In her civil case against Benjamin Wickham, Jr., Abigail Stoneman presented an unusual form of evidence to the court: the nine of clubs. By the time of its court appearance, this playing card had traveled across the landscape of the late eighteenth-century economy. It had also transformed repeatedly in meaning and purpose. Created in an English print shop as part of a full deck, the card was loaded onto a ship for export to Newport, Rhode Island, where it came to rest alongside towcloth, limes, stone mugs, and linen on the shelves of Thomas Brenton’s shop. Selected by Stoneman’s slave...

Census-takers, like historians, understood early American society in terms of households. The smallest building block of society was also the organizing principle of the population count. As they made their tallies, census-takers grouped residents together under a single name, called “head of family,” defined as the “master, mistress, steward, overseer or other principal person” in each household.¹ The identity of that “principal person” might differ, but his powers, under law and by cultural agreement, were broad. The household, which included kin, servants, and slaves, was supposed to govern individual behavior, channel productive and reproductive energies, and serve as the foundation...

Most of the women who moved through the streets of Newport and Charleston were hard at work—carrying goods, pumping water, attending the market, and visiting stores. In some ways, these tasks echoed what generations of African, European, and American women had done on behalf of themselves and their families. But international commerce, in the form of goods and people, left its stamp on every kind of work that women did in the revolutionary era and transformed what it meant to them. In particular, commerce widened the possibilities for women to earn money for their labors. Their small, often self-employed...

In 1776, Sarah Cantwell responded indignantly and in print to her husband’s claim that she had run away from him, taking his credit and good name with her. In the pages of the South Carolina and American General Gazette she asserted: “john cantwell has the Impudence to advertise me in the Papers, cautioning all persons against crediting me; he never had any Credit till he married me: As for his Bed and Board he mentioned, he had neither Bed nor Board when he married me; I never eloped, I went away before his Face when he beat me.”¹ Point-by-point refuting...

A sheaf of promissory notes distributed throughout the city marked a woman as a person of credit but not necessarily of wealth. From tax lists with only a sprinkling of female names to poorhouse rolls dominated by them, official city records tell a tale of relative female poverty. These records support conclusions that have guided our understanding of women and money in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: that most free married women’s wealth was controlled by their husbands; that many unmarried women were too poor to possess enough property to be taxed; and that those unmarried women who did...

In March 1775, Eliza Pinckney packed a trunk with limes, aprons, paper, and cloth to send to her daughter Harriott Horry. Pinckney tucked the trunk’s key into a newsy letter that reported on her labors:

Jones sent me word a few days after I came to town that the stores had been serched and he could not get a bit of fine washing pavilion Gause any where; I afterwards sent old Mary with directions not to miss a store, and to let them know it was Cash, and after two or three days serch she got me some coarse stuff...

The work of shopping networks—circulating information, looking for bargains, arranging credit payments—spurred business, cemented social connections, and offered moments of autonomy and authority to subordinates. The process was emphatically not self-sufficient, which was what made shopping so economically and socially powerful in eighteenth-century commercial life. But its collaborative and even cosmopolitan nature posed a problem for politics that increasingly troubled the writers, lawyers, and rabble-rousers who wanted to harness commercial culture for political ends. The tension at the heart of shopping between frivolous indulgence and thrifty practicality became a glaring rebuke of America’s “first consumer economy” during the...

“All the World is becoming commercial,” Thomas Jefferson wrote to George Washington after the Revolution, though he would not say “whether commerce contributed to the Happiness of mankind.”¹ Ambivalence over commerce, which brought great wealth and sudden disaster, was at the heart of heated transatlantic debate over human nature, authority, and economy. Commerce, as everyone could see, was social and interdependent. In the minds of some philosophers, these qualities made it the basis of civil society, because the conduct of commerce instilled trust and friendship.² Adam Smith believed that for the majority of people, “the road to virtue and that...