Yeoman Farmers in a Planters’ Republic: Socioeconomic Conditions and Relations in Early National Prince George’s County, Maryland
Bibliographic record
Abstract
From the founding of the colonies through independence, contemporary commentators and many historians since have portrayed the independent yeoman farmer as the archetypal early American. Yet colonial Chesapeake social-economic historians have found that landownership rates in the tidewater fell from two-thirds of free household heads in the 1660s to one-half a century later. This article takes Prince George’s County, Maryland, as a test case and uses censuses and tax records to reveal that landownership rates fell further to one-third by 1800 and one-quarter by 1820. Moreover, the proportion of yeomen (broadly defined as owning 40 to 799 acres) fell from 24 percent of free householders in 1800 to under 19 percent in 1820. The decline was due to the precarious economic position of small yeomen, owners of 40 to 279 acres, who formed under 17 percent of free householders in 1800 and just 11 percent in 1820. Furthermore, while historians often portray yeomen as eschewing markets and slavery, the vast majority grew
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".