Bonds of Empire

HIS 131 The Bonds of Empire, 1660-1750 Chapter 4

As we have seen, the English colonies in America had originated in several different ways and as quite different and diverse projects…and for the most part, they evolved independent of each other.

There was also little thought that they belonged or ought to belong together in one system…Yet the growing economic success of the colonies was, by the mid-17th century, creating pressure in England for a more rational and organized structure to this new British Empire in the New World.

Reorganization, many claimed, would increase the profitability of the colonies and the power of the English government to supervise the colonies….Above all, it would contribute to the success of the mercantile system, which had become the foundation of the English economy.

I. The Development of Empire

A. Mercantilism

One of the arguments for colonization in the first place had been that colonies would increase the wealth of the mother country and lessen its independence on other nations.

According to the theory of mercantilism…England would prosper and grow strong by exporting more and more to foreigners and importing less and less from them….Colonies would help this goal by not only providing a market for England’s manufactured goods, but also by providing a source of raw materials England could not produce at home.

On the whole, the mercantile system would also meet the needs of the colonies as well….The colonies stood to gain by concentrating on the crude products of the field and forest, and exchanging these products for the finer goods of manufacturers in England.

In actual practice, the colonies did turn out products that the mother country needed for its own consumption or for resale to foreigners….such as, tobacco, furs, and lumber. But the colonies also produced surpluses of some items…such as, wheat, flour, and fish…and these items competed with commodities produced in England.

Therefore, the colonial producers often found that they could make a better profit dealing directly with foreigners as opposed to going through the mother country, England.

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Because of this, a high level of direct trade developed between English colonists and foreign countries…

As mentioned earlier, England had been involved in a civil war between Charles I and Parliament….Distracted as they were, the English government made only partial efforts to control colonial trade in accordance with England’s mercantile principles.

However, after the Restoration, under Charles II, the government went much further…adopting legislation that had the goal of controlling colonial trade activities….This legislation consisted of three English laws called the Navigation Acts.

The first of them, issued in 1660, closed the colonies to all trade except trade that was carried by English ships….English ships were defined as those built in England or the colonies and manned by sailors of which three-fourths must be Englishmen or colonists. This law also required that certain items, among them tobacco, could only be exported to England or an English possession.

The second Navigation Act, issued in 1663, provided that all goods sent from other countries in Europe to the colonies had to first go by way of England so that English taxes could be applied to the goods prior to being shipped to the colonies.

The third Navigation Act, issued in 1673 was designed to prevent colonists from evading the British control of exports by simply pretending to sail to another colony while actually having a foreign country as their destination…To discourage this type of activity, England imposed a tax on cargoes bound for other colonies, so since the colonist traders would have to pay the tax anyway, this would hopefully discourage the colonists attempting to trade directly with foreign countries.

The Navigation acts also provided for the appointment of customs officials to collect the duties and administer the Navigation Acts….These acts, with later amendments, were to form the legal basis of England’s mercantile system for the next 100 years.

B. The Dominion of New England

If the Navigation Acts were to be strictly enforced, it soon became apparent that the king would have to do more than simply dispatch customs officials to America….He would also have to set up an agency in London that would permit him a more direct supervision over colonial governments.

Only in Virginia, a “royal colony” since the bankruptcy of the London Company in 1624, did the king have the right to appoint the governor.

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In Massachusetts…a “corporate colony”… the people elected their own governor, as they did also in Plymouth…In Maryland…a “proprietary colony”… the appointing power had been delegated to the proprietor.

When Charles II created other proprietary colonies…such as, Carolina, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania…he himself followed the Maryland example….And when he gave royal charters to Connecticut and Rhode Island, he accepted these as “corporate colonies” by allowing them to continue choosing their own officials.

Therefore, Charles II and his predecessors had, without forethought, permitted the development of a colonial system in which the individual colonies had the right to choose their own leaders through their individual representative assemblies…and, these assemblies were now claiming more and more power for themselves.

For help in enforcing the new Navigation Acts, Charles II could not place much reliance on the colonial governments….Least of all could he depend on Massachusetts, which dared to behave practically like an independent country to the point of actually minting their own coinage.

The Puritan leadership in Massachusetts…whose religion itself was obnoxious to him…persisted in maintaining their own established church instead of the Church of England, thus violating the terms of the Massachusetts Bay Company’s charter.

Many of the Massachusetts merchants…disregarding the Navigation Acts as well…evaded the payment of duties and made smuggling a regular business.

After a royal investigation commission had visited the Bay Colony and reported back to London the extent of the colony’s illegal business, Charles II decided to take action to control and punish Massachusetts in particular and tighten control over the American empire in general.

In 1675 he set up a special committee, the Lords of Trade, to make recommendations for royal reform…The Lords of Trade recommended that the king participate more directly in colonial government.

Charles II wanted to make Massachusetts a royal colony like that of Virginia, but its corporate charter was one he could not revoke without a lawsuit…But, he soon had grounds for action.

When the Lords of Trade ordered Massachusetts to see that the Navigation Acts were enforced, the Massachusetts General Court replied that, in view of the charter’s provisions for self-government, British Parliament had no power to make laws for the colony.

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When the Lords of Trade sent over a customs official to see to the enforcement of the Navigation Acts, the General Court not only refused to recognize him in his official capacity, they also arrested the local agents he appointed to carry out his duties.

These actions led Charles II to begin legal proceedings that led, in 1684, to the revocation of the Massachusetts charter.

After Charles II’s death in 1685, his successor, his brother James II, went much further…He combined Massachusetts and the rest of the New England colonies into one Dominion of New England.

Within this dominion he eliminated the existing assemblies, and over it placed a single governor, Sir Edmond Andros, with his headquarters in Boston…Andros thoroughly antagonized the people of New England as he proceeded to levy taxes and enforce the Navigation Acts….When the colonists protested on the basis of their right to be taxed only with the consent of their elected representatives…Andros responded by claiming they no longer had such rights.

II. The Colonial Population

The first Americans, of course, were the Indians…and, for many years after the beginning of European colonization, they continued to outnumber the new settlers in North America.

Even within areas in which English settlements took root, the colonists were often in the minority….Gradually, the European population grew…through both continued immigration and through the natural processes of birth…until by the late 17th century European Americans and African Americans became the dominant group in the population of the Atlantic coast.

A. The Early Population

A few of the early settlers were members of the English upper classes. For the most part, however, the colonial population was conspicuous for its lack of representatives of the aristocracy…Instead, the dominant element was free English laborers.

Some came independently…others came as indentured servants….The system of indentured servitude in the New World developed naturally out of existing practices in England, where a youth commonly bound himself to a master as an apprentice for a term of seven years, during which time he would learn a trade….In America, the term of service was usually four to five years, but the conditions of the agreement were basically the same.

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In return for service to his master, a servant was entitled to passage to America, food and shelter, and upon completion of his term, he received such benefits as clothing, tools, and occasionally land.

Most of these indentured servants came to the colonies voluntarily, but not all.

Beginning as early as 1617, the English government occasionally dumped shiploads of convicts in America to be sold into servitude… Included in these shipments of human cargo were members of other groups deemed undesirable, such as, orphans, vagrants, and beggars.

The reason that this system of indentured servitude was so appealing to those in a position to employ these individuals was because it provided a means of coping with the severe labor shortage in the wilderness….However, for the servants themselves, the attractions were not always so clear….As the number of freed indentured servants grew, becoming by the late 17th century one of the largest elements of the population, serious problems began to develop.

Some freed servants managed to establish themselves successfully as farmers, skilled workers, and tradesmen…However, others found themselves without employment and without prospects…which, created in some areas a large floating population of young single men (such as those who formed the backbone of Bacon’s Rebellion).

These large groups of ramblers became the source of social turbulence not only in Virginia, but also in many other colonial areas…Even with this problem, indentured servitude remained an important source of population growth well into the 18th century.

B. The Beginnings of Slavery

The demand for black servants to supplement the always scarce Southern labor supply existed almost from the first moments of settlement.

The African slave trade had begun in the 16th century, when Portuguese ships began visiting the west coast of Africa…There they captured native tribesmen and shipped them across the Atlantic to the new colonies in South America…The trade then began to grow more extensive, more sophisticated, and more horrible in the 17th century.

Flourishing slave marts grew up on the African coast, where native chieftains made large supplies of slaves available by capturing enemy tribesmen in battle and bringing them out of the jungles to the ports…There, the chieftains sold their human merchandise to the European traders, and the unfortunate victims were then packed into the dark, filthy holds of the ships for the journey to America…this journey called the “middle passage.”

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For weeks, occasionally months, the slaves were kept chained below deck, unable to stand, hardly able to breathe, supplied with minimal food and water…Those who died en route…and there were many...were simply thrown overboard….Once in the colonies, the slaves were auctioned off to white landowners and transported…terrified and bewildered…to their new homes.

The first slave laborers arrived in English North America in 1620…and as English seamen began to establish themselves in the slave trade…the flow to the colonies gradually increased.

By the end of the 17th century, about 25,000 slaves lived in English America (approximately 10% of the total population)…But, because the slaves were so heavily concentrated in a few Southern colonies, they were already beginning to outnumber whites in many areas.

It was not entirely clear at first that the status of black slaves in America would be fundamentally different from that of white indentured servants…In the rugged conditions of the 17th century South, it was often difficult for whites and blacks to maintain strictly separate roles….In some areas, South Carolina for example where black arrivals grew more quickly than anywhere else…whites and blacks lived and worked together for a time on terms of relative equality.

Some slaves were freed after a term of servitude (just like white indentured servants) and others were treated much like white hired servants….Gradually, however, relations between races evolved in such a way that a rigid distinction became established between black and white.

White indentured servants were necessarily freed after a term of servitude; their masters were required by contract to release them….There was no such necessity to free slaves, and the assumption slowly spread that blacks would remain in service permanently…The result was a system of permanent servitude…a system made legal in the early 18th century when colonial assemblies began to pass “slave codes” limiting the rights of blacks (both free and slave) and ensuring almost absolute authority to white masters.

C. New Immigration

Besides the Africans, other non-English peoples came in large numbers to the colonies after the end of the 17th century.

Populations of some of the colonies swelled from vast numbers of arrivals from France, Germany, Switzerland, Ireland, and Scotland….All of these various immigrants contributed to the remarkable growth of the colonies.

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In 1700, the colonial population totaled 250,000 or less…by 1775, it was nearly 2.5 million….From there, the number practically doubled every 25 years.

Important as the continuing immigration was, the rapid growth of the colonial population was mainly due to natural increase, to the excess of births over deaths….In the colonies, with their abundance of land and opportunity, large families were an asset.

III. The Colonial Economy

Although colonial Americans engaged almost from the beginning in a wide range of economic pursuits, it was farming that dominated all areas of settlement throughout the 17th and 18th centuries….However, beyond that basic similarity the economies of the different regions varied markedly from one another.

In the South, economic life revolved around the cultivation of marketable crops through the plantation system…In the North, where farming was usually less profitable, the economy was more diverse and included an important commercial sector.

A. The Southern Economy

In the Chesapeake region tobacco established itself early in the 1600’s as the basis of the colonial economy.

Demand for tobacco in England and continental Europe expanded quickly once the substance was introduced there…After 1700, great tobacco plantations employing 100’s of slaves were quick to emerge….The small farms of a hundred acres, cultivated by the family of the owner with perhaps two or three slaves, was now being overshadowed by great estates.

The Maryland plantation of Charles Carroll of Carrollton, reputedly the wealthiest man in the colonies, covered 40,000 acres and contained 285 slaves…Other plantations, in Maryland, Virginia, and the tobacco-growing regions of North Carolina, eventually attained similar size.

Elsewhere in the South, the economy developed along different lines…South Carolina and Georgia were unsuitable for tobacco growing, therefore they relied instead on rice production.

Beginning in the 1740’s, indigo became another important crop in the southernmost colonies…The brilliant blue dye that indigo produced found immediate favor in England, which had traditionally been dependent on foreign sources for such coloring substances.

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Because of this early dependence on large-scale cash crops, the Southern colonies developed far less of a commercial or industrial economy than the colonies to the north.

The trading in tobacco and rice was handled by merchants based in London and in the Northern colonies…Few cities of more than modest size developed in the South…no substantial merchant communities emerged in the South….Therefore, a pattern was established that would characterize the Southern economy, and differentiate it from that of other regions, for more than 200 years.

B. The Northern Economy

The economies of the Northern colonies…the settlements stretching from Pennsylvania into Maine…were even more varied than those of their Southern counterparts.

In the North, as in the South, agriculture continued to dominate, yet it was a far more diverse agriculture…and, in addition to farming, there gradually emerged an important commercial sector of the economy, with far-reaching effects on the future of the region.

One reason that agriculture did not remain the exclusive economic pursuit of the North was that conditions for farming were far less favorable in the North than they were in the South….In New England, in particular, colder weather and hard rocky soil made it almost impossible for colonists to develop a successful commercial farming system.

Instead, most settlers cultivated relatively small areas of land, growing food, raising animals, and in general attempting to make themselves self-sufficient.

One exception to the normal New England farm scene was found on the shores and islands of Rhode Island…There, rich and extensive farms existed, and because of this, Rhode Island was one of the few Northern areas where large amounts of African slaves were common.

Conditions for agriculture were far better in the Northern middle colonies, where soil was excellent and the weather slightly warmer….Farmers in this area, particularly New York and Pennsylvania, concentrated less on growing crops for their own use and focused more on marketable crops…such as wheat… for sale in the colonies and abroad.

From time to time, entrepreneurs in New England and the middle colonies attempted to augment their agricultural economy with industrial enterprises. At the simplest level, almost every colonist engaged in a certain amount of “industry” at home…such as, carpentry, weaving, making soap and candles, and other tasks basic to the life of the family.

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On a larger level, craftsmen and skilled workers established themselves in colonial towns as cobblers, blacksmiths, rifle makers, cabinetmakers, silversmiths, printers, and so forth.

In some areas, industry developers harnessed the waterpower of the many streams and rivers to run small mills…for grinding corn, processing cloth, and milling lumber….And, in some areas, large-scale shipbuilding operations began to grow.

More important than manufacturing to the economy of the Northern colonies were the so-called extractive industries…those industries that exploited the natural resources of the continent.

At first, it was trapping that seemed to hold out the most promise for the New England economy…A flourishing fur trade grew up during the first decades of settlement…but, by the mid-17th century the supply of fur-bearing animals had been nearly exhausted, and the trade all but ceased.

For the next century and beyond, the Northern colonists relied instead on lumbering, fishing, and mining…These extractive industries provided what manufacturing and agriculture often failed to give the colonists…that is, commodities that could be exported to England in exchange for manufactured goods…Therefore, these industries helped to produce the most distinctive feature of the Northern economy…a thriving commercial social class.

C. The Rise of Commerce

The inability of any one colony, or any one region, to attain genuine economic self-sufficiency made the development of some level of commerce inevitable.

Perhaps the most remarkable feature of colonial commerce in the 17th century was that it survived at all, because there were many obstacles that stood in the way of successful commerce…such as, there was no commonly accepted medium of exchange.

The colonies had almost no gold or silver coins…They experimented at times with different forms of paper currency, however, such paper was not accepted as payment for any goods from abroad, and it was ultimately outlawed by British Parliament…For the most part, colonial merchants had to rely on a system of barter (which is trading goods without using money), or on crude money substitutes such as beaver skins.

A second obstacle was the near impossibility of rationalizing trade….No merchant could be certain that the goods on which his commerce relied would be produced in sufficient quantity…nor could he be certain of finding adequate markets for them if they were.

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Despite these and other problems, commerce in the colonies not only survived…it grew.

From this growth there emerged a group of businessmen who by the mid-18th century were beginning to constitute a distinct merchant class…Concentrated in the port cities of the North (Boston, New York, and Philadelphia) these merchants had the advantage of protection from foreign competition, since the British Navigation Acts had excluded all non-British ships from the colonial trade.

IV. Patterns of Society

It was not only the composition of its population and the structure of its economy that the society of the colonies differed from that of England…it was also in the nature of its most basic social institutions…the class structure, the community, and the family.

The class system of England was unable to re-create itself in North America…Although there were sharp class distinctions in the colonies, there was no entrenched noble class as there was in England…Also, there were many more opportunities for social mobility (both up and down).

There emerged also, new forms of community whose structure reflected less the British model than the realities of the American wilderness…These forms varied greatly from one region to another…but several basic…and distinctly American…types emerged.

These were the Plantation communities, the Puritan communities, and the Cities.

A. The Plantation

The plantation system of the American South illustrated clearly both the differences between colonial and English class systems and the way in which colonial communities evolved in response to local conditions.

The first plantations emerged in the early settlements of Virginia and Maryland in response to the establishment of tobacco as the economic basis of the Chesapeake.

In the early days in Virginia, plantations were little more than crude clearings on the frontier, where landowners and indentured servants worked side by side in conditions so horrible that death was an everyday occurrence.

Even in later years, when the death rate declined and the landholdings became more established, plantations were seldom more than simple farms.

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The economy of the plantation was a precarious one…In good years, a successful grower could earn great profits, enabling him to expand his operations…But, without control over his market, the planter was also constantly at risk…When prices for his crops fell, he could face the prospect of ruin….Therefore, it could be said that the plantation economy created many new wealthy landowners, but it also destroyed many as well.

Because plantations were normally far from cities and towns, they often became self-contained communities.

Residents lived in close proximity to one another in a cluster of buildings that included the “great house”, the service buildings, the barns, and the cabins of the slaves…Wealthier planters often created something resembling a full town on their plantations, with a school, a chapel, and sometimes a large population.

Smaller planters, however, lived far more modestly, but still lived in a relatively self-sufficient world.

The African-American slaves, of course, lived very differently…On the smaller plantations, it was not always possible for a rigid separation to develop between masters and slaves….But, where slaves lived together in substantial numbers, they began to develop a society and culture of their own.

Although the whites did nothing in particular to encourage marriage among slaves, the slaves themselves developed a strong and elaborate family structure….Families often lived together and worked together, tending their own private gardens allotted to them for growing their own food.

The slave family was so successful that the African-American population increased more rapidly in the early 18th century than the white.

Slaves also developed languages of their own….In South Carolina, for example, the early slaves communicated with one another in Gullah, a hybrid language of English and African tongues, that not only reinforced the slave’s sense of connection with their ancestry but also enabled them to engage in conversation that their white masters could not understand.

There also emerged a distinctive slave religion, which was blended with Christianity and African folklore…This religion became a central element in the emergence of an independent black culture.

Most slaves worked as field hands, but there was a wide variety of other roles they could perform….Some were house servants and as a result often lived in what was…by slave standards…great luxury.

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Others learned trades and crafts…such as, blacksmithing and carpentry…and became particularly valuable members of the plantation work force…These skilled craftsmen were at times hired out to other planters, and some slaves were even permitted to set up their own businesses in towns or cities, paying a share of their profits to their owners, and, on occasion, buying their own freedom.

Because of this, there was a small but significant free African-American population living in the Southern cities by the time of the Revolution.

As an economic unit, the Southern plantation was both efficient and productive…helping the agricultural output of the region expand greatly in the course of the colonial period.

As a social unit, it achieved stability at the cost of human freedom…The relationship between slaves and master on the plantation was a complex one….at times cruel, and at other times warm and kind…But, whatever its particular character, it rested in the end on the enforced servitude of one race on another.

The result of which was the emergence of two separate cultures in the South…closely tied to one another, yet separate…the culture of the white American planter and the culture of the African-American slave.

B. The Puritan Community

A very different form of community emerged in the Puritan area of New England, but it was one, like that of the plantation, that was distinctively American.

The characteristic community in New England was not the isolated farm, it was the town… Each of these communities drew up a covenant among its members, binding all residents together in a religious and social commitment to unity and harmony.

The structure of the towns generally reflected the spirit of the covenant…Colonists laid out a village, with houses and a meeting house arranged around a central pasture called a “common.”

The New England townsmen lived with his neighbors close by, reinforcing the strong sense of community…Once established, a town was generally left alone by the higher authorities of the colony.

Residents held a yearly “town meeting” to decide on important issues and to choose a of “selectmen”, who governed the town until the next general gathering…As a rule, all adult males were permitted to participate in the meeting…but important social distinctions remained, the most crucial of which was membership in the church.

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Only those residents who could give evidence of having been “saved”…thus assured of heavenly salvation…were admitted to membership in the church, although other residents of the town were required to attend church services.

Puritan towns were usually self-sufficient…Each established its own school as required by colonial statute…A 1647 Massachusetts law required every community of more than 50 households to hire a schoolmaster to teach basic reading and writing, and a larger town, one over 100 households had to set up a rough equivalent to today’s high school.

Villages maintained relatively self-contained economies as well…Residents consumed most of what they produced, and they used the surplus to trade for those comparatively few goods they could not make for themselves.

Central to the Puritan community, was the family….And, central to each family was the father, who exercised absolute power over family members…The English system of primogeniture (the passing of all property to the firstborn son) was not practiced in American Puritan society….Instead, a father divided up his lands among all of his sons.

His control of this inheritance was one of the most effective means of exercising power over the family….Often a son would reach his late twenties before his father would allow him to move into his own household and work his own land.

So…as you can see…the early Puritan community was tightly knit…The town as a whole was bound together by the initial covenant, by the central layout of the village, by the power of the church, and by the town meeting….The family was held together by a rigid structure controlled by the father that limited opportunities for younger members to strike out on their own.

As the years passed and the communities grew, this rigid structure began to come under increasing strain…By the late 17th century, New England had ceased to be a purely agricultural society…a new commercial sector had been added to the economy, and new economic opportunities had intruded themselves into even the most isolated communities.

The family structure was also undergoing changes…For the first several generations, the available land within any town had been sufficient to satisfy the needs of younger members of a family….Even when a father had to divide his land among four or five sons, there was usually enough for all…However, by the third generation, when such lands were being divided for the third time, there was often too little to go around.

Sons were beginning to be upset over the prospect of remaining permanently under the control of their fathers, with no prospect of independence.

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And towns as a whole were growing overcrowded. The result was that in community after community, groups of younger residents were breaking away and moving elsewhere to form towns of their own.

Therefore, we now see the original communal nature of the Puritan community being challenged and slowly eroded…This gap between the expectation of a united community and the reality of a diverse and divided community often caused severe social and psychological strain.

At the extreme, these tensions could produce bizarre and disastrous events…One example was the widespread hysteria in the 1680’s and 1690’s over witchcraft in New England…It reached its greatest extremes in Salem, Massachusetts, where the strange behavior of several children and the mysterious actions of two West Indian slaves steeped in voodoo lore produced hundreds of accusations of witchcraft.

Nineteen residents of Salem were put to death before the trials finally ended in 1692.

On the surface, the witchcraft crisis was an example of wild superstition and social hysteria….However, a closer examination reveals deeper origins.

Research into the background of the phenomenon in Salem has indicated that the Witchcraft turmoil there was in large part a result of severe social tensions in the town…These tensions were between those who were gravitating toward the new commercial economy of the town’s thriving seaport and those who remained tied to the stagnating agricultural economy of the community’s western areas.

Residents of the outlying areas of the town resented the favored position of their eastern neighbors…But, since such jealousy could not be openly expressed in a Puritan community, it found expression instead in the form of accusations of witchcraft.

The accusations were usually made by the relatively isolated and unsuccessful members of the community against people associated with its more prosperous segments…Few communities reacted to these tensions as violently as Salem, but social change created uneasiness in towns throughout New England.

C. Cities

To call the commercial centers that emerged along the Atlantic coast in the 18th century “cities” would be to stretch today’s definition of that word. Even the largest colonial community was scarcely bigger than a modern small town….Yet, by the standards of the 18th century, cities did indeed exist in America.

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The two largest ports…Philadelphia and New York….had populations of 28,000 and 25,000 respectively.

Colonial cities developed in response to both internal and external commercial demands…They served as trading centers for the farmers of the region, and, they were also the markets of international trade…Their social, economic, and political leaders…therefore…were the merchants.

In most colonial communities, differences in wealth were generally not very great…but in the cities…they sometimes came to be enormous.

Wealthy merchants and their families moved along crowded streets dressed in fine imported clothes, often riding in fancy carriages, coming in and out of large houses with staffs of servants.

Also living in close proximity to the wealthy merchants were the large numbers of minor tradesmen, workers, and indigents, dressed simply and living in crowed and often filthy conditions…Therefore, in the colonial cities, sharp class distinction between the “haves” and the “have-nots” were beginning to emerge.

There were other distinctive features of city life as well…Cities were the centers of much of what industry there was in the colonies…such as, distilleries for turning molasses into rum…They were also the locations of the most advanced schools and sophisticated cultural activities, and of shops where imported goods could be purchased.

In addition, colonial cities were communities with social problems that are normally associated with dense populations….such as, crime, vice, pollution, and traffic.

Perhaps most important for the political future of the colonies, cities became places where new ideas could circulate and be discussed…Because there were printers, it was possible to have regular newspapers…Books and other publications from abroad introduced new intellectual influences….And, the taverns and coffee houses of cities provided forums in which people could gather and debate the issues of the day.

Therefore it is hardly surprising that when the revolutionary crisis began to build in the 1760’s and 1770’s, it manifested itself first in the cities.