A p p e n d i x A Statistical Analysis of Wealth Distribution and Mobility Levy Courts and Tax Records To pay for such things as poor relief, building and repairing roads, bridges, and wharves, remunerating local legal and administrative offi- cials, occasionally raising new courthouses and jails, and whatever else their members believed was in the interest of their counties, Levy Courts of course raised local taxes. That indeed was their first and foremost pur- pose, if the name Levy Court is anything to go by. They therefore kept records of the quantity and sometimes the quality of taxable property that people owned. These assessment lists allow us to reconstruct the distribution of wealth and the waxing and waning of individual fortunes of each of a county’s inhabitants. Throughout this book, for reasons of readability, I have tried to keep analysis of statistical details of wealth distribution and mobility to what I hope is an acceptable minimum within each of the chapters. The purpose of this Appendix, however, is to explore these tax lists in more detail. The appendix therefore goes into greater depth of wealth analysis of planters, yeomen, smallholders and the landless than the chapters have done. Besides trying to keep the book as readable as possible, another reason for confining some of the statistical analysis to the appendix is that in this one place one can more easily compare levels of wealth and rates of mobility across the different groups of landowners and nonlandowners. Prince George’s County, Maryland, has a near-complete run of Levy Court annual property assessments from 1792 through the 1820s. County levy courts assessed land (including built improvements such as barns and stables), slaves (according to age and sex), gold and silver 170 The Tobacco-Plantation South plate, and “other” property in the form of ready cash, livestock, stills, riding carriages, vessels over 20 tons, and, after, 1813, some farm equip- ment and furniture. Matching these records against the decennial census population schedules for 1800, 1810, and 1820 reveals how much and what kinds of property individual household heads possessed at those moments. The courts did not record or lay a levy on those with less than $40 worth of taxable wealth, so an advantage of matching the tax records against the census is that it captures these poorer householders as well as the wealthier taxable ones. One can also use the tax lists matched against the census to measure social-economic mobility of individuals at these 10-year intervals. 1 Problems with Sources and Methods Although local assessments provide the best measures of wealth and mobility available, there are of course complications and imperfections that one must take account of when using them. First, this analysis focuses mainly on a single county, and it will soon become clear that researching more than one would have been an impossible undertak- ing. I have, however, where possible, compared my findings for Prince George’s County with those of others who have done similar studies elsewhere in the tobacco south. Furthermore, the figures used here only account for household heads residing in Prince George’s County at the time of each census. The lists also contained another 768 named individuals in 1800, 782 in 1810, and 688 in 1820, besides those on the census as well, and in each year they owned a little under one-third of the county’s taxable wealth. These people fall into three categories: those whose permanent residence was in another county; those who lived in the county in a household in which census takers designated someone else as head; and those who had died but whose estates had not been distributed among decedents at the time assessments were made. Assessors occasionally revealed who belonged in what category with such designations as “George Digges’ heirs” and “Rezin Beall of Kentucky,” but only rarely and apparently by whim rather than by rule or routine. It would be impossible to trace all these people though other records. There are also too many unknown variables to make precise calculations about the implications of these people and their property for the county’s wealth distribution. One can, however, safely make the following generalizations. 2 First, absentee ownership in one county by someone living in another usually indicated considerable wealth, and indeed preceding chapters have shown that wealthy Prince Georgians often owned property else- where as well as near home. As seen in chapters 1 and 2, the 1800 county assessments recorded George Calvert as owner of 3,325 acres Appendix 171 of land, 76 slaves, and other property to a total value of just under $14,000, making him Prince George’s seventh wealthiest household head at the time. Assessments show that by 1820 he was the richest householder in the county by far. Also, however, Rosalie Calvert’s letters and George’s last will and testament reveal that at various times between the early 1800s and mid 1830s the Calverts owned 875 acres of land in neighboring Montgomery County, Spurrier’s Tavern and its 516 acres in Anne Arundel County, lots on Pennsylvania Avenue, 6th Street, and C Street, and a majority share in the National Hotel in Washington, D.C., unknown quantities of land in Alexandria, Virginia, and invest- ments and shares in various banks and other institutions. George Calvert was also, as his wife Rosalie wrote to her father in 1810, “director of the Bank of Washington . [and] director of a manufacturing company in Georgetown.” 3 As we saw in chapter 1 , the bank investments the Calverts made were immensely profitable. The Calverts also invested $10,000 in the Baltimore-Washington Turnpike, which was incorpo- rated by the Maryland Assembly in 1812, and capitalized at $100,000 with shares at $50 each. And they put “$5,000, or 100 shares” into it on behalf of Rosalie Calvert’s father, Henri Joseph Stier. 4 Rosalie expected that it “will pay 10 ½ percent which the law authorizes.” 5 It seems safe to suppose that most of those who owned substantial amounts of prop- erty outside of Prince George’s County or had large noninvestments of this kind in it, were, like the Calverts, among the richest people in the county, and that many of the county’s richest residents owned property elsewhere. Indeed, Lee Soltow has estimated that perhaps as much as “one-third of the real estate belonging to a rich person lay outside the county containing his holdings of greatest value, and in which he was most likely to reside.” If that is correct, then the gaps visible in the fol- lowing analysis between the richest Prince Georgians and the rest can be multiplied by 1.33 of the value of real estate to account for this factor alone. Similarly, we can safely assume that those who were subsumed by census takers in the household of someone else usually held less property than that someone else (they would normally be the wife and children of the census-designated household head). As for those who had died, as previous chapters have shown, inheritance was more often a means of perpetuating fortunes and consequently inequality than it was of redistributing wealth. Although Jean Lee is right that both ante- and postmortem bequest practices generally continued to favor all family members, not just eldest sons, in the early national era, it also seems to have helped to maintain class privilege. 6 Property owned by those who were not Prince Georgian residents or householders, and that recorded in the estates of the deceased, would therefore have had the effect of increasing the levels of inequality as measured here—according to prop- erty held only by living, locally resident household heads. 7 172 The Tobacco-Plantation South In addition to the above, local assessments rated property sometimes significantly below market values. Slaves under the age of eight, for exam- ple, were valued at an average of $14.68 each (the exact amount depend- ing on age), those aged 8 to 14 were routinely valued at $40, women of 14 to 36 at just over $80, men of 14 to 45 at just over $120, and women and men of 45 and over at an average of a little over $40 (with variations according to age, health, and occupational skills). Yet, in December 1800, Susanna Cannon sold “one negro lad named Nathan Aged about thirteen years[,] One negro Woman named Sall aged about Twenty five years and her male child named Joe aged about Eleven months” to Augustus Levine and John Lynch of Baltimore County for $375, while their taxable value would have been somewhere between $267 and $320. Sometimes the gap between assessed and market values was even greater. The same month, Margery Belt sold “One Negro woman named Peg” to Charles Hodges for $220 and Gibson Keadle sold “One Negro Man Slave named John” to Ninian Willett for $300. 8 Land was undervalued in the assessments even more than slaves. The 1800 levy lists reveal an average taxable value of land of just under $1.90 (although actual values varied quite widely, as is already clear in previous chapters). Yet, in August 1800, Zachariah Baldwin sold “one hundred and fifteen Acres and half of an Acre” to Benjamin Fairall for $1,231.24, or $10.66 per acre. Some land was worth even more. In November the same year, Nathaniel Craufurd sold five acres to Zachariah Berry for $133.50, or $26.70 per acre. Some was worth less. In December, Elizabeth Hilton sold 4½ acres to Richard Coe for $26.67, but even that, at near $6 per acre, was well above the values recorded in local tax assessments.