Between 1585 and 1763 the population of British North America increased enormously as growing numbers of Europeans and Africans replaced declining numbers of Native Americans. The best estimates are that the colonies contained approximately 4,600 people of European and African descent in 1630, a quarter million in 1700, and slightly more than 2 million on the eve of the Revolution.
Scholars disagree about the number of Indians who lived north of the Rio Grande before contact with Europeans. Estimates vary from 1 to 13 million inhabitants. Contact with Europeans had a disastrous impact on Native Americans. Common European childhood diseases, such as whooping cough, measles, and especially smallpox, killed tens of thousands of Indians, who had not been previously exposed to these illnesses. Indeed, these diseases often killed Native Americans who had never even seen a white person, because the pathogens that caused these illnesses—often unknowingly carried by Natives who had been infected through contact with whites—frequently preceded the arrival of Europeans.
The first English colonists at Roanoke, unaware that they carried pathogens to which the Natives had no resistance, noted that Indians often became sick and died. English commercial anglers went ashore in present-day New England in the 1610s to dry their catch and trade with the Natives; in the process, they passed diseases to the local peoples. By the time the Pilgrims arrived in the area in 1620, disease had killed so many Native people that one English trader, noting the skeletons and abandoned wigwams that littered the landscape, called it a “new found Golgotha.”
Disease, however, did not affect only those who died; it also devastated those who survived. When a large number of people in a community fell ill, the healthy often fled, hoping to avoid the contagion. If they went to another village, they unwittingly carried the disease with them. Disease on a large scale meant that no one was available to tend fires, carry water, prepare food, or care for the sick. If crops were not harvested, the survival of the community after the epidemic was jeopardized. Women who survived disease were less likely to bear children, thereby affecting future generations. Indians in the interior of the country usually had sufficient time to renew their population before facing the onslaught of European settlers. However, East Coast Natives sometimes found that the combination of population decline caused by diseases and the aggressive seizure of land by white settlers were too intense to survive.
Among European colonists population growth varied over time and space, although it generally increased rapidly due both to immigration and natural increase (the difference between the number of births and deaths). In New England, despite the 50 percent mortality rate in the first few years among the Pilgrims, the population grew rapidly. The arrival of migrants in family groups, the general good health of the region, and the widespread availability of land all encouraged high fertility and low mortality rates. It was not uncommon for settlers to survive into their 70s, much longer than their counterparts in the mother country. Many lived long enough to exert control over their adult children and to see their grandchildren—another rarity in England. In addition, waves of immigrants increased the number of inhabitants. From a population of 14,000 in 1640, the New England population multiplied to perhaps 87,000 by 1690. It continued to expand, albeit at a somewhat slower rate, during the 18th century.
In sharp contrast to New England, the white population of the Chesapeake area colonies did not increase rapidly in the early 17th century. Indeed, the English population actually declined during the initial decades of settlement. Between 1625 and 1640, 15,000 people immigrated to Virginia, yet only 8,000 whites lived in the colony in 1640. Unlike New England, where entire families immigrated, most immigrants to the Chesapeake area were single males arriving as indentured servants. The resulting gender imbalance, with males at times outnumbering females by seven to one, created very low birth rates. In addition, because large planters concentrated almost entirely on raising tobacco rather than foodstuffs, diets were often inadequate. Diseases like malaria, common in a hot, damp climate, as well as shallow wells poisoned by saltwater, also took a high toll on human life. Not until the end of the 17th century did the number of births exceed the number of deaths in the Chesapeake area colonies. One stabilizing factor in this period was the constant replenishment, both in settlers and in indentured servants, from England. Unlike New England, the British population of the Chesapeake area did not become self-reproducing until the 18th century, but the population then grew relatively rapidly until the War for Independence.
The Middle Colonies experienced enormous growth resulting from both natural increase and migration. While New York and New Jersey had steady, although not spectacular, rates of population growth, Pennsylvania, founded in 1681, contained the second largest population in British North America by 1770 and the largest white population by 1780. Much of Pennsylvania’s demographic increase in the 18th century can be attributed to the influx of large numbers of German settlers, who by the 1750s accounted for a third of the colony’s population. Their huge numbers, language, and observance of German customs caused some uneasiness among English colonists. Benjamin Franklin, for example, worried that Pennsylvania would soon become a “Colony of Aliens.” Pennsylvania was also the destination of thousands of Scots, Irish, and Scots-Irish immigrants, most of whom headed for the frontier and the land available there.
The 18th-century black slave population of British North America was unique in that it was the only bound population in the New World that reproduced itself. However, this reproduction did not begin in the 17th century. Throughout the first half of the 17th century newly arrived African slaves suffered high mortality rates. Many died within five years after landing in the Chesapeake area as disease, inadequate diets, depression, and brutal working conditions took their toll. After the Middle Passage many Africans were in poor health on arriving in the colonies. The African population in the Chesapeake area was small in the early 17th century because planters invested in less expensive white indentured servants rather than African slaves. After 1675, as planters turned to purchasing African slaves, their population increased substantially. By the end of the first decades of the 18th century, slaves had formed sufficiently stable communities and marriages to enable them to reproduce their numbers. Their population was continually augmented by newly purchased slaves from abroad, as more than 250,000 blacks were brought into America between 1700 and 1775. Indeed, more Africans than Europeans arrived in British America in the 18th century.
The slave population in South Carolina exploded in the early 18th century, once planters found that rice was a profitable crop and that they could purchase slaves relatively inexpensively. In some rice cultivation areas blacks accounted for 80 to 90 percent of the inhabitants. Bondpeople were forced to labor in very hazardous conditions, detrimental to their health, on those plantations. The only advantage that some enjoyed was partial immunity to malaria.
By the 1730s African Americans made up about 15 percent of the population of New York City and accounted for about 8 percent of Boston’s population. By the mid-18th century African Americans constituted one-third of the people living in the coastal areas stretching from the Chesapeake Bay to Georgia. On the eve of the American Revolution one of every five colonists was black.
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).
—Roger Carpenter
World History
