Egalitarian America and its Inegalitarian Housing in the Federal Period

A casual observer may very well consider America’s dwellings in the period after independence as being homogeneous in character. A log cabin was a log cabin, after all, and Mount Vernon and Monticello, owned by famous leaders, were, rather, the exceptions that somehow prove the rule, or at least provide evidence that there was a second economic class consisting of only a few cases. The idea of a continuous distribution of housing values, from hovels to mansions, seems absent from a common perception of living conditions in the United States in its early, formative, years. A city’s exhibit of an original log cabin is presented as being an example of typical housing; a series of log cabins in an historical village often shows remarkable uniformity; and the Williamsburg reconstructions convey the impression that there was no significant variation in value between the homes belonging to a lawyer, a doctor, an artisan, or a day laborer. The subject of this paper is the determination of the degree of inequality in housing values that did, in fact, exist, as well as to demonstrate the shape of the configuration of those values. The data for this study are a result of the elaborate inventory of housing values which was made in the United States in 1798 for taxation purposes; almost every house in the entire country was evaluated carefully because a strongly progressive tax rate schedule was a prominent part of the law. We can determine exactly how much inequality existed by determining the numbers of houses in the various tax classes.