“What then is this American, this new man?,” Hector St. John Crevecoeur inquired in 1782. Twenty-two years earlier Benjamin Franklin questioned the whole idea of a “typical” American. The colonies, he explained, “were not only under different governors, but have different forms of government, different laws, different interests, and some of them different religious persuasions and different manners.”
Crevecoeur’s question and Franklin’s assessment described coexisting aspects of colonial British American society. Throughout most of the colonial period, British
America consisted of several distinct societies. These cultures distinguished themselves through their demographic conditions, labor arrangements, economic structures, racial and GENDER roles, and political frameworks, yet, at the same time, the notion that a single “American” had emerged after the Revolution suggested that colonial America shared unifying characteristics that bound its diverse regions into a single culture. Franklin and Crhvecoeur were two of colonial America’s most astute observers. An understanding of their competing perspectives contributes to an appreciation of colonial America’s social complexity.
Within 10 years of jAMESTOWN’s 1607 founding, the Chesapeake region had created a commercialized TOBACCO ECONOMY strong enough to shape the region’s early social development. A young, male-dominated population of white planters, white and black indentured servants, and African slaves prepared the region’s large plantations for extensive tobacco exportation. The conditions under which these men labored confirmed the planters’ drive for profit. An inadequate fOOD supply, overworked laborers, and unhealthy water resulted in high MORTALITY rates and frequent political instability. These conditions, along with fluid racial categories, the lack of families, and an increasingly skewed distribution of wealth, encouraged personal autonomy and greed while discouraging social deference, traditional gender roles, and political stability. The planters’ ongoing quest for land, moreover, not only strained relations among whites but antagonized relations with Native Americans. Major battles between settlers and Indians broke out in 1622, 1644, and 1675. Early Virginia and Maryland thus stood in sharp contrast to society in England.
Chesapeake area settlers ameliorated these destabilizing conditions by approximating familiar metropolitan traditions. Throughout the 17th century the establishment of county courts and parishes, representative lawmaking assemblies, and widespread political participation provided the Chesapeake region with a sociopolitical framework coherent enough to moderate its destructive trends. White planters further contributed to this emerging stability by manipulating race and gender so as to define more rigidly a once ambiguous hierarchy of power. By perpetuating a racial distinction between white servitude and black SLAVERY through SLAVE CODES, white planters defused the CLASS tensions that fueled BACON’S REBELLION in 1676 and established the basis for a white supremacist ideology. Furthermore, the division of labor along gender lines, the regulation of white women’s sexuality, and the condemnation of Native Americans’ division of labor (Indian women managed fieldwork) similarly constructed once fluid gender expectations into less flexible gender roles. As more women arrived in the colony this evolving patriarchal norm exerted a social influence that contributed to the region’s growing stability.
New England PURITANS established England’s second large North American society in 1629. Although the MASSACHUSETTS Bay Colony and the Chesapeake region were outposts of the same metropolitan culture, the contrasts between these societies were striking. Most migration to New England occurred in a short burst of voyages lasting from 1630 to 1642. It landed about 4,000 white, Puritan, middle-class families in a healthy ENVIRONMENT replete with natural resources, even if the farmland was less rich than in other colonies. The economic quest for transatlantic profits through cod, timber, and fur exports initially yielded to modest family farms that closely replicated English traditions. Puritans employed servant labor rather than slaves, made the family rather than the plantation the central economic unit, and immediately adopted the patriarchal assumption (enforced by the practice of “coverture”) that husbands controlled their wives’ property and person. Puritans did not oppose material gain. Instead, they tempered commercial pursuits with values gleaned from covenant theology, familial stability, and the supposed moral benefits of hard work. Accordingly, they established a political system favoring religiously “elect” white men who monitored social behavior for signs of subversion. The banishment of Roger Williams for transgressing Congregational theology and Anne Marbury HUTCHINSON for contradicting the gendered order suggest the magnitude of this vigilance. A low infant mortality rate, a nearly equal sex ratio, and a mixed economy supportive of an equitable wealth distribution allowed New England to evolve without the benefit of constant immigration. New England quickly became a fair approximation of England.
While the early Chesapeake region worked to impose stability on its evolving society, New England labored to preserve it. And while the Chesapeake area largely succeeded, New England generally failed. The theologically driven, socially homogeneous society that the founding generations forged bowed under the weight of several changes. New England became an aggressively commercial society defined less by its ministers’ sermons than its MERCHANTS’ ledgers. The anxiety inspired by a growing commercial elite manifested itself in events such as the Halfway Covenant (1662) and the Salem Witch Trials (1692). New Englanders’ further challenged their founding ideals by abandoning their original towns for cities like BOSTON, Newport, and New Haven, or for frontier communities. Migration and urbanization disrupted church organizations, strained traditional gender roles, and undermined the deferential attitudes once enforced by family, church, and community. Commercialization and internal migration, moreover, ushered in slavery and poverty. By the late 17th and early 18th centuries growing wealth from the cod, timber, and whale trades enabled a powerful minority of New Englanders to import slave labor. If New England slaveholders and those who fell into poverty were relatively few, their presence nevertheless reflects the larger changes unhinging New England from its original mission. As “peaceable kingdoms” of the 17th century diminished, New England started to look more like the rest of colonial British America.
The Middle Colonies—primarily New York and Pennsylvania—emerged later in the century (1664 and 1681, respectively) and quickly assumed a unified sociocultural character. Like the Chesapeake region, the Middle Colonies exhibited materialistic and individualistic tendencies during their settlement years. Unlike the Chesapeake area, though, an influx of immigrants from Scotland, Ireland, and Germany channeled potentially disruptive social impulses into the development of colonial America’s most stable and diverse economy. A healthy balance of family farms, merchant houses (especially among Pennsylvania Quakers), and shipping firms enabled this region to negotiate both local and transatlantic markets. Through the exportation of wheat and livestock, a local trade in iron, dairy products, and bread, and the provision of services including shipbuilding and food processing, the Middle Colonies nurtured an economic culture that made it, according to one historian (referring to Pennsylvania), “the best poor man’s country.”
The Middle Colonies’ economic progress was inextricably linked with the region’s social development. As in New England, family labor dominated the Middle Colonies. Quaker families in particular advocated an arrangement whereby parental authority remained weak, the nuclear family prevailed, partible inheritance became common, and children left home at young ages to improve their material conditions. Tenancy and servitude, however, were also common features of the social landscape, and these institutions placed poorer immigrants in positions of extreme dependency. Despite tenant uprisings on New York’s manorial estates in the 1740s, however, tenancy and servitude sometimes became stepping-stones to a freehold in the hinterland or artisanal independence in the city, rather than remaining a permanent condition.
However, opportunities for upward mobility were not ubiquitous. Slavery was a growing reality in the Middle Colonies. New York City and the manufacturing centers around Philadelphia craved skilled slave labor. By 1746 30 percent of New York City’s laborers were slaves. Slaveholders in the Middle Colonies never employed the brutal gang labor techniques used in the Chesapeake region, but slaves still suffered the cruelties of their condition. Slave codes mandated the same racial dichotomy that prevailed in the Chesapeake area, and violent resistance among disgruntled slaves remained an ongoing and often real threat. Colonial North America’s first slave insurrection took place in New York in 1712. Servitude, tenancy, and slavery, moreover, fostered a differentiated social structure. In cities the wealthiest 10 percent owned more than 50 percent of the taxable wealth, with the bottom 30 percent owning less than 2 percent. Stratification was lower in rural areas, with a distribution of property more equal than in New England. Finally, government in the Middle Colonies reflected the antiauthoritarianism of the Quaker population by remaining weak, highly inclusive, and responsive to the needs of white males.
Planters from Barbados settled the Lower South in the 1680s. By the early 1700s the dominant sociocultural traits of the Lower South included a dedication to staple crops (rice and later indigo), an unhealthy environment, rapid demographic growth due to English, Scots, Ulster Scots, and German immigrants, and a fierce commitment to slave labor. The logic behind staple agriculture required the importation of a slave population that in some counties dramatically exceeded that of whites (as high as 90 percent), a wealth disparity that made a select minority of planters the richest men in colonial North America, and unprecedented displays of conspicuous consumption. The Lower South adopted a restrictive approach towards the black population, especially after the 1739 Stono Rebellion, but its stance towards other institutions, such as the family, was comparatively lax. White women in South Carolina, for example, routinely contradicted traditional gender norms. Married women were allowed to maintain an estate, and thus a measure of independence, separate from their husbands’ holdings. This provision, in addition to the many slaves that white widows inherited, conferred unusual economic power upon southern women and perpetuated fluid gender norms inconsistent with the rest of colonial North America. If there was a culture that looked the most different from the metropolis of Britain, it was the Lower South.
The differences among these four colonial regions, stark as they seem, coexisted with four broad social developments that, throughout the 18th century, transcended distinctions among colonial societies and provided colonial British America a shared foundation upon which to negotiate their differences and build a unified, highly complex society. First, scattered pockets of slavery evolved into a comprehensive slave society that influenced life from New England to the Carolinas. Black slaves, unlike indentured servants, lacked formal rights, became cheaper and easier to obtain, and, unlike Native Americans, were initially reluctant to escape into an unfamiliar countryside. In 1640 the mainland colonies had about 1,000 slaves—about 2 percent of the European-American population. By 1780 they had well over 500,000—about 25 percent of the European-
American population. The economic consequences of this transition catapulted the mainland colonies to a position of international significance. Its sociocultural consequences, however, were equally profound. Enslaved Africans negotiated incredible difficulties to establish an influential African-American society that pervaded the British mainland colonies. Slaves from the Carolinas to New England reconstructed family life to incorporate aspects of their African pasts into their colonial present. They conducted extralegal marriages, traveled widely to maintain kinship and friendship connections, and, in so doing, supported vibrant African-American communities. Slaves participated actively in public culture. Through music, marriage ceremonies, storytelling, and dancing, enslaved blacks preserved traditions while carving out a meaningful place within colonial America’s growing public sphere. Slaves resisted the institution under which they labored through finely coordinated strategies. Whether it was slacking off work on the plantation, breaking field equipment, running away, or assaulting (and even murdering) whites, slaves honed a sense of community and shared culture unlike any other immigrants to America. Their suffering and strategies to manage that suffering forged a set of common ideals that influenced white societies throughout colonial British America.
Second, although historians have vigorously debated the extent of its impact, religious expression also shaped a discrete American society. As colonists took advantage of North America’s comparatively tolerant religious environment to embrace dissenting Protestant ideals, they established social trends that resonated deeply throughout the colonies. Most visibly, congregational expansion after 1700—be it Baptist, Methodist, Lutheran, or Presbyterian—transformed America’s physical space. Churches and meeting houses replete with bells and spires gradually “sacralized” the colonial landscape. This landscape, in turn, became the context for transcolonial evangelical revivals that grew especially intense in the 1740s, leading some historians to call this movement the Great Awakening. These periods of spiritual rapture encouraged colonists of all religious backgrounds and from all regions to balance traditional doctrinal loyalty with personal introspection. Colonial American religious development also granted women unique opportunities to assert their independence and authority. Although they could not be ordained, chair meetings (except Quakers), or hold office, women constituted a majority of church membership, and their numerical strength allowed them to influence hiring, policy, and church discipline.
A third factor influencing the convergence of a single American society involved consumer behavior. Throughout the 18th century, European-Americans, slaves, and Native Americans experienced important changes in their material lives. The diet of white Americans improved, incorporating finer cuts of meat, a wider variety of fruits and vegetables, and more herbs and spices. Slaves also developed more sophisticated diets as masters allotted them time to grow their own food, keep their own livestock, and do their own cooking in separate quarters. Sickness, drought, and dispossession of their land placed Native Americans in a different position. For them, diminished agricultural activity meant dependency on European-Americans for their food. In terms of clothing, white colonists enjoyed both increasing imports from England and clothes made domestically. They could, especially after 1730, choose from a plethora of affordable fabrics and complement their outfits with distinctive hats, shoes, and underwear. Garments became status markers, and as wealthy merchants donned the finest silk shirts and French shoes, slaves, with their rough-cut shirts and threadbare pants, reflected the lowest rung of the sartorial ladder. Native Americans, in contrast, embraced a culturally diverse style of dress, incorporating European styles into traditional garb, often donning European shirts, leggings, and the traditional feathered headdress. Finally, with respect to housing, whites enjoyed the major improvements. Homes grew in size and sophistication, and colonists decorated them with imported furniture, china, carpets, and drapery—items all made affordable by a “consumer revolution.” While vernacular styles persisted, the rudiments of an early American architecture slowly cohered.
The final element driving the convergence of colonial America’s separate societies involved the relegation of Native Americans to the most distant periphery of British America. Throughout the colonial period Indians and Europeans were engaged in an ongoing battle to shape their own economic and social destinies, and the object of that battle was invariably land. Major wars between Indians and whites included King Philip’s War (1676), a battle in Deerfield, Massachusetts (1704), the Tuscarora War in North Carolina (1712), and the Yamasee War in South Carolina (1715). During the Seven Years’ War (1754-63) Indians were able to achieve substantial diplomatic leverage by playing French and English interests against each other. For groups like the Catawba in the South and the Iroquois in the North, these strategies proved temporarily beneficial. By the end of the Seven Years’ War, however, as the Revolutionary Era approached, white Americans moved West with such force and rapidity that many Indians, who no longer enjoyed the diplomatic advantages that the English-French conflict conferred, disintegrated as coherent tribal entities. Some tribes, like the Mississippi Chickasaw and the Florida Seminole, extended their autonomy, but they were the exceptions. The Oneida took refuge in camps, and the Iroquois Confederacy was dissolved. The marginalization of Native Americans throughout colonial North America unified the colonies in a relentless quest for land.
“What then is this American, this new man?” In light of these four developments, Crhvecoeur’s question has added resonance. Franklin may have been correct in highlighting colonial America’s bewildering diversity (his observation even rings true for contemporary North America), but the emergence of a slave society, the freedom to pursue individual spiritual enlightenment, the acquisition of similar consumer goods, and the elimination of Native Americans as legitimate competitors for America’s most valuable resource all converged in the years before the Revolution to the forge the foundation of a distinctly American society.
Further reading: Jon Butler, Becoming America: The Revolution before 1776 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000); Jack P Greene, Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); Alice Hanson Jones, Wealth of a Nation to Be: The American Colonies on the Eve of the Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980).
—James E. McWilliams
World History
