CHAPTER 8 DEPARTS FROM our examination of community structure
to focus on power within the five towns. The latter parts of the
chapter look at power in a broad sense and briefly analyze some
general patterns of political dominance and subordinance, but our
initial and major concern is with power in the narrow context of local
politics. Overall, we want to discover the degree to which social and
economic change during the first one-half of the nineteenth century
provoked, or was accompanied by, shifts in the locus of political
power within the five towns. But, more specifically, in the first part of
the chapter we would like to find out: To what extent did the relative
wealth of officeholders change between 1800 and 1854? To what
degree did the occupations of officeholders shift between 1800 and
1854? To what extent did the social status (i.e., priority and family
background) of officeholders change between 1800 and 1854? And,
finally, how were shifts in power related to the general social and
economic characteristics of the five towns? ¹

Did the relative wealth of officeholders change between 1800 and
1854? Yes, it did. Officeholders tended to come from lower economic
strata between 1845 and 1854 than they had a half century earlier. In
both the early and middle parts of the nineteenth century, officehold-
ing was the province of the well-to-do (table 8.1). In each period,
most public officials were in the richest two deciles of the population
regardless of their communal affiliation. We could hardly have ex-
pected otherwise, since virtually all studies of local political power
have found officeholders to have been drawn from middle and upper
social strata. Let's look at wealth and officeholding in greater detail.

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