page_739 < previous page page_739 next page > Page 739 social scale merely by accepting Calvert's offer. Complicating the situation was the fact that high status in the colonies did not have quite the repute it had in the mother country. The poor men who came to Maryland as indentured servants in the first half of the seventeenth century thrived on attaining their personal freedom (after five to seven years of servitude), most of them becoming landowners and active in the affairs of their community. But the servants who came to Maryland in the latter half of the century fared poorly in freedom, victimized by the depression that overtook tobacco farming. In neighboring Virginia at the time, more than 40 percent of the members of the House of Burgesses had previously been servants. But Massachusetts, a land of small farms and hard work, offered few inducements to would-be aristocrats. In Salem, the socially emerging elite of the seventeenth century had considerable wealth to start with. For New England as a whole, those who achieved prominence had for the most part been successful in old England. Master craftsmen who came to America flourished; servants and journeymen "remained humble." A detailed investigation of the town of Dedham, Massachusetts, has revealed that during the seventeenth century "the average young man had little chance of growing rich." A century later his son's chances remained "bleak." Of course, this does not necessarily mean that "average young men'' did not improve their lot at all. In the eighteenth century the picture remained mixed. Opportunity to rise varied from place to place. Older, settled areas offered little chance of success to those of limited means. Opportunity in all geographical areas was greater in frontier counties than in developed eastern regions. One scholar is much impressed by the large proportion of young Bostonians who became taxpayers in the 1770s and 1780s. But another reads the evidence as proof of little vertical mobility in the 1770s and even less in the 1780s. The former finds upward movement in improvement or modest increase in property held; the latter dismisses as "trivial" changes in wealth or occupation unaccompanied by change in an individual's "position." On the one hand, abundance of land and shortage of labor made America the "best poor man's country"; on the other, the great majority of rich men were born to wealth or prominence, and wealth became more unequally distributed with the passage of time, particularly in towns and cities. African-Americans, who had, of course, come to America involuntarily, moved not upward but more firmly into enslavement after the mid-seventeenth century. Although a minority of skilled blacks did improve their economic lot, the status of all African-Americans was low, even those who became free. The American Revolution had important social and economic as well as political consequences. Among other things, it resulted in the confiscation of Loyalists' estates and the appearance in the new state legislatures of many men of modest circumstances. The Loyalists' lands, however, most often wound up in the hands of substantial speculators, not those of small purchasers. The "new men" who thrived financially during the War for Independence did not supplant older wealth so much as supplement it. In the first half of the nineteenth century the American economy took off. Booms in transportation, banking, commerce, and manufacturing enticed Europeans, mainly Germans and Irish, to come to the "fabled republic" in unprecedented numbers. The wealth of the nation increased dramatically and surely opened opportunities for at least modest gains to many. But the wealth was distributed more unequally than ever. Far from having suffered "the sting of want" as youngsters, the nation's richest men were almost invariably born to families of wealth and renown. The great majority of Americans, though by no means poverty-stricken, nevertheless owned few worldly goods and enjoyed little improvement in their condition during what used to be called "the era of the common man." Clever politicians and publicists outdid one another in praising "Tom, Dick, and Harry," but in fact ordinary people had little influence as well as little property other than a patch of land. The movement they experienced was more often geographical than vertical, as families facing poor prospects in their home communities moved to new locales. The depressions following the financial panics of 1837 and  < previous page page_739 next page >