What were the social, ethnic, and economic differences among the southern, middle, and New England colonies?
What were the prevailing attitudes of English colonists toward women?
How important was indentured servitude to the development of the colonies, and why had the system been replaced by slavery in the South by 1700?
How did the colonies participate in international and imperial trade?
What were the effects of the Enlightenment in America?
How did the Great Awakening affect the colonies?
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He process of carving a new civilization out of an abundant “New World” involved often violent encounters among European, African, and Native American cultures. War, duplicity, displacement, and enslavement were the tragic results. Yet on another level the process of transforming the American continent was not simply a story of conflict but also of accommodation, a story of diverse peoples and cultures engaged in the everyday tasks of building homes, planting crops, trading goods, raising families, enforcing laws, and worshipping their gods. Those who colonized America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were part of a massive social migration occurring throughout Europe and Africa. Everywhere, it seemed, people were moving from farms to villages, from villages to cities, and from homelands to colonies. They moved for different reasons. Most Britons and Europeans were responding to powerful social and economic forces as rapid population growth and the rise of
Commercial agriculture squeezed people off the land. Many migrants traveled in search of political security or religious freedom. A tragic exception was the Africans, who were captured and transported to new lands against their will.
Those who settled in colonial America were mostly young (over half were under twenty-five), male, and poor. Almost half were indentured servants or slaves, and during the eighteenth century England would transport some 50,000 convicts to the North American colonies. Only about a third of the settlers came with their families. Once in America, many of the newcomers kept moving, trying to take advantage of inexpensive western land or new business opportunities. Whatever their status or ambition, this extraordinary mosaic of adventurous people created America’s enduring institutions and values, as well as its distinctive spirit and energy.
The Shape of Early America
Colonial farm
This plan of a newly cleared American farm shows how trees were cut down and the stumps left to rot.
POPULATION growth England’s first footholds in America were bought at a fearsome price: many settlers died in the first years. But once the brutal seasoning phase was past and the colonies were on their feet, Virginia and its successors grew rapidly. By 1750 the number of colonists had passed 1 million; by 1775 it stood at about 2.5 million. The prodigious increase of the colonial population did not go unnoticed. Benjamin Franklin, a keen observer of many things, published in 1751 his Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, in which he pointed out two facts of life that distinguished the colonies from Europe: land was plentiful and cheap, and laborers were scarce and expensive. The opposite conditions prevailed in the Old World. From this reversal of conditions flowed many of the changes that European culture underwent in America— not the least being that more land and good fortune beckoned enterprising immigrants and induced settlers to replenish the earth with large families. Where labor was
Scarce, children could lend a hand and, once grown, find new land for themselves if need be. Colonists tended, as a result, to marry and start families at an earlier age than did their old World counterparts.
BIRTHRATES AND DEATH RATES Given the better economic prospects in the colonies, a greater proportion of white women married, and the birthrate remained much higher than it did in Europe. In England the average age at marriage for women was twenty-five or twenty-six; in America it dropped to twenty. Men also married younger in the colonies than in the Old World. The birthrate rose accordingly, since women who married earlier had time for about two additional pregnancies during their childbearing years.
Equally responsible for the burgeoning colonial population was a much lower death rate than that in Europe. After the difficult first years of settlement, infants generally had a better chance of reaching maturity in the New World, and adults had a better chance of reaching old age. In seventeenth-century New England, apart from childhood mortality, men could expect to reach seventy, and women nearly that age.
This longevity resulted from several factors. Since the land was bountiful, famine seldom occurred after the first year, and although the winters were more severe than those in England, firewood was plentiful. Being younger on the whole—the average age in the new nation in 1790 was sixteen— Americans were less susceptible to disease than were Europeans. That they were more scattered than in the Old World meant they were also less exposed to infectious diseases. That began to change, of course, as cities grew and trade and travel increased. By the mid-eighteenth century the colonies were beginning to have levels of contagion much like those in Europe.
WOMEN IN THE COLONIES In contrast to New Spain and New France, British America had far more women, and this different sex ratio largely explains the difference in population growth rates among the European empires competing in the New World. Most colonists brought to America deeply rooted convictions about the inferiority of women. As one minister stressed, “the woman is a weak creature not endowed with like strength and constancy of mind.” The prescribed role of women was clear: to obey and serve their husbands, nurture their children, and endure the taxing labor required to maintain their households. Governor John Winthrop insisted that a “true wife” would find contentment only “in subjection to her husband’s authority.” Both social custom and legal codes ensured that most women in most colonies could not vote, preach, hold office, attend public schools or colleges, bring lawsuits, make contracts, or own property.
During the colonial era, women played a crucial, if restricted, role in religious life. No denomination allowed women to be ordained as ministers. Only the Quakers let women hold church offices and preach (“exhort”) in public. Puritans cited biblical passages claiming that God required “virtuous” women to submit to male authority and remain “silent” in congregational matters. Governor John Winthrop demanded that women “not meddle in such things as are proper for men” to manage.
In colonial America the religious roles of black women were quite different from those of their white counterparts. In most West African tribes, women were not subordinate to men, and women frequently served as priests and cult leaders. Furthermore, some enslaved Africans had been exposed to Christianity or Islam in Africa, through slave traders and missionaries. Most of them, however, tried to sustain their traditional African religion once they arrived in the colonies. In America, black women (and men) were often excluded from church membership for fear that Christianized slaves might seek to gain their freedom. To clarify the situation, Virginia in 1667 passed a law specifying that children of slaves would be slaves even if they had been baptized as Christians.
“women’s work” In the eighteenth century, “women’s work” typically involved activities in the house, garden, and yard. Farm women usually rose at four in the morning and prepared breakfast by five-thirty. They then fed and watered the livestock, woke the children, churned butter, tended the garden, prepared lunch, played with the children, worked the garden again, cooked dinner, milked the cows, got the children ready for bed, and cleaned the kitchen before retiring, at about nine. Women also combed, spun, spooled, wove, and bleached wool for clothing, knit linen and cotton, hemmed sheets, pieced quilts, made candles and soap, chopped wood, hauled water, mopped floors, and washed clothes. Female indentured servants in the southern colonies commonly worked as field hands, weeding, hoeing, and harvesting.
Despite the laws and traditions that limited the sphere of women, the scarcity of labor in the colonies created opportunities. In the towns, women commonly served as tavern hostesses and shopkeepers and occasionally also worked as doctors, printers, upholsterers, painters, silversmiths, tanners, and shipwrights—often, but not always, they were widows carrying on their husbands’ trade.
Over time, the colonial environment did generate slight improvements in the status of women. The acute shortage of women in the early years made
The First, Second, and Last Scene of Mortality
Prudence Punderson’s needlework (ca. 1776) shows the domestic path, from cradle to coffin, followed by most colonial women.
Them more highly valued than they were in Europe, and the Puritan emphasis on a well-ordered family life led to laws protecting wives from physical abuse and allowing for divorce. In addition, colonial laws allowed wives greater control over property that they had contributed to a marriage or that was left after a husband’s death. But the age-old notions of female subordination and domesticity remained firmly entrenched in colonial America. As a Massachusetts boy maintained in 1662, the superior aspect of life was “masculine and eternal; the feminine inferior and mortal.”
Society and Economy in the Southern Colonies
As the southern colonies matured, inequalities became more pronounced and social life grew more stratified. The wealthy (“gentry”) increasingly became a class apart, distinguished by their sumptuous living and their disdain for their social “inferiors,” both white and black.
RELIGION It has often been said that Americans during the seventeenth century took religion more seriously than they have at any time since. That may have been true, but many early Americans—especially in the southern colonies—were not active communicants. One estimate holds that fewer than one in fifteen residents of the southern colonies was a church member. After 1642, Virginia governor William Berkeley decided that his colony was to be officially Anglican, and he sponsored laws requiring “all nonconformists. . . to depart the colony.” Puritans and Quakers were hounded out. By the end of the seventeenth century, Anglicanism predominated in the Chesapeake region, and it proved especially popular among the large landholders. In the early eighteenth century it became the established (official) church throughout the South. The tone of religious belief and practice in the eighteenth-century South was less demanding than that in Puritan New England or Quaker Pennsylvania. As in England, colonial Anglicans tended to be more conservative, rational, and formal in their modes of worship than their Puritan, Quaker, or Baptist counterparts. Anglicans stressed collective rituals over personal religious experience. They did not require members to give a personal, public, and often emotional account of their conversion. Nor did they expect members to practice self-denial. Anglicans preferred ministers who stressed the reasonableness of Christianity, the goodness of God, and the capacity of humankind to practice benevolence.
CROPS The southern colonies had one unique economic advantage: the climate. The warm weather and plentiful rainfall enabled the colonies to grow exotic staples (profitable market crops such as tobacco and rice) prized by the mother country. Virginia, as King Charles I put it, was “founded upon smoke.” Tobacco production soared during the seventeenth century. “In Virginia and Maryland,” wrote Governor Leonard Calvert in 1629, “Tobacco as our Staple is our All, and indeed leaves no room for anything else.” After 1690, rice was as much the profitable staple crop in South Carolina as tobacco was in Virginia. Rice loves water; it flourishes in warm, moist soils, and it thrives when visited by frequent rains or watered by regular irrigation. The daily rise and fall of tidewater rivers perfectly suited a crop that required the alternate flooding and draining of fields. In addition, southern pine trees provided lumber and key items for the maritime industry. The resin from pine trees could be boiled to make tar, which was in great demand for waterproofing ropes and caulking the seams of wooden ships. From their early leadership in the production of pine tar, North Carolinians would earn the nickname of Tar Heels. In the Carolinas a cattle industry presaged life on the Great Plains—with cowboys, roundups, brandings, and long drives to the market.
Virginia plantation wharf
Southern colonial plantations were constructed with easy access to oceangoing vessels, as shown on this 1730 tobacco label.
LABOR Voluntary indentured servitude accounted for probably half the white settlers (mostly from England, Ireland, or Germany) in all the colonies outside New England. The name derived from the indenture, or contract, by which a person promised to work for a fixed number of years in return for transportation to America. Not all the servants went voluntarily. The London underworld developed a flourishing trade in “kids” and “spirits,” who were “kidnapped” or “spirited” into servitude in America. After 1717, by act of Parliament, convicts guilty of certain major crimes could escape the hangman by relocating to the colonies.
Once in the colonies, servants contracted with masters. Their rights were limited. As a Pennsylvania judge explained in 1793, indentured servants occupied “a middle rank between slaves and free men.” They could own property but could not engage in trade. Marriage required the master’s permission. Runaway servants were hunted down and punished just as runaway slaves were. Masters could whip servants and extend their indentures for bad behavior. Many servants died from disease or the exhaustion of cultivating tobacco in the broiling sun and intense humidity. In due course, however, usually after four to seven years, the indenture ended, and the servant claimed the “freedom dues” set by custom and law: money, tools, clothing, food, and occasionally small tracts of land. Some former servants did very well for themselves. In 1629 seven members of the Virginia legislature were former indentured servants. Others, including Benjamin Franklin’s grandmother, married the men who had originally bought their services. Many servants died before completing their indenture, however, and most of those who served their term remained relatively poor thereafter.
COLONIAL SLAVERY Colonial America increasingly became a land of white opportunity and black slavery. Africans were the largest ethnic group to come to British America during the colonial era. Some of the first Africans in America were treated as indentured servants, with a limited term of servitude. Those few African servants who worked out their term of indenture gained freedom, and some of them, as “free blacks,” acquired slaves and white indentured servants. Gradually, however, with racist rationalizations based on color difference, lifelong servitude for black slaves became the custom—and law—of the land. Slaves cost more to buy than servants, but they served for life. By the 1660s colonial legislative assemblies had legalized lifelong slavery.
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the incredibly profitable sugar islands of the French and British West Indies and the cane fields of Portuguese Brazil had the most voracious appetite for enslaved Africans. By 1675 the British West Indies had over 100,000 slaves while the colonies in North America had only about 5,000. But as staple crops became established on the American continent and as economic growth in England slowed the number of white laborers traveling to the Americas, the demand for mostly male Indian or African slaves grew. Though British North America took less than 5 percent of the total slaves imported to the Western Hemisphere during more than three centuries of that squalid traffic, it offered better chances for survival, if few for human fulfillment.
As overall living conditions improved in the colonies, slave mortality improved. By 1730 the black slave population in Virginia and Maryland had become the first in the Western Hemisphere to achieve a self-sustaining rate of population growth. By 1750 about 80 percent of the slaves in the Chesapeake region had been born there. The natural increase of blacks in America approximated that of whites by the end of the colonial period. During the colonial era, slavery was recognized in all the colonies but was most prevalent in the southern colonies.
AFRICAN ROOTS The transport of Africans across the Atlantic to the Americas was the largest forced migration in world history. Over 10 million people made the journey, so many that it changed the trajectory of Africa’s development. The vast majority of Africans were taken to Brazil or the West Indian islands. Only 5 percent of them—including twice as many men as women—were taken to British North America, often in ships built in New England and owned by merchants in Boston and Newport. Most of the enslaved were young—between the ages of fifteen and thirty.
Such aggregate statistics can be misleading, however. Enslaved Africans are so often lumped together as a social group that their great ethnic diversity is overlooked. They came from lands as remote from each other as Angola is from Senegal. They spoke as many as fifty different languages and worshipped many different gods. Some lived in large kingdoms and others in dispersed villages. All of them prized their kinship ties.
Africans preyed upon Africans, however, for centuries, rival tribes had conquered, kidnapped, enslaved, and sold one another. Slavery in Africa, how-
Slave ships
One in six African died while crossing the Atlantic in ships like this one, from an American diagram ca. 1808.
Ever, was more benign than the culture of slavery that developed in North America. In Africa, slaves were not isolated as a distinct caste; they also lived with their captors, and their children were not automatically enslaved. The involvement of Europeans in commercial slavery changed that.
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, African middlemen brought captives (debtors, thieves, war prisoners, and those who refused to convert to Islam) to dozens of “slave forts” along the Atlantic coast where they were subjected to humiliating physical inspections before being sold to European slave traders. To reduce the threat of rebellion, traders split up family and tribal members. Once purchased, the millions of people destined
For slavery in the Americas were branded on the back or buttocks with a company mark, shackled, and loaded onto horrific slave ships, where they were packed tightly like animals below deck. The Africans then endured a four-week to six-month Atlantic voyage, known as the Middle Passage. It was so brutal that one in six captives died en route. Almost one in every ten slave ships experienced a revolt during the crossing. On average, twenty-five Africans were killed in such uprisings. Far more died of disease. Some committed suicide by jumping off the ships.
Slavery in the Western Hemisphere was driven by high profits and rationalized by a pervasive racism. Race-based slavery entailed the dehumanization of an entire class of human beings who, in the eyes of white Europeans, were justifiably deprived of their dignity and honor. Once in America, Africans were treated like property (“chattel”), herded in chains to public slave auctions where they were sold to the highest bidder. They were often barefoot, ill clothed, and poorly housed and fed. Their most common role was to dig ditches, drain swamps, build dams, clear, plant, and tend fields. On large southern plantations, “gangs” of slaves cultivated tobacco and rice. They were often quartered in barracks, fed in bulk, like livestock, and issued work clothes and unsized shoes so uncomfortable that many slaves preferred to go barefoot. Colonial laws allowed whites to use brutal means to discipline slaves and enforce their control over them. They were whipped, branded, shackled, castrated, or sold away, often to the Caribbean islands.
Enslaved Africans, however, found ingenious ways to resist being “mastered.” Some rebelled against their captors by resisting work orders, sabotaging crops and stealing tools, feigning illness or injury, or running away. If caught, runaways faced certain punishment—whipping, branding, and even the severing of an Achilles tendon. Runaways also faced uncertain freedom. Where would they run to in a society governed by whites and ruled by racism?
SLAVE CULTURE In 1700 there were enslaved Africans in every one of the American colonies, and they constituted 11 percent of the total population (it would be more than 20 percent by 1770). But slavery in British North America differed greatly from region to region. Africans were a tiny minority in New England (about 2 percent) and in the middle colonies (about 8 percent). Because there were no large plantations in New England and fewer slaves were owned, “family slavery” prevailed, with masters and slaves usually living under the same roof. Slaves in the northern colonies performed a variety of tasks, outside and inside. In the southern colonies, slaves were far more numerous, and most of them worked on farms and plantations.
African cultural heritage in the south
The survival of African culture among enslaved Americans is evident in this late-eighteenth-century painting of a South Carolina plantation. The musical instruments and pottery are of African (probably Yoruban) origin.
In the process of being forced into lives of bondage in a new world, diverse blacks from diverse homelands forged a new identity as African Americans while leaving entwined in the fabric of American culture more strands of African heritage than historians and anthropologists can ever disentangle, including new words that entered the language, such as tabby, tote, cooter, goober, yam, and banana and the names of the Coosaw, Pee Dee, and Wando Rivers.
Most significant are African influences in American music, folklore, and religious practices. On one level, slaves used such cultural activities to distract themselves from their servitude; on another level they used songs, stories, and religious preachings to circulate coded messages expressing their distaste for masters or overseers. Slave religion, a unique blend of African and Christian beliefs, was frequently practiced in secret. Its fundamental theme was deliverance: God would eventually free African Americans from slavery and open the gates to heaven’s promised land. The planters, however, sought to strip slave religion of its liberationist hopes. They insisted that being “born again” as Christians had no effect upon their workers’ status as slaves.
Africans brought with them to America powerful kinship ties. Even though most colonies outlawed slave marriages, many owners believed that slaves would work harder and be more stable if allowed to form families. Though many families were broken up when members were sold to different owners, slave culture retained its powerful domestic ties. It also developed gender roles distinct from those of white society. Most enslaved women were by necessity field workers as well as wives and mothers responsible for childrearing and household affairs. Since they worked in proximity to enslaved men, they were treated more equally (for better or worse) than were most of their white counterparts.
Society and Economy in New England
There was remarkable diversity among the American colonies during the seventeenth century and after. The prevalence of slavery, for example, was much less outside the southern colonies. Other environmental, social, and economic factors also contributed to striking differences between New England and the middle Atlantic and southern regions.
Townships Unlike the settlers in the southern colonies or in Dutch New Netherland, few New England colonists received huge tracts of land. Township grants were usually awarded to organized groups. A group of s ettlers, often already gathered into a church, would petition the general court for a town (what elsewhere was commonly called a township) and then divide its acres according to a rough principle of equity—those who invested more or had larger families or greater status might receive more land—retaining some pasture and woodland in common and holding some for later arrivals. In some early cases the towns arranged each settler’s land in separate strips after the medieval practice, but over time the land was commonly divided into separate farms distant from the close-knit village.
Enterprise Early New England farmers and their families led hard lives. Simply clearing rocks from the glacier-scoured soil might require sixty days of hard labor per acre. The growing season was short, and no staple (profitable) crops grew in the harsh climate. The crops and livestock were
Profitable fisheries
Fishing for, curing, and drying codfish in Newfoundland in the early 1700s. For centuries the rich fishing grounds of the North Atlantic provided New Englanders with a prosperous industry.
Those familiar to the English countryside: wheat, barley, oats, some cattle, pigs, and sheep. Many New Englanders turned to the sea for their livelihood. Cod, a commercial fish that can weigh hundreds of pounds, had been a regular element of the European diet for centuries, and the waters off the New England coast had the heaviest concentrations of cod in the world. Whales, too, abounded in New England waters and supplied oil for lighting and lubrication, as well as ambergris, a waxy substance used in the manufacture of perfumes. The New England fisheries, unlike the farms, supplied a product that could be profitably exported to Europe, with lesser grades of fish going to the West Indies as food for slaves. Fisheries encouraged the development of shipbuilding, and experience at seafaring spurred transatlantic commerce.
TRADE By the end of the seventeenth century, the American colonies had become part of a complex North Atlantic commercial network, trading not only with the British Isles and the British West Indies but also—and often illegally—with Spain, France, Portugal, Holland, and their colonies. Out of necessity the colonists imported manufactured goods from Europe. The colonies were blessed with abundant natural resources—land, furs,
Deerskins, timber, fish, tobacco, indigo, rice, and sugar, to mention a few— but they lacked capital (money to invest in new enterprises) and laborers.
The mechanism of trade in New England and the middle colonies differed from that in the South in two respects: the lack of staple crops to exchange for English goods was a relative disadvantage, but the success of the region’s own shipping and commercial enterprises worked in their favor. After 1660, in order to protect England’s agriculture and fisheries, the government placed prohibitive duties (taxes) on certain colonial exports—fish, flour, wheat, and meat—while leaving the door open to timber, furs, and whale oil, products in great demand in the home country. New York and New England between 1698 and 1717 bought more from England than they sold to England, incurring an unfavorable trade balance.
The northern colonies addressed the import/export imbalance partly by using their own ships and merchants, thus avoiding the “invisible” charges by British middlemen, and by finding other markets for the staples excluded from England, thus acquiring goods or coins to pay for imports from the mother country. American lumber and fish therefore went to southern Europe for money or in exchange for wine; lumber, rum, and provisions went to Newfoundland; and all of these and more went to the sugar-producing island colonies in the West Indies, which became the most important trading outlet of all. American merchants could sell fish, bread, flour, corn, pork, bacon, beef, and horses to West Indian planters. In return, they got gold, sugar, molasses, rum, indigo, dyewoods, and other products, many of which went eventually to England.
These circumstances gave rise to the famous “triangular trade” (more a descriptive convenience than a uniform pattern), in which New Englanders shipped rum to the west coast of Africa, where they bartered for slaves; took the enslaved Africans to the West Indies; and returned home with various commodities, including molasses, from which they manufactured rum. In another version they shipped provisions to the West Indies, carried sugar and molasses to England, and returned with goods manufactured in Europe.
The colonies suffered from a chronic shortage of hard currency (coins), which drifted away to pay for imports and shipping charges. Merchants tried various ways to get around the shortage of gold or silver coins. Some engaged in barter, using commodities such as tobacco or rice as currency. In addition, most of the colonies at one time or another issued bills of credit, on promise of payment later (hence the dollar “bill”), and most set up “land banks” that issued paper money for loans to farmers who used their land for collateral. Colonial farmers knew that printing paper money inflated crop prices, and they therefore asked for more and more paper money. Thus
Began in colonial politics what was to become a recurrent issue in later times, the complex question of currency inflation. Whenever the issue arose, debtors (often farmers) commonly favored growth in the money supply, which would make it easier for them to pay long-term debts, whereas creditors favored a limited money supply, which would increase the value of their capital. British merchants wanted gold or silver, and they convinced Parliament to outlaw paper money in New England in 1751 and throughout the colonies in 1764.
CHURCH AND STATE The Puritans who settled Massachusetts, unlike the Separatists of Plymouth, proposed only to form a purified version of the Anglican Church. They were called Nonseparating Congregationalists. That is, they remained loyal to the Church of England, the unity of church and state, and the principle of compulsory religious uniformity. But their remoteness from England led them to adopt a congregational form of church government identical with that of the Pilgrim Separatists and for that matter little different from the practice of Anglicans in the southern colonies.
In the Puritan version of John Calvin’s theology, God had voluntarily entered into a covenant, or contract, with worshippers through which they could secure salvation. By analogy, therefore, an assembly of true Christians could enter into a congregational covenant, a voluntary union for the common worship of God. From this idea it was a fairly short step to the idea of people joining together to form a government. The early history of New England included several examples of such limited steps toward constitutional government: the Mayflower Compact, the charter of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, and the informal arrangements whereby the Rhode Island settlers governed themselves until they secured a charter in 1663.
The covenant theory contained certain kernels of democracy in both church and state, but democracy was no part of Puritan political thought, which like so much else in Puritan belief began with an emphasis on original sin. Humanity’s innate depravity made government necessary. The Puritan was more of a biblical fundamentalist than a political democrat, dedicated to seeking the will of God, not the will of the people. The ultimate source of authority was not majority rule but the Bible. Biblical passages often had to be interpreted, however. So Puritans looked to ministers to explain God’s will. By law, every town had to collect taxes to support a church. And every community member was required to attend midweek and Sunday religious services. The average New Englander heard 7,000 sermons in a lifetime.
Although Puritan New England has often been called a theocracy, individual congregations were entirely separate from the state—except that the residents were taxed to support the churches. And if not all inhabitants were official church members, all were nonetheless required to attend church services.
DIVERSITY AND SOCIAL STRAINS Despite long-enduring myths, New England towns were not always pious, harmonious, and self-sufficient utopias populated by praying Puritans. Several communities were founded not as religious refuges but as secular centers of fishing, trade, or commercial agriculture. The animating concerns of residents in such commercial towns tended to be more entrepreneurial than spiritual. After a Puritan minister delivered his first sermon to a congregation in the Massachusetts port of Marblehead, a crusty fisherman admonished him: “You think you are preaching to the people of the Bay. Our main end was to catch fish.”
In many of the godly inland communities, social strains increased as time passed, a consequence primarily of population pressure on the land and increasing disparities of wealth. “Love your neighbor,” said Benjamin Franklin, “but don’t pull down your fence.” With the growing pressure on land in the settled regions, poverty and social tension increased in what had once seemed a country of unlimited opportunity.
More damaging to the Puritan utopia was the gradual erosion of religious fervor. More and more children of the “visible saints” found themselves unable to give the required testimony of spiritual regeneration. In 1662 an assembly of Boston ministers created the “Half-Way Covenant,” whereby baptized children of church members could be admitted to a “halfway” membership and secure baptism for their own children in turn. Such partial members, however, could neither vote in church nor take communion. A further blow to Puritan control came with the Massachusetts royal charter of 1691, which required toleration of religious dissenters and based the right to vote in public elections on property rather than church membership.
THE DEVIL IN NEW ENGLAND The strains accompanying Massachusetts’s transition from Puritan utopia to royal colony reached a tragic climax in the witchcraft hysteria at Salem Village (now the town of Danvers) in 1692. Belief in witchcraft was widespread throughout Europe and New England in the seventeenth century. Prior to the dramatic episode in Salem, almost 300 New Englanders (mostly middle-aged women) had been accused of practicing witchcraft, and more than 30 had been hanged.
The Salem episode was unique in its scope and intensity, however. During the winter of 1691-1692, several adolescent girls became fascinated with the fortunetelling and voodoo practiced by Tituba, a West Indian slave owned by a minister. The entranced girls began to behave oddly—shouting, barking, groveling, and twitching for no apparent reason. When asked who was tormenting them, the girls replied that three women—Tituba, Sarah Good, and Sarah Osborne—were Satan’s servants. Authorities thereupon arrested the three accused women. At a special hearing, the “afflicted” girls rolled on the floor in convulsive fits as the accused women were questioned. Tituba not only confessed to the charge of witchcraft but also listed others in the community who she claimed were performing the devil’s work. Within a few months the Salem Village jail was filled with townspeople—men, women, and children—all accused of practicing witchcraft.
As the accusations and executions spread, leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony began to worry that the witch hunts were out of control. The governor intervened when his own wife was accused of serving the devil. He disbanded the special court in Salem and ordered the remaining suspects released. A year after it had begun, the frenzy was finally over. Nineteen people (including some men married to women who had been convicted) had been hanged, one man—the courageous Giles Corey—was pressed to death with heavy stones for refusing to sacrifice family and friends to the demands of the court, and more than one hundred others were jailed. Nearly everybody responsible for the Salem executions later recanted, and nothing quite like it happened in the colonies again.
What explains Salem’s witchcraft hysteria? It may have represented nothing more than theatrical adolescents trying to enliven the dreary routine of everyday life. Others have highlighted the fact that most of the accused witches were women, many of whom had in some way defied the traditional roles assigned to females. Some had engaged in business transactions outside the home; others did not attend church; some were curmudgeons. Most were middle-aged or older and without sons or brothers. They thus stood to inherit property and live independently. The notion of autonomous spinsters flew in the face of prevailing social conventions.
Still another interpretation stresses the hysteria caused by frequent Native American attacks occurring just north of Salem, along New England’s northern frontier. Some of the participants in the witch trials were girls from Maine who had been orphaned by Indian violence. The terrifying threat of Indian attacks created a climate of fear that helped fuel the witchcraft hysteria. “Are you guilty or not?” the Salem magistrate John Hathorne demanded of fourteen-year-old Abigail Hobbs in 1692. “I have seen sights and been scared,” she answered. Whatever the precise cause, the witchcraft controversy reflected the peculiar social dynamics of the Salem community.
Society and Economy in the Middle Colonies
Both geographically and culturally, the middle colonies stood between New England and the South, blending their own influences with elements derived from the older regions on either side. In so doing, they more completely reflected the diversity of colonial life and more fully foreshadowed the pluralism of the American nation than the other regions did.
AN ECONOMIC MIX The primary crops in the middle colonies were those of New England but more bountiful, owing to more fertile soil and a longer growing season. They developed surpluses of foodstuffs for export to the plantations of the South and the West Indies: wheat, barley, oats, and other cereals, flour, and livestock. Three great rivers—the Hudson, the Delaware, and the Susquehanna—and their tributaries gave the middle colonies ready access to the backcountry and the extremely profitable fur trade with Native Americans. As a consequence, the region’s bustling commerce rivaled that of New England, and indeed Philadelphia in time supplanted Boston as the largest city in the colonies.
Land policies in the middle colonies followed the headright system of the South. In New York the early royal governors carried forward, in practice if not in name, the Dutch device of the patroonship, granting influential men (called patroons) vast estates on Long Island and throughout the Hudson and Mohawk River valleys. The patroons lorded over self-contained domains farmed by tenants who paid fees to use the landlords’ mills, warehouses, smokehouses, and wharves. But with free land available elsewhere, New York’s population languished, and the new waves of immigrants sought the promised land of Pennsylvania.
AN UNRULY ETHNIC MIX In the makeup of their population, the middle colonies of British North America stood apart from both the mostly English Puritan settlements and the biracial plantation colonies to the south. In New York and New Jersey, for instance, Dutch culture and language lingered. Along the Delaware River the few Swedes and Finns, the first settlers, were overwhelmed by the influx of English and Welsh Quakers, followed in turn by Germans, Irish, and Scots-Irish. By the mid-eighteenth century, the middle colonies were the fastest growing area in North America.
The Germans came to America (primarily Pennsylvania) mainly from the war-torn Rhineland region of Europe. (Until German unification, in 1871, ethnic Germans—those Europeans speaking German as their native language—lived in a variety of areas and principalities in central Europe.) William Penn’s recruiting brochures encouraging settlement in Pennsylvania circulated throughout central Europe in German translation, and his promise of religious freedom appealed to persecuted sects, especially the Mennonites, German Baptists whose beliefs resembled those of the Quakers.
In 1683 a group of Mennonites founded Germantown, near Philadelphia. They were the vanguard of a swelling migration in the eighteenth century that included Lutherans, Reformed Calvinists, Moravians, and members of other evangelical German sects, a large proportion of whom paid their way as indentured servants, or “redemptioners,” as they were commonly called. The relentless waves of German immigrants during the eighteenth century alarmed many English colonists. Benjamin Franklin expressed the fear of many that the Germans “will soon. . . outnumber us.”
The feisty scots-irish began to arrive later and moved still farther out into the backcountry throughout the eighteenth century. (Scotch-Irish is an enduring misnomer for Ulster scots or scots-irish, mostly Presbyterians transplanted from Scotland to northern Ireland to give that Catholic country a more Protestant tone.) During the eighteenth century these people were more often called “Irish” than “Scots-Irish,” a term later preferred by their descendants. Most arrived in Philadelphia, then gravitated to the backwoods of Pennsylvania before streaming southward into the fertile valleys stretching southwestward into Virginia and western Carolina. Land was the great magnet attracting the waves of Scots-Irish settlers. They were, said a recruiting agent, “full of expectation to have land for nothing” and were “unwilling to be disappointed.” In most cases, the lands they “squatted on” were owned and occupied by Native Americans. In 1741 a group of Delaware Indians protested to Pennsylvania authorities that the Scotch-Irish intruders were taking “our land” without giving “us anything for it.” If the government did not intervene, the Native Americans threatened, then they would “drive them off”
The Scots-Irish and Germans became the largest non-English elements in the colonies. Other minority ethnic groups enriched the population in New York and the Quaker colonies: Huguenots (Protestants whose religious freedom had been revoked in Catholic France in 1685), Irish, Welsh, Swiss, and Jews. New York had inherited from the Dutch a tradition of ethnic and religious tolerance, which had given the colony a diverse population before the English conquest: French-speaking Walloons (a Celtic people of southern Belgium), French, Germans, Danes, Portuguese, Spaniards, Italians, Bohemians, Poles, and others, including some New England Puritans. The Sephardic Jews who landed in New Amsterdam in 1654 quickly founded a synagogue there.
Colonial Cities
The eighteenth century was a period of rapid expansion and soaring population growth in British North America, during which the colonies grew much more diverse. A rough estimate of the national origins of the white population as of 1790 found it to be 61 percent English; 14 percent
What attracted German immigrants to the middle colonies? Why did the Scots-Irish spread across the Appalachian backcountry? What major population changes were reflected in the 1790 census?
Scottish and Scots-Irish; 9 percent German; 5 percent Dutch, French, and Swedish; 4 percent Irish; and 7 percent miscellaneous or unassigned. If one adds to the 3,172,444 whites in the 1790 census the 756,770 nonwhites, without even considering uncounted Native Americans, it seems likely that only about half the nation’s inhabitants, and perhaps fewer, could trace their origins to England.
During the seventeenth century the American colonies remained in comparative isolation from one another, evolving distinctive folkways and unfolding separate histories. Residents of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston were more likely to keep in close touch with people in London than with one another. Since commerce was their chief purpose, colonial cities hugged the coastline or, like Philadelphia, sprang up on rivers that could be navigated by oceangoing vessels. Never holding more than 10 percent of the colonial population, the large coastal cities exerted a disproportionate influence on commerce, politics, and culture. By the end of the colonial period, Philadelphia, with some 30,000 people, was the largest city in the colonies and second only to London in the British Empire. New York City, with about 25,000, ranked second; Boston numbered 16,000; Charleston, 12,000; and Newport, Rhode Island, 11,000.
THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL ORDER The urban social elite was dominated by wealthy merchants and a middle class of retailers, innkeepers, and artisans. Almost two thirds of the urban male workers were artisans, people who made their living at handicrafts. They included carpenters and coopers (barrel makers), shoemakers and tailors, silversmiths and blacksmiths, sailmakers, stonemasons, weavers, and potters. At the bottom of the pecking order were sailors and unskilled workers.
Class stratification in the cities became more pronounced as time passed. One study of Boston found that in 1687 the richest 15 percent of the population held 52 percent of the taxable wealth; by 1771 the top 15 percent held about 67 percent and the top 5 percent contributed some 44 percent of the city’s wealth. In Philadelphia and Charleston the concentration of wealth was even more pronounced.
Colonial cities were busy, crowded, and dangerous. Frequent fires led to building codes, restrictions on burning rubbish, and the organization of fire companies. Rising crime and violence required formal police departments. Colonists brought with them to America the English principle of public responsibility for the poor and homeless. The number of Boston’s poor receiving public assistance rose from 500 in 1700 to 4,000 in 1736; in New York the number rose from 250 in 1698 to 5,000 in the 1770s. Most of the public assistance went to “outdoor” relief in the form of money, food, clothing, and fuel. Almshouses were built to house the destitute.
THE URBAN WEB Transit within and between colonial cities was initially difficult. The first roads were Native American trails, which were widened with travel, then made into roads. Land travel was initially by horse or by foot. The first public stagecoach line opened in 1732. Taverns were an important aspect of colonial travel, as movement at night was treacherous. (During the colonial era it was said that when the Spanish settled an area, they would first build a church; the Dutch, in their settlements, would first construct a fort; and the English, in theirs, would first erect a tavern.) By the end of the seventeenth century, there were more taverns in America than any other business. There were fifty-four taverns in Boston alone, half of them operated by women. Colonial taverns and inns were places to drink, relax, read a newspaper, play cards or billiards, gossip about people or politics, learn news from travelers, or conduct business. Local ordinances regulated them, setting prices and usually prohibiting them from serving liquor to African Americans, Native Americans, servants, or apprentices.
Taverns served as a collective form of communication; long-distance communication, however, was more complicated. Postal service in the seventeenth
Taverns
A tobacconist’s business card from 1770 captures the atmosphere of late-eighteenth-century taverns. Here men in a Philadelphia tavern converse while they drink ale and smoke pipes.
Century was almost nonexistent—people entrusted letters to travelers or sea captains. Under a parliamentary law of 1710, the postmaster of London named a deputy in charge of the colonies, and a postal system eventually extended the length of the Atlantic seaboard. Benjamin Franklin, who served as deputy postmaster for the colonies from 1753 to 1774, sped up the service with shorter routes and night-traveling post riders.
More reliable mail delivery gave rise to newspapers in the eighteenth century. Before 1745 twenty-two newspapers had been started: seven in New England, ten in the middle colonies, and five in the South. An important landmark in the progress of freedom of the press was John Peter Zenger’s trial for publishing criticisms of New York’s governor in his newspaper, the New York Weekly Journal. Zenger was imprisoned for ten months and brought to trial in 1735. English common law held that one might be punished for “libel,” or criticism that fostered “an ill opinion of the government.” Zenger’s lawyer startled the court with his claim that the editor had published the truth—which the judge ruled an unacceptable defense. The jury, however, held the editor not guilty. The libel law remained standing as before, but editors thereafter were emboldened to criticize officials more freely.
The Enlightenment in America
By the middle of the eighteenth century, the thirteen colonies were rapidly growing and maturing. Schools and colleges were springing up, and the standard of living was rising as well. More and more colonists had easier access to the latest consumer goods—and the latest ideas percolating in Europe. Through their commercial contacts, newspapers, and other channels, colonial cities became centers for the dissemination of new ideas. Most significant was a burst of intellectual activity known as the Enlightenment that originated in Europe and soon spread to the colonies. Like the Renaissance, the Enlightenment celebrated rational inquiry, scientific research, and individual freedom. Curious people wanted to dissect the workings of nature by close observation, scientific experimentation, and precise calculation. Unlike their Renaissance predecessors, however, many enlightened thinkers during the eighteenth century were willing to discard orthodox religious beliefs in favor of more “rational” ideas and ideals.
Discovering the laws of nature One manifestation of the Enlightenment was a scientific revolution in which the ancient view of an earth-centered universe, which reinforced Christian mythology, was overthrown in the early sixteenth century by the controversial heliocentric (sun-centered) solar system proposed by the Polish cleric Nicolaus Copernicus. His discovery that the earth orbits the sun was more than controversial; in an age governed by religious orthodoxy, it was heretical.
The climax to the scientific revolution came with Sir Isaac Newton’s theory of gravitation, which he announced in 1687. Newton challenged biblical notions of the cosmos by depicting a mechanistic universe moving in accordance with natural laws that could be grasped by human reason and explained by mathematics. He implied that natural laws govern all things—the orbits of the planets and the orbits of human relations: politics, economics, and society. Reason could make people aware, for instance, that the natural law of supply and demand governs economics or that the natural rights to life, liberty, and property determine the limits and functions of government.
When people carried Newton’s scientific outlook to its ultimate logic, as the Deists did, the idea of natural law reduced God from a daily presence to a remote Creator who planned the universe and set it in motion but no longer interacted with the earth and its people. Evil in the world, in this view, results not from original sin and innate depravity so much as from ignorance, an imperfect understanding of the laws of nature. The best way, therefore, to improve both society and human nature was by the application and improvement of Reason, which was the highest Virtue (Enlightenment thinkers often capitalized both words).
THE AGE OF REASON IN AMERICA Such illuminating ideas profoundly affected the climate of thought in the eighteenth century. The premises of Newtonian science and the Enlightenment, moreover, fitted the American experience, which placed a premium on observation, experiment, reason, and the need to think anew. America was therefore especially receptive to the new science. Benjamin Franklin epitomized the Enlightenment in the eyes of both Americans and Europeans. Born in Boston in 1706, a descendant of Puritans, Franklin left home at the age of seventeen, bound for Philadelphia. There, before he was twenty-four, he owned a print shop, where he edited and published the Pennsylvania Gazette. When he was twenty-six, he published Poor Richard’s Almanack, a collection of homely maxims on success and happiness. Before he retired from business, at the age of forty-two, Franklin, among other achievements, had founded a library, organized a fire company, helped start the academy that became the University of Pennsylvania, and organized a debating club that grew into the American Philosophical Society.
Franklin was devoted to science and the scientific method. Skeptical and curious, pragmatic and irreverent, he was a voracious reader and an inventive
Genius. His wide-ranging experiments traversed the fields of medicine, meteorology, geology, astronomy, and physics, among others. He developed the Franklin stove, the lightning rod, and a glass harmonica.
Benjamin Franklin
A champion of reason, Franklin was an inventor, philosopher, entrepreneur, and statesman.
Franklin’s love of commonsensical reason and his pragmatic skepticism clashed with prevailing religious beliefs. Although raised as a Presbyterian, he became a freethinker who had no patience with religious orthodoxy and sectarian squabbles. Franklin prized reason over revelation. He was not burdened with anxieties regarding the state of his soul. Early on, he abandoned the Calvinist assumption that God had predestined salvation for a select few. He grew skeptical of the divinity of Jesus and the authenticity of the Bible as God’s word. Like the
European Deists, Franklin came to believe in a God that had created a universe animated by natural laws, laws that inquisitive people could discern through the use of reason.
Benjamin Franklin and other like-minded thinkers, such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, derived an outlook of hope and optimism from modern science and Enlightenment rationalism. Such enlightened thinking, founded on freedom of thought and expression, clashed with the religious assumptions that had shaped Puritan New England in the seventeenth century. The eighteenth-century Enlightenment thus set in motion intellectual forces in the colonies that challenged the “truthfulness” of revealed religion and the logic of Christian faith. Those modern forces, however, would inspire stern resistance among the defenders of religious orthodoxy.
The Great Awakening
Religion was put on the defensive by the rational emphases of the Enlightenment and the growing materialism of eighteenth century life. But religious fervor has always shown remarkable resilience in the face of new Ideas and secular forces. During the early eighteenth century, the colonies experienced a widespread revival of religious zeal. Hundreds of new congregations were founded between 1700 and 1750. Most Americans (85 percent) lived in colonies with an “established” church, meaning that the government officially sanctioned—and collected taxes to support—a single official denomination. Anglicanism was the established church in Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, and the Carolinas. Congregationalism was the official faith in New England. In New York, Anglicanism vied with the Dutch Reformed Church for control. Pennsylvania had no single state-supported church, but Quakers dominated the legislative assembly. New Jersey and Rhode Island had no official denomination and hosted numerous sects.
Most colonies with an established church organized religious life on the basis of well-regulated local parishes, which defined their borders and defended them against dissenters and heretics. No outside preacher could enter the parish and speak in public without permission. Then, in the 1740s, the parish system was thrown into turmoil by the arrival of outspoken traveling (itinerant) evangelists, who claimed that the parish ministers were incompetent. The evangelists also insisted that Christians must be “reborn” in their convictions and behavior; traditional creeds or articles of faith were unnecessary for rebirth. By emphasizing the individualistic strand embedded in Protestantism, the so-called Great Awakening ended up invigorating—and fragmenting—American religious life. Unlike the Enlightenment, which affected primarily the intellectual elite, the Great Awakening appealed to the masses and spawned Protestant evangelicalism. It was the first popular movement before the American Revolution that spanned all thirteen colonies. As Benjamin Franklin observed of the Awakening, “Never did the people show so great a willingness to attend sermons. Religion is become the subject of most conversation.”
FIRST STIRRINGS During the early eighteenth century the currents of rationalism stimulated by the Enlightenment aroused concerns among orthodox believers in Calvinism. Many people seemed to be drifting away from the moorings of piety. And out along the fringes of settlement, many of the colonists were unchurched. On the frontier, people had no minister to preach to them or administer sacraments or perform marriages. According to some ministers, these pioneers had lapsed into a primitive and sinful life, little different from that of the “heathen” Native Americans. By the 1730s the sense of religious decline had provoked the Great Awakening.
In 1734-1735 a remarkable spiritual revival occurred in the congregation of Jonathan Edwards, a Congregationalist minister in Northampton, in
Our people,”
Western Massachusetts. One of America’s most brilliant philosophers and theologians, Edwards had entered Yale College in 1716, at age thirteen, and graduated as valedictorian four years later. In 1727, Edwards was called to serve the Congregational church in Northampton. He was shocked at the town’s tepid spirituality. Edwards claimed that the young people of Northampton were addicted to sinful pleasures, such as “night walking and frequenting the tavern”; they indulged in “lewd practices” that “exceedingly corrupted others.” Christians, he believed, had become preoccupied with making and spending money.
Religion had lost its emotional force.
Edwards lambasted Deists for believing that “God has given mankind no other light to walk by but their own reason.” Edwards resolved to restore deeply felt spirituality.
Jonathan Edwards
One of the foremost preachers of the Great Awakening, Edwards dramatically described the torments that awaited sinners in the afterlife.
He said, “do not so much need to have their heads stored [with new knowledge] as to have their hearts touched.” His own vivid descriptions of the torments of hell and the delights of heaven helped rekindle spiritual fervor among his congregants. By 1735, Edwards could report that “the town seemed to be full of the presence of God; it never was so full of love, nor of joy.” To judge the power of the religious awakening, he thought, one need only observe that “it was no longer the Tavern” that drew local crowds, “but the Minister’s House.”
The Great Awakening saved souls but split churches. At about the same time that Jonathan Edwards was promoting revivals in New England, William Tennent, an Irish-born Presbyterian revivalist, was stirring souls in Pennsylvania. He and his sons charged that many of the local ministers were “cold and sapless”; they showed no evidence of themselves having experienced a convincing conversion experience, nor were they willing to “thrust the nail of terror into sleeping souls.” Tenne
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