Sometime in the mid-18th century, British North Americans became increasingly interested in consumer goods. This development had profound implications for the way people lived and for the colonial relationship with Great Britain. Purchasing more goods transformed consumers' material lives. At the highest level, colonial Americans sought to copy the lifestyles of the British aristocracy, building houses in the Georgian style and filling their homes with fine imported furniture; paneling their walls with English wood; and surrounding themselves with fine drapery, china, silver, and pewter. The elite even sought to adorn themselves in suits tailored in England. George Washington ordered much of his clothing from England even though he complained to his purchasing agent that the workmanship was inferior and the style out of date.

It should not be surprising that the elite copied the British aristocracy. However, in the second half of the 18th century, the concern with consumer goods spread downward in society as even middling artisans and farmers sought the lineaments of refinement. In his autobiography, Benjamin Franklin offers the reader a glimpse into the mechanism of this creeping consumerism even before 1750. As a tradesman, Franklin saw nothing wrong with eating his meals with a pewter spoon and an earthen bowl, even though his success as a printer meant he could afford better tableware. His wife Deborah Read Franklin, perhaps knowing her husband better than he was willing to admit, thought differently and served him his meal in a china bowl with a silver spoon one day. She made no excuse for this change other than "she thought her husband deserv'd a silver spoon and China bowl as well as any of her neighbors."

Purchasing imported goods had an impact on the relationship between the colonies and Great Britain. First, the colonies became increasing important to the British economy in the 18th century, and by the 1760s North America was the most important market for British manufactured goods. However, buying so many things came at a price and an ever-increasing personal debt. After his marriage to Martha Custis (Martha Washington), George Washington went on a spending spree with the wealth his bride had brought him. Within a few years he was lamenting this extravagance and wrote that his purchases had "swallowed up" his fortune and brought him into debt. Although the ability to borrow is one measure of wealth--no one wanted to lend money to someone who did not have property as collateral--the expansion of debt for consumer goods was so rapid in the 1760s as to become frightening. Between 1760 and 1772 the personal debt of colonial Americans doubled from $2 million to $4 million. This debt had a psychological cost, as Washington's comment suggests. Many colonial Americans began to question themselves and wonder if they were too interested in pursuing wealth to obtain luxury.

Consumerism thus contributed to the origins of the American Revolution. The anxiety over consumerism, debt, and luxury augmented a sense of unease that challenged traditional notions of a corporate society and underpinned colonial reaction to the imperial regulation of the 1760s and 1770s. One author in a Connecticut paper commented in 1765 that the efforts of "every single Person to imitate the person next above him" in gaining possessions spread in "the most ridiculous Mimickry, the Fashions of London . . . to the poorest, meanest Town in Connecticut." Franklin, speaking to the House of Commons in 1765, declared that the goods colonial Americans imported were largely "superfluities," which were purchased and consumed, because "they are mere articles of fashion in a respected country." As such they were unnecessary, and in any conflict they would become "detested and rejected." During the resistance movement (1764-75), protestors against imperial regulation organized nonimportation pledges and boycotts, in part to put economic pressure on British merchants but also in part to demonstrate that virtuous colonial Americans did not need Franklin's "superfluities" and could produce other items that were more necessary or convenient for themselves.

The Revolutionary War (1775-83) tested that virtue and self-sufficiency. Throughout the war there was a dearth of consumer goods that made life more difficult for most people, whether Whigs or Loyalists. Once the war was over, however, a renewed flood of British goods into the United States again set people scrambling to purchase consumer goods from Great Britain and other European countries. Consumerism regained the momentum it had developed before the war and spread wider and wider in society. Frontier regions participated in this consumerism, and as early as 1792, 20 different stores were started in Lexington, Kentucky. Interest in purchasing goods encouraged greater participation in a market economy. Even for families actively engaged in producing homespun cloth--that is, cloth made at home--much of that homespun would be sold for cash, which would then be used to purchase other goods. A rural New England family might have its daughter spin woolen shirting while simultaneously buying "fabric for gowns" and "fashionable hats, purple satin lined with straw."

Both Native Americans and African Americans participated in the world of consumer goods. Indians eagerly traded furs and skins for blankets, cloth, and metal tools and implements. Even Native Americans who explicitly rejected European-American culture might be attired in clothing obtained through trade: Pictures of Tecumseh show him sporting a military jacket with epaulets; and Handsome Lake, despite a plumed headdress and body piercings, donned a European-style overcoat and a blanket made from European textiles. Slaves and free blacks sought consumer goods whenever they could obtain them. One Kentucky slave bought tea, shoes, buckles, velvet, and thread from a store with a small amount of cash and a variety of trade goods. Elizabeth Sandwith Drinker of Philadelphia complained of the extravagant dress of her African-American servants, describing a female servant as decked out "in white muslin dizen'd with white ribbon from head to foot, yellow morocco shoes and white bows."

But it was among the European Americans that consumerism had its greatest impact, leading to a tremendous variety of items available in the marketplace. For example, in Baltimore in 1806 a consumer could purchase coffee from the East and West Indies and the Isle of Reunion in the Indian Ocean. Also available were six kinds of tea from China, eight varieties of sugar, and a wide range of spices from around the world. By the early 19th century, consumer items such as textiles and shoes were being produced in greater quantities within the United States. In addition, in one of the key characteristics of modern consumerism, the introduction of new products also created demands and changed the way people lived. Before 1800 the broom was not a mass-produced item as most people made their own or relied on local Indians to produce them. Brooms, however, because of different standards in housekeeping, were not used frequently and were not considered an essential item for the average household. In 1797 Levi Dickinson, a farmer in Hadley, Massachusetts, started to grow broom corn. At first his neighbors mocked him, but soon many began to join him as Dickinson and his family used the slack winter months to fashion hundreds of brooms. With large numbers of brooms coming on the market, and with more common people seeking the gentility that a cleanly swept floor seemed to represent, a new standard for household order emerged, which included daily floor sweeping and expanded the demand for brooms. In 1810 New England produced 70,000 brooms annually.

By 1815 consumerism had permeated the European-American population of the United States. In preparation for a tax on luxury goods, federal government assessors went from house to house evaluating the consumer products each family owned, excluding beds, kitchenware, family portraits, and homemade items. The assessors found a plethora of luxury goods, including clothes presses, dining and tea tables, coffee urns and teapots, chandeliers, fancy porcelain, prints, pianofortes, and a host of other items not necessary for daily living but which added comfort and refinement to most homes. Of the approximately 800,000 households in the country, less than a third owned luxury items of less than $200 and were exempt from the tax. About half of the households held property with luxury goods valued between $200 and $600, while more than 100,000 had more than $600 in possessions. In short, the vast middle of society had become active consumers and participants in the market economy.

Bibliography:

1) T. H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

2) Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Knopf, 1992).

3) Cary Carson, Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert, eds., Of Consuming Interests: The Style of Life in the Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994).

4) Paul A. Gilje, The Making of the American Republic, 1763-1815 (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2005).

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