The Social Origins of Some Early Americans: Rejoinder

Abstract

Both Mildred Campbell's Social Origins of Some Early Americans' and my own recent reconsideration' deal with a single central problem: the interpretation of the evidence in two sets of seventeenth-century servant registrations for the social origins of those registered. Both papers acknowledge that the records pose some problems, yet both of us have made inferences and drawn conclusions from the evidence. All of our inferences are based on interpretive assumptions. The main purpose of this note is to make the assumptions entailed by each interpretation explicit, and to offer some evidence that bears on the relative plausibility of the different assumptions involved. The most difficult problem posed by the data results from the absence of any recorded occupations for large numbers of men in both sets of registrations. Several answers to the question why the occupations were not recorded have been suggested, but to date none has been universally accepted. Postponing the resolution of this question for the moment, it is possible to consider the different conclusions the data yield concerning the social and occupational groups from which the men without recorded occupations came. Two extreme assumptions can be used to establish the ranges within which any other allocation of these men will fall. One is that all the men without