For class I wrote a review of Daniel Vickers’s 1994 book Farmers and Fishermen: Two Centuries of Work In Essex County, Massachusetts, 1630–1850 (University of North Carolina Press). Here it is, for the sake of it:
Detail from the cover of Farmers and Fishermen
Farmers and Fishermen displays Daniel Vickers’s magisterial command of the local literature of Essex County, Massachusetts, as well as of historians’ interpretations of the labor performed there in the first two centuries of European settlement. Vickers aims, in this clear, accessible narrative, to fill a gap in the knowledge of preindustrial America concerning the structure of labor relations in the region’s farming and fishing communities. In doing so he confidently stitches together the available literature on the topic with observations drawn from sixteen years of archival research. The latter effort involved both the creative interpretation of documents much pored over by other historians, such as the Massachusetts Tax Valuation List of 1771, and the development of vast tables of data drawn from county court records, farmers’ and merchants’ account books, and diaries. The conclusions he draws from these materials—that in the first century of settlement the farming and fishing communities were each drawn together into unique webs of interdependence; that after 1675 the labor structure on land and on sea changed in different ways; and that after the Revolutionary War the social bonds underpinning work began to fray, leading eventually to the nineteenth-century industrialization of the region—are always measured, and, because they do not stray far from the documents at hand, are convincing.
The fundamental problem facing those who wished to replicate English patterns of labor relations in the new world was that “whereas labor and capital had been the cheapest factors of production in the Old World, they were the dearest in the new.” (325) Because achieving “competency,” the settlers’ term for comfortable independence, led independent men to acquire their own property whenever they could, “those who needed help generally had to depend on those who were not free.” (4)
On land, the farming regime that New England settlers left behind recognized the household as the basic unit of production. This, combined with the labor shortage in Essex County during the first decades of settlement there, meant that the dependent figures who provided assistance clearing forests, constructing farm buildings, and tilling and hoeing fields were typically the sons of farm owners. The “productive relations” between fathers and sons in New England families, Vickers argues, has never received extended study, and his depiction of how boys, teenagers, and young men fulfilled their roles at home convincingly illustrates that “the two were interdependent on each other.” (73)
In the coastal waters off villages like Salem, Ipswich, Gloucester, and Newbury, settlers discovered abundant populations of cod that could be exported back to Europe, but were faced with similar labor shortages—and, for that matter, a lack of knowledge about the trade, since few were fisherman in England. Borrowing the example of Newfoundland, New England merchants and middlemen depended on skilled outsiders to execute the catch, and engaged them in a clientage relationship. An outfitter “advanced to each company of men the necessary provisions and equipment for the voyage; in return, they promised to sell him at current prices the entire catch.” (103) These relationships, although not familial, nonetheless created bonds of interdependency between those who had the capital to outfit the ships and those who did the work of hauling in cod, line by line.
Throughout Farers and Fishermen, the confidence borne from deep familiarity with his material allows Vickers to civilly but thoroughly overturn assumptions, parse distinctions, and adjudicate between rival factions among historians of preindustrial New England. At one point in this early section of the book, Vickers attempts to overturn a century of received opinion about the early cod fishery—that it was worked by “farmer-fisherman” rather than those who fished alone. Here he laments the “intellectual respectability” (136n) granted the notion by Bernard Bailyn; later in the book he adroitly shows that neither “market” nor “social” approaches to early American economy, both of which have numerous adherents in recent scholarship, are entirely correct. When he agrees with a historian’s work, though, Vickers is gracious; he leans on the scholarship of, among others, Virginia DeJohn Anderson and Christine Heyrman throughout the book.
In the five decades after 1675, Vickers makes clear, the fishing industry, by then the dominant sector of New England’s fledgling economy, changed direction. As capital accumulated in the colony, merchants and fisherman both acknowledged a distinction between capital and labor, and the bonds of clientage began to dissipate. No longer were fisherman-owners of shallops receiving advances on their catch in order to outfit their ships; instead, merchants were reinvesting profits in new (and larger) ships of their own, then hiring fisherman as laborers to pilot them, for longer periods of time, into deeper offshore waters. In the earlier system, “credit was the financial expression of delegated power.” (162) Now, as “the same customers or their children discovered that their accounts were being squeezed, their loyalty evaporated.” (162) By historical standards, this transition occurred very quickly, and it caused social and cultural gaps to open both between merchants and a nascent laboring class of fisherman and between “seaward and landward society.” (189)
Farmers experienced relatively little of this dramatic change before the Revolutionary War. Instead, the peculiarly tight bonds of interfamilial dependence morphed gradually into webs of local integration. Sons would work not only for their fathers, but also exchange their labor with neighbors, and, with increasing frequency throughout the eighteenth century, work outside the home (whether in military service, at sea, or, most frequently, by taking up a craft). Vickers’s reliance on seventeenth-century court records, which are filled with background descriptions of the cases, is here replaced by more speculative work; he infers eighteenth-century changes in the structure of farm labor through such means as parsing the habits of self-identification in those newly utilitarian legal documents and identifying the tools listed in the inventoried estates of farming householders. Although roles were shifting, most rural men “generally outgrew their reliance on manufacture as they accumulated land.” (257) The ideal of owning land as the precursor to independence held fast throughout this period.
Because it is largely outside the purview of his study, Vickers’s final chapter, juxtaposing the increasingly capitalist structural organization of farming and fishing with the early industrialization of the region, is brief. He aims to give evidence of the ways in which preindustrial ideas and social structures influenced capitalist development, and while his depictions of a rising merchant class, an increasing occupational diversity, and the opening of regional and American markets are sound, the details of this preindustrial legacy to industrial development are not wholly clear. Vickers notes that, in the fishing industry, “the conditions of the early national period re-created those of the 1640s,” when “both productive manpower and equipment were scarce in a context of high prices and the disruption of translatlantic fisheries.” (267) On the evidence of the book itself, however, such correspondences seem just as likely to have been set in place by the need for credit to fuel a rapidly expanding marketplace as by inherited social models of productive labor. Yet Vickers has done so thorough a job documenting one segment of economic life in New England before the American Revolution that it seems churlish to complain about details at the fringes of his purview. “Throughout this book the aim has been to view the relations of productive comparatively across time and space and to distinguish the forms that dependency assumed,” (258) Vickers writes. On that score, this study succeeds. Farmers and Fishermen brings into sharp focus the period that led to New England’s widely examined nineteenth-century industrial revolution.
