Week 7 Brog: Labor and builing up from within

As the colony of Connecticut was founded for families who wished to spread out from home base as it were in the Massachusetts colony, the reasons were not the same as in other industrial minded colonies. The religious privileges to worship freely were the main motivating factor and the economic impact was initially centered on the self-sustainment of these Bible-based communities. This self-sustainment was mainly of an agricultural sort, and as the colony grew, the agrarian mindset expanded into profit enterprises for the communities in Connecticut. Many different people filled the needs of labor and as the colony grew in population, resources, and inter-colonial and international dialogue, so did the nature and development of the labor force.

Beginning early in the colony, the labor force included all people at one time or another. Following Biblical precepts and imperatives, men and women in the nuclear family all contributed to the family and community need. Officially, the labor force became more delineated as the colony grew and more civic structures were put in place. In Jackson Turner Main’s work on Connecticut society and economy, he lays out the labor force in four groups which become helpful in understanding the unique demographic that was developing in all colonies. The four groups were slaves (of both sexes and both African and Indian heritage), indentured servants, free dependent men (mostly sons of local families and single), and free independent men whose names are documented on church and tax records. The free independents were usually sons who were single or married who were old enough to own land, but had not acquired it, and also migrants and single unmarried men as well.

In Connecticut in the 1600’s the majority of these servants were sons, being mostly over 50% of the labor force. The slave trade with the West Indies saw a slow but steady increase in purchases of African slaves, as well as the appropriation of Indians as farm laborers. Initially, it would appear from probates that Connecticut slave holdings were not of a coercive nature as to strictly hard and sometimes harsh manual labor. Most of the slaves (which were still a very small minority in the 1680’s) appear to simply be household help who “raised their owners standard of living, rather than engaging in production for the market.”

The slow growing slave labor force helped to establish long-range economic sustainment for the Connecticut colony. The familial infrastructure ensured a solid foundation to start on, with values of good stewardship in the micro translated long term in the macro. Eventually, a strong middling class of married landowners emerged with imports of an agricultural and livestock sort. The colony started and continued to be very well self-sustaining all during these differing labor systems.

Main,Jackson T.. Society and Economy in Colonial Connecticut. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.