The Middle Colonies

The land between the Potomac and the Hudson Rivers was, on the whole, fertile and readily tillable and therefore enjoyed a comparative advantage in the production of grains and other foodstuffs. As the seventeenth century elapsed, two distinct types of agricultural operations developed there. To the west, on the cutting edge of the frontier, succeeding generations continued to encounter many of the difficulties that had beset the

Colonial agriculture depended heavily on such cash crops as indigo—shown here being processed in South Carolina from fresh cut sheaves to final drying—and rice, shown previously in a plantation setting.

First settlers. The trees in the forests—an ever-present obstacle—had to be felled, usually after they had been girdled and allowed to die. The felled trees were burned and their stumps removed to allow for the use of horse-drawn plows. The soil was worked with tools that did not differ much from the implements used by medieval Europeans. A living literally had to be wrested from the Earth. At the same time, a stable and reasonably advanced agriculture began to develop to the east of the frontier. The Dutch in New York and the Germans in Pennsylvania, who brought skills and farming methods from areas with soils similar to those in this region, were encouraged from the first to cultivate crops for sale in the small but growing cities of New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. Gradually, a commercial agriculture developed.

Wheat became the important staple, and although there was a considerable output of corn, rye, oats, and barley, the economy of the region was based on the great bread grain. During the latter part of the seventeenth century, a sufficient quantity of wheat and flour was produced to permit the export of these products, particularly to the West Indies.

The kind of agricultural unit that evolved in the Middle colonies later became typical of the great food belts of the midwestern United States. Individual farms, which were considerably smaller in acreage than the average plantation to the south, could be operated by the farmer and his family with little hired help. Slaveholding was rare (except along the Hudson in New York and in Rhode Island) because wheat production was labor intensive only during planting and harvest periods and because there were no apparent economies of large-scale production in wheat, corn, or generalized farming as there were in the southern plantation staples, especially rice. It was normally preferable to acquire an indentured servant as a hand; the original outlay was not great, and the productivity of even a young and inexperienced servant was soon sufficient to return the owner’s investment. The more limited growing season in the North also lowered the economic gains of slave labor in the fields. Finally, as Coelho and McGuire (1997) show, the northern climates had negative biological consequences for blacks relative to whites.