How Self-Sufficient Was Early America?

Abstract

So reads one of the most frequently cited passages in early American history. The idea that pre-industrial households practiced self-sufficiency has been a powerful one, and the vision of the past evoked in the quotation has enjoyed widespread popularity for some time. To conservatives, it highlights the selfreliance and frugality of the good old days, whereas to the Left, it illustrates the purity and simplicity of life before capitalists and industrialists botched things up.1 There is some question, though, about how accurate a reflection of the past this image is since few specialists on the colonial economy ascribe to it, and about how much historical material can be mustered in its support. The excerpt that is quoted above, for example, turns out to be a rather flimsy piece of evidence. The lines appeared in a letter from A Farmer, published by the American Museum, a Philadelphia magazine, in I787. The writer goes on for about a page and a half discussing the virtues of self-sufficiency, bemoaning his own and his countrymen's sad departure from that happy condition, and vowing a return to his former state before he is ruined financially. In the process of relating his plight, he gives us his life story. Born to

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