Price : American Port Towns	131

earlier made a similar but less thorough calculation from the pub-
lished tax lists of I78oand 1783 giving the occupations of 3/^65 adult
males (also Appendix C). I have arranged these data in the same
manner as I have KulikofF's Boston data. (In both, "Jaoorers" have
been listed separately at die end as unclassified berause they could
not be assigned to a sector.) The results appear strikingly consistent,
though there are far more unidentified people in the Philadelphia
data.

I have not thus far been able to find>equivalent data for other
towns, but have located four possible/substitutes for New York:
(a) the printed admissions of freemen, which I have analyzed for
the twenty-five years, 1746-177O/(b) the published New York
wills of the eighteendi century;20>(c) the New York City directories
available from 1786 (I have chosen that of 1790 for analysis); and
(d) die published record of all persons dying in New York City
during the yellow fever epyfaemic of 1795, containing specific oc-
cupations for 258 men. Of die four, only die wills must be totally
rejected, for an experimental analysis of diose for die years 1771-
1776 shows diem to misrepresent grossly (as one might expect) die
relative weight of die wealdiier inhabitants of die city, particularly
merchants. The ooier diree (summarized in Appendix D) show
less obvious bias/and prove relatively consistent. The admissions of
freemen have mdierto been deliberately neglected by historians be-
cause there was little effective compulsion to oblige residents to
take up the'freedom of die city. Even so, die political life of die
community seems to have been lively enough to have drawn re-
spectable numbers in that direction, from merchants and gende-
men tc/common laborers. The only possible distortions apparent are
die paucity of clerks and die relatively large proportion of artisans
in the industrial sector, considerably higher dian that shown by
ovir later (1790-1795) data for die city. It is possible, however, diat
Jew York City had a higher proportion of artisans in 1746-1770
dian in 1790-1795; i.e., as the city's commerce and population

20. Abstract of Wills on File in the Surrogates Office, City of New York [1665-1801], (Col-
lections of the New York Historical Society for the Year[s] [1892-1908], XXV-XLI [New
York, 1893-1909]).