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Prices and Wages in Antebellum America: The West Virginia Experience

Over the years scholars have shown considerable interest in the long-run changes in prices and wages during the nineteenth century, using them to gauge fundamental change in the pace and pattern of economic activity. To be sure, prices rose and fell, reflecting the business cycle, military and political events, and fluctuations in foreign trade and finance. There is even some evidence of long-swing variation in economic activity as reflected in price level changes. Despite significant growth and development of the economy, however, the overall price level exhibited little net change between 1800 and 1900. Equally interesting is the evidence on the size and timing of regional wage rate differentials which provide important clues to the questions of migration patterns, labor market mobility, urbanization, and productivity trends. A large number of studies of nineteenth-century prices, particularly those dealing with the antebellum years, are composed of wholesale price quotations from the major eastern seaboard cities such as Boston, New York, Philadelphia, or Charleston.' While this focus is useful in assessing the performance of important parts of the early American economy, such data may not accurately reflect the course of price level movements and market activity in less visible sections of the United States. Data on the movement of commodity prices and wages in areas outside of major urban centers is more difficult to obtain. Some scholars have broken ground in this area and we have access to such valuable studies as Timothy Adams' work on prices and wages in rural Vermont, Winifred Rothenberg's more recent study of prices in the Massachusetts back country, Thomas Berry's data on prices in the Ohio River Valley and Cincinnati, and the work of Margo and Villaflor on regional wage differentials.2 This article draws on manuscript data sources covering the western counties of Virginia between the late 1780s and 1860.3 These data suggest that this region, separated from the urban east by distance, rudimentary transportation facilities, and slow communications, was not isolated from many of the principal forces which drove price level changes in the coastal commercial centers and that a national commodity market