Mortality

Overall, European settlers found the climate of mainland North America healthier than that of early modern Europe.

Early New England colonists, in particular, enjoyed exceptionally favorable demographic conditions. In the 17th century a New England man who reached the age of 21 could expect to live to 69, on average, while a woman could expect to live to 62. (The GeNDer difference resulted largely from the risks of childbirth.) The infant mortality rate in colonial New England was about 10 percent, quite modest by early modern standards. In the malarial regions of the Chesapeake and the Lower South, life was more precarious. In 17th-century Virginia a typical man who reached adulthood could expect to live to 49, while women were slightly less vulnerable to Disease but faced the additional risk of childbirth. Estimates of the child mortality rate in the southern colonies range between 25 and 40 percent, with 33 percent being perhaps the most likely figure. While these numbers are shocking by contemporary standards, the demographic regime of 17th-century North America was better than that of early modern England, where the life expectancy of a 20-year-old man was only 52 and urban child mortality rates ran as high as 50 percent.

North American colonists succumbed to a wide variety of diseases, some regionally specific, some nearly universal. The most disease-ridden region was the South, and the most virulent diseases were malaria and YeLLOW Fever, both transmitted by mosquitoes. Yellow fever, endemic in the South, struck the port cities of PHiLADeLPHiA and New York City periodically as well; it carried off 5 percent of Philadelphia’s population in 1699 and 10 percent of New York’s population in 1702. Other common diseases, such as typhus, dysentery, influenza, diphtheria, and SMALLPox, erupted in towns throughout mainland North America,

Pre-1700 New England gravestones often depicted death as a frightening skull, warning sinners to repent of their sins.

The one depicted here suggests a more optimistic view of the afterlife. (Library of Congress)

Even in relatively healthy New England. European physicians began to develop a technique for smallpox inoculation in the early 18th century, and by the late colonial period many affluent British colonists chose to have themselves and their children inoculated (sometimes after trying it out on their slaves). Non-disease-related causes of death included maternal mortality for women (in New England possibly as many as one woman in six died in childbirth) and maritime and agricultural accidents for men. Health conditions in New England and the Middle Colonies were generally good, however, and most settlers (with the exception of some slaves) throughout North America enjoyed an ample and varied diet.

For new immigrants the most dangerous period was the journey to the New World and the first year or two within it. Enslaved Africans, shackled, despondent, and poorly fed, suffered most severely from the transatlantic passage; 15 to 20 percent of slaves bound from Africa to North America died en route. Many European immigrants, crammed in tight quarters and weakened by a monotonous diet, also succumbed to diseases aboard ship. Conditions were particularly bad in the 18th-century servant trade, and passengers occasionally even mutinied. Upon arrival in North America immigrants passed through the “seasoning time,” a period of a year or so in which their immune systems adjusted to the unfamiliar disease climate. Seasoning was particularly strenuous in the South, where many settlers died of malaria, dysentery, and other diseases during their first summer in North America. In 17th-century Virginia only about 60 percent of indentured servants survived their terms of service. High mortality rates contributed to social and economic instability. The Chesapeake area’s demographic regime also shaped planters’ labor preferences; they did not shift from servant to slave labor until the late 17th century, when declining mortality rates made it advantageous for planters to purchase slaves.

African and African-American slaves, concentrated in the southern colonies, faced the same epidemiological “seasoning,” but their immune systems, shaped by the West African disease environment, responded somewhat differently. As many Africans had already been exposed to yellow fever and malaria, they succumbed to these diseases less frequently than did Europeans (although many Africans did die of them). On the other hand, they were particularly susceptible to respiratory complaints such as pneumonia and tuberculosis. Between a quarter and a third of slaves imported to the southern colonies died within a year. African and African-American slaves also faced some status-specific health threats, including depression (newly enslaved men and women sometimes committed suicide), exhaustion, and exposure. (These problems also manifested themselves among European settlers living in exceptionally harsh conditions; some of the first Virginia settlers appear to have suffered from debilitating depression.) In the southern colonies a third or more of children born into slavery died in infancy.

While European and African immigrants struggled with the unfamiliar American epidemiological environment, countless Native Americans succumbed to diseases that were endemic to Europe and Africa but unknown in precontact North America. Until the 16th century Native Americans lived in dispersed communities isolated from the rest of the world’s human population and enjoyed a relatively disease-free environment. After 1492, however, European explorers and settlers inadvertently (and sometimes purposefully) introduced a host of virulent diseases from the Old World, including smallpox, measles, and pneumonia. These unfamiliar diseases, combined with famine and warfare, decimated the Native American population. On the eve of European colonization the most widely accepted estimates are that between 7 million and 10 million Native Americans populated the North American continent north of Mexico; four centuries later, less than 1 million Native Americans remained. This extreme depopulation caused recurring political conflict and led to the reconfiguration of many Native American communities and political alliances in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Further reading: Robert V. Wells, Revolutions in Americans’ Lives: A Demographic Perspective on the History of Americans, Their Families, and Their Society (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982).

—Darcy R. Fryer

Morton, Thomas (1597?-1647) trader, writer Thomas Morton, trained as a lawyer, arrived in New England in 1625 as part of a small colonizing venture led by Captain Thomas Wollaston. The colonists settled on a tract where Quincy, Massachusetts, is now located, establishing a trading post and plantation there. In 1626 Wollaston departed with some of the group for Virginia. Morton renamed the post Merry Mount and continued to trade successfully, perhaps by flaunting attempts by other English colonists to restrict sales of firearms to Native people. His success in trade as much as his “revels and merriment” upset the Puritans and their leader William Bradford of the Separatist Plymouth Plantation 30 miles to the south. Bradford described Morton as “lascivious,” exhibiting conduct befitting “a School of Atheism” by drinking, dancing, and consorting sexually with Native American women. In 1627 Morton was detained for trading guns to the Indians and exiled. After being acquitted, he returned to Merry Mount in 1629. Arrested again in 1630, he was sent to Charleston for trial, and he then returned to England. Morton spent the next decade trying to persuade the Crown to revoke the Royal Charter of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

More of a promotional tract than a historical account, Morton’s only book, New English Canaan (1637), presents a compelling view of a promising new land: “the beauty of the place. . . I did not think that in all the known world it could be paralleled.” Divided into three parts, the volume outlines the manners and customs of the friendly Natives, describes the natural endowments of a lush land, and satirizes the Separatists at Plymouth. In contrast to the civil Natives who lead “the more happy and freer life,” who “are not delighted in baubles,” and who are “full of humanity,” the uncivil Puritans massacre Natives at Wessaguscus, practice life-denying austerity, and “make a great show of Religion, but no humanity.” The sardonic assault culminates when Morton chronicles how in 1628 Captain Shrimpe (Myles Standish) and his “nine worthies” raid Merry Mount and take Morton prisoner. Blending Renaissance masque, satire, myth, prose, and poetry, Morton’s literary production contests the dominance of Bradford’s Separatists, substituting Arcadian imagery for biblical typology and privileging secular colonization over a schismatic settlement. Morton’s gesture toward cultural amalgamation challenges Puritan exclusionary politics and values.

Morton’s timing was less than propitious since Puritan power in England was then rapidly rising. His New English Canaan sold few copies, and most of the volumes in the first edition were burned as subversive. Shortly after the English Civil War (1642-49) broke out, Morton made his last journey to New England. Why he returned to the location of his earlier travails is unknown, but by 1644 he was once again in prison. Spending the winter in distress may have completely broken his health. He was released from jail and shortly after left Boston for the Massachusetts frontier that later was to become Maine. French influence in that region was strong, and opportunities to live life as he wished were abundant. However, his health was not up to frontier living, and within two years he likely died.

Despite appearing in a Nathanial Hawthorne short story as an anti-Puritan figure, in two novels by John Lathrop Motley (1839 and 1849), and even in a 1934 opera by Howard Hanson, Morton has endured in history as a licentious and incompetent felon in the image portrayed by the puritanical William Bradford.

Further reading: Donald F. Connors, Thomas Morton (New York: Twayne, 1969).

—Keat Murray and Marshall Joseph Becker