that the U.S. government was duty-bound to keep intruders from Cherokee land. Instead, during the 1830s 60,000 surviving Native Americans from the areas of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and North and South Carolina were forcibly marched to the Oklahoma "Indian" territory. In 1838, one in ten Cherokees died along the route of the Trail of Tears, see www.trailoftears.org and http://ngeorgia.com/history/nghisttt.html. The Indian removal-wars then shifted to the states of the Midwestern plains during the years 1840 to 1870, as described in Death on the Prairie, the Thirty Year Struggle for the Western Plains, by Paul I Wellman.
One day in 1899, the area of Oklahoma designated as Indian reservation land was instead made available to the citizens of the United States through the humongous horse race known as the Land Rush–some in the family of my great-great-grandparents took part in this. Just forty years later, conditions during the Dust Bowl caused many Oklahomans to leave for California and other states. For a contemporary account of the land rush, visit www.library.cornell.edu/Reps/DOCS/landrush.htm. Visit www.pan-tex.net/usr/l/drlocke for a personal account. Links to many photos are given at www.hanksville.org/sand/realprop/gof.html, and several other accounts are given at http://nativenewsonline.org/history/hist0422.html.
Social and economic classes and enslaved people
The European-Americans had forgotten the social classes of their old countries. For example, a coach driver did not feel he was of a lower class than that of his passengers, as was expected in Europe. One British traveler described how he could not comprehend the driver's view of his own social place. European travelers who were visiting the U.S. said they were not treated with the respect that they felt their station deserved and that the U.S. workers were unwilling to be subservient. When special meals were requested, they instead received rancid bacon. Workers would go out of their way to provide slow service just to let "uppity" guests know they were not impressed by their opinion of being of a more-noble class. Larkin says that "the uppity would receive the democratic rudeness that assumed or presumptuous superiority seldom fails to experience." In the U.S., by 1824 knee-dips and bowing between adults were relics of the past but children continued to be taught to show this respect to elders until 1840. British travelers said they had trouble telling who was who in the U.S. because social distinctions were less-clearly spelled out. Persons were instead considered to be equals and would even be seen shaking hands with each other.
Wigs were common in the English colonies. Tunis says that a person might make an annual contract with a barber for the upkeep and curling of a wig. People were bald under their wigs, and so wore turbans when they removed their wigs at home. After the Revolution, wigs began to be replaced with hats which soon grew to be as tall as a person's head by the year 1820–President Lincoln wore such a hat. Politicians continued to wear traditional European wigs until about 1830. Andrew Jackson's presidency (1829-1837) was celebrated as representing the common people, he even drank and danced on the table during his inauguration. He held meetings in the White House that were open to all citizens.
But the land of social equals still showed a number of economic levels including the largest urban merchants, plantation owners, professionals, middle-sized farmers, storekeepers, artisans, smaller and hard-pressed common farmers, landless laborers, and slaves. As the Declaration of Independence brought the United States into existence, one in six of us were slaves.
During the years 1600 to 1800, ten million of us humans from Africa were enslaved and taken to North and South America. (You might like to visit http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/aaohtml/exhibit/aointro.html. For first-person accounts of slavery, visit http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/voices. You might like to view Unearthing Secret America at the PBS website at www.pbs.org/saf/1301/features/archeology.htm. Also visit www.history.org/Foundation/journal/summer03/enslaved.cfm to view "In Mind and Heart" with the Enslaved of Yesteryear.) About 20% of us died on the boat journey because we were given subsistence rations and were packed so tightly into ship-compartments that we could barely move. No sanitary facilities were available in these compartments. We died of the flu, dysentery, smallpox, and from severe mental depression. Some of us humans treated some other of us humans in this manner because we did not consider the “different” people to be fellow human beings.
The climate and flora of the Southern U.S. resembled that of West Africa. We African-American slaves introduced rice cultivation to South Carolina and our experience in animal husbandry was used in managing livestock. We adapted our use of grass and reed to make baskets and mats and used palmetto leaves for fans, brooms, and chairs. We also knew of swamps, fishing, and the use of alligators (which Europeans had never seen) to protect livestock. We continued to make our own earthenware pots and bowls. We also brought our knowledge of herbal medicines. Some of these things were described above in the description of those of us humans who are Yoruba.
Individuals from many different African cultures were mixed together as we were enslaved. Also notice that as we were moved from our home culture to the New World, the culture of our children born in our new home was already different from that of our own childhood. Our children's culture was a combination of African and enslaved-American. With each generation our children's culture was increasingly different. A newly arrived enslaved person knew what it was to have been previously un-enslaved. Our children, who were born enslaved, could only imagine from the tales of elders what life was to be not enslaved.
Those of us who resisted would soon be killed by our enslavers. Whenever one of us was killed as a penalty for disobedience, all other slaves within miles were gathered and made to watch. For example, one man was threatened with five hundred lashes if he didn't stop preaching the gospel to other slaves, so he ran off. When he was later caught in Greenville, South Carolina he was burned alive as all other slaves from within twenty miles were forced to watch. In Charleston, South Carolina in 1822, Denmark Vesey was grabbed while trying to begin a slave uprising, see http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/aaohtml/exhibit/aopart1.html#0106. Thirty-five of us slaves were hung en-masse and left to dangle for some hours to strike fear into all similarly minded slaves. Nat Turner is another person who led a slave insurrection in Virginia in 1831. There are many other examples.
Neighboring plantations traditionally took turns providing feasts and celebrations for the others of the area, and this is how many of us slaves met our spouse. It is surprising to people today that those of us who were slaves often married a person who lived on a nearby plantation. We slaves could travel on Sundays to visit them but only if we had a properly-signed card and stayed on the main road–otherwise we would be taken as a runaway. It may not be surprising that there was no limit to the efforts that us men would expend in getting over to our girlfriend's plantation. For those of us Americans who were slaves, the extended family was crucial in child rearing since us parents were still forced to work even while caring for our infants. It also occurred that after marrying a person enslaved on the same plantation and then having children, either of the parents or any of the children might be sold and moved to another plantation.
When we were released from enslavement, after the Civil War of 1861-1865, we had already been Americans for many generations. But it took still another hundred years, until the Civil Rights events of the 1960s, to make the previously proclaimed U.S. ideals of "the land of opportunity and the pursuit of happiness" begin to mean "for all Americans." You might visit www.mecca.org/~crights/cyber.html for a history of the civil rights struggle. For the numerous Civil Rights sites of the National Park Service, visit www.cr.nps.gov/nr/travel/civilrights.
In 1790, only 5% of the U.S. population lived in towns having more than 2,500 persons but by 1840 this had doubled to 10%. (We saw above that the city of Cahokia had a much larger population of 10,000 to 20,000 persons around the year 1150 ad.) By 1840, Boston's population had reached 90,000 and New York City contained 312,000 people. Already by then, rural people said that the big-city dwellers "rushed like they were heading for a good dinner or running from a bailiff and that their faces showed knit eyebrows and compressed lips."
The largest cities of the U.S. were the seaports of Boston, New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia. The cities had merchants, artisans, laborers, mariners, ox- and horse-driving teamsters, and marginal rural folk. Goods were bought and sold, imported and exported. The cities imported European fashions, songs, dances, books, and ideas and passed them along to the surrounding countryside. The city's family households also took care of the sick, orphaned, and widowed.
Inequality of wealth was more apparent in the urban areas than it was in the family farms of New England. In 1800 in Philadelphia, the wealthiest 10% of us owned 90% of the taxable property, while about 30% of us lived in poverty and another 15% of us were indentured servants and slaves. About 10% of us were merchants. The average profit margin for us merchants was 12% of gross sales.
Most cities still relied on roaming pigs to keep the streets clean, except for Charleston, which had buzzards (remember the scavenging pigs of Ancient Mesopotamia). The roaming pigs converted the trash into pork that the poorest of us would eat. One visiting farmer said "the city streets were so littered that road surfaces hadn't been seen in years and that the city was so noisy he couldn't sleep." City streets have always required one to exercise care in aiming their steps. Both town and countryside contained the odors of animals, manure, rotting food, un-emptied chamber pots, alcohol, and tobacco.
Boston's public water system was built in 1652. (We saw that irrigation and fresh water systems were built in Ancient Mesopotamia about 5,000 years ago.) A person, called a pump-log-borer, bore holes lengthwise through logs using an auger with addable extensions. These extensions were added, one-by-one, to increase the length of the drill so it could create an increasingly deeper hole through the length of the log. It took some talent to bore a hole straight enough that id didn't cut through the walls of the log. One end of the resulting wood pipe was tapered while the other was recessed so that a series of such sections could be joined together. Mutton fat was used to seal the joints. Most towns built their water systems in the late 1700s and used wooden pipes until well into the 1800s. As towns became large, greater water pressures were needed than could be withstood by mutton-sealed wooden pipes so wooden pipes were replaced with metal ones.
Somehow we tend to think we are different humans today than we had been in the past. For example, we think that we are the first humans to have fads but even these have always occurred. In 1784, a hot air balloon in France was invented that could actually lift people off the ground in an unbelievable defeat of gravity. A fad of balloons then engulfed the U.S. Clothing fashions included little balloons on hats and pins. The word "balloon" was used to attract attention to everything; one farmer's sign described the vegetables he was trying to sell as "fine balloon string beans." Fads help keep us entertained. Clothing fashion changes as quickly as people can muster money for new clothes. In The Spanish Frontier in North America, Weber gives another example in that the name for the state of California came from a popular travel-adventure novel. It is easy to believe that if a New World were discovered today, many of us would be moving there to pursue an increased opportunity for life. There would be many news reports and movies depicting the adventures. The name of this new land could easily be taken from one of these movies.
As had occurred since the time of the first cities in Mesopotamia, industry in the U.S. before the year 1800 was composed entirely of small shops with people crafting items by hand. Compared to a modern, mass-production factory, working by hand is slow but much more personal. A day's work might result in the casting of one spoon, sometimes three.
Tunis explains that there were four kinds of shops. There were craftspeople who did custom work to order in what was called "bespoke work." Retailers simply bought and sold goods. Other artisans made items which they sold on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. There were specialists who performed some direct service for people–for example, those people who traveled the country offering to repair shoes or metal pans or some other specific object. These travelers often arrived in the morning, discussed the work needed with the farm owner for a few hours, did the work, and then spent the night in the home of that customer. Other travelers might sell these items from a wagon–sometimes from a wheelbarrow. These travelers did most of their work during April through October, when the roads were least miserable.
The city had many shopless hawkers shouting their offer of goods or services as they walked the streets, perhaps pushing a cart full of goods. For example, there were wood sellers, charcoal burners, rag buyers (for paper making), broom sellers, chimney sweeps, scissor grinders, meat butchers, fish sellers, game hunters, and milk sellers. The milk seller carried milk through the streets in big copper cans and ladled it into the customer's container right at their front door. Tunis describes the old joke about a hard of hearing person sticking a trumpet through a barely open door and getting milk in it.
In the city, each shop placed a sign above its entrance. The sign was usually a three-dimensional object depicting the shop's business, a shoe or tooth for example, but some signs were just a flat painting. A customer did not have to be able to read to understand these signs. Some craft shops illegally displayed the heraldic arms of their trade's English Guild, though few persons could recognize those now-foreign symbols. A tavern sign was either a jug or a portrait of a presumably important person. Tunis says that in 1776, every "King George Tavern" changed its name but not its portrait. (For a photo of a typical sign hung outside a tavern, visit www.memorialhall.mass.edu/collection/itempage.jsp?itemid=7792.) Tobacco shops customarily hung a picture of an Indian, supposedly because Indians had introduced tobacco to the Europeans. One tobacco shop in Baltimore in 1775 had an old ship mast carved into the figure of a standing Indian and by 1850, every tobacco shop had a similar figure standing at its entrance. Shops had signs but homes needed no identifying numbers. Before street addresses were common, people would tell incoming travelers to "Go to the Inn on River street and ask anyone you see to point out my house."
Every shop was run by its owner, who might also have an employee or an apprentice. It was rare for a shop to have more than a few workers. As we saw for Medieval Europe, the "shop" was a room within the home that simultaneously served as living quarters, workshop, inventory warehouse, and retail showroom. The shop owner obtained materials, discussed custom jobs with customers and directed apprentices. Shop owners and their spouses did the retailing and accepted payment in most any form–usually farm products. A shop in a city might advertise that this "country pay" was accepted. A silversmith's newspaper ad might also mention some cheese he or she had to sell. If coins were exchanged they were usually Spanish Dollars. These were cut into eight pieces or bits; two bits made a quarter dollar, hence the term.
A craftsperson was not as specialized as today. For example, a printer was an editor, typesetter, book binder, book publisher, book seller, and book repairer (re-sewing covers onto books), and usually made the local newspaper. A printing shop also sold writing paper, ruled paper–whose rulings were hand drawn in the shop–for keeping accounting records, pen quills, ink, and sealing wax (for sealing folded papers for privacy in correspondence). A printing shop often made its own ink from either foreign or local, organic materials; some printers made a surplus of ink to sell to other printers.
Printing presses were expensive and finicky to operate. They were made by only a few persons, still following the Gutenberg design. The first printing press in the American continents arrived in Mexico in the 1550s–the second in Lima, Peru in 1584. In 1638, the first press to be used in the English colonies was setup in the cellar of Harvard College.Printers published religious books, translations of Greek and Latin classics, history, school texts, official proclamations, apprenticeship contracts, and almanacs. An almanac contained weather predictions, moon phases, tides and schedules of courts, post riders, ferries, and freight wagons. When needed, space was filled with jokes and home remedies.
Type was also expensive, as it had to be imported from Europe. The typical printing shop owned one set of type and so printed in a single font. Type pieces were kept in a case having separate sections for each letter. To create a page of text, individual letters had to be placed into a block, which would then be smeared with ink, covered with a sheet of paper, and finally pressed. Individual letters of type were hand placed into that block, at a rate of almost one per second. Tunis explains that the typesetter grabbed type from this case without having to look at the case, just as a typist today doesn't have to look at the keys. Small letters were more frequently used and so were placed in a "lower case" within closest reach of the typesetter. Larger letters were used less frequently, and so were grabbed from a more-distant "upper case." We still use these terms today to refer to upper and lower case letters. By the year 1900, the typical printing shop owned type for three hundred different fonts; by 2000, a computer could hold tens of thousands of fonts.
In the early colonies, paper came from Europe only. If a boatload of paper was late in arriving then the press might come to a halt. Later, local paper was made from cloth rags gathered from the community. The rags were chopped into pieces, wet, left to decay for a few months, and then stamped into sheets. Many processes were experimented with while trying to better refine paper. In Asia, paper has always been made from wood; this was not done in the U.S. until recently. (This also means that toilet paper was being used in China in the ninth century ad but not until last week in the Western World.) Colonials tried making paper from corn husks, straw, pine cones, seaweed, moss, or wool but did not know enough chemistry to break down these materials. Papermaking involves complicated chemistry. Today, paper mills are common in the forested Southern U.S.
A newspaper typically contained four pages and was shared around the community until it was worn out. Its two outer pages usually contained local ads while the inner pages contained literary works and local commentaries along with three-month-old news stories from foreign exchanges. Many newspapers also made their way to other regions of the colonies, keeping each colony informed of the others. A local newspaper printer would reprint articles contained in papers received from other colonies. On January 14, 1768, when Anne Catherine Green's newspaper contained but a half-sheet she explained that her meager content was due to bad weather blocking the arrival of other newspapers.
Most occupations were learned through on-the-job apprenticeships, including those of merchants, lawyers, doctors, carpentry, clergy, and most every craft. Apprentices were not paid in cash wages. We will see below that even a helper on a farm was most-often paid in lodging or through the system of exchanging goods and help that existed between neighboring family farms.
The apprentices traded their labor for the master's training and usually lived in the master's home and ate with the master's family. The housewife prepared food and clothing for her children and for the apprentice. This means that the master not only taught the apprentices but housed and fed them, too. Not only the apprentices but also any other shopworker typically lived in the shop-owner's house and were fed as a single family. Some apprentices lived in the home of a wealthy master while others lived under poorer conditions; some were even beaten. The apprentice typically worked "sunrise to sunset" but also took part in the chores and activities of the household. An apprentice could travel home for occasional visits.
Most apprentices signed a seven-year contract with their trainer. (Today we enroll in college.) If apprentices ran away before completing the contract-period, the trainer had the legal power to have them found and returned to work. The town's tavern often had a few posters showing rewards for runaway apprentices. At the end of the training period, apprentices–now journeymen–would move away to open their own shop. Sometimes a Southern plantation would hire Northern journeymen long enough to teach their "mysteries" to slaves, who would then perform that task for the plantation and often for the people of the entire county.
The labor surplus of Europe benefitted trainers over apprentices because it enabled trainers to charge a teaching fee to the learner's family. In the labor-short colonies, orphaned or illegitimate children could become apprentices. They could less often do so in Europe. Also, the powerful craft guilds of Europe did not redevelop in the colonies.
After crossing an ocean–a journey of a few weeks duration–in pursuit of a better life, we would frequently move yet again, still in pursuit of a better life. This move might be across town or across a few hundred miles of land. Notice that since the time in which we were gatherer-hunters, each and every time a family has moved they were in search of a better opportunity to pursue life. Still today, we move across town, the nation, or the world for this same reason.
Since the United States began, it has been common for a family to move every few years. It is often found that 25% to 65% of the persons in one town would have moved elsewhere between successive governmental censuses, which occur every ten years. In Boston, each year about one-fourth of the families moved to another home elsewhere in Boston. Around the year 1800, New York City had the convention of ending leases on May first of each year. There were so many families and shops moving on this day that the streets were filled with carts and furniture “as if everyone were running from the plague.” Western land had an enormous pull on us farmers. Those of us who had made one move toward the nation's west were likely to move again even farther west, perhaps to the leading-edge of that moment's western frontier. Still today, we continually emigrate from one state to another in pursuit of a better life.
Travel has been common since the beginning of the U.S. Back in Europe there were millions of persons who had never been “beyond the sound of the parish bell.” Most of the traveling in the U.S. was done on foot. Still in 1840, only half of farming families had even a single horse and almost no horses were kept in the urban areas. You might see three family members riding on one horse. Thousands of us walked two miles to school, four miles to church, and ten miles to a weekly event. (My friend Datman Escher's grandparents said they had to walk uphill both ways to school, see www.worldofescher.com/gallery/jpgs/P14L.jpg.) If we walked more than fifteen miles we would spend the night before returning.
Some of us had two-wheeled carts pulled by a horse. These were easily overturned and upon smashing into pieces would impale passengers with their debris, as happened in 1818 to two drunken sailors while passing a bottle in Newbury, Massachusetts. Beginning in 1800, four-wheeled vehicles were starting to be seen and by 1820 they had become the most common vehicle. These four-wheeled wagons could also be used on the farm, and for hauling goods across the county. Commercial freight wagons began to appear and quickly grew in size to be pulled by as many as eight horses. Tunis says that these wagons differed little from those made in Roman times.
In the U.S., the earliest coaches were nothing but wagons with a few rows of forward-facing benches nailed onto them. Later, they were enclosed and had two benches that faced each other to facilitate conversation. For many years, a third backless seat continued to be placed between the other two with nothing but a strap of leather for the passengers to lean against. Larkin explains that "nine persons squeezed their cleanliness and tobacco into these coaches." A tenth passenger could choose to ride outside in the weather next to the driver–for full fare but also with full ventilation. The wind and the rain came right through the cracks and the leather-curtained viewing holes. If these leather curtains were strapped down then the passengers were simply tossed around in the dark. All the passengers had to get out and walk up every step hill because the horses could not pull them.
Along the journey each person would try to guess who the others were and what sort of person they were–often while pretending to be someone else. The passengers might debate politics or theology. (While riding a cross-country bus at age nineteen, I had similar fun pretended to have various reasons for my journey and following the advice of my wise, old uncle who had told me to “never let the truth interfere with a good story.”) You might like to read about a fourteenth-century coach trip in The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, or you might like to read Travel in the Ancient World by Lionel Casson. For first-person accounts of travel in the U.S., visit the two websites at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/lhtnhtml/lhtnhome.html and http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/DETOC/europeans/front.html.
Few stage lines existed between the years 1700 and 1800 but then their numbers quickly increased. In 1786, a journey from Boston to New York City took four to six days, depending on the weather. By 1830, stagecoaches were making this trip in just 1.5 days, and after 1840, railroad trains would make the trip in just twelve hours. Today it requires four to six hours by car. By 1835, the Boston area had 600 coaches per week traveling along one hundred lines at the good-weather speed of eight or nine miles per hour (13 or 14 km/hour). We also started putting spring suspensions onto the coaches.
Coaches suffered from runaway horses and broken axles. The holes and stumps in the "roads" would overturn a coach and sometimes cause injuries to the passengers. Overturns were expected on long journeys. For example, one New York City to Cincinnati coach was overturned nine times during its round-trip journey. On such long journeys, not only would the passengers fall asleep but the driver would also (a dozen sleeping persons being dragged behind a team of horses). One sleeping driver fell off the coach, caught his coat in the wheels, and was killed.
Traveling for pleasure was becoming easier and cheaper. We could more easily make a two-hundred-mile (320 km) trip to visit parents and siblings. Some more-wealthy newlyweds started a fashion of traveling to Niagara Falls for their honeymoon. Travel in 1835 was three times faster and three times cheaper than it had been in just 1790 but it was still costly. A stagecoach trip from Boston to Providence, Rhode Island cost two day's wages for a skilled artisan. From Boston, it cost eight-day's pay to go to New York City but two month's pay to go to Ohio.
By 1840 there were 15,000 freight drivers on the road. They were called "crackers" for their constant attempts to speed their horses by cracking their whip. Rougher taverns began to appear on the major roads for the rougher travelers. A traveler could rent a bed for the night in one of these taverns. Often, two or three strangers had to share a single bed. (There's an old saying that "politics makes strange bedfellows.") When we rented a bed for the night, we found that it contained the insects of each and every one of the previous guests. If we asked the tavern operator for soap, we surprised them.
In the northeastern United States at the start of the 1800s, we were living in communities of single-family farms. A typical family lived in a small house located on their own farm land, not in town. Each farmhouse was within sight of those of a number of other family's because the farmhouses were separated by the lengths of the farmland. New England was so densely occupied that you could see the candlelight of your neighbor's homes from your own front door. In Our Own Snug Fireside, Images of the New England Home 1760 - 1860, Jane C. Nylander explains that as you approached your neighbor's doorway you would likely hear the whir of the spinning wheel (see www.memorialhall.mass.edu/collection/itempage.jsp?itemid=15517) and the thump of the butter-churn (see www.memorialhall.mass.edu/collection/itempage.jsp?itemid=3422). Dwellings were more scattered in the less-populated South, and along the Western Frontier, a family might go weeks without seeing another person because people were scarce.
In New England, towns were not residential centers as they were in Europe. They were instead small commercial centers that contained a handful of craft shops and a general store, sometimes two. There was also a public building that served as both church and town meetinghouse. The town might have a tavern that served food, and that tavern might have a bed for travelers to share. The villages of the European predecessors of the U.S. residents also contained a few shops but mainly contained the homes of the area's farmers. Each day, European farmers would walk from the village to work in their fields, so villages tended to be spaced apart by this walking distance. The villages of the U.S. were commerce centers only and were not sleeping areas for farmers.
Initially, several transplanted European families would live together in a town from which their farmlands stretched radially outward. But land was so abundant that the very next generation would move out to the center of their farmland. The expectation of obtaining abundant farmland was often the reason for transplanting the family from Europe to New England in the first place. Hawke points out that the transplanted persons had no plans of changing their culture as they moved to the New World. Each group setup life in their new home to match that of their old European culture. Notice that the culture of their children was no longer European; it was European-American.
The South had very few villages. Tunis says that even a county seat had nothing but a church, a blacksmith, and an "ordinary," which was an inn where travelers spent the night and ate whatever they got. In contrast to Northerners who always went to a nearby village to see a smith and such, the South's smaller farmers went to a nearby plantation for things they couldn't do themselves. For example, few persons could do their own blacksmithing.
Since the land of the U.S. was covered by essentially one large forest, the space for each home was obtained by cutting away the forest trees, one by one, with an axe. As a clearing was being finished in one field, the clearing of the next field had already been started by cutting away bark to kill its trees. Many travelers commented that Americans would not let a tree stand anywhere. Some of the techniques used to clear land are described at www.osv.org/learning/DocumentViewer.php?DocID=778.
Home design changed little from 1600 to 1800. Until 1750, homes were not aligned with the street but to catch the southern sun. European immigrants continued to build homes in the fashion of their old country. Sometimes brick was used but mostly homes were constructed with heavy wooden posts and beams held together by mortise and tendon joints in which each board fits into a slot within the next board. Several homes can be seen at http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/DETOC/every/housing.htm.
A house builder was called a housewright. Housewrights usually built a home from trees cut down right in the yard of the owner. To cut boards from a felled tree, a string was covered in red ochre dust, stretched tightly over the bark covered log, and then snapped to leave a straight red line on the log. A line was snapped onto both the right and left edges of the log to guide the axe cut. A sixteen foot (five meter) oak could be squared in two hours with an axe. It was usually too difficult and expensive to haul ready-to-use lumber from a sawmill.
The sides of any log that would be visible in the finished house would be smoothed with adze and plane by a person called a joiner. (Axes, adzes, and planes were made by a blacksmith who forged pieces of iron and steel brought from Europe or India; India produced the best steel, which was needed for every cutting edge.) Any wall that was assembled but still lying on the ground would be raised into place with the aid of the neighbors. Since there were no closets, the joiner might make a lidded box to hold clothing and such. Later, some drawers were built under the box, and yet later, the box was all drawers–a dresser. Only the largest homes had two floors, and in this case it was the joiner who made the stairways and their balusters.
Knowledge of the more-easily built log home was brought to the colonies later by Swedes and became the typical home of the Western Frontier family. These families hoped to build something more permanent in the near future but often lived in their log home for a generation or two. (We have all heard that Abe Lincoln was born in a log-cabin that "he built with his own hands!") For a photo of a log cabin, visit the Arlington Heights Historical Museum at www.ahmuseum.org/AboutTheMuseum/Buildings/LogCabin/LogCabin.htm.
There was a much wider range in home sizes around the year 1800 than occurs today. Most were one-room homes, but about one-third of them had a second story that was used for sleeping. (Today’s suburban neighborhoods contain miles of homes that differ little in size but come in three colors.) The fanciest homes were found in the cities. The oldest surviving homes that we see today were not the typical small homes but were the largest, or those that had a famous resident, because those were more likely to remain standing.
During the 1800s, our homes in the northeast were built by a local expert and were typically 32 by 22 feet (10 x 7 meters) in size but many were either half or double this size. A home typically had a cooking area at one end and a sitting area at the opposite end, which contained a few cushionless, wooden chairs. The walls of the house were usually bare because paintings were expensive. Only 10% of families could afford a single painting or engraving–these would usually depict the homeowner. Mirrors were so expensive that usually just one could be afforded. The windows had no curtains and the floors had no carpets. The house contained no insulation at all so the summer heat and winter cold could only be endured. We took turns washing at the sink with water; soap was used only to clean clothing. It was common to see mothers picking lice from the heads of their children.
Collecting, emptying, and cleaning the chamber pots was a daily chore. The chamber pots were used to avoid a freezing nighttime walk to the woods. By 1820, English factory-made pots were cheap enough that all but the poorest homes had one (Still today we say "I'm too poor to have a pot to pee in"). Since the contents of a pot were often thrown through an open window or door, archaeologists often find broken chamber pots right outside the windows. The pots presumably landed there because a person's grip was lost while trying to toss its contents. Indoor bathrooms did not exit in New England. Some city-homes had an outdoor pit for garbage and waste, but many persons simply threw the contents of their chamber pot into the street; there was a common story about a couple being hit on their way to a wedding.
Bedrooms were rare. Only the wealthiest homes had a separate bedroom for use by the parents. Sometimes part of a one-room home was sectioned off to create a separate sleeping quarter for the parents, but then this area would not receive any heat from the fireplace. Sometimes children slept above in the unfinished rafter space, as we saw Kalapalo children do. Babies slept in their mother's arms until they were weaned. The bed was placed in a corner of the house; its mattress was stuffed either with straw or with chicken feathers. Many families slept in the bed at night and then sat on it during the day because it was their only "chair."
If two beds were available then all of the females of the family slept in one of the beds along with any female hired help and any female guests that might spend the night. Similarly, all the males slept together in the other bed. This meant that we became used to being surrounded by the warm bodies of our siblings and came to miss that after our siblings had moved out. Combining warmth this way helped us make it through the cold winter nights whose temperatures went below freezing. We can now see why travelers would share a bed with strangers who happened to be staying at the same tavern. When pots became cheap and our homes began to have separate sleeping areas, we began to place private basins, pitchers, and wash-stands in them. Some people started washing their entire body–and more often than once per year. A few wealthy homes had indoor water taps.
Usually three candles provided the light for an entire house. A large office of ten persons typically used just eight candles and the personnel tried to work near the daylight windows. Only the wealthiest homes could use more than a few candles; some might fill a chandelier with several candles. Outside the house were dark nights and bright stars, as can be seen today only when far from city lights. On the farm, one day each year was spent making candles from melted animal fat. People in the city would instead buy candles from one of the city's candle-makers. Back in Europe, a wealthy church or home might purchase cleanly burning candles made from bees wax. Visit http://collections.ic.gc.ca/HandCraftTrade/domestic/candlemaking_video.html for a video clip depicting the steps in candle making. The wealth of homes could be differentiated simply by the number of candles burning within them. The wealthiest 1% of urban homes contained the early version of a piano called a pianoforte. As you strolled in the afternoon past the homes within a wealthy neighborhood, you would hear tunes being played by the daughters within those homes.
Just as our homes did not contain any areas separated for specific uses, neither did the farmyard. Piles of wood were anywhere and everywhere. Our pigs and cows wandered throughout the yard and our chickens wandered throughout our home. The outside area was seen as a place for work. There were no grassy lawns, enclosed yards, or sunshade–due to our habit of removing every tree. Our yards were chaotic and our homes might be in need of repair. Home repairs required an imaginative use of available materials because factory-made replacement parts did not exist. The cracks in a log home were filled with mud, and some doors that wouldn't shut were simply allowed to hang sideways from one corner. Since glass was rare and expensive, we repaired broken windows by stuffing them with rags, hats, or bags.
Only the wealthiest of us could afford to paint our homes until chemical factories came into existence to mass-produce inexpensive paint. After 1840, the fashion developed to paint homes and to surround a yard with a picket fence that would be painted white. We also started planting decorative flowers around our homes. Some commercial villages in New England began to paint every building in town in white. These painting and planting fashions took a few decades to spread toward the southern and western U.S.
Food, food-storing, and cooking
Food was stored by placing it underground, as we had done for 10,000 years. It was also preserved using the more recent discoveries of salting, drying, or smoking. In a large home, a year's supply of pig meat was slaughtered on a single day, packed into a 25 by 4 by 3 feet (8 by 1.3 by 1 meters) salt box for ten days, hung on rafters to be smoked for two days, and then left to be eaten throughout the winter. (Recall that in Ancient Mesopotamia, Inanna was the power in the storage house and became the last piece of green meat at the very end of winter.) Other foods were also hung to dry from the ceiling or rafters inside the home. Game meat–including deer, possum, and raccoon–was a more-regular part of our diet along the Western Frontier than in the Northeast, where there was a decrease in the numbers of these animals. Fresh meat was then available only after the autumn pig slaughter.
Some wealthy families in the Mid-South filled a large pit with winter ice that could then be used in the summer. In Gleanings From Long Ago, Ellen Mordecai says one person warned that ice in the summertime "went against nature." Visit www.nps.gov/hamp/virtualtour/vtmansionproperty.htm#icehouse to see an ice house and visit http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mbrsmi/awal.1555 for a video clip of ice harvesting around the year 1900. Recall that the Medieval Chinese used fast boats to move ice from north to south.
Since apple trees were abundant in the Northeast, apple cider was stored in barrels for the year and was alcoholic. We drank it at every meal, so did our children. Alcohol also came in the form of rum distilled from molasses that came from the West Indian Islands. After 1790 we began distilling grain. Immigrants from Germany brought beer making knowledge. Recall that for 7,000 years, clean water has been the hardest thing for each group of persons to obtain.
After 1750, those of us who lived in New England began to have a more varied diet than other regions by growing squash, turnip, and cabbage that we then kept through the winter in the root cellar, which consists of dirt piled against the bottom of the house. Those of us in the southern U.S. began growing sweet potatoes. A Georgian friend of mine says Southerners discovered collared greens were edible during periods of hunger in the Civil War. Each of these foods remain somewhat regional still today.
Each house had a fireplace for cooking. The fire also provided light and was the only source of heat in the winter–except that it could heat just one side of your body and could not heat any separated sleeping room. You might have a burning-hot back toward the fire while facing away and holding a frozen dishrag in your hands. The chimney required continual cleaning or else it would catch fire. One person said that a simple way to give the chimney a quick cleaning was to drop a chicken down it from the roof and let its wildly flapping wings remove some of the soot. (My physicist friend says she cleans the tube of her optical instrument by pushing a cat through it.) In a genealogy book about some of my family's great-grandparent's great-grandparent's great-grandparents (see the reading list, below), the Bennetts describe a little bit of life in New Hampshire and Vermont around 1820. The Bennetts explain that many household items were placed around the fireplace: the bird gun and its powder horns were hung above on the wall, strings of apple and pumpkin were drying above, and alongside were bellows, pots, and utensils. The fireplace was constantly burning, accompanied by the sound of crackling logs. If the fire went out, a dish full of live coals might be fetched from the nearest neighbor or a spark would be struck from flint. Sometimes punk material was gathered from a rotten maple tree, dried, and kept handy because sparks from the flint would easily ignite this material (no-doubt this was discovered by accident just before the ensuing living-room stomp-dance was performed). A slow-burning fire could be started within a hollow elm, where it could get little air and might burn for weeks, and used to supply coals to kindle the fire in the home's fireplace. Some men carried flint and steel to light their tobacco pipes. Each fireplace burned an amount of wood that was about 8 by 8 by 4 feet in volume (200 cubic meters). To obtain firewood, we would cut down a tree, trim its branches, and then hitch it to the oxen to be dragged to the front door where it would then be cut up and used in the fireplace.
We cooked our meals by placing heavy metal pots directly into the hot coals or at the edge of the fireplace. Some of us hung our pots above the fire from a crane that could be swung over the fire. The typical home had just a few pots and cooking utensils. Within the fireplace, a smaller fire might be pulled off to a side whose heat was less intense and could be used to warm certain foods. Different heats were used for different purposes just as is done today.
Until after 1800, the family ate from the same large bowl of food, with their own utensil, and passed around a single drinking vessel for all to drink from just as their European ancestors had done and were still doing. Manners called for you to wipe your mouth with the tablecloth before drinking from this vessel. Around age sixteen, George Washington recorded one hundred rules of manner, see The Exercise of a Schoolboy at www.history.org/Almanack/life/manners/rules2.cfm. You might compare this to the 1951 film about teenage etiquette available from the Open Video Project at www.open-video.org/details.php?videoid=4324.
Plates were often made of wood or pewter. Forks continued to be in use in Europe but did not exist in the early colonies for several decades. When forks did later appear, they were held and operated upside down compared with European usage. (You might watch for this difference in movies or television shows from these two continents.) Before industrialization reduced the price of utensils and furniture and such, we used any available item as a utensil, including seashells for spoons, sharp pointed sticks for forks and knives, and conveniently shaped logs for chairs and tables. After industrialization, we used ceramic instead of wooden plates, drinking glasses instead of tin cups, and a butcher knife that actually had a handle.
European immigrants found that meat was eaten every day by the residents of the U.S.; in Europe, commoners rarely ate meat. The huge land area of the U.S. allowed room for a larger number of cattle and pigs. New York City residents bought $12 million in food in 1841. Of this, 39% was spent on meat, 25% on grain, 22% on dairy products, and 10% on vegetables (compare these percentages with your own). Half the meat was beef and one-quarter was pork. In the U.S., bread was usually made from wheat; only 1% of the native-born population had even heard of the cheaper oat bread that was common in Europe.
For 750,000 years, gatherer-hunters had been cooking over an open fire (as was mentioned above in the discussion of the archaeological excavation in Choukoutien, China). During recent centuries we moved the open fire into a hearth (or fireplace) within our home. We still cooked in the same manner except that we placed a strong metal bar across the flames from which we would hang cooking-pots. At the beginning of our Industrial Revolution, huge quantities of lowcost iron were being produced for the first time and used for many things. In 1813, the cast iron plow began to replace the metal-covered wooden plow. John Deere introduced a steel plow in 1837 that was strong enough to turn tough prairie sod.
The cast-iron cooking-stove appeared around the year 1820 and changed our cooking technique for the first time since our invention of fire 750,000 years earlier. It took a few decades for its usage to spread across entire countries. One woman said that the first time she started a fire in her stove it seemed like magic. Instead of turning meat on a stick placed over the fire, the iron cooking-stove had topside heating surfaces placed at waist height. Heavy iron pots no longer had to be lifted into and out of the blazing hot flames of the fire. Since stoves used just one-third as much wood as did the open fireplace, less wood had to be chopped on the farm or purchased in the city. In 1838, one family who was the first in their town to purchase a cooking stove was told by the other townspeople that it would poison them all but instead, within two years most everyone had one. Cookbooks quickly appeared for this new-fangled machine just as they would 150 years later when microwave ovens first appeared. (You can see a video history of nineteenth-century household utensils by visiting the Library of Congress website at www.loc.gov/rr/program/journey/household.html.)
Our life began within our own warm and crowded home, with the neighborhood's women clamoring and shouting in the Kalapalo fashion while men waited outdoors. More often mom gave birth while standing than while lying down. In the frontier west, dad was often the only person around so mom would sit in his lap for support while giving birth. (Visit www.dohistory.org for the diary of a midwife.) Mothers and children often died during birth.
One woman said that six of her friends had died while giving birth. If the baby wasn't emerging, the neighborhood women would try to turn it and sometimes had to decide within a few moments that to save at least the mother they might have to pull the baby out in pieces. In Life in a Medieval Village, Francis and Joseph Gies said that whenever a woman died during childbirth, the midwife was expected to quickly cut her open to remove the baby in hopes of saving at least its life (see Chapter 14). It is guaranteed that within the last few centuries, one of your grandmothers lost a child or her own life in this way. (What are the maternal mortality rates around the world today? The WHO reports that there are 0.2 maternal deaths per 1,000 births in the developed world but 8 per 1,000 in Africa. The worldwide average is 4 maternal deaths per 1,000 births. For the full report, visit www.who.int/reproductive-health/publications/maternal_mortality_2000/mme.pdf. See also Making Pregnancy Safer at http://w3.whosea.org/pregnancy/main.htm.)
Doctors did not assist in births until after the 1840 arrival of the tools for troublesome births. For several years after that, the doctor would have been surrounded by many critics while attending childbirths. It took a few more decades for the house-calling doctor to spread from the wealthiest urban areas to the rural areas. Childbirth slowly changed from the anciently-communal female event to the private relation between a woman and her doctor. (Visit www.who.int/reproductive-health/global_monitoring/data.html for the latest WHO table Proportion of births attended by skilled health personnel - Estimates by country.)
Nursing typically lasted twelve to fifteen months, often until after the child's second summer had ended. It had been noticed that nursing decreased the number of infections occurring at the end of the hot summer season. Of course there was much daily discussion in the neighborhood about whose baby was sick, whose was not, and what each mother and father were doing differently. Back in our biological past, such discussion began the very moment that we had sufficient language to do so.
The average European family had five persons but in New England the average family size grew to be six persons. Later, as New England's population became more dense and farmland became filled, the area's average again dropped to five persons per family. This number also remained high along the Western Frontier until its residents had been there for a generation or so, then it too would decrease. (As Richard Feynman says, you can picture a thin, north-south line of larger families, and how the line itself moves westward with the settlers.)
In 1798, 20% of rural homes were occupied by two families but this number had decreased to just 10% by 1850. Until 1850, one in five of our families had eight or more persons, but today, just one in twelve have this number. This means that in the early 1800s children were seen everywhere, much more so than occurs today. (The average is 2.7 persons per family in the U.S. today.) In the 1800s it was common for a home to include extra, unrelated persons, including co-workers, kinfolk, or lodgers. The dairies of the Ward family of Massachusetts shows that throughout a thirty-year period, they kept eleven to sixteen guests in their home. They were wealthy enough to afford to do this. Prosperous families could house more kin, employ more workers, and have longer staying guests.
A more-prosperous family might have a live-in helper who was a girl or boy from a poorer family working toward establishing their own future farm. (A girl was paid about one-fourth as much as a boy.) These youths would work for one or two years at one farm before switching to work for another. Children from homes with "more children than means" could be bidded out until adulthood to help with a more-prosperous family's chores, see www.memorialhall.mass.edu/collection/itempage.jsp?itemid=5897. A poor family with little land might send their eight-year-old to work and stay at a nearby farm, trading labor for food and shelter. As they became mid-teenagers, they would frequently return home to help in their parent's own home. See www.mayflowerfamilies.com/enquirer/servitude.htm for some examples.
As a girl approached marrying age, she might begin having extended visits with nearby relatives. As she met the neighbors of these relatives, she would be meeting increasing numbers of potential spouses. These visits were necessary because there were just a handful of potential spouses within a day's walk of her own home. Women usually married between the ages of nineteen and twenty-three.
The agricultural season encouraged most of us to marry after the time-consuming harvest and before the coldest part of the winter had set in. Most marriages occurred in late November or early December. We didn't yet have the tradition of wearing white or giving gifts, but the entire neighborhood would come to the house to celebrate with dancing and heavy drinking. Most everyone would spend the night by packing into the house and onto the bed.
In 1800, about one in three couples were already pregnant when they got married but only 1 in 5.5 in 1840. (Bennett reports that today 40% of first-births are premarital, 12% were premaritally conceived, and 30% occur out-of-wedlock). Illegitimate births were not even recorded in the public birth records. Abortions were sometimes used to end a pregnancy; if the child could not yet be felt to move then it was considered to be legal. In 1800, women continued to have children into their forties. Since many adults died before our youngest children had left the house, fewer parents experienced an empty nest and grand-parenting was less common.
Each day was filled with hard physical exertion for all, but no one complained of the work because they had no idea there could be any other way. In 1800, a single person alone could not handle all the duties needed to make a home function. Meals were prepared from scratch, clothing was kept in repair, the house and farm needed repair, crops and animals were tended, a few surplus items were made for sale, and socializing was done. Until the twentieth century, all of these chores were done by hand as it was a hand-made world. How many hours per week does your family spend doing these things, and what sort of things do you now do with your “spare time”?
A child went to work young. Daniel Drake of Mayslick Kentucky described his childhood chores. At the age of eight he rode on the horse to steady it while his father plowed. He planted seeds as his father covered them. He weeded. He stood guard over the crops by throwing rocks at squirrels and crows. He cared for stock, and he chopped and hauled wood. At eleven he was given an old gun to scare pests from the field. At twelve he held the plow and guided the horse, himself. At thirteen he split rails and built fences. By sixteen he was doing a full man's work in the fields. At the age of ten, Daniel's sister Lizzy, was sent to a farm one mile away to watch over twins and their aged father for an entire week. She had complete charge of the house. She woke up at five o'clock in the morning. walked a distance to get water, made breakfast, and got the children ready for school. She then cleaned the dishes and began preparing dinner. A few years ago, when I visited the Kentucky farm of a friend, I could not believe the number of hours per week of farm work their teenagers were doing. I grew up in the big city and worked around the home barely one hour per month.
We women worked in the farmyard milking the dairy cows and feeding the chickens and hogs. (Skim milk and swill for the hogs would be poured into a trough dug out of a big log.) We maintained the vegetable garden and spent many hours cooking at the fireplace. Every woman knew the preservation crafts of salting, pickling, and smoking. Bread was made in the home, including wheat, rye, Indian, and Johnnycake. Inside the house we churned milk into butter by vigorously shaking it for about an hour and then kneading it with our hands or with wooden paddles. The Ward family made eighty pounds (35 kg) of butter per week, using eighty pans, to barter at the local General Store. Visit http://collections.gc.ca/video/handcrafttrade/buttermaking.ram for a video clip depicting the steps in butter making, and see www.memorialhall.mass.edu/collection/itempage.jsp?itemid=3422 for a photo of a woman churning butter.
Not every household had the knowledge required to make cheese. First, milk was poured into a stomach lining taken from a calf. This lining contained acids that solidified milk into curd. After this was done, a press was used to squeeze the whey from the curds. (Oh, so that's what those old nursery rhyme words mean.) Then it was left to age by covering in wax. In effect, the calf's stomach acids would partially digest the milk and turn it into cheese that could be stored for long periods without spoiling.
Coffee and sugar were becoming more widely available. Tea had long been England's beverage, but in the year 1800, only half of U.S. homes had daily tea. In the New World, coffee cost less than tea because coffee was grown in the New World; consequently, by 1830 it was more popular than tea. Coffee was obtained in bulk form and then ground and pounded. Sugar had been an expensive luxury item but as its price fell it became more-widely used. It came in the shape of a tapered-cone, about six inches in height (15 cm), and then sugar scissors were used to cut off little pieces from the cone. The doors of our homes had no locks but both tea and sugar were kept in locked boxes.
Most homes home had a spinning wheel used to twist fibers into thread. A photo of a spinning wheel can be seen at http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object.cfm?key=35&objkey=75. We spent many hours spinning thread, day after day. The mother of a household would delegate spinning to their daughters, hired help, or to an older unmarried women who lived in the house, hence the term "old spinster." Thread and clothing was also made from flax plants, though it required extra effort. (Flax was picked in midsummer, allowed to partially rot in water, fragmented, had its splinters removed, and then spun into thread.) Usually, spun thread was taken to town to trade for cloth but some of us had looms to make our own cloth. This cloth could also be traded in town. Many households exchanged goods or labor with a not too distant family that did have a loom.
All but the wealthiest families made their own clothes. It took many hours of work to sew the entire family's wardrobe so we did not have several copies of each item. We women usually had two sets of work clothes and a third set used only on special occasions. Since clothes were not easily replaced, we kept the clothes in a functioning condition for as long as possible by mending them often. We bought children's shoes oversized and stuffed them with rags while the child was growing into them. A southern plantation might have to quickly make one hundred new shirts before the previous one hundred were worn out. We also had to wash the clothes by scrubbing and pounding on them within tubs. This was usually done on Monday or Friday but some of us washed clothes just once a month. Harriet Beecher Stowe said that this day-long chore resulted in "bleached, par-boiled fingers." Women's work was less varied through the seasons than was that of the men but was more varied through the day. Women were usually trying to do four things at once, all while tending to the children.
Urban women had much the same chores as had rural women, but those of us poorer urban women struggled ever harder to scratch out a living. The most-leisured women were those who presided over a wealthy home. She might have only to make pastries between social visits while her live-in help prepared and served meals. She might also choose to wash the delicate China cups herself. Her day was less wearing than for the vast majority of women in the United States.
The work of us men involved the barn, gates, fields, pastures, and woodlands. It included such things as cleaning cow stalls, maintaining gates and fences, and working the crops. During the cold Northern winters there was no work to do in the fields. We then chopped wood, repaired harnesses, and took long social visits.
For entertainment and socializing, many of us drank heavily at the town's tavern. The per-capita rate of consumption of alcohol was triple today's rate. In 1827 the city of Rochester, New York had one-hundred taverns for 80,000 persons, which is one for each eighty persons. Women drank in small amounts and were rarely seen drinking in a tavern. The temperance advocates of the 1820s estimated that men drank fifteen times as much as did women. Entertainment also consisted of various forms of gambling. Card and dice games were common, and many towns had a horse-race route on the outskirts of town. Bets were also placed on bloody fights between pairs of about any types of animals, including roosters, dogs, dogs and chained bulls, and dogs and bears. Eventually, we decided this was just pointless brutality.
As for the Mesopotamians and Kalapalo, superstitions guided many aspects of the daily actions of New England farmers. Astrology guided the timing in weaning a calf and even in weaning our own babies. We would do, or leave undone, certain things during certain signs of the zodiac, and certain crops would be planted only during certain phases of the moon. For example, the December hog slaughter had to avoid a waning moon or it was feared that the pork would whither and shrink in the barrel. Trouble with cattle, or even butter or cheese, could still bring accusations of witchcraft. Why do you suppose our grandparents would do things this way? They would answer "Because it has always been so."
Families bartered goods at the General Store
Tunis explains that in the fourteenth century, European "grossers" wholesaled spices and produce. We saw this occurring in the Medieval Fairs. During the 1600s, grossers began also to retail items which would not spoil and the spelling was changed to "grocer," as we know it today. Most every New England village had a general store, and they sold goods in bulk because individual packages did not yet exist. (In the next chapter, we’ll see that by the 1950s the general stores were being replaced by self-serve supermarkets.)
Currency was rarely used in the general store or in any other transaction. Any currency that was used was usually foreign. Instead families bartered for goods at the village shops by bringing butter, eggs, bee's wax, feathers, axe handles, hats, thread, and some crops to exchange for dry goods, cloth, nails, molasses and rum. (More and more cloth was being made in the new factories in England, and soon in New England, also.) The values of the exchanged goods were agreed upon through haggling. Several families sometimes formed a train of wagons to take their surplus products to a more-distant but larger town that had a larger market. Much of this surplus was being exchanged with the plantations of the West Indies.
Within the home, hired help was not paid in cash. Instead, helpers would move into your house and exchange their labor for your food and clothing. The hired help became a part of the family, just as we saw above for apprentices.
Agricultural and social events
There is very short time-span in which a hay field is ready to be cut and rolled into bundles. To do this quickly, the neighboring families combined efforts and the nearby town would be emptied as its merchants closed shop to join in the project. Haying was handled with the excitement of a battle. Lines of people with long-handled scythes worked across the field. A slow cutter would receive friendly insults. Young men considered haying to be a physical challenge and a contest. They strived to be given the distinction of being the best mower or to be assigned head of a group. This work lasted fourteen to sixteen hours through the long summer day, from dawn until dusk–even later during the bright light of a full moon. Cutting hay required the most work of all. Visit www.memorialhall.mass.edu/collection/itempage.jsp?itemid=765 for a painting of a group at work in the hay field and www.memorialhall.mass.edu/collection/itempage.jsp?itemid=2437 for a photo of the scythe that workers swung to cut the hay.
Oats, rye, wheat, corn, and potatoes were harvested later in the year and did not require such a frantic rush as did haying. Threshing grain was done in the 10,000-year-old labor-intensive fashion. Since cotton was hard to pick, only the most dexterous avoided cuts and bleeding fingers and hands. While picking cotton, those of us who were slaves were driven, sometimes to exhaustion, by the threat of the ever-present whip.
Hawke explains that Europeans had used the word corn to stand for grains or cereals in general. The Europeans who had moved to the U.S. began using the word corn to refer also to New World maize. Native Americans began planting and harvesting maize about 7,000 years ago. The archaeologist MacNeish has spent many years studying the first locations in which maize was being farmed. He found that the original, wild version of maize had just a few small kernels, but that after several thousand years of selection by us humans it has developed into today's version. Throughout the U.S., the main crop of the transplanted Europeans continued to be Native American maize or “corn” because it was found that it would grow in most every soil and climate and that it could be eaten by people, our pigs, and our cows–who would be allowed into the fields to eat the stalks after we had gathered the corn ears. Corn fields are seen to extend from coast to coast for hundreds of miles (1.6 km) at a time in the U.S. today and in most every other nation, too.
As a family harvested their cornfield, they stacked the ears into a number of high piles. Neighboring families would come over to help remove the corn husk from each ear. Groups were assigned to each pile and then races would occur. Finding a lucky red ear meant pending courtship. (For a photo of a 1910 cornhusking bee, visit
