After the end of the Revolutionary War in 1783, the United States developed a thriving trade with England, exporting agricultural crops such as tobacco and importing manufactured goods. When Jefferson wrote the quotes above, he had never seen an American factory because the first such factory (which produced spindles of yarn) did not open until 1790.8 By 1810, New England alone had at least 250 such factories, small and large.9
Perhaps exposure to those factories helped soften Jefferson’s stance after he became president. “I trust the good sense of our country will see that its greatest prosperity depends on a due balance between agriculture, manufactures and commerce,” he wrote in 1809.10 He doesn’t say what that balance is, but no doubt it is less than the 100 percent agriculture he appeared to favor in 1785.
A few years later, the nation went through another war with Britain, and Jefferson realized the country should not rely exclusively on England for manufactured goods. “Experience has taught me that manufactures are now as necessary to our independence as to our comfort,” he wrote in a letter in 1816.
“You tell me I am quoted by those who wish to continue our dependence on England for manufactures,” the letter notes. “There was a time when I might have been so quoted with more candor, but within the thirty years which have since elapsed, how are circumstances changed! We were then in peace. . . . A commerce which offered the raw material in exchange for the same material after receiving the last touch of industry, was worthy of welcome to all nations.”
The War of 1812 completely altered Jefferson’s perception of industry. “We have experienced what we did not then believe, that there exists both profligacy and power enough to exclude us from the field of interchange with other nations: that to be independent for the comforts of life we must fabricate them ourselves. We must now place the manufacturer by the side of the agriculturist.” The question of the day, Jefferson wrote, was, “Shall we make our own comforts, or go without them, at the will of a foreign nation? He, therefore, who is now against domestic manufacture, must be for reducing us either to dependence on that foreign nation, or to be clothed in skins, and to live like wild beasts in dens and caverns. I am not one of these; experience has taught me that manufactures are now as necessary to our independence as to our comfort.”11
A Nation of Farmers
If Jefferson changed, it was from emphasizing the self-sufficiency of individuals and their families to emphasizing the self-sufficiency of the nation as a whole. Yet whatever Jefferson and Hamilton wanted, the bulk of the American population remained rural through the end of the 19th century. That circumstance is at odds with our stereotypical view of the nation in, say, 1790, when we might think of Samuel Adams in Boston, Alexander Hamilton in New York, and Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia. But these examples are atypical of how people lived in the nation’s early years. The 1790 census found that the combined populations of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia (including the Northern Liberties and Southwark “suburbs” of Philadelphia) had fewer than 100,000 people, or just 2.4 percent of the nation’s population.12 For comparison, in 2008, when the nation’s land area had grown tenfold, the Boston, New York, and Philadelphia urban areas held more than 9 percent of the nation’s population.
That census also found only 24 communities—not all of them incorporated as cities—with more than 2,500 people. The combined population of those two dozen communities was just over 200,000, or about 5.1 percent of the nation’s 3.9 million residents. Although some people lived in communities with fewer than 2,500 people, the vast majority of the nation’s population was rural.
As of 1790, it is likely that the majority of Americans did not own the homes they lived in. The Census Bureau did not record homeownership status until 1890, but scattered data indicate that farm ownership and homeownership rates at the end of the 18th century were low and declining.
Breaking the Feudal Chains
In rural areas, the 1890 census found that 66 percent of farmers owned their homes, but there are several reasons to believe that the share was lower in 1790. Most importantly, farm ownership and homeownership were hampered by the large land grants created in the colonial era combined with the customs of primogeniture and entail that prevailed in most of the colonies before the Revolution. In many of the colonies, those customs kept much of the land in a few large estates. In addition, the 1790 census found that almost 18 percent of American residents were slaves, who obviously did not own their own homes.
The first widespread weakening of primogeniture and entail began in 1737, when the British Parliament passed the “Act for the More Easy Recovery of Debts in His Majesty’s Plantations and Colonies in America.” This act made land, buildings, and other real property “equivalent to chattel property for the purpose of satisfying debts,” making it easier for people to borrow against the value of their land. Although increasing the risk to landowners, the act boosted economic growth. After the Revolution, most states, recognizing “the importance of the expansion of commerce to the creation of an American meritocracy,” followed this precedent.13
Revolutionary-era Americans clearly considered entail and primogeniture to be inappropriate for an egalitarian nation. To prevent the establishment of a landed aristocracy, they rapidly moved to abolish these customs. Thomas Jefferson persuaded the Virginia legislature to abolish entail in 1776. The preamble to Jefferson’s law claimed that entail “tends to deceive fair traders, who give a credit on the visible possession of such estates, discourages the holder thereof from taking care and improving the same, and sometimes does injury to the morals of youth, by rendering them independent of and disobedient to their parents.” The law itself immediately changed any “fee taille” land to fee simple land and prevented landowners from entailing their land to their heirs in a will.14 Years later, Jefferson listed the abolishment of entail as one of the six greatest accomplishments of his life.15
South Carolina and Delaware abolished entail shortly before Virginia, and within 10 years after 1776 all the remaining states except Massachusetts and Rhode Island had done so as well.16 Massachusetts (and by extension Maine, which was formed out of the original Massachusetts colony) and Rhode Island still allow entail today, though in a modified form: Someone may entail a property to his or her heir or heirs, which would mean the heirs cannot sell it. But the entail would disappear on the death of the heir unless the entail was included in his or her will.
Primogeniture soon followed: of the states that observed this custom, Georgia abolished it in 1777; North Carolina in 1784; Virginia (led again by Jefferson) in 1785; Maryland and New York in 1786; South Carolina in 1791; and Rhode Island in 1798.17 Landowners could still will their land to their eldest sons, but property of people who died without a will was divided equally among their male heirs or, if they had no sons, their female heirs. The abolishment of entail and primogeniture, combined with the adoption of the credit policies in the Act of 1737, led to the gradual breakup of the great landed estates and in turn increased the share of farmers who owned their own land and homes.
Abolishing primogeniture and entail eventually led to a more egalitarian nation. “No sooner was the law of primogeniture abolished than fortunes began to diminish, and all the families of the country were simultaneously reduced to a state in which labor became necessary to procure the means of subsistence,” observed Alexis de Tocqueville in the early 1830s. “Several of them have since entirely disappeared, and all of them learned to look forward to the time at which it would be necessary for everyone to provide for his own wants. Wealthy individuals are still to be met with, but they no longer constitute a compact and hereditary body.”18
The rejection of feudalism turned America into a magnet for European immigrants. As historians Doucet and Weaver note, “Nineteenth-century immigrants to North America identified property ownership with freedom from customary restrictions,” meaning feudal traditions that survived in many European nations until the beginning of the 20th century.19
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