Abstract
Taking New York as a case study, this article examines how well Early Republican city dwellers were provisioned with meat. It asks how the availability of supplies, and their distribution through a tightly regulated network of municipal marketplaces, affected the living standards of urban residents. The discussion centers on quantity, distribution, and quality. First, new meat consumption estimates document that New Yorkers enjoyed abundant meat supplies by any historical comparison. Second, geographic information system (GIS) analysis shows that the municipal market system fulfilled its mandate to distribute the city’s plentiful meat and other fresh food supplies to residents of all neighborhoods. And third, this article argues that the public market system played a central role in enforcing quality while also promoting egalitarian principles in citizens’ access to food. Overall, New Yorkers were well provisioned with meat not only thanks to sufficiently expanding supplies but also because they relied on a well-run municipal infrastructure of provisioning.
Keywords
Introduction
Provisioning food, constructing shelter, and supplying clean water for growing populations were three vital challenges that booming nineteenth-century American cities confronted. Two of these issues—housing and sanitation—have been central topics for urban social and economic history, but food supplies have received relatively little research in relation to modern urbanization. The lack of research in this area is puzzling, considering that cities are population concentrations based predominantly on nonagricultural economic activities. 1 For nineteenth-century urbanization to take place, city dwellers depended on expanding agricultural supplies as well as the proper functioning of urban provisioning infrastructures.
This article makes a contribution to the history of urban meat provisioning and consumption through a case study of New York City in the Early Republican era. Gotham offers an ideal site for the analysis. On the one hand, it was the fastest growing city in America, with its built-up area doubling and its population quadrupling from 33,000 to 120,000 in one generation. 2 On the other, it is the best documented case, thanks to the butcher-turned-historian, Thomas F. De Voe, who in the mid-nineteenth century, generated extensive published and manuscript records about the history of the city’s public marketplaces. 3 This unique set of sources, combined with more conventional municipal archival records, makes it possible to study a range of new and important issues about the provisioning of Early American city dwellers.
The three decades between 1790 and 1820 was a crucial period, when northeastern cities experienced their first stage of modern urbanization. During this time, New York attained its position as America’s most prominent urban center. Unprecedented population growth and spatial expansion challenged the capacity of existing urban institutions, designed for a midsized colonial port, to meet the needs of a rapidly changing metropolis. New York’s ever-growing appetite required rapidly expanding supplies, as well as the persistent upgrading and expansion of the city’s infrastructure of municipal marketplaces.
Traditionally, in New York, as in other major American cities, the retail trade of fresh meat—specifically beef, veal, lamb and mutton, and pork—was restricted to licensed butchers working at municipal marketplaces. 4 The original intent of the so called “market monopoly of meat” was to maintain strict municipal oversight of a crucial and perishable component of the urban food supply, fresh meat, chiefly for reasons of public health. Market butchers, in return for their trade privilege and to finance the upkeep and expansion of the city’s infrastructure of provisioning, paid excise taxes on the amount of fresh meat they sold.
Given the centrality of fresh meat in the urban diet, the market laws had far-reaching consequences for the political economy and geography of urban provisioning. In particular, the highly restricted meat trade agglomerated the retail of all other fresh food supplies—including poultry, fowls and games, fish and shellfish, milk and dairy products, vegetables and fruits—at the city’s limited number of marketplaces. To procure daily provisions, New Yorkers, and urban dwellers across America, had to frequent their local marketplace, which was owned and managed by the city government. Importantly, this municipal system dominated the landscape of provisioning in American cities through the mid-nineteenth century. 5 In New York, only after two centuries, in 1843, did the Common Council deregulate the city’s retail food markets. 6 In other words, Gotham’s rise did not occur under a free market regime of food provisioning. On the contrary, access to food was regarded a public good, and hence the urban infrastructure of food retailing was owned, managed, and strictly monitored by the city government.
This article starts with the premise that urban provisioning was a mediated process. Accordingly, the analysis examines both the availability of supplies and the geography and political economy of the city’s market intermediaries. The article is organized into three sections. The first one draws on previously unused archival sources to generate new estimates of per capita meat consumption for a hitherto undocumented period. It establishes for the first time that city dwellers in the Early Republic enjoyed abundant meat supplies by any historical comparison.
Additionally, the data present new raw material for the standard of living debate in general and the Antebellum Puzzle in particular. The term Antebellum Puzzle refers to the three decades prior to the Civil War characterized by the perplexing combination of rapid economic growth and growing per capita income on the one hand, and deteriorating biological standard of living, in particular, declining physical stature and rising mortality, on the other. One prominent theory, put forth by John Komlos, 7 emphasizes the role of deteriorating diets, above all falling meat consumption from the 1820s until after the Civil War, to explain the phenomenon. 8 While this article focuses on the Early Republican era, the new meat consumption estimates present a reliable benchmark for scholars to which to compare more widely available census figures from the subsequent period. 9
The second section of the article shifts the analysis from the availability of supply to the city’s market intermediaries. Spatial research based on geographic information system (GIS) mapping reveals that the public market system succeeded in its mandate to distribute fresh food supplies to residents in all neighborhoods. In a rapidly growing city, where the market laws required households to purchase provisions at a select number of marketplaces, city officials exhibited both commitment and competence in upgrading and expanding the market facilities.
But what were the social benefits, if any, of the market laws’ restrictions and the Common Council’s ownership, management, and tight control of the city’s infrastructure of provisioning? Even if the public markets ensured residents’ proper access to food, what did citizens gain by replacing the mechanism of supply and demand with political negotiations about the allocation of market facilities? The concluding section assesses the costs and benefits of the municipal model compared to the alternative of a free market regime of dispersed private stores. It makes the case that the public market system’s most important benefit was that it instituted powerful mechanisms of food quality control. Additionally, it promoted equity by ensuring the proper provisioning of residents in poorer, more marginal neighborhoods.
Supply: New Meat Consumption Estimates
For estimating the quantity of fresh red meat consumed by New Yorkers in the early nineteenth century, two hitherto unused sets of sources have been consulted. First, market clerks were required to register and collect fees on each and every cow, calf, sheep, and hog processed at their respective marketplaces. They then submitted these returns monthly to the city comptroller; a substantial amount of the 1816 and 1818 returns has survived for the city’s three principal markets of Fly, Washington, and Catharine. Additionally, De Voe’s The Market Book (1862) contains complementary sheets of the returns for the missing months. 10 By combining these two sources, one can make reliable estimates of the total number of cattle, calves, sheep, and hogs slaughtered for consumption in New York City in 1816 and 1818. 11
Second, the Proceedings of the Common Council document the aggregate amount of market fees collected from the market butchers between 1790 and 1818. Given that fees were collected in the form of excise taxes on the heads of animals slaughtered for sale, while also knowing the specific tax rates that applied to the four kinds of animals, they can be used to estimate the actual volume of meat sales for most of the years during the period. Overall, combining these two sets of data makes it possible for the first time to measure per capita red meat consumption in a major American city of the Early Republic—and not only for one year, but for nearly three decades.
The data have one limitation. The City Council collected revenue only on the sale of butcher’s meats. All other meats, including poultry, fowl, and game, which were sold by farmers and hucksters at the city’s markets, as well as processed and preserved meats, such as ham, sausage, lard, salted pork and beef, smoked beef, or corned beef, which were retailed by the city’s grocers, fell outside the remit of municipal taxation. Any attempt to quantify per capita meat consumption is therefore necessarily limited to red meat, leaving a substantial portion of the urban meat supply unaccounted for. 12
Based on the market clerk’s monthly returns, complemented by De Voe’s records, the per capita red meat consumption estimates are as follows: In the late 1810s, New Yorkers on average ate between 85.9 to 92.1 pounds of beef, 16.9 to 19.6 pounds of veal, 28.6 to 34.1 pounds of lamb and mutton, and 10.7 to 13.5 pounds of pork—for all categories, the year of 1816 representing the upper, while the year of 1818 the lower bound. 13 On the whole, annual per capita fresh red meat consumption reached 159.3 pounds in 1816 and 142 pounds in 1818.
Two caveats are in order. First, these figures are likely to slightly underestimate per capita butcher’s meat consumption, as they refer to animals officially accounted for and prepared and sold by licensed butchers at the city’s public markets. Given the “market monopoly of meat,” this should have been the whole supply. Yet despite a well-functioning and strictly enforced public market system, there was already evidence of some informal trade. It is also unlikely that market clerks managed to count all animals sold by the butchers. Butchers paid taxes after each and every animal was slaughtered and thus had the incentive not to report all sales. The figures, on the other hand, may also slightly overestimate per capita consumption. By 1810, New York surpassed Philadelphia to become North America’s most populous city and greatest emporium of commerce. 14 At any given day, there were many thousands more eating butcher’s meat in New York than there were residents. It is impossible to know which factor was more important and to what extent the two cancelled each other out.
But before continuing with the analysis: Are these figures realistic? Roger Horowitz offers precise estimates of urban meat consumption levels for the twentieth century. In 1909, per capita meat consumption ranged from an average of 136.1 pounds for lower-income families, to 163.7 pounds for middle, and to 201.6 pounds for higher-income families. By 1942, the Great Depression pushed total meat consumption for the respective income groups down to 107.5, 143.6, and 166.1 pounds. Yet by 1965, per capita meat consumption reached record levels with figures as high as 205.2 pounds for lower, 219.4 pounds for middle, and 230.2 pounds for higher income families. 15 At the same time, per capita beef consumption stood at 81.5 pounds in 1909, dropped to 69.4 pounds by 1942, to reach a staggering 104.7 pounds by 1965. 16 In comparison, the market data indicate very high but by no means unrealistic levels of meat consumption for the early nineteenth century.
The years 1816 and 1818, however, are only two cases in point. They are also too close to each other to suggest any trend, and while unlikely, it is possible that they refer to exceptional years, which might explain the high consumption figures. Further evidence is needed to expand the chronology and thus solidify the consumption estimates. For each year between 1790 and 1800, and for some of the years between 1801 and 1816, the Proceedings of the Common Council report the aggregate amount of market fees collected by the market clerks on the total amount of butcher’s meat sold. 17 Given that the respective tax rates applied per head of cattle, calf, sheep, and hog remained unchanged over the period, and that the market laws limited the sale of fresh butcher’s meat to the public marketplaces, aggregate market fees directly reflect relative levels of meat consumption in New York City between 1790 and 1818. 18
Figure 1 compares the growth of New York City’s population to that of the aggregate market fees between 1790 and 1818. 19 It clearly shows how market fees grew at exactly the same rate as did the city’s population between 1790 and 1818. It is also evident that urban food consumption was highly sensitive to exogenous shocks. Above all, the War of 1812 caused a temporary collapse in meat sales in 1813. De Voe himself noted that the prices of provisions became very high at the commencement of the war, and continued so for a few years, resulting in notable scarcities in supplies. 20 Yet exorbitant prices were only part of the story, as meat sales swiftly recovered by 1816, despite prices remaining high. The war not only disrupted New York City’s supply chains, but also interrupted the day-to-day functioning of market intermediaries. 21 It took some time for the markets to fully recover and for the city’s butchers to resume business.
Population and market fees, 1790-1820.
Food consumption was not immune to other external shocks either. After nearly a decade of steady growth, in 1798 market fees dropped by a remarkable 14.2 percent compared to the year before, as the most devastating yellow fever in New York’s history wiped out nearly 4 percent of the city’s population and sent thousands into the countryside. 22 The next notable decline in meat consumption was connected to the 1807 Embargo Act. New York City’s meat supplies derived from regional sources, and thus the embargo did not directly hurt the meat trade. But for a commercial city, the interruption of foreign trade presented a severe economic setback, which in turn manifested in a 4.2 percent decline in the volume of meat sales. 23
Despite setbacks caused by the yellow fever epidemic of 1798, the embargo of 1807, or the War of 1812, the market fee data provide strong evidence for the steady growth of the city’s meat supplies between 1790 and 1818. The reliability of the series is confirmed by its responsiveness to external shocks. Moreover, fees calculated from the original market returns of 1816 and 1818—which were based on actual animal counts—fit remarkably well into the data set. Earlier, the original market returns were used to calculate per capita meat consumption rates for 1816 and 1818. Given the reliability of the market fee data, it makes sense to convert fees into meat consumption figures for the two-and-a-half decades prior to 1816. For such a conversion, one needs to know the relative importance of the four kinds of butcher’s meat between 1790 and 1816. Lacking such data, the estimations make a reasonable but not unproblematic assumption: that the 1816 ratios between the sales of fresh beef, veal, lamb and mutton, and pork reflected stable consumption patterns.
As for beef and pork, two sets of data confirm the validity of this method. First, the only comparable estimates of the composition of Early American urban meat diets, calculated by Billy Smith, yield nearly identical consumption ratios for these two meats. 24 Second, wholesale prices from Philadelphia and New York City reveal a strong association between the prices of barreled beef and pork in the Early Republican period. 25 As Figure 2 reveals, even as beef and pork prices show much volatility, these changes tended to affect both species of meat similarly. Importantly, no trend change in the wholesale prices—and thus the relative price—of beef and pork can be detected, for this would indicate a shift in their supply curves or consumer preferences. These findings reflect that prior to the 1820s there were no major changes in transportation technologies or animal husbandry that would have significantly altered urban supply conditions for butcher’s meats. 26
Wholesale price indexes (base years: 1821-25), 1790-1825.
While this general point is true for all four species of meat, the case for veal and lamb and mutton is less clear. Comparing the 1772 Philadelphia and the 1816 New York City estimates, the data indicate that urban consumers may have shifted their preferences from veal to mutton by the early nineteenth century. 27 Yet additional sources do not confirm this interpretation. Archeological data of bone remains from Boston do not provide evidence of declining veal consumption from the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth century, 28 while American sheep stocks were not improved for mutton production until the mid-nineteenth century. 29 Besides, beef and veal prices tend to move closely together, but as noted, wholesale beef prices did not experience any trend increase that would indicate mounting pressure on consumers to substitute mutton for veal. Most probably, for veal and mutton the Philadelphia and New York City figures are not directly comparable, after all Smith’s data refer to a Philadelphia laborer, not to an “average” consumer. Alternatively, residents in the two cities may have differed in their preferences. Either way, the evidence is in favor of applying the 1816 ratios for veal and mutton as well. One should note, however, that even if one were to assume shifting ratios (using the Philadelphia figures as benchmarks), this would have a minor impact on total per capita meat consumption estimates, given the much greater importance of fresh beef in the Early Republican urban diet. 30
Table 1 summarizes per capita meat consumption estimates for New York between 1790 and 1818. Even if the data are far from perfect, they provide new insights into urban meat consumption for a hitherto undocumented period. The figures show that per capita consumption of fresh red meat increased from 132.3 pounds in 1790 to rates as high as 154.7 to 166.5 pounds between 1795 and 1816—excluding the war year of 1813, when it dropped to 131.6 pounds. The corresponding rates of beef consumption rose from 76.5 pounds in 1790 to 89.5 to 96.3 pounds between 1795 and 1816. The 1818 figures indicate a notable decline in per capita red meat consumption compared to two years earlier. However, there is good evidence that the 1818 data are likely to slightly underestimate the overall number of animals butchered in New York, in which case the 1818 rates were probably much closer to those of 1816 than Table 1 suggests. 31
Per Capita Butcher’s Meat Consumption in New York City (pounds), 1790-1818.
Source: See text and notes 10-11, 13, 17-19.
How do these figures measure up to similar estimates for the period? Table 2 presents comparable data on average meat consumption in the Northeast during the latter half of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The best estimates for the Colonial and Early Republican periods come from Sarah F. McMahon’s meticulous studies of a large sample of wills from rural Middlesex County in Massachusetts. She finds that the yearly meat allowance of widows grew from 120.8 pounds in the early eighteenth century, to 168.2 pounds by the midcentury, to 183.5 pounds by the Revolutionary era, then it slightly decreased to 178 pounds during the last two decades of the century, to reach an impressive 201.8 pounds by the early nineteenth century. 32 James T. Lemon’s calculations for southeast Pennsylvania arrive at a lower widow rate of 150 pounds of meat for the second half of the eighteenth century. 33 In addition, Billy Smith’s reconstruction of a Philadelphia laborer’s diet for 1772 produces an overall meat consumption level of 174.5 pounds. 34
Meat Consumption in North America (pounds), 1740-1830.
Source: Figures for Middlesex Co., MA: McMahon, “A Comfortable Subsistence,” 36-7, 56, Table IV; for Southeast PA: Lemon, “Household Consumption,” 61-3; for Philadelphia: Smith, “The Material Lives,” 170, Table I; for NYC: Table 1.
Even if widow rates are not the same as average per capita consumption, they provide a good idea of societal expectations of what constituted a reasonable supply of meat at any given time. 35 And the New York City average of about 160.4 pounds of fresh butcher’s meat between 1795 and 1816—excluding the war year of 1813—compares well with McMahon’s estimate of between 178 and 201.8 pounds of meat allowance for the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It is in fact surprising that the New York City figures are only slightly lower, given that they exclude preserved meats (ham, sausage, lard, salted pork and beef, smoked beef, or corned beef) as well as poultry, fowl, and game. If, on average, New Yorkers ate about 160 pounds of fresh red meat, there had to be plenty more on their dinner table once these categories are also accounted for, adding up to a total per capita meat consumption level well above McMahon’s rural averages. 36
Moreover, the data underline one profound difference between urban and rural diets. Horowitz notes that the widespread consumption of fresh meat, beef in particular, was an urban privilege. 37 Indeed, whereas almost all of McMahon’s estimates derive from preserved meats, New Yorkers ate above all fresh meat. Only in cities was demand sufficient and constant enough to sustain large supplies of slaughtered and retailed beef for immediate consumption.
The primacy of fresh meat contributed to another distinctive feature of the urban diet: city dwellers experienced more marked seasonal variations in their meat consumption than did rural dwellers. Figure 3 presents monthly per capita consumption estimates for the four butcher meats in 1816. Unlike beef, which was consumed all year around, veal, lamb and mutton, and pork were eaten only in their “proper seasons.” Throughout the year, New Yorkers had an appetite for beef. They compromised their beef consumption when veal came into season in the spring and early summer. Once veal was gone, the beef diet was complemented by lamb and mutton during the summer and early fall, whereas by the late fall and early winter, market clerks registered the highest sales of beef matched by a peak in the sale of pork. Overall, the average New Yorker could count on eating ten to sixteen pounds of fresh red meat at each month of the year. The urban standard of living, insofar as meat consumption was concerned, depended on these strong complementary seasonal cycles, which ensured a stable supply of fresh red meat through the different months of the year, and then from one year to the next. 38
Per capita monthly butcher’s meat consumption in New York City (pounds), 1816.
Returning to annual aggregates, one also wonders how meat consumption in New York compared to those of other rapidly growing cities outside of the United States. Thanks to its highly centralized and closely monitored provisioning system, data concerning the number of animals slaughtered for sale in Paris are exceptionally good. Table 3 compares the New York City estimates to Armand Husson’s figures from his Les consommations de Paris (1856). 39 Accordingly, during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the per capita annual consumption of beef, veal, and lamb and mutton were strikingly similar in the two metropolises—pork is treated as a separate category, as in Paris it also included cured meats (charcuterie). At first reading then, the data raise doubts about the conventional wisdom that nineteenth-century Americans consumed far more meat, in particular beef, than Europeans.
Per Capita Butcher’s Meat Consumption in New York City and Paris (pounds), 1781-1818.
Source: Figures for Paris: Husson, Les consommations de Paris, 142, 145, 148, 153-54, 157, 196; for France: Brantz, “Slaughter in the City,” 138, Table 2.3; for NYC: Table 1.
A closer look, however, reveals that even as Parisian meat consumption rates were remarkably close to those of New York, the discrepancy between urban and rural diets was far greater in France than in the United States. 40 Whereas Parisians ate three times as much meat as the average French citizen, per capita meat consumption in New York, insofar as quantity was concerned, was not all that different from rural New England widow rates. This discrepancy reflected different traditions of government intervention. The French state intervened to ensure steady supplies of meat for Paris. It required all beef cattle from the Paris region to be sold at the Sceaux and Poissy provisioning markets for the exclusive consumption of the capital. When regular supplies from Normandy and Limousine were inadequate, the state also commissioned livestock purchases from more distant regions. 41
In contrast, New York had no jurisdiction outside the city’s borders. Even as the Common Council tightly regulated market intermediates within New York City, supply chains linking urban consumers to food producers developed entirely on the basis of free market relations. Gotham’s meat was obtained from autonomous drovers, who collected herds from farmers in Westchester and Duchess Counties, Long Island, and New Jersey. 42 In other words, the high meat consumption standards enjoyed by New Yorkers reflected the abundance of meat supplies in the city’s hinterlands. Given that the same market forces determined urban supply chains across the nation, meat consumption figures estimated for New York can be taken as representative of other major American cities, such as Philadelphia or Boston.
Overall, New Yorkers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries ate remarkably well for their own time and in comparison to later periods. They ate about as much meat as did better-off urban Americans in 1909 and only a little less, if at all, than the average urban American in the record year of 1965. More precisely, they consumed about 14 percent more beef than the average American in 1909 and about 11 percent less than the average American in 1965. The data also complement McMahon’s claim of progressively rising meat consumption levels. Compared to McMahon’s estimate of a 10 percent increase from the Revolutionary period to the early nineteenth century, the market fees suggest a more robust 19 percent increase between 1790 and the period between 1795 and 1818. The stability of the consumption rates between 1795 and 1818 provides strong evidence that after the Revolution, American urban meat consumption reached very high levels. In other words, to the degree that per capita meat consumption fell in the Antebellum era, this declining trend followed an earlier, very high equilibrium. 43 Moreover, city dwellers not only had the privilege to devour more meat than their rural counterparts, who fed them, they also ate first and foremost fresh red meat, beef in particular, which represented the most distinctive feature of the urban diet while also defining an important aspect of the urban living standard.
Distribution: The Geography of the Public Market System
Thus far the analysis has focused on the supply side. And even as the new estimates document that New Yorkers had access to abundant sources of meat, per capita consumption figures tell little about distribution. A more precise evaluation of residents’ access to food requires an analysis of the retail infrastructure of public markets. Two factors determined the geography of the public market system. First, the market laws limited the retail of fresh meat to the public markets, which in turn agglomerated the sale of most of the fresh food supplies into these locations. Second, lacking reliable refrigeration technologies, customers had to visit the market three to four times a week to purchase provisions. 44 The Market Committee’s responsibility was to ensure that residents in all areas had access to a marketplace within walking distance.
The challenge was accelerating urban growth: Between 1790 and 1820, New York’s population quadrupled from 33,000 to 120,000, while its built-up area doubled from 620 to 1,240 acres. 45 As the city’s population densities were shifting, the optimal allocation of the market facilities was also changing. Insofar as New Yorkers insisted on retaining strict municipal oversight of the city’s food supplies, the Common Council had to constantly upgrade and expand the market system. And since the challenge they faced was essentially a spatial one, the measure of administrative success should be determined by looking at the spatial organization of the public market infrastructure.
The expansion of the market system refers to the joint processes of building new marketplaces in urbanizing northern areas while enlarging existing facilities in more densely populated central districts. The process is best measured not by the number of marketplaces, but by the number of retail units within the system. Figure 4 calculates how many residents there were for each butcher stall between 1790 and 1820. 46 In theory, there need not be a one-to-one relationship between the number of stalls and how many customers they could supply. Yet three structural obstacles limited the scale of the retail butcher’s trade. First and foremost, the distances New Yorkers were willing to walk on a daily basis constrained the pool of customers. Second, lacking proper refrigeration, a butcher could cut up only about as much meat as he expected to sell on any given day. And even if he could overcome these constraints by hiring more apprentices, the small and prescribed size of his stall posed further limitations on how much meat could be handled. Insofar as the retail butcher’s trade remained unchanged, there was an upper bound to how many customers he could supply. In short, increasing demand had to be met by licensing more butchers, that is, by adding new stalls to the market system.
Number of residents per butcher stall, 1790-1820.
Indeed, as Figure 4 shows, the number of residents per butcher stall increased very modestly over the period. Whereas in the 1790s there were on average 433 residents for each stall, in the first decade of the nineteenth century, this ratio increased to 488, and then to 498 for the 1810s. Even as the city’s population grew nearly fourfold, the average butcher in the 1810s retailed meat to a clientele only about 15 percent larger than his predecessor one generation earlier. Greater demand was not met by more efficient retail practices, but by more butchers entering the trade, which, given the market laws, depended on the Council’s commitment to adding new facilities to the market system. Evidently, in this period, the Council was committed to make the necessary investment to ensure the public good of citizens’ access to food.
It is feasible that resources were poorly allocated, and hence certain areas of the city became oversupplied while others were left undersupplied by market facilities. In order to better assess the success or failure of the municipal infrastructure, four GIS maps are presented (Figure 5), documenting the spatial expansion of the public market system between 1792 and 1818. For each map, the size of the circles corresponds to the relative volume of trade of the individual marketplaces. For 1792 and 1818, the data come from excise taxes, whereas for 1800 and 1810, the number of butcher stalls is used as proxies. 47
Geographic information system (GIS) maps of the expansion of the public market system, 1792-1818.
The maps of 1792 and 1800 depict a densely built walking city, where residents provisioned their households through a public market system dominated by Fly Market and complemented by small neighborhood markets, in order of size, Oswego, Bear, Exchange, Catharine, and Peck Slip. Revenue data show that in 1792, Fly Market concentrated no less than two-thirds of New York’s entire retail meat trade. Given the city’s small size, such a centralized distribution system made sense. Even from the remotest area, one could walk to Fly Market in about twenty minutes. Here all provisions were available, and customers could shop for quality and price. For those who considered this too long a walk on a daily basis, smaller area markets closer to home offered an alternative. Meanwhile, to meet rising demand in the dynamically growing northeastern district, the Council enlarged Catharine Market, which by 1800 became the city’s third largest after Fly and Bear in terms of the number of butcher stalls.
This original market system, however, soon became overstretched. As immigrants kept pouring in, and the city expanded northward, the spatial organization of the market system needed readjustment. The 1810 and especially the 1818 maps reveal the development of a two-tiered market system, whereby the city’s central districts were served by the equally large Fly, Washington, and Catharine Markets, while urbanizing northern areas relied on the smaller Duane, Spring, Greenwich, Centre, Essex, Grand Street, Corlears Hook, and Governeur Markets. To the Council’s credit, marketplaces were well sited. They stood roughly at equal distance from each other, covering all urbanized areas. In fact, the average distance between any one of the marketplaces to its three closest neighbors was about 0.6 miles. In other words, from any one marketplace three others were accessible within a fifteen-minute walk. More importantly, the allocation of the market system closely mirrored the distribution of the population. By overlaying maps of market volume of trade in 1818 and ward-level population densities in 1820, one finds a clear correspondence between the two distributions. 48 To conclude, food supplies were going to where there was demand: the municipal market system passed the test of facilitating the distribution of food supplies to all of the city’s residents.
Overall, New Yorkers enjoyed abundant provisions across all of the city’s neighborhoods, even as they lived through a turbulent time with numerous external shocks and a remarkable rate of population growth. The fact that Gotham could draw on sufficiently expanding supplies was a necessary but not a sufficient condition. It also mattered that market intermediaries functioned properly to ensure the distribution of meat and other fresh food supplies to all residents. Under the public market system, this required the Common Council to maintain and expand the market infrastructure at a sufficient rate while also attending to the city’s shifting population densities. Based on the evidence of spatial analysis, between 1790 and 1820, the city government managed its public market system with administrative competence.
Assessment: Quality Control and Redistribution
Two conclusions have been established. First, New Yorkers, on average, enjoyed historically high living standards in terms of their meat consumption in the Early Republican era. And second, the public market system succeeded in distributing meat and other fresh food supplies to all neighborhoods, even as New York experienced exponential rates of urbanization to become the largest city of the Americas by the 1820s. Importantly, neither of these points proves that the municipal market system was the best possible institutional structure to ensure the proper provisioning of residents. In theory, a free market model of private retailers, selling fresh food out of their own shops or street stalls, would have guaranteed that the spatial distribution of suppliers corresponded to local demand at no public expenditure.
Before assessing the benefits of the municipal market system, it is useful to examine whether or not it depended on excessive government spending. The historical record suggests the contrary. As the market fee series demonstrates, marketplaces generated considerable revenues for the city. In theory, excise taxes could have been collected from the butchers at private meat shops. Yet tax collection was far more efficient at a few marketplaces, where all transactions occurred in plain sight of the market clerks, vendors, and customers, than it would have been at hundreds of dispersed retail locations. That aggregate market fees grew at the same rate as the population is evidence that few transactions escaped the remit of municipal taxation.
It is feasible that market expenditures far exceeded revenues. Yet until Washington Market was opened in 1813, municipal markets were built in the form of public and private partnerships. They were erected with voluntary subscriptions by property holders and neighborhood residents, and subsequently were handed over to the Council, which then took charge of their regular upkeep and enlargement. 49 Washington Market, 50 by far the costliest in this period, was built entirely by the city at the expense of $22,500. 51 Yet even this investment was recovered by three years of market fees. While the sources do not allow for drawing an exact balance, it is safe to conclude that during the 1810s, market revenues slightly exceeded expenditures, covering all infrastructural costs and officials’ salaries, yet without imposing excessive taxation on citizens.
So what did consumers gain in return of funding the city’s infrastructure of public marketplaces? Historians have used a variety of terms and conceptual frameworks, including “moral economy,” “paternalism,” and “well-ordered market,” to describe the underlying principles of Early American urban provisioning. 52 They suggested that the system’s main rationale had to do with access: Early American citizens expected their local governments to ensure the availability of adequate quantities and quality of food supplies. 53 The public market system, consisting of the physical infrastructure of the market houses, and the market laws and ordinances, represented the corresponding institutional structure. In essence, municipal governments extended the state’s police power to regulate private interests for the common good in order to maintain well-ordered markets in food supplies. 54
Accordingly, public markets were privileged sites in Early American cities, bringing together vendors and customers to conduct trade in fresh food under the watchful eye of the municipal government. Participation was limited to municipally licensed butchers, fishmongers, and hucksters, while local farmers were invited to bring their produce to market. In exchange of their retail licenses, butchers and other vendors were expected to respect well-defined market rules: Attend the market on fixed days and hours, occupy vending spaces according to a strictly prescribed order, abide to ethical trade practices, such as the use of legal weights and measures, and most importantly, follow public health standards in the sale of fresh provisions. 55 Needless to say, disputes and violations occurred. But this reflected the logic of the public marketplace: to bring together the three constituent parties of urban provisioning—residents, vendors, and city officials—at a few designated sites to maintain the public good of residents’ access to food.
The previous sections have shown that in terms of quantity and distribution, New York City’s public marketplaces fulfilled their mandate to ensure access to food to all residents. This final part makes the additional point that the foremost benefit of the public market system, in comparison to the alternative of a free market regime of private stores, was its positive contribution to public health. 56 In fact, marketplaces exerted five mechanisms of quality control of the city’s fresh food supplies. First and most evidently, market laws directly attended to public health concerns. 57 In order to shield against putrefaction, market trade was restricted from sunrise to midday, while the sale of highly perishable goods such as oysters was prohibited in certain seasons. Market laws instituted high penalties for selling unwholesome provisions and charged market clerks to inspect and enforce quality standards. In cases of violations, officials had the right to suspend retail licenses. Market clerks also kept a close eye on the lawful occupancy of market space, kept records of legitimate butchers, and issued or denied daily permits to the other vendors. They oversaw the general cleanliness of their marketplaces, employed sweepers for this purpose, and required butchers to keep their stalls clean. In short, market clerks were granted extensive authority to directly uphold socially perceived norms of public health.
Municipal officials were one source of quality control, the internal organization of the marketplace was another. In essence, the public marketplace is one good example of an agglomeration economy derived from shopping externalities. 58 Even as market facilities were municipal property, market trade remained the domain of free enterprise. By concentrating the sale of all fresh food into one location, the marketplace functioned much like a supermarket. But whereas the supermarket is owned by one firm, the public marketplace agglomerated hundreds of independent retailers, encouraging competition between the vendors. In theory, competition promoted lower prices, greater selection, and better quality of goods. In other words, the public marketplace provided a balance of competitive business practice and strict government oversight. Given the “market monopoly of meat,” residents were forced to frequent the neighborhood marketplace to procure provisions. But there, not only could they buy all kinds of fresh food, but were also able to compare prices and quality across the vendors of the same goods.
The third source of quality control was peer pressure. Market vendors customarily monitored each other to prohibit violations of basic market principles. A butcher selling unwholesome meat faced formal and informal sanctions from fellow butchers. Numerous petitions by licensed butchers complained how “shirk butchers,” selling meat in small pieces, violated market laws. 59 The market law itself institutionalized peer pressure. If the market clerk suspected that a butcher sold spoiled meat, he called on the authority of “any two butchers whom he may select for that purpose . . . (the said butchers being under oath) to determine whether such article or provision . . . is stale or unwholesome, or whether such meat is blown or stuffed, or whether such pork is measly, and their judgment shall be final and conclusive.” 60 Market vendors had a vested interest not only in protecting themselves from unfair competition, but also in upholding the reputation of their marketplace. In particular, the butchers, who retailed fresh meat each and every day by the same stalls, were identified not only by the price, selection, or quality of their cuts, but also by the general character of their marketplace.
Whereas the aforementioned three mechanisms operated at the level of the marketplace, involving all vendors and fresh food supplies, the butcher’s trade had two unique characteristics that helped enforce quality standards. The first aspect was craftsmanship. 61 Market laws granted a special retail privilege to the butchers, which may be considered an example of rent-seeking. Yet the raison d’être behind limitations to open entry of trade was the recognition that butchers handled an essential but highly sensitive and perishable food product. Unlike other food purveyors, butchers were required to complete six, later four years of apprenticeship before they could apply for a license and a vending space. Obtaining a market stall depended not only on availability but also on one’s reputation. When a young butcher applied, he had to submit a formal petition to the Council, which was customarily endorsed by fellow butchers and residents, who testified to the sound business practices and flawless moral character of the novice. In general, butchers were a well-organized and influential group of urban craftsmen. 62 Their high social status reflected their unique skills in the art of preparing and retailing animal flesh for Gotham’s meat-loving citizens. 63
The other aspect was that the butcher’s trade fostered lasting relations with customers. On the one hand, limitations of refrigeration technologies required households to visit the marketplace three to four times a week. On the other, the butcher’s business was spatially stable. Unlike other vendors, who occupied the marketplace on a first-come basis, butchers retailed meat by their individually assigned stalls. 64 Given that stalls were in limited supply, once a butcher obtained a vending space, he would hold on to this possession. 65 The public market system thus not only restricted the sale of fresh meat into a handful of locations, but also locked in butchers to specific pieces of market space. As a result, the butcher’s business depended on one’s good reputation and a stable clientele. Considering that households bought meat several times a week, hundreds of transactions occurred between the same butcher and customer. For the consumer, repeated transactions guaranteed that the regular butcher could be trusted with the merchandise. In fact, residents customarily endorsed their local butcher’s petition to the Council, testifying to the strong personal relations and mutual trust between the two parties. 66
Overall, the municipal market system combined fives lines of defense—government oversight, consumer choice, peer pressure, skilled craftsmanship, and direct sustained relations between vendors and customers—to create a formidable institution of food quality control. Alternatively, a free market system of private meat shops and groceries would have been less effective in promoting the quality of fresh food supplies. Strict municipal oversight of food retail transactions was possible because officials monitored only a handful of marketplaces instead of hundreds of dispersed stores. Customers could shop quality and price since the public markets agglomerated food retailers at specific designated sites. Peer pressure upheld basic standards of marketing because all transactions occurred under the watchful eye of other vendors. And even if butchers working at private shops would have been equally skilled or relied on a regular clientele, the public marketplace put customer and vendor relations under external scrutiny.
One important caveat to this positive assessment concerns the problem of urban slaughtering. Public markets enforced food quality only at the retail end of the distribution chain, while the other end of the provisioning system, slaughtering, experienced weakening municipal control in this period. In 1789, the butchers overhauled the colonial model of slaughtering, whereby the killing of animals was restricted to a centralized facility in the city’s outskirts, managed by a private individual under municipal contract, and acquired the right to operate private slaughterhouses anywhere in New York. 67 The Council appointed inspectors to prevent “nuisances,” but they were mostly recruited from the butchers themselves. More importantly, the decentralization of slaughtering into dozens of private facilities presented public health risks. Butchers drove live animals across the city from the central stockyards to their killing sheds. Residents had to put up with noxious odors and sights in the vicinity of these facilities, many of which were located in densely populated districts. Fresh meat was carted to the public markets, while meat byproducts were transported across the city to be discarded or processed by nuisance trades. 68 At each point, residents could come into contact at the city’s public spaces with potential sources of disease related to urban butchering.
It is also true that the public market system, to some degree, helped offset these negative health effects. Since public markets enforced quality at the points of retail, they could correct problems that may have occurred earlier at slaughtering or transport. Besides, the main problem with private slaughterhouses was that they contributed to the spread of nuisances. The public market system, compared to the alternative of a free market regime of private meat shops, helped contain this process. In a rapidly growing city, public markets solved the challenge of extending distribution chains into all areas by concentrating food retailers into a handful of privileged sites. Similarly, their agglomeration economies spatially anchored the butchers’ activities into their vicinity. There can be little doubt that the geography of slaughtering would have experienced even greater decentralization had Gotham’s butchers scattered into 208 private stores by 1818. Surely, a centralized public slaughterhouse, in the Parisian model of municipal abattoirs, complementing the city’s tightly regulated public retail markets would have been the ideal way to enforce quality. 69 But insofar as slaughterhouses were in private hands, the public market system’s countervailing agglomeration of the retail meat trade into designated locations played an even more important role in upholding basic food quality standards. 70
One should note that quality control via a system of public retail food markets came at a price to Early American city dwellers. The municipal model of provisioning may have inconvenienced some, who lived too far from a marketplace, while excise taxes may have driven up retail prices, although there is no evidence to make the case. 71 Importantly, as the earlier analysis revealed, these costs were not excessively high: the city’s network of marketplaces reached residents in all neighborhoods, while excise taxes were set to roughly cover both capital investments and regular expenditures. Besides, had butchers run private meat shops, they would have paid out comparable sums for rents, which in turn they would have charged to their customers.
Finally, the public market system also instituted two mechanisms of redistribution contributing to equity. First, market fees were paid only by the butchers, while fishmongers, farmers, and hucksters stood at the marketplace free of charge. 72 In effect, the excise tax was the price butchers paid for their privilege of retailing fresh meat, as well as a form of subsidy to other vendors. Subsidizing farmers to bring their products into the city made good economic sense: Residents depended on farm provisions, and transactions at the marketplace directly linked producers to consumers, bypassing the middlemen. Hucksters were commonly elderly widows, and the Council issued them retail licenses as a form of social welfare. 73 Justifying similar transfers to fishmongers, many of whom resided in the city, are arguably more ambiguous.
The second mechanism of redistribution manifested across urban space. Municipal marketplaces, located roughly at equal distance from their immediate neighbors, supplied all of the neighborhoods, irrespective of their level of urbanization or socioeconomic status. This geography was the product of a delicate balancing act between the interests of all consumers and retailers. 74 Keeping the scale of the marketplaces proportional to local population size ensured that residents in all areas were well provisioned. Locating marketplaces at equal distance from each other protected vendors from uneven competition. And lastly, opening food markets in urbanizing northern districts helped sustain urban expansion into fringe areas, where only poorer residents lived. Butchers would have been more reluctant to establish businesses in thinly populated districts had the Council not guided their decisions through the availability of market stalls. And without the butchers generating market traffic, fishmongers, farmers, and hucksters would have likely stayed away. A free market system would have surely succeeded in linking suppliers and consumers, without taxation or administrative oversight. The public market system’s contribution was that it fostered spatial expansion and a more egalitarian distribution of food supplies to all residents by making investments into poorer, urbanizing northern districts. 75
Conclusions
Through a case study of New York, this article examines the conditions of urban provisioning in the Early Republic. It presents important new insights regarding the standard of living of urban residents and the political economy of the period’s dominant public market system of provisioning. In particular, three questions are answered. First, new data show that urban Americans enjoyed high living standards in terms of their meat consumption by any historical comparison. Second, spatial analysis reveals that the city’s public marketplaces distributed abundant meat supplies to residents in all neighborhoods. And third, further analysis suggests that the public market system played a central role in enforcing quality while also promoting egalitarian principles in citizens’ access to food.
The first set of findings concerns the new meat consumption estimates for the previously undocumented period between 1790 and 1820. Accordingly, New Yorkers consumed 160 pounds of fresh red meat per capita annually, an amount that measures up to the highest recorded figures in America in the twentieth century. In addition, they ate substantial quantities of processed and preserved meats as well as fresh poultry, fowl, and game. Literature on the Antebellum Puzzle posits that average meat consumption declined in the second and third quarters of the nineteenth century, which may have contributed to the widely noted negative trends of deteriorating physical stature and rising mortality. Importantly, to the degree that meat consumption fell in the Antebellum era, this declining trend followed an earlier, very high equilibrium. On the evidence of the new data, one could make the case that Early American city dwellers were excessively carnivorous, perhaps even to the detriment of their health. If so, the actual health effects of declining meat consumption may have not been all that negative.
The consumption data also underline some of the distinctive features of urban provisioning. American city dwellers consumed above all fresh red meat, which distinguished them from their rural counterparts. They also ate more meat than those living in the countryside. The key component of the red meat diet was fresh beef, complemented by veal, lamb and mutton, and pork, each eaten in their proper seasons. Complementary seasonal cycles guaranteed that urban dwellers could count on a stable amount of fresh red meat over each month of the year. Persistently expanding supplies sustained a high equilibrium of meat consumption over the entire period. These urban privileges, however, came at a price. The urban supply of food was highly sensitive to external shocks. The yellow fever epidemic of 1798, the embargo of 1807, and the War of 1812 resulted in temporary setbacks in urban food consumption. At times of crises, urban dwellers, who did not produce their own food but relied on complex provisioning chains that linked city to hinterlands, experienced greater hardships than rural residents.
The second set of conclusions focuses on the urban infrastructure of provisioning. Consistently expanding supplies was a necessary but insufficient condition of the successful provisioning of city dwellers. It equally mattered that market intermediaries function well, so that the meat be processed and distributed properly to customers. Insofar as the market laws limited the retail of fresh meat to licensed market butchers, the provisioning infrastructure had to be regularly upgraded and expanded. This depended on the commitment and competence of successive generations of city officials. Data on market stalls reveal that the Common Council was willing to make the necessary investments to expand the market infrastructure at the rate of population growth. More importantly, mediating between the interests of consumers and vendors, city officials determined the location of new market facilities with administrative competence. As a result, residents in all areas were well supplied with fresh provisions. By the criteria of the spatial analysis, the public market system of early nineteenth-century New York was a well-managed municipal infrastructure.
Taking into account that the alternative would have been a free market system of private stores, the third set of conclusions weighs the costs and benefits of the municipal model of provisioning. The analysis suggests that the public market system’s most important social benefit was to institutionalize five mechanisms of food quality control: government oversight, consumer choice, peer pressure, skilled craftsmanship, and direct sustained relations between vendors and customers. Additionally, the market laws promoted equity by redistributing resources from the butchers to the other market vendors and from centrally located, wealthier neighborhoods to recently urbanizing, poorer districts. At the same time, the tax burden, it appears, was not excessive, but sufficient to cover all necessary expenditures. Insofar as quality and equity were worthy priorities, public expenses on the market system seem justifiable.
Overall, between 1790 and 1820, New York experienced its first stage of modern urbanization, laying the foundations for the city’s successive rise as America’s dominant metropolis. That all New Yorkers had access to abundant and healthy fresh meat and other provisions through this transformative period is both evidence of constantly expanding agricultural supplies and a properly functioning public market system. Of course, New York is only one case in point. Even as this article’s insights regarding per capita meat consumption, the distinctive features of urban provisioning, or the underlying principles of the municipal market system may be taken as representative, how effectively the municipal model fulfilled its mandate to ensure the public good of provisioning residents must have differed from one city to another. Similar studies of other major cities, in particular Philadelphia and Boston, would help cast a broader understanding of the conditions of urban provisioning in the Early Republic.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank Josef Barton and Joel Mokyr at Northwestern University and David F. Weiman at Barnard College for their helpful comments on this article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This article is based on my Ph.D. dissertation, which was generously supported by a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship (2008-09).