The Wealth of Patriarchs: Deerfield, Massachusetts, 1760-1840

Abstract

The Wealth of Patriarchs: Deerfield, Massachusetts, I760-I840 In I809, when Simeon Peck, Jr. requested public aid for his father from the town of Deerfield, the town's officials informed him that they would not aid parents who had children able to labor. Forty years earlier such a request would have been unlikely, for most eighteenth-century New Englanders assumed that it was their own responsibility to support their parents in old age. Forty years later such a request might well have been satisfied, because the absence of children able to labor was no longer a necessary prerequisite for public relief. Changes in economic relations between the generations were a central aspect of the transition from an economy based largely on patriarchal households to an economy in which wage labor played an important role.1 Much of the historical literature on the New England family explores authority relations within the patriarchal household. But this literature, with its largely descriptive emphasis and typically non-economic slant, has had little impact on conventional explanations of New England's economic and demographic transitions, which often treat the family as an undifferentiated unit acted on by external forces, such as population pressure.2