Demographics

Still wandering through the primary sources available on potential Revolutionary War soldiers in Easton. It's probably a hopeless task to try to figure out which source is talking about which one of the five Joseph Drakes in town or to distinguish between someone who might be called Howard one day and Hayward the next. Most Town Clerks just split the difference and called those two families Haward. However, certain interesting facts are beginning to emerge from the whole mass of data.

In 18th century Massachusetts you needed to own property valued at £20 in order to be a voter. 99.9% of the time you had to be a white male also although there are rare cases where a particularly distinguished woman was allowed to vote in town meeting. In some frontier towns all males were allowed to vote just to complicate the historian's task. In 1771 Easton had 110 official voters that made the £20 limit. Late in the 1770s that number jumped to 195 voters. What's going on? Actually I don't know for sure since ideas move faster than my data entry skills, but there are two possibilities. One is some kind of demographic bulge hit the town during the war, but the most interesting idea is inflation. As the Revolutionary War went on the government of the nascent country and the individual states printed paper money that were little more than IOUs. This caused a fairly substantial inflation that Chaffin talks about in his History. It's likely that our town father's didn't correct the £20 property requirement for inflation so that some normally poor folks suddenly found themselves voters. I haven't found a historian who talks about this issue, but it's potentially an important one.

In an agrarian community like Easton, it took a while to accumulate the land needed to become a voter. In fact, by the time of the Revolution farms had been subdivided among heirs for two or three generations making it increasingly difficult to put together a farm valued at £20. This meant that voters tended to be older than the average age of all adult males. This was exactly what the philosophers of the "stake in society" school of voting wanted. However, in a world where younger men were being asked to serve in the Revolutionary War Eastoners may have heard the same grumbling that was heard during Vietnam when 18 year olds complained they were old enough to die for their country, but not old enough to vote. Letting inflation increase the number of voters, mostly younger males, might have had the unintentional benefit of building support for the war effort. On the other hand, did deflation after the war disenfranchise voters? If so could this be a cause of the famous Shays' Rebellion, that drew in a number of Eastoners as rebels? We may just have enough data to unravel this and to heck with the five Joseph Drakes.