The Growth of Colonial America

� C r e a t i n g A n g l o - A m e r i c a 1 6 6 0 – 1 7 5 0

F O C U S Q U E S T I O N S • How did the English empire in America expand in the

mid-seventeenth century?

• How was slavery established in the Western Atlantic world?

• What major social and political crises rocked the colonies in the late seventeenth century?

• What were the directions of social and economic change in the eighteenth-century colonies?

• How did patterns of class and gender roles change in eighteenth-century America?

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In the last quarter of the seventeenth century, a series of crises rocked the European colonies of North America. Social and political tensions boiled over in sometimes ruthless confl icts between rich and poor, free and slave, settler and Indian, and members of different religious groups. At the same time, struggles within and between European empires echoed in the colonies. Aggrieved groups seized upon the language of freedom to advance their goals. Although each confl ict had its own local causes, taken together they added up to a general crisis of colonial society in the area that would become the United States.

The bloodiest and most bitter confl ict occurred in southern New England, where in 1675 an Indian alliance launched attacks on farms and settlements that were encroaching on Indian lands. It was the most dramatic and violent warfare in the region in the entire seventeenth century.

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New Englanders described the Wampanoag leader Metacom (known to the colonists as King Philip) as the uprising’s mastermind, although in fact most tribes fought under their own leaders. By this time, the white population considerably outnumbered the Indians. But the fate of the New England colonies hung in the balance for several months. By 1676, Indian forces had attacked nearly half of New England’s ninety towns. Twelve in Massachusetts were destroyed. As refugees fl ed eastward, the line of settlement was pushed back almost to the Atlantic coast. Some 1,000 settlers, out of a population of 52,000, and 3,000 of New England’s 20,000 Indians, perished in the fi ghting.

In mid-1676, the tide of battle turned and a ferocious counterattack broke the Indians’ power once and for all. Although the uprising united numerous tribes, others remained loyal to the colonists. The role of the Iroquois in providing essential military aid to the colonists helped to solidify their developing alliance with the government of New York. Together, colonial and Indian forces infl icted devastating punishment on the rebels. Metacom was captured and executed, Indian villages were destroyed, and captives, including men, women, and children, were killed or sold into slavery in the West Indies. Most of the survivors fl ed to Canada or New York. Even the “praying Indians”—about 2,000 Indians who had converted to Christianity and lived in autonomous communities under Puritan supervision—suffered. Removed from their towns to Deer Island in Boston Harbor, supposedly for their own protection, many perished from disease and lack of food. Both sides committed atrocities in this merciless confl ict, but in its aftermath the image of Indians as bloodthirsty savages became fi rmly entrenched in the New England mind.

In the long run, King Philip’s War produced a broadening of freedom for white New Englanders by expanding their access to land. But this freedom rested on the fi nal dispossession of the region’s Indians.

GLOBAL COMPETITION AND THE EXPANSION OF ENGLAND’S EMPIRE

THE MERCANTILIST SYSTEM

s the New World became a battleground in European nations’ end- less contests for wealth and power, England moved to seize control of Atlantic trade, solidify its hold on North America’s eastern coast, and exert greater control over its empire. By the middle of the seventeenth century, it was apparent that the colonies could be an important source of wealth for the mother country. According to the prevailing theory

known as “mercantilism,” the government should regulate economic activity so as to promote national power. It should encourage manufacturing and

cA

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commerce by special bounties, monopolies, and other mea- sures. Above all, trade should be controlled so that more gold and silver fl owed into the country than left it. That is, exports of goods, which gen- erated revenue from abroad, should exceed imports, which required paying foreigners for their products. In the mer- cantilist outlook, the role of colonies was to serve the inter- ests of the mother country by producing marketable raw materials and importing man- ufactured goods from home. “Foreign trade,” declared an infl uential work written in 1664 by a London merchant, formed the basis of “England’s treasure.” Commerce, not ter- ritorial plunder, was the foun- dation of empire.

Under Oliver Cromwell, as noted in Chapter 2, Parliament passed in 1651 the fi rst Naviga- tion Act, which aimed to wrest control of world trade from the Dutch, whose merchants profi ted from free trade with all parts of the world and all existing empires. Additional measures followed in 1660 and 1663. England’s new economic policy, mercantilism, rested on the idea that England should enjoy the profi ts arising from the English empire.

According to the Navigation laws, certain “enumerated” goods—essentially the most

C H R O NO LO G Y

1651 First Navigation Act issued by Parliament

1664 English seize New Netherland, which becomes New York

1670 First English settlers arrive in Carolina

1675 Lords of Trade established

1675– King Philip’s War 1676

1676 Bacon’s Rebellion

1677 Covenant Chain alliance

1681 William Penn granted Pennsyl- vania

1682 Charter of Liberty drafted by Penn

1683 Charter of Liberties and Privileges drafted by New York assembly

1686– Dominion of New England 1689

1688 Glorious Revolution in England

1689 Parliament enacts a Bill of Rights

Maryland Protestant Associa- tion revolts

Leisler’s Rebellion

Parliament passes Toleration Act

1691 Plymouth colony absorbed into Massachusetts

1692 Salem witch trials

1705 Virginia passes Slave Code

1715– Yamasee uprising 1717

1737 Walking Purchase

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valuable colonial products, such as tobacco and sugar—had to be transported in English ships and sold initially in English ports, although they could then be re-exported to foreign markets. Similarly, most European goods imported into the colonies had to be shipped through England, where customs duties were paid. This enabled English merchants, manufacturers, shipbuilders, and sailors to reap the benefi ts of colonial trade, and the government to enjoy added income from taxes. As members of the empire, American colonies would profi t as well, since their ships were considered English. Indeed, the Navigation Acts stimulated the rise of New England’s shipbuilding industry.

THE CONQUEST OF NEW NETHERLAND

The restoration of the English monarchy when Charles II assumed the throne in 1660 sparked a new period of colonial expansion. The government chartered new trading ventures, notably the Royal African Company, which was given a monopoly of the slave trade. Within a generation, the number of English colonies in North America doubled. First to come under English control was New Netherland, seized in 1664 during an Anglo-Dutch war that also saw England gain control of Dutch trading posts in Africa. King Charles II awarded the colony to his younger brother James, the duke of York, with “full and absolute power” to govern as he pleased. (Hence the colony’s name became New York.)

New Netherland always remained peripheral to the far-fl ung Dutch empire. The Dutch fought to retain their holdings in Africa, Asia, and South America, but they surrendered New Netherland in 1664 without a fi ght. English rule transformed this minor military base into an important imperial outpost, a seaport trading with the Caribbean and Europe, and a launching pad for mili- tary operations against the French. New York’s European population, around 9,000 when the English assumed control, rose to 20,000 by 1685.

NEW YORK AND THE RIGHTS OF ENGLISHMEN AND ENGLISHWOMEN

English rule expanded the freedom of some New Yorkers, while reducing that of others. Many English observers had concluded that Dutch prosperity— what one writer called “the prodigious increase of the Netherlanders in their domestic and foreign trade”—stemmed from “their toleration of different opinions in matters of religion,” which attracted “many industrious people of other countries.” Thus, the terms of surrender guaranteed that the English would respect the religious beliefs and property holdings of the colony’s many ethnic communities. But English law ended the Dutch tradition by which married women conducted business in their own name and inherited some of the property acquired during marriage. As colonists of Dutch origin adapted to English rule, their wills directed more attention to advancing the fortunes of their sons than providing for their wives and daughters. There had been many

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E A S T E R N N O R T H A M E R I C A I N T H E S E V E N T E E N T H A N D E A R L Y E I G H T E E N T H C E N T U R I E S

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aw ren

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James R.

Lake H uron

Lake E rie

Lake Ontario

Lake Champlain

La ke

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Lake Superior

Atlantic Ocean

Charles Town (Charleston)

Savannah

Jamestown

Baltimore Philadelphia

New Amsterdam New Haven (1638)

Hartford Providence (1636)

Boston

Montreal

Quebec (1608)

Port Royal (1606)

Fort Orange

Raleigh expedition to Roanoke Island (1585)

NEW HAMPSHIRE

THE CHESAPEAKE

CAROLINA (1663)

GEORGIA (1732)

MASSACHUSETTS BAY (1629–1630)

PLYMOUTH (1620)

RHODE ISLAND (1636–1643)

CONNECTICUT (1636–1639)

NEW NETHERLAND (1644)

NEW YORK (1644)

PENNSYLVANIA (1681)

NEW SWEDEN (1638)

MARYLAND (1632)

VIRGINIA (1607)

NEW FRANCE

PENOBSCOT

ABENAKI

KENNEBECHURONOTTAWA

OTTAWA

WESTERN DELAWARE

SENECA TUSCARORA

CAYUGA ONONDAGA

ONEIDA

MOHAWK

IROQUOIS

NARRAGANSETT

PEQUOT

DELAWARE

SHAWNEE

CATAWBA

YAMASEE

UPPER CHEROKEE

MIDDLE CHEROKEE

LOWER CHEROKEEUPPER

NATCHEZ

LOWER NATCHEZ

CREEK

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0

100

100

200 miles

200 kilometers

Date of settlement Dutch settlement English settlement French settlement Spanish settlement

(1585)

By the early eighteenth century, numerous English colonies populated eastern North America, while the French had established their own presence to the north and west.

female traders in New Amsterdam (often widows who had inherited a deceased husband’s property), but few remained by the end of the seventeenth century.

The English also introduced more restrictive attitudes toward blacks. In colonial New York City, as in New Amsterdam, those residents who enjoyed the status of “freeman,” obtained by birth in the city or by an act of local

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authorities, enjoyed special privileges compared to others, including the right to work in various trades. But the English, in a reversal of Dutch practice, expelled free blacks from many skilled jobs.

Others benefi ted enormously from English rule. The duke of York and his appointed governors continued the Dutch practice of awarding immense land grants to favorites, including 160,000 acres to Robert Livingston and 90,000 to Frederick Philipse. By 1700, nearly 2 million acres of land were owned by only fi ve New York families who intermarried regularly, exerted considerable political infl uence, and formed one of colonial America’s most tightly knit landed elites.

NEW YORK AND THE INDIANS

Initially, English rule also strengthened the position of the Iroquois Confed- eracy of upstate New York. After a complex series of negotiations in the mid- 1670s, Sir Edmund Andros, who had been appointed governor of New York after fi ghting the French in the Caribbean, formed an alliance known as the Covenant Chain, in which the imperial ambitions of the English and Indians reinforced one another. The Five (later Six) Iroquois Nations assisted Andros in clearing parts of New York of rival tribes and helped the British in attacks on the French and their Indian allies. Andros, for his part, recognized the Iro- quois claim to authority over Indian communities in the vast area stretching to the Ohio River. But beginning in the 1680s, Indians around the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley regrouped and with French aid attacked the Iroquois, push- ing them to the east. By the end of the century, the Iroquois Nations adopted a policy of careful neutrality, seeking to play the European empires off one another while continuing to profi t from the fur trade.

THE CHARTER OF LIBERTIES

Many colonists, meanwhile, began to complain that they were being denied the “liberties of Englishmen,” especially the right to consent to taxation. There had been no representative assembly under the Dutch, and the gov- ernors appointed by the duke of York at fi rst ruled without one. Discontent was especially strong on Long Island, which had been largely settled by New Englanders used to self-government.

In 1683, the duke agreed to call an elected assembly, whose fi rst act was to draft a Charter of Liberties and Privileges. The charter required that elections be held every three years among male property owners and the freemen of New York City; it also reaffi rmed traditional English rights such as trial by jury and security of property, as well as religious toleration for all Protestants. In part, the charter refl ected an effort by newer English colonists to assert dominance over older Dutch settlers by establishing the principle that the

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“liberties” to which New Yorkers were entitled were those enjoyed by English- men at home.

THE FOUNDING OF CAROLINA

For more than three decades after the establishment of Maryland in 1634, no new English settlement was planted in North America. Then, in 1663, Charles II awarded to eight proprietors the right to establish a colony to the north of Florida, as a barrier to Spanish expansion. Not until 1670 did the fi rst settlers arrive to found Carolina. In its early years, Carolina was the “colony of a colony.” It began as an offshoot of the tiny island of Barbados. In the mid- seventeenth century, Barbados was the Caribbean’s richest plantation economy, but a shortage of available land led wealthy planters to seek opportunities in Carolina for their sons. The early settlers of Carolina sought Indian allies by offering guns for deer hides and captives, a policy that unleashed widespread raiding among Indians for slaves to sell. The colonists also encouraged native allies to attack Indians in Spanish Florida; in one series of wars between 1704 and 1706 the Creek, Savannah, and Yamasee enslaved almost 10,000 Florida Indians, most of them shipped to other mainland colonies and the West Indies. Indeed, between 1670 and 1720, the number of Indian slaves exported from Charleston was larger than the number of African slaves imported. In 1715, the Yamasee and Creek, alarmed by the enormous debts they had incurred in trade with the settlers and by slave traders’ raids into their terri- tory, rebelled. The uprising was crushed, and most of the remaining Indians were enslaved or driven out of the colony into Spanish Florida, from where they occasionally launched raids against English settlements.

The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, issued by the proprietors in 1669, proposed to establish a feudal society with a hereditary nobility (with strange titles like landgraves and caciques), serfs, and slaves. Needing to attract settlers quickly, however, the proprietors also provided for an elected assembly and religious toleration—by now recognized as essential to enticing migrants to North America. They also instituted a generous headright system, offering 150 acres for each member of an arriving family (in the case of inden- tured servants, of course, the land went to the employer) and 100 acres to male servants who completed their terms.

None of the baronies envisioned in the Fundamental Constitutions were actually established. Slavery, not feudalism, made Carolina an extremely hier- archical society. The proprietors instituted a rigorous legal code that promised slaveowners “absolute power and authority” over their human property and included imported slaves in the headright system. This allowed any persons who settled in Carolina and brought with them slaves, including planters from Barbados who resettled in the colony, instantly to acquire large new

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landholdings. In its early days, however, the economy centered on cattle raising and trade with local Indians, not agriculture. Carolina grew slowly until plant- ers discovered the staple—rice—that would make them the wealthiest elite in English North America and their colony an epicenter of mainland slavery.

THE HOLY EXPERIMENT

The last English colony to be established in the seventeenth century was Pennsylvania. The proprietor, William Penn, envisioned it as a place where those facing religious persecution in Europe could enjoy spiritual freedom, and colonists and Indians would coexist in harmony. Penn’s late father had been a supporter and creditor of Charles II. To cancel his debt to the Penn family and bolster the English presence in North America, the king in 1681 granted Penn a vast tract of land south and west of New York, as well as the old Swedish-Dutch colony that became Delaware.

A devout member of the Society of Friends, or Quakers, Penn was particu- larly concerned with establishing a refuge for his coreligionists, who faced increasing persecution in England. He had already assisted a group of English Quakers in purchasing half of what became the colony of New Jersey from Lord John Berkeley, who had received a land grant from the duke of York. Penn was largely responsible for the frame of government announced in 1677, the West Jersey Concessions, one of the most liberal of the era. Based on Quaker ideals, it created an elected assembly with a broad suffrage and established religious liberty. Penn hoped that West Jersey would become a society of small farmers, not large landowners.

QUAKER LIBERTY

Like the Puritans, Penn considered his colony a “holy experiment,” but of a different kind—“a free colony for all mankind that should go hither.” He hoped that Pennsylvania could be governed according to Quaker principles, among them the equality of all persons (including women, blacks, and Indians) before God and the primacy of the individual conscience. To Quakers, liberty was a universal entitlement, not the possession of any single people—a position that would eventually make them the fi rst group of whites to repudiate slavery. Penn also treated Indians with a consideration almost unique in the colonial experience, arranging to purchase land before reselling it to colonists and offering refuge to tribes driven out of other colonies by warfare. Sometimes, he even purchased the same land twice, when more than one Indian tribe claimed it. Since Quakers were pacifi sts who came to America unarmed and did not even organize a militia until the 1740s, peace with the native population was essential. Penn’s Chain of Friendship appealed to the local Indians, promising protection from rival tribes who claimed domination over them.

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Religious freedom was Penn’s most fundamental principle. He condemned attempts to enforce “religious Uniformity” for depriving thousands of “free inhabitants” of England of the right to worship as they desired. His Charter of Liberty, approved by the assembly in 1682, offered “Christian liberty” to all who affi rmed a belief in God and did not use their freedom to promote “licen- tiousness.” There was no established church in Pennsylvania, and attendance at religious services was entirely voluntary, although Jews were barred from offi ce by a required oath affi rming belief in the divinity of Jesus Christ. At the same time, the Quakers upheld a strict code of personal morality. Penn’s Frame of Government prohibited swearing, drunkenness, and adultery, as well as popular entertainments of the era such as “revels, bull-baiting, and cock-fi ghting.” Private religious belief may not have been enforced by the gov- ernment, but moral public behavior certainly was. Not religious uniformity but a virtuous citizenry would be the foundation of Penn’s social order.

LAND IN PENNSYLVANIA

Given the power to determine the colony’s form of government, Penn estab- lished an appointed council to originate legislation and an assembly elected by male taxpayers and “freemen” (owners of 100 acres of land for free immigrants and 50 acres for former indentured servants). These rules made a majority of the male population eligible to vote. Penn owned all the colony’s land and sold it to settlers at low prices rather than granting it outright. Like other proprietors, he expected to turn a profi t, and like most of them, he never really did. But if Penn did not prosper, Pennsylvania did. A majority of the early settlers were Quakers from the British Isles. But Pennsylvania’s religious toleration, healthy climate, and inexpensive land, along with Penn’s aggressive efforts to publicize the colony’s advantages, soon attracted immigrants from all over western Europe.

Ironically, the freedoms Pennsylvania offered to European immigrants contributed to the deterioration of freedom for others. The colony’s successful efforts to attract settlers would eventually come into confl ict with Penn’s benevolent Indian policy. And the opening of Pennsylvania led to an immedi- ate decline in the number of indentured servants choosing to sail for Virginia and Maryland, a development that did much to shift those colonies toward reliance on slave labor.

ORIGINS OF AMERICAN SLAVERY

No European nation, including England, embarked on the colonization of the New World with the intention of relying on African slaves for the bulk of its labor force. But the incessant demand for workers spurred by the spread of tobacco cultivation eventually led Chesapeake planters to turn to the

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97How was slavery established in the Western Atlantic world?

transatlantic trade in slaves. Compared with indentured servants, slaves offered planters many advantages. As Africans, they could not claim the protections of English common law. Slaves’ terms of service never expired, and they therefore did not become a population of unruly landless men. Their children were slaves, and their skin color made it more diffi cult for them to escape into the surrounding society. African men, moreover, unlike their Native American counterparts, were accustomed to intensive agricul- tural labor, and they had encountered many diseases known in Europe and developed resistance to them, so were less likely to succumb to epidemics.

ENGLISHMEN AND AFRICANS

The English had long viewed alien peoples with disdain, including the Irish, Native Americans, and Africans. They described these strangers in remarkably similar language as savage, pagan, and uncivilized, often comparing them to animals. “Race”—the idea that humanity is divided into well-defi ned groups associated with skin color—is a modern concept that had not fully developed in the seventeenth century. Nor had “racism”—an ideology based on the belief that some races are inherently superior to others and entitled to rule over them. The main lines of division within humanity were thought to be civilization versus barbarism or Christianity versus heathenism, not color or race.

A Quaker Meeting, a painting by an unidentifi ed British artist, dating from the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. It illustrates the prominent place of women in Quaker gatherings.

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Nonetheless, anti-black stereotypes fl ourished in seventeenth-century Eng- land. Africans were seen as so alien—in color, religion, and social practices— that they were “enslavable” in a way that poor Englishmen were not. Most English also deemed Indians to be uncivilized. But the Indian population declined so rapidly, and it was so easy for Indians, familiar with the country- side, to run away, that Indian slavery never became viable. Some Indians were sold into slavery in the Caribbean. But it is diffi cult to enslave a people on their native soil. Slaves are almost always outsiders, transported from elsewhere to their place of labor.

SLAVERY IN HISTORY

Slavery has existed for nearly the entire span of human history. It was central to the societies of ancient Greece and Rome. Slavery survived for centuries in northern Europe after the collapse of the Roman Empire. Germans, Vikings, and Anglo-Saxons all held slaves. Slavery persisted even longer in the Mediter- ranean world, where a slave trade in Slavic peoples survived into the fi fteenth century. (The English word “slavery” derives from “Slav.”) Pirates from the Barbary Coast of North Africa regularly seized Christians from ships and enslaved them. In West Africa, as noted in Chapter 1, slavery and a slave trade predated the coming of Europeans, and small-scale slavery existed among Native Americans. But slavery in nearly all these instances differed greatly from the institution that developed in the New World.

In the Americas, slavery was based on the plantation, an agricultural enter- prise that brought together large numbers of workers under the control of a single owner. This imbalance magnifi ed the possibility of slave resistance and made it necessary to police the system rigidly. It encouraged the creation of a sharp boundary between slavery and freedom. Labor on slave plantations was far more demanding than in the household slavery common in Africa, and the death rate among slaves much higher. In the New World, slavery would come to be associated with race, a concept that drew a permanent line between whites and blacks. Unlike in Africa, slaves in the Americas who became free always carried with them in their skin color the mark of bondage—a visible sign of being considered unworthy of incorporation as equals into free society.

SLAVERY IN THE WEST INDIES

A sense of Africans as alien and inferior made their enslavement by the Eng- lish possible. But prejudice by itself did not create North American slavery. For this institution to take root, planters and government authorities had to be convinced that importing African slaves was the best way to solve their persis- tent shortage of labor. During the seventeenth century, the shipping of slaves from Africa to the New World became a major international business. But only

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a relative handful were brought to England’s mainland colonies. By the time plantation slavery became a major feature of life in English North America, it was already well entrenched elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere. By 1600, huge sugar plantations worked by slaves from Africa had made their appear- ance in Brazil, a colony of Portugal. In the seventeenth century, England, Holland, Denmark, and France joined Spain as owners of West Indian islands. English emigrants to the West Indies outnumbered those to North America in the fi rst part of the seventeenth century. In 1650, the English population of the West Indies exceeded that in all of North America. Generally, the fi rst settlers established mixed economies with small farms worked by white indentured servants. But as sugar planters engrossed the best land, they forced white farmers off island after island. White indentured servants proved as discontented as elsewhere. In 1629, when a Spanish expedition attacked the British island of Nevis, servants in the local militia joined them shouting, “Liberty, joyful liberty!”

With the Indian population having been wiped out by disease, and with the white indentured servants unwilling to do the back-breaking, monotonous work of sugar cultivation, the massive importation of slaves from Africa began. In 1645, for example, Barbados, a tiny island owned by England, was home to around 11,000 white farmers and indentured servants and 5,000

A lithograph by the German artist Johann Moritz Rugendas, who visited Brazil in the early 1820s, depicts the operation of a sugar mill. Slaves feed the cane into rollers, which grind it to crush out the juice.

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slaves. As sugar cultivation intensifi ed, planters turned increasingly to slave labor. By 1660, the island’s population had grown to 40,000, half European and half African. Ten years later, the slave population had risen to 82,000, concentrated on some 750 sugar plantations. Meanwhile, the white popula- tion stagnated. By the end of the seventeenth century, huge sugar plantations manned by hundreds of slaves dominated the West Indian economy, and on most of the islands the African population far outnumbered that of European origin.

Sugar was the fi rst crop to be mass-marketed to consumers in Europe. Before its emergence, international trade consisted largely of precious metals like gold and silver, and luxury goods aimed at an elite market, like the spices and silks imported from Asia. Sugar was by far the most important product of the British, French, and Portuguese empires, and New World sugar plantations produced immense profi ts for planters, merchants, and imperial governments. Saint Domingue, today’s Haiti, was the jewel of the French empire. In 1660, Barbados generated more trade than all the other English colonies combined.

Compared to its rapid introduction in Brazil and the West Indies, slavery developed slowly in North America. Slaves cost more than indentured ser- vants, and the high death rate among tobacco workers made it economically unappealing to pay for a lifetime of labor. For decades, servants from England formed the backbone of the Chesapeake labor force, and the number of Africans remained small. As late as 1680, there were only 4,500 blacks in the Chesapeake, a little more than 5 percent of the region’s population. The most important social distinction in the seventeenth-century Chesapeake was not between black and white but between the white plantation owners who domi- nated politics and society and everybody else—small farmers, indentured servants, and slaves.

SLAVERY AND THE LAW

Centuries before the voyages of Columbus, Spain had enacted Las Siete Partidas, a series of laws granting slaves certain rights relating to marriage, the holding of property, and access to freedom. These laws were transferred to Spain’s American empire. They were often violated, but nonetheless gave slaves opportunities to claim rights under the law. Moreover, the Catholic Church often encouraged masters to free individual slaves. The law of slavery in English North America would become far more repressive than in the Spanish empire, especially on the all-important question of whether avenues existed by which slaves could obtain freedom.

For much of the seventeenth century, however, the legal status of Chesa- peake blacks remained ambiguous and the line between slavery and freedom more permeable than it would later become. The fi rst Africans, twenty in

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all, arrived in Virginia in 1619. British pirates sailing under the Dutch fl ag had seized them from a Portuguese ship carrying slaves from Angola, on the southwestern coast of Africa, to modern-day Mexico. Small numbers followed in subsequent years. Although the fi rst black arrivals were almost certainly treated as slaves, it appears that at least some managed to become free after serving a term of years. To be sure, racial distinctions were enacted into law from the outset. As early as the 1620s, the law barred blacks from serving in the Virginia militia. The government punished sexual relations outside of marriage between Africans and Europeans more severely than the same acts involving two white persons. In 1643, a poll tax (a tax levied on individuals) was imposed on African but not white women. In both Virginia and Mary- land, however, free blacks could sue and testify in court, and some even managed to acquire land and purchase white servants or African slaves. It is not known exactly how Anthony Johnson, who apparently arrived in Virginia as a slave during the 1620s, obtained his freedom. But by the 1640s, he was the owner of slaves and of several hundred acres of land on Virginia’s eastern shore. Blacks and whites labored side by side in the tobacco fi elds, sometimes ran away together, and established intimate relationships.

THE RISE OF CHESAPEAKE SLAVERY

Evidence of blacks being held as slaves for life appears in the historical record of the 1640s. In registers of property, for example, white servants are listed by the number of years of labor, while blacks, with higher valuations, have no terms of service associated with their names. Not until the 1660s, however, did the laws of Virginia and Maryland refer explicitly to slavery. As tobacco planting spread and the demand for labor increased, the condition of black and white servants diverged sharply. Authorities sought to improve the status of white servants, hoping to counteract the widespread impression in England that Virginia was a death trap. At the same time, access to freedom for blacks receded.

A Virginia law of 1662 provided that in the case of a child one of whose parents was free and one slave, the status of the offspring followed that of the mother. (This provision not only reversed the European practice of defi ning a child’s status through the father but also made the sexual abuse of slave women profi table for slaveholders, since any children that resulted remained the owner’s property.) In 1667, the Virginia House of Burgesses decreed that religious conversion did not release a slave from bondage. Thus, Christians could own other Christians as slaves. Moreover, authorities sought to prevent the growth of the free black population by defi ning all offspring of interracial relationships as illegitimate, severely punishing white women who begat chil- dren with black men, and prohibiting the freeing of any slave unless he or she were transported out of the colony. By 1680, even though the black population

How was slavery established in the Western Atlantic world?

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102 Ch . 3 : CREATING ANGLO-AMERICA

was still small, notions of racial difference were well entrenched in the law. In England’s American empire, wrote one contemporary, “these two words, Negro and Slave [have] by custom grown homogenous and convertible.” In British North America, unlike the Spanish empire, no distinctive mulatto, or mixed- race, class existed; the law treated everyone with African ancestry as black.

BACON’S REBELLION: LAND AND LABOR IN V IRGINIA

Virginia’s shift from white indentured servants to African slaves as the main plantation labor force was accelerated by one of the most dramatic confronta- tions of this era, Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676. Governor William Berkeley had for thirty years run a corrupt regime in alliance with an inner circle of the colony’s wealthiest tobacco planters. He rewarded his followers with land grants and lucrative offi ces. At fi rst, Virginia’s tobacco boom had benefi ted not only planters but also smaller farmers, some of them former servants who managed to acquire farms. But as tobacco farming spread inland, planters connected with the governor engrossed the best lands, leaving freed servants (a growing population, since Virginia’s death rate was fi nally falling) with no options but to work as tenants or to move to the frontier. At the same time,

heavy taxes on tobacco and falling prices because of overproduction reduced the prospects of small farm- ers. By the 1670s, poverty among whites had reached levels reminis- cent of England. In addition, the right to vote, previously enjoyed by all adult men, was confi ned to land- owners in 1670. Governor Berkeley maintained peaceful relations with Virginia’s remaining native popu- lation. His refusal to allow white settlement in areas reserved for Indians angered many land-hungry colonists.

As early as 1661, a Virginia inden- tured servant was accused of plan- ning an uprising among those “who would be for liberty and free from bondage.” Fifteen years later, long- simmering social tensions coupled with widespread resentment against the injustices of the Berkeley regime

Sir William Berkeley, governor of colonial Virginia, 1641–1652 and 1660–1677, in a portrait by Sir Peter Lely. Berkeley’s authoritarian rule helped to spark Bacon’s Rebellion.

OR IGI NS OF A M E R IC A N SL AV E RY

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erupted in Bacon’s Rebellion. The spark was a minor confrontation between Indians and colonists on Virginia’s western frontier. Settlers now demanded that the governor authorize the extermination or removal of the colony’s Indi- ans, to open more land for whites. Fearing all-out warfare and continuing to profi t from the trade with Indians in deerskins, Berkeley refused. An uprising followed that soon careened out of control. Beginning with a series of Indian massacres, it quickly grew into a full-fl edged rebellion against Berkeley and his system of rule.

To some extent, Bacon’s Rebellion was a confl ict within the Virginia elite. The leader, Nathaniel Bacon, a wealthy and ambitious planter who had arrived in Virginia in 1673, disdained Berkeley’s coterie as men of “mean education and employments.” His backers included men of wealth outside the governor’s circle of cronies. But Bacon’s call for the removal of all Indians from the colony, a reduction of taxes at a time of economic recession, and an end to rule by “grandees” rapidly gained support from small farmers, landless men, indentured servants, and even some Africans. The bulk of his army consisted of discontented men who had recently been servants.

THE END OF THE REBELLION, AND ITS CONSEQUENCES

Bacon promised freedom (including access to Indian lands) to all who joined his ranks. His supporters invoked the tradition of “English liberties” and spoke of the poor being “robbed” and “cheated” by their social superiors. In 1676, Bacon gathered an armed force for an unauthorized and indiscriminate campaign against those he called the governor’s “protected and darling Indi- ans.” He refused Berkeley’s order to disband and marched on Jamestown, burn- ing it to the ground. The governor fl ed, and Bacon became the ruler of Virginia. His forces plundered the estates of Berkeley’s supporters. Only the arrival of a squadron of warships from England restored order. Bacon’s Rebellion was over. Twenty-three of his supporters were hanged (Bacon himself had taken ill and died shortly after Berkeley’s departure).

The specter of a civil war among whites greatly frightened Virginia’s ruling elite, who took dramatic steps to consolidate their power and improve their image. They restored property qualifi cations for voting, which Bacon had rescinded. At the same time, planters developed a new political style in which they cultivated the support of poorer neighbors. Meanwhile, the authorities reduced taxes and adopted a more aggressive Indian policy, opening western areas to small farmers, many of whom prospered from a rise in tobacco prices after 1680. To avert the further rise of a rebellious population of landless former indentured servants, Virginia’s authorities accelerated the shift to slaves (who would never become free) on the tobacco plantations. As Virginia reduced the number of indentured servants, it redefi ned their freedom dues to include fi fty acres of land.

How was slavery established in the Western Atlantic world?

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104 Ch . 3 : CREATING ANGLO-AMERICA

A SLAVE SOCIETY

Between 1680 and 1700, slave labor began to supplant indentured servitude on Chesapeake plantations. Bacon’s Rebellion was only one among several factors that contributed to this development. As the death rate fi nally began to fall, it became more economical to purchase a laborer for life. Improving conditions in England reduced the number of transatlantic migrants, and the opening of Pennsylvania, where land was readily available, attracted those who still chose to leave for America. Finally, the ending of a monopoly on the English slave trade previously enjoyed by the Royal Africa Company opened the door to other traders and reduced the price of imported African slaves.

By 1700, blacks constituted more than 10 percent of Virginia’s popula- tion. Fifty years later, they made up nearly half. Recognizing the growing importance of slavery, the House of Burgesses in 1705 enacted a new slave code, bringing together the scattered legislation of the previous century and adding new provisions that embedded the principle of white supremacy in the law. Slaves were property, completely subject to the will of their masters and, more generally, of the white community. They could be bought and sold, leased, fought over in court, and passed on to one’s descendants. Henceforth, blacks and whites were tried in separate courts. No black, free or slave, could own arms, strike a white man, or employ a white servant. Any white person could apprehend any black to demand a certifi cate of freedom or a pass from the owner giving permission to be off the plantation. Virginia had changed from a “society with slaves,” in which slavery was one system of labor among others, to a “slave society,” where slavery stood at the center of the economic process.

NOTIONS OF FREEDOM

One sentiment shared by Europeans, Native Americans, and Africans was fear of enslavement. Throughout history, slaves have run away and in other ways resisted bondage. They did the same in the colonial Chesapeake. Colonial newspapers were fi lled with advertisements for runaway slaves. These notices described the appearance and skills of the fugitive and included such com- ments as “ran away without any cause” or “he has great notions of freedom.” Some of the blacks brought to the region during the seventeenth century were the offspring of encounters between European traders and Africans on the western coast of Africa or the Caribbean. Familiar with European culture and fl uent in English, they turned to the colonial legal system in their quest for freedom. Throughout the seventeenth century, blacks appeared in court claiming their liberty, at fi rst on the basis of conversion to Christianity or

OR IGI NS OF A M E R IC A N SL AV E RY

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105How was slavery established in the Western Atlantic world?

having a white father. This was one reason Virginia in the 1660s closed these pathways to freedom. But although legal avenues to liberty receded, the desire for freedom did not. After the suppression of a slave conspiracy in 1709, Alex- ander Spotswood, the governor of Virginia, warned planters to be vigilant. The desire for freedom, he reminded them, can “call together all those who long to shake off the fetters of slavery.”

COLONIES IN CRISIS

King Philip’s War of 1675 and Bacon’s Rebellion the following year coincided with disturbances in other colonies. In Maryland, where the proprietor, Lord Baltimore, in 1670 had suddenly restricted the right to vote to owners of fi fty acres of land or a certain amount of personal property, a Protestant uprising unsuccess- fully sought to oust his government and restore the suffrage for all freemen. In several colonies, increasing settlement on the frontier led to resistance by alarmed Indians. A rebellion by Westo Indians was suppressed in Carolina in 1680. The Pueblo Revolt of the same year (discussed in Chapter 1) indicated that the crisis of colonial authority was not confi ned to the British empire.

THE GLORIOUS REVOLUTION

Turmoil in England also reverberated in the colonies. In 1688, the long struggle for domination of English government between Parliament and the crown reached its culmination in the Glorious Revolution, which established parliamentary supremacy once and for all and secured the Protestant succes- sion to the throne. Under Charles II, Parliament had asserted its authority in the formation of national policy. It expanded its control of fi nance, infl uenced foreign affairs, and excluded from political and religious power Catholics and Dissenters (Protestants who belonged to a denomination other than the offi cial Anglican Church).

When Charles died in 1685, he was succeeded by his brother James II (for- merly the duke of York), a practicing Catholic and a believer that kings ruled by divine right. In 1687, James decreed religious toleration for both Protestant Dissenters and Catholics. The following year, the birth of James’s son raised the prospect of a Catholic succession, alarming those who equated “popery” with tyranny. A group of English aristocrats invited the Dutch nobleman Wil- liam of Orange, the husband of James’s Protestant daughter Mary, to assume the throne in the name of English liberties. William arrived in England in November 1688 with an army of 21,000 men, two-thirds of them Dutch. As the landed elite and leaders of the Anglican Church rallied to William’s cause, James II fl ed and the revolution was complete.

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106 Ch . 3 : CREATING ANGLO-AMERICA

Unlike the broad social upheaval that marked the English Civil War of the 1640s, the Glorious Revolution was in effect a coup engineered by a small group of aristocrats in alliance with an ambitious Dutch prince. They had no intention of challenging the institution of the monarchy. But the overthrow of James II entrenched more fi rmly than ever the notion that liberty was the birthright of all Englishmen and that the king was subject to the rule of law. To justify the ouster of James II, Parliament in 1689 enacted a Bill of Rights, which listed parliamentary powers such as control over taxation as well as rights of individuals, including trial by jury. These were the “ancient” and “undoubted . . . rights and liberties” of all Englishmen. In the following year, the Toleration Act allowed Protestant Dissenters (but not Catholics) to wor- ship freely, although only Anglicans could hold public offi ce.

As always, British politics were mirrored in the American colonies. The period from the 1660s to the 1680s had been one of growing religious toleration in both regions, succeeded by a tightening of religious control once William of Orange, a Protestant, became king. Indeed, after the Glorious Revolution, Prot- estant domination was secured in most of the colonies, with the established churches of England (Anglican) and Scotland (Presbyterian) growing the fastest, while Catholics and Dissenters suffered various forms of discrimina- tion. Despite the new regime’s language of liberty, however, religious freedom was far more advanced in some American colonies, such as Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, and Carolina, than in England. Nonetheless, throughout English America the Glorious Revolution powerfully reinforced among the colonists the sense of sharing a proud legacy of freedom and Protestantism with the mother country.

THE GLORIOUS REVOLUTION IN AMERICA

The Glorious Revolution exposed fault lines in colonial society and offered local elites an opportunity to regain authority that had recently been chal- lenged. Until the mid-1670s, the North American colonies had essentially gov- erned themselves, with little interference from England. Governor Berkeley ran Virginia as he saw fi t; proprietors in New York, Maryland, and Carolina governed in any fashion they could persuade colonists to accept; and New Eng- land colonies elected their own offi cials and openly fl outed trade regulations. In 1675, England established the Lords of Trade to oversee colonial affairs. Three years later, the Lords questioned the Massachusetts government about its compliance with the Navigation Acts. They received the surprising reply that since the colony had no representatives in Parliament, the acts did not apply to it unless the Massachusetts General Court approved.

In the 1680s, England moved to reduce colonial autonomy. Shortly before his death, Charles II revoked the Massachusetts charter, citing wholesale

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violations of the Navigation Acts. Hoping to raise more money from America in order to reduce his dependence on Parliament, James II between 1686 and 1688 combined Connecticut, Plymouth, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, New York, and East and West Jersey into a single super-colony, the Dominion of New England. It was ruled by the former New York governor Sir Edmund Andros, who did not have to answer to an elected assembly. These events reinforced the impression that James II was an enemy of freedom. In New England, Andros’s actions alienated nearly everyone not dependent on his administration for favors. He appointed local offi cials in place of elected ones, imposed taxes without the approval of elected representatives, declared earlier land grants void unless approved by him, and enforced religious toleration for all Protestants. His rule threat- ened both English liberties and the church-state relationship at the heart of the Puritan order.

THE MARYLAND UPRISING

In 1689, news of the overthrow of James II triggered rebellions in several American colonies. In April, the Boston militia seized and jailed Edmund Andros and other offi cials, whereupon the New England colonies reestab- lished the governments abolished when the Dominion of New England was created. In May, a rebel militia headed by Captain Jacob Leisler established a Committee of Safety and took control of New York. Two months later, Maryland’s Protestant Association overthrew the government of the colony’s Catholic proprietor, Lord Baltimore.

All of these new regimes claimed to have acted in the name of English liberties and looked to London for approval. But the degrees of success of these coups varied markedly. Most triumphant were the Maryland rebels. Concluding that Lord Baltimore had mismanaged the colony, William revoked his charter (although the proprietor retained his land and rents) and established a new, Protestant-dominated government. Catholics retained the right to practice their religion but were barred from voting and holding offi ce. In 1715, after the Baltimore family had converted to Anglicanism, proprietary power was restored. But the events of 1689 transformed the ruling group in Maryland and put an end to the colony’s unique history of religious toleration.

LEISLER ’S REBELLION

The outcome in New York was far different. The German-born Leisler, one of the wealthiest merchants in the city, was a fervent Calvinist who feared that James II intended to reduce England and its empire to “popery and slav- ery.” Although it was not his intention, Leisler’s regime divided the colony

What major social and political crises rocked the colonies in the late seventeenth century?

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108 Ch . 3 : CREATING ANGLO-AMERICA

along ethnic and economic lines. Members of the Dutch majority seized the opportunity to reclaim local power after more than two decades of English rule, while bands of rebels ransacked the homes of wealthy New Yorkers. Prominent English colonists, joined by some wealthy Dutch merchants and fur traders, protested to London that Leisler was a tyrant. William refused to recognize Leisler’s authority and dispatched a new governor, backed by troops. Many of Leisler’s followers were imprisoned, and he himself was condemned to be executed. The grisly manner of his death—Leisler was hanged and then had his head cut off and body cut into four parts—refl ected the depths of hatred the rebellion had inspired. For generations, the rivalry between Leisler and anti-Leisler parties polarized New York politics.

CHANGES IN NEW ENGLAND

After deposing Edmund Andros, the New England colonies lobbied hard in London for the restoration of their original charters. Most were successful, but Massachusetts was not. In 1691, the crown issued a new charter that absorbed Plymouth into Massachusetts and transformed the political structure of the Bible Commonwealth. Town government remained intact, but henceforth property ownership, not church membership, would be the requirement to vote in elections for the General Court. The governor was now appointed in London rather than elected. Thus, Massachusetts became a royal colony, the majority of whose voters were no longer Puritan “saints.” Moreover, it was required to abide by the English Toleration Act of 1690—that is, to allow all Protestants to worship freely. The demise of the “New England way” greatly benefi ted non-Puritan merchants and large landowners, who came to domi- nate the new government.

These events produced an atmosphere of considerable tension in Massa- chusetts, exacerbated by raids by French troops and their Indian allies on the northern New England frontier. The advent of religious toleration heightened anxieties among the Puritan clergy, who considered other Protestant denomi- nations a form of heresy. “I would not have a hand in setting up their Devil worship,” one minister declared of the Quakers. Indeed, not a few Puritans thought they saw the hand of Satan in the events of 1690 and 1691.

THE PROSECUTION OF WITCHES

Belief in magic, astrology, and witchcraft was widespread in seventeenth- century Europe and America, existing alongside the religion of the clergy and churches. Many Puritans believed in supernatural interventions in the affairs of the world. They interpreted as expressions of God’s will such events as lightning that struck one house but spared another, and epidemics that reduced the population of their Indian enemies. Evil forces could also affect

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daily life. Witches were individuals, usually women, who were accused of having entered into a pact with the devil to obtain supernatural powers, which they used to harm others or to interfere with natural processes. When a child was stillborn or crops failed, many believed that witchcraft was at work.

In Europe and the colonies, witchcraft was punishable by execution. It is estimated that between the years 1400 and 1800, more than 50,000 people were executed in Europe after being convicted of witchcraft. Witches were, from time to time, hanged in seventeenth-century New England. Most were women beyond childbearing age who were outspoken, economically inde- pendent, or estranged from their husbands, or who in other ways violated traditional gender norms. The witch’s alleged power challenged both God’s will and the standing of men as heads of family and rulers of society.

THE SALEM WITCH TRIALS

Until 1692, the prosecution of witches had been local and sporadic. But in the heightened anxiety of that year, a series of trials and executions took place in the town of Salem that made its name to this day a byword for fanaticism and persecution. The crisis began late in 1691 when several young girls began

An engraving from Ralph Gardiner’s England’s Grievance Discovered, published in 1655, depicts women hanged as witches in England. The letters identify local offi cials: A is the hangman, B the town crier, C the sheriff, and D a magistrate.

What major social and political crises rocked the colonies in the late seventeenth century?

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110 Ch . 3 : CREATING ANGLO-AMERICA

to suffer fi ts and nightmares, attributed by their elders to witchcraft. Soon, three witches had been named, including Tituba, an Indian from the Carib- bean who was a slave in the home of one of the girls. Since the only way to avoid prosecution was to confess and name others, accusations of witchcraft began to snowball. By the middle of 1692, hundreds of residents of Salem had come forward to accuse their neighbors. Some, it appears, used the occasion to settle old scores within the Salem community. Local authorities took legal action against nearly 150 persons, the large majority of them women. Many confessed to save their lives, but fourteen women and fi ve men were hanged, protesting their innocence to the end. One man was pressed to death (crushed under a weight of stones) for refusing to enter a plea.

In Salem, accusations of witchcraft spread far beyond the usual profi le of middle-aged women to include persons of all ages (one was a child of four) and those with no previous history of assertiveness or marital discord. As accusations and executions multiplied, it became clear that something was seriously wrong with the colony’s system of justice. Toward the end of 1692, the governor of Massachusetts dissolved the Salem court and ordered the remaining prisoners released. At the same time, the prominent clergyman Increase Mather published an infl uential treatise, Cases of Conscience Concern- ing Evil Spirits, warning that juries should not take seriously either the testi- mony of those who claimed to be possessed or the confessions and accusations of persons facing execution. The events in Salem discredited the tradition of prosecuting witches and accelerated a commitment among prominent colonists to fi nding scientifi c explanations for natural events like comets and illnesses, rather than attributing them to magic. In future years, only two accused witches would be brought to trial in Massachusetts, and both were found not guilty.

THE GROWTH OF COLONIAL AMERICA

The Salem witch trials took place precisely two centuries after Columbus’s initial voyage. The Western Hemisphere was dramatically different from the world he had encountered. Powerful states had been destroyed and the native population decimated by disease and in some areas deprived of its land. In North America, three new and very different empires had arisen, competing for wealth and power. The urban-based Spanish empire, with a small settler elite and growing mestizo population directing the labor of a large Indian population, still relied for wealth primarily on the gold and silver mines of Mexico and South America. The French empire centered on Saint Domingue, Martinique, and Guadeloupe, plantation islands of the West Indies. On the mainland, it consisted of a thinly settled string of farms and trading posts in

T H E GROW T H OF C OLON I A L A M E R IC A

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111What were the directions of social and economic change in the eighteenth-century colonies?

the St. Lawrence Valley. In North America north of the Rio Grande, the English colonies had far outstripped their rivals in population and trade.

As stability returned after the crises of the late seventeenth century, English North America experienced an era of remarkable growth. Between 1700 and 1770, crude backwoods settlements became bustling provincial capitals. Even as epidemics continued in Indian country, the hazards of disease among colonists diminished, agricultural settlement pressed westward, and hundreds of thou- sands of newcomers arrived from the Old World. Thanks to a high birthrate and continuing immigration, the population of England’s mainland colonies, 265,000 in 1700, grew nearly tenfold, to over 2.3 million seventy years later. (It is worth noting, however, that because of the decline suffered by the Indians, the North American population was considerably lower in 1770 than it had been in 1492.)

A DIVERSE POPULATION

Probably the most striking characteristic of colonial American society in the eighteenth century was its sheer diversity. In 1700, the colonies were essen- tially English outposts. Relatively few Africans had yet been brought to the mainland, and the overwhelming majority of the white population—close to 90 percent—was of English origin. In the eighteenth century, African and non-English European arrivals skyrocketed, while the number emigrating from England declined.

As economic conditions in England improved, the government began to rethink the policy of encouraging emigration. No longer concerned with an excess population of vagabonds and “masterless men,” authorities began to worry that large-scale emigration was draining labor from the mother country.

Table 3.1 O R I G I N S A N D S TAT U S O F M I G R A N T S T O B R I T I S H

N O R T H A M E R I C A N C O L O N I E S , 170 0 –1775

Indentured Total Slaves Servants Convicts Free

Africa 278,400 278,400 — — —

Ireland 108,600 — 39,000 17,500 52,100

Germany 84,500 — 30,000 — 54,500

England/Wales 73,100 — 27,200 32,500 13,400

Scotland 35,300 — 7,400 2,200 25,700

Other 5,900 — — — 5,900

Total 585,800 278,400 103,600 52,200 151,600

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112 Ch . 3 : CREATING ANGLO-AMERICA

About 40 percent of European immigrants to the colonies during the eighteenth century continued to arrive as bound laborers who had temporarily sacrifi ced their freedom to make the voyage to the New World. But as the colonial economy prospered, poor indentured migrants were increasingly joined by professionals and skilled craftsmen—teachers, ministers, weavers, carpenters—whom Eng- land could ill afford to lose. This brought to an end offi cial efforts to promote English emigration.

ATTRACTING SETTLERS

Yet while worrying about losing desirable members of its population, the gov- ernment in London remained convinced that colonial development enhanced the nation’s power and wealth. To bolster the Chesapeake labor force, nearly 50,000 convicts (a group not desired in Britain) were sent to work in the tobacco fi elds. Offi cials also actively encouraged Protestant immigration from the non-English (and less prosperous) parts of the British Isles and from the European continent, promising newcomers easy access to land and the right to worship freely. A law of 1740 even offered European immigrants British citi- zenship after seven years of residence, something that in the mother country could be obtained only by a special act of Parliament. The widely publicized image of America as an asylum for those “whom bigots chase from foreign lands,” in the words of a 1735 poem, was in many ways a by-product of Britain’s efforts to attract settlers from non-English areas to its colonies.

Among eighteenth-century migrants from the British Isles, the 80,000 English newcomers (a majority of them convicted criminals) were consider- ably outnumbered by 145,000 from Scotland and Ulster, the northern part of Ireland, where many Scots had settled as part of England’s effort to subdue the island. Scottish and Scotch-Irish immigrants had a profound impact on colonial society. Mostly Presbyterians, they added signifi cantly to religious diversity in North America. Their numbers included not only poor farm- ers seeking land but also numerous merchants, teachers, and professionals (indeed, a large majority of the physicians in eighteenth-century America were of Scottish origin).

THE GERMAN MIGRATION

Germans, 110,000 in all, formed the largest group of newcomers from the European continent. Most came from the valley of the Rhine River, which stretches through present-day Germany into Switzerland. In the eighteenth century, Germany was divided into numerous small states, each with a ruling prince who determined the offi cial religion. Those who found themselves worshiping the “wrong” religion—Lutherans in Catholic areas, Catholics in Lutheran areas, and everywhere, followers of small Protestant sects such as Mennonites, Moravians, and Dunkers—faced persecution. Many decided to

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Among the most striking features of eighteenth-century colonial society was the racial and ethnic diversity of the population (except in New England). This resulted from increased immigration from the non-English parts of the British Isles and from mainland Europe, as well as the rapid expansion of the slave trade from Africa.

What were the directions of social and economic change in the eighteenth-century colonies?

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114 Ch . 3 : CREATING ANGLO-AMERICA

emigrate. Other migrants were motivated by persistent agricultural crises and the diffi culty of acquiring land. Indeed, the emigration to America rep- resented only a small part of a massive reshuffl ing of the German population within Europe. Millions of Germans left their homes during the eighteenth century, most of them migrating eastward to Austria-Hungary and the Rus- sian empire, which made land available to newcomers.

Wherever they moved, Germans tended to travel in entire families. English and Dutch merchants created a well-organized system whereby “redemption- ers” (as indentured families were called) received passage in exchange for a promise to work off their debt in America. Most settled in frontier areas—rural New York, western Pennsylvania, and the southern backcountry—where they formed tightly knit farming communities in which German for many years remained the dominant language. Their arrival greatly enhanced the ethnic and religious diversity of Britain’s colonies.

RELIGIOUS DIVERSITY

Eighteenth-century British America was not a “melting pot” of cultures. Ethnic groups tended to live and worship in relatively homogeneous com- munities. But outside of New England, which received few immigrants and retained its overwhelmingly English ethnic character, American society had a far more diverse population than Britain. Nowhere was this more evident than in the practice of religion. In 1700, nearly all the churches in the colonies were either Congregational (in New England) or Anglican. In the eighteenth century, the Anglican presence expanded considerably. New churches were built and new ministers arrived from England. But the number of Dissenting congregations also multiplied.

Apart from New Jersey (formed from East and West Jersey in 1702), Rhode Island, and Pennsylvania, the colonies did not adhere to a modern separation of church and state. Nearly every colony levied taxes to pay the salaries of minis- ters of an established church, and most barred Catholics and Jews from voting and holding public offi ce. But increasingly, de facto toleration among Protes- tant denominations fl ourished, fueled by the establishment of new churches by immigrants, as well as new Baptist, Methodist, and other congregations created as a result of the Great Awakening, a religious revival that will be discussed in Chapter 4. By the mid-eighteenth century, Dissenting Protestants in most colo- nies had gained the right to worship as they pleased and own their churches, although many places still barred them from holding public offi ce and taxed them to support the offi cial church. Although few in number (perhaps 2,000 at their peak in eighteenth-century America), Jews also contributed to the religious diversity. German Jews, in particular, were attracted by the chance to escape the rigid religious restrictions of German-speaking parts of Europe;

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many immigrated to London and some, from there, to cities like Charleston and Philadelphia. A visitor to Pennsylvania in 1750 described the colony’s religious diversity: “We fi nd there Lutherans, Reformed, Catholics, Quakers, Menonists or Anabaptists, Herrnhuters or Moravian Brethren, Pietists, Seventh Day Baptists, Dunkers, Presbyterians, . . . Jews, Mohammedans, Pagans.”

“Liberty of conscience,” wrote a German newcomer in 1739, was the “chief virtue” of British North America, “and on this score I do not repent my immi- gration.” Equally important to eighteenth-century immigrants, however, were other elements of freedom, especially the availability of land, the lack of a military draft, and the absence of restraints on economic opportunity com- mon in Europe. Skilled workers were in great demand. “They earn what they want,” one emigrant wrote to his brother in Switzerland in 1733. Letters home by immigrants spoke of low taxes, the right to enter trades and professions without paying exorbitant fees, and freedom of movement. “In this country,” one wrote, “there are abundant liberties in just about all matters.”

INDIAN LIFE IN TRANSITION

The tide of newcomers, who equated liberty with secure possession of land, threatened to engulf the surviving Indian populations. By the eighteenth century, Indian communities were well integrated into the British imperial system. Indian warriors did much of the fi ghting in the century’s imperial

Baptists were among the numerous religious denominations in the eighteenth-century colonies. In this engraving, from a history of American Baptists published in 1770, a minister baptizes a new member in the Schuylkill River in Pennsylvania, while members of the congregation look on.

What were the directions of social and economic change in the eighteenth-century colonies?

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one wants without asking anyone when he buys or leases something. . . .

I have always enough to do and we have no shortage of food. Bread is plentiful. If I work for two days I earn more bread than in eight days [at home]. . . . Also I can buy many things so reasonably [for example] a pair of shoes for [roughly] seven Pennsylvania shillings. . . . I think that with God’s help I will obtain land. I am not pushing for it until I am in a better position.

I would like for my brother to come . . . and it will then be even nicer in the country. . . . I assume that the land has been described to you suffi ciently by various people and it is not surprising that the immigrant agents [demand payment]. For the journey is long and it costs much to stay away for one year. . . .

Johannes Hänner

Germans were among the most numerous immigrants to the eighteenth-century colonies. Many wrote letters to family members at home, relating their experiences and impressions.

Dearest Father, Brother, and Sister and Brother-in-law,

I have told you quite fully about the trip, and I will tell you what will not surprise you—that we have a free country. Of the sundry craftsmen, one may do whatever one wants. Nor does the land require payment of tithes [taxes to support a local landlord, typical in Europe]. . . . The land is very big from Canada to the east of us to Carolina in the south and to the Spanish border in the west. . . . One can settle wherever

From Letter by a Swiss-German

Immigrant to Pennsylvania

(August 23, 1769)

�

V O I C E S O F F R E E D O M

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From Memorial against Non-English

Immigration (December 1727)

Only a minority of emigrants from Europe to British North America in the eighteenth century came from the British Isles. Some English settlers, such as the authors of this petition from Pennsylvania to the authorities in London, found the growing diversity of the colonial population quite disturbing.

How careful every European state, that has Colonies in America, has been of preserving the advantage arising from them wholly to their own Nation and People, is obvious to all who will consider the policy & conduct of the Spanish, French & others in relation to theirs. . . .

About the year 1710 a Company of religious People called Menists [Mennonites] from the Palatinate of the Rhine, transported themselves into the Province of Pennsylvania from Holland in British shipping, and purchased Lands at low rates towards the River Susquehanna. The Terms & Reception they met with proved so encouraging, that they invited diverse of their relations and friends to follow them. In the succeeding years . . . several thousands were settled in that Province. . . . We are now assured by the same people that fi ve or six thousand more are to follow them this next ensuing year. . . .

All these men young & old who arrived since the fi rst, come generally very well armed. Many of them are Papists, & most of them appear inured to War & other hardships. They retire commonly back into the woods amongst or behind the remoter inhabitants, sometimes purchase land, but often sit down on any piece they fi nd vacant that they judge convenient for them without asking questions. . . . Few of them apply now to be Naturalized, [and as] they . . . gener- ally . . . adhere to their own customs. The part of the country they principally settle in is that towards the French of Canada, whose interest, it may be apprehended, . . . (since several of them speak their language) [they] would as willingly favor as the English. . . . It is hoped therefore that nothing need be added to shew the present necessity of putting a stop to that augmentation of their strength. . . . A general provision against all Foreigners may be necessary.

QUESTIONS

1. What does Johannes Hänner have in mind when he calls America a “free country”?

2. What do the petitioners find objectionable about non-English migrants to Pennsylvania?

3. How do these documents reflect different views of who should be entitled to the benefits of freedom in the American colonies?

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118 Ch . 3 : CREATING ANGLO-AMERICA

wars. Their cultures were now quite different from what they had been at the time of fi rst contact. Indian societies that had existed for centuries had disappeared, the victims of disease and warfare. New tribes, like the Catawba of South Carolina and the Creek Confederacy, which united dozens of Indian towns in South Carolina and Georgia, had been created from their remnants. Few Indians chose to live among whites rather than in their own communi- ties. But they had become well accustomed to using European products like knives, hatchets, needles, kettles, and fi rearms. Alcohol introduced by traders created social chaos in many Indian communities. One Cherokee told the governor of South Carolina in 1753, “The clothes we wear, we cannot make ourselves, they are made to us. We use their ammunition with which we kill deer. . . . Every necessary thing we must have from the white people.”

While traders saw in Indian villages potential profi ts and British offi cials saw allies against France and Spain, farmers and planters viewed Indians as little more than an obstruction to their desire for land. They expected Indians to give way to white settlers. The native population of the Virginia and South Carolina frontier had already been displaced when large numbers of settlers arrived. In Pennsylvania, however, the fl ood of German and Scotch-Irish settlers into the backcountry upset the relatively peaceful Indian-white rela- tions constructed by William Penn. At a 1721 conference, a group of colonial and Indian leaders reaffi rmed Penn’s Chain of Friendship. But confl icts over land soon multiplied. The infamous Walking Purchase of 1737 brought the fraudulent dealing so common in other colonies to Pennsylvania. The Lenni Lanape Indians agreed to an arrangement to cede a tract of land bounded by the distance a man could walk in thirty-six hours. To their amazement, Governor James Logan hired a team of swift runners, who marked out an area far in excess of what the Indians had anticipated.

By 1760, when Pennsylvania’s population, a mere 20,000 in 1700, had grown to 220,000, Indian-colonist relations, initially the most harmonious in British North America, had become poisoned by suspicion and hostility. One group of Susquehanna Indians declared “that the white people had abused them and taken their lands from them, and therefore they had no reason to think that they were now concerned for their happiness.” They longed for the days when “old William Penn” treated them with fairness and respect.

REGIONAL DIVERSITY

By the mid-eighteenth century, the different regions of the British colonies had developed distinct economic and social orders. Small farms tilled by family labor and geared primarily to production for local consumption predominated in New England and the new settlements of the backcountry (the area stretch- ing from central Pennsylvania southward through the Shenandoah Valley of

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Virginia and into upland North and South Carolina). The backcountry was the most rapidly growing region in North America. In 1730, the only white residents in what was then called “Indian country” were the occasional hunter and trader. By the eve of the American Revolution, the region contained one- quarter of Virginia’s population and half of South Carolina’s. Most were farm families raising grain and livestock, but slaveowning planters, seeking fertile soil for tobacco farming, also entered the area.

In the older portions of the Middle Colonies of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, farmers were more oriented to commerce than on the frontier, growing grain both for their own use and for sale abroad and supplementing the work of family members by employing wage laborers, tenants, and in some instances slaves. Because large landlords had engrossed so much desirable land, New York’s growth lagged behind that of neighboring colonies. “What man will be such a fool as to become a base tenant,” wondered Richard Coote, New York’s governor at the beginning of the eighteenth century, “when by crossing the Hudson river that man can for a song purchase a good freehold?” With its fertile soil, favorable climate, initially peaceful Indian relations, generous governmental land distribution policy, and rivers that facilitated long-distance trading, Pennsylvania came to be known as “the best poor man’s country.” Ordinary colonists there enjoyed a standard of living unimaginable in Europe.

THE CONSUMER REVOLUTION

During the eighteenth century, Great Britain eclipsed the Dutch as the leading producer and trader of inexpensive consumer goods, including colonial prod- ucts like coffee and tea, and such manufactured goods as linen, metalware, pins, ribbons, glassware, ceramics, and clothing. Trade integrated the British empire. As the American colonies were drawn more and more fully into the system of Atlantic commerce, they shared in the era’s consumer revolution. In port cities and small inland towns, shops proliferated and American newspa- pers were fi lled with advertisements for British goods. British merchants sup- plied American traders with loans to enable them to import these products, and traveling peddlers carried them into remote frontier areas.

Consumerism in a modern sense—the mass production, advertising, and sale of consumer goods—did not exist in colonial America. Nonetheless, eighteenth-century estate inventories—records of people’s possessions at the time of death—revealed the wide dispersal in American homes of English and even Asian products. In the seventeenth century, most colonists had lived in a pioneer world of homespun clothing and homemade goods. Now, even modest farmers and artisans owned books, ceramic plates, metal cutlery, and items made of imported silk and cotton. Tea, once a luxury enjoyed only by the wealthy, became virtually a necessity of life. “People that are least able to

What were the directions of social and economic change in the eighteenth-century colonies?

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120 Ch . 3 : CREATING ANGLO-AMERICA

go to the expense,” one New Yorker noted, “must have their tea though their families want bread.”

COLONIAL CITIES

Britain’s mainland colonies were overwhelmingly agricultural. Nine-tenths of the population resided in rural areas and made their livelihood from farm- ing. Colonial cities like Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston were quite small by the standards of Europe or Spanish America. In 1700, when the population of Mexico City stood at 100,000, Boston had 6,000 residents and New York 4,500. As late as 1750, eight cities in Spanish America exceeded in size any in English North America.

English American cities served mainly as gathering places for agricultural goods and for imported items to be distributed to the countryside. Nonetheless, the expansion of trade encouraged the rise of port cities, home to a growing population of colonial merchants and artisans (skilled craftsmen) as well as an increasing number of poor. In 1770, with some 30,000 inhabitants, Philadelphia was “the capital of the New World,” at least its British component, and, after Lon- don and Liverpool, the empire’s third busiest port. The fi nancial, commercial, and cultural center of British America, its growth rested on economic integra- tion with the rich agricultural region nearby. Philadelphia merchants organized the collection of farm goods, supplied rural storekeepers, and extended credit to consumers. They exported fl our, bread, and meat to the West Indies and Europe.

COLONIAL ARTISANS

The city was also home to a large population of furniture makers, jewelers, and silversmiths serving wealthier citizens, and hundreds of lesser artisans like weavers, blacksmiths, coopers, and construction workers. The typical artisan owned his own tools and labored in a small workshop, often his home, assisted by family members and young journeymen and apprentices learning the trade. The artisan’s skill, which set him apart from the common laborers below him in the social scale, was the key to his existence, and it gave him a far greater degree of economic freedom than those dependent on others for a live- lihood. “He that hath a trade, hath an estate,” wrote Benjamin Franklin, who had worked as a printer before achieving renown as a scientist and statesman.

Despite the infl ux of British goods, American craftsmen benefi ted from the expanding consumer market. Most journeymen enjoyed a reasonable chance of rising to the status of master and establishing a workshop of their own. Some achieved remarkable success. Born in New York City in 1723, Myer Myers, a Jewish silversmith of Dutch ancestry, became one of the city’s most prominent artisans. Myers produced jewelry, candlesticks, coffeepots, table- ware, and other gold and silver objects for the colony’s elite, as well as religious

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ornaments for both synagogues and Protestant churches in New York and nearby colonies. He used some of his profi ts to acquire land in New Hampshire and Connecticut. Myers’s career refl ected the opportunities colonial cities offered to skilled men of diverse ethnic and religious backgrounds.

AN ATLANTIC WORLD

People, ideas, and goods fl owed back and forth across the Atlantic, knitting together the empire and its diverse populations—British merchants and con- sumers, American colonists, African slaves, and surviving Indians—and creat- ing webs of interdependence among the European empires. Sugar, tobacco, and other products of the Western Hemisphere were marketed as far away as eastern Europe. London bankers fi nanced the slave trade between Africa and Portuguese Brazil. Spain spent its gold and silver importing goods from other countries. As trade expanded, the North American and West Indian colonies became the major overseas market for British manufactured goods. Although most colonial output was consumed at home, North Americans shipped farm products to Brit- ain, the West Indies, and with the exception of goods like tobacco “enumerated” under the Navigation Acts, outside the empire. Virtually the entire Chesapeake tobacco crop was marketed in Britain, with most of it then re-exported to Europe by British merchants. Most of the bread and fl our exported from the colonies was destined for the West Indies. African slaves there grew sugar that could be distilled into rum, a product increasingly popular among both North American colonists and Indians, who obtained it by trading furs and deerskins that were then shipped to Europe. The mainland colonies carried on a fl ourishing trade in fi sh and grains with southern Europe. Ships built in New England made up one-third of the British empire’s trading fl eet.

Membership in the empire had many advantages for the colonists. Most Americans did not complain about British regulation of their trade because commerce enriched the colonies as well as the mother country and lax enforce- ment of the Navigation Acts allowed smuggling to fl ourish. In a dangerous world, moreover, the Royal Navy protected American shipping. And despite the many differences between life in England and its colonies, eighteenth- century English America drew closer and closer to, and in some ways became more and more similar to, the mother country across the Atlantic.

SOCIAL CLASSES IN THE COLONIES

THE COLONIAL ELITE

Most free Americans benefi ted from economic growth, but as colonial society matured an elite emerged that, while neither as powerful nor as wealthy as the aristocracy of England, increasingly dominated politics and

What were the directions of social and economic change in the eighteenth-century colonies?

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122 Ch . 3 : CREATING ANGLO-AMERICA

society. Indeed, the gap between rich and poor probably grew more rapidly in the eighteenth century than in any other period of American history. In New England and the Middle Colonies, expanding trade made possible the emergence of a powerful upper class of merchants, often linked by family or commercial ties to great trading fi rms in London. There were no banks in colonial America. Credit and money were in short supply, and mercantile success depended on personal connections as much as business talent. By 1750, the colonies of the Chesapeake and Lower South were dominated by slave plantations producing staple crops, especially tobacco and rice, for the world market. Here great planters accumulated enormous wealth. The colo- nial elite also included the rulers of proprietary colonies like Pennsylvania and Maryland.

America had no titled aristocracy as in Britain. It had no system of legally established social ranks or family pedigrees stretching back to medieval times. Apart from the De Lanceys, Livingstons, and van Rensselaers of New York, the Penn family in Pennsylvania, and a few southern planters, it had no one whose landholdings, in monetary value, rivaled those of the British aristocracy. But throughout British America, men of prominence controlled colonial government. In Virginia, the upper class was so tight-knit and intermarried so often that the colony was said to be governed by a “cousin- ocracy.” Members of the gentry controlled the vestries, or local governing bodies, of the established Anglican Church, dominated the county courts (political as well as judicial institutions that levied taxes and enacted local ordinances), and were prominent in Virginia’s legislature. In the 1750s, seven members of the same generation of the Lee family sat in the House of Burgesses.

Eighteenth-century Virginia was a far healthier environment than in the early days of settlement. Planters could expect to pass their wealth down to the next generation, providing estates for their sons and establishing family dynasties. Nearly every Virginian of note achieved prominence through family connections. The days when self-made men could rise into the Virginia gentry were long gone; by 1770, nearly all upper-class Virginians had inherited their wealth. Thomas Jefferson’s grandfather was a justice of the peace (an important local offi cial), militia captain, and sheriff, and his father was a member of the House of Burgesses. George Washington’s father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had been justices of the peace. The Vir- ginia gentry used its control of provincial government to gain possession of large tracts of land as western areas opened for settlement. Grants of 20,000 to 40,000 acres were not uncommon. Robert “King” Carter, a speaker of the House of Burgesses, acquired 300,000 acres of land and 1,000 slaves by the time of his death in 1732.

S O C I A L C L A S SE S I N T H E C OLON I E S

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123

ANGLICIZATION

For much of the eighteenth century, the American colonies had more regular trade and communications with Britain than among themselves. Elites in different regions slowly developed a common life- style and sense of common interests. But rather than thinking of themselves as dis- tinctively American, they became more and more English—a process historians call “Anglicization.”

Wealthy Americans tried to model their lives on British etiquette and behavior. Somewhat resentful at living in provincial isolation—“at the end of the world,” as one Virginia aristocrat put it—they sought to demonstrate their status and legitimacy by importing the latest London fashions and literature, sending their sons to Britain for education, and building homes equipped with fashionable furnishings modeled on the country estates and town houses of the English gentry. Their residences included large rooms for entertainment, display cases for imported luxury goods, and elaborate formal gardens. Some members of the colo- nial elite, like George Washington, even had coats of arms designed for their families, in imitation of English upper-class practice.

Desperate to follow an aristocratic lifestyle, many planters fell into debt. William Byrd III lived so extravagantly that by 1770 he had accumulated a debt of £100,000, an amount almost unheard of in England or America. But so long as the world market for tobacco thrived, so did Virginia’s gentry.

THE SOUTH CAROLINA ARISTOCRACY

The richest group of mainland colonists were South Carolina planters (although planters in Jamaica far outstripped them in wealth). Elite South Carolinians often traveled north to enjoy summer vacations in the cooler climate of Newport, Rhode Island, and they spent much of the remainder of their time in Charleston, the only real urban center south of Philadelphia and the richest city in British North America. Here aristocratic social life fl ourished, centered on theaters,

A portrait of Elijah Boardman, a merchant in New Milford, Massachusetts. Boardman wears the attire of a gentleman and rests his arm on his counting desk. In the rear, bolts of cloth are visible. But Boardman chose to emphasize his learning, not his wealth, by posing with books, including two plays of Shakespeare, John Milton’s Paradise Lost, and the London Magazine.

How did patterns of class and gender roles change in eighteenth-century America?

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124 Ch . 3 : CREATING ANGLO-AMERICA

literary societies, and social events. Like their Virginia counterparts, South Carolina grandees lived a lavish lifestyle amid imported furniture, fi ne wines, silk clothing, and other items from England. They surrounded themselves with house slaves dressed in specially designed uniforms. In 1774, the per capita wealth in the Charleston District was £2,300, more than four times that of tobacco areas in Virginia and eight times the fi gure for Philadelphia or Boston. But wealth in South Carolina was highly concentrated. The richest 10 percent of the colony owned half the wealth in 1770, the poorest quarter less than 2 percent.

Throughout the colonies, elites emulated what they saw as England’s bal- anced, stable social order. Liberty, in their eyes, meant, in part, the power to rule—the right of those blessed with wealth and prominence to dominate over others. They viewed society as a hierarchical structure in which some men were endowed with greater talents than others and destined to rule. The social order, they believed, was held together by webs of infl uence that linked patrons and those dependent on them. Each place in the hierarchy carried with it different responsibilities, and one’s status was revealed in dress, man- ners, and the splendor of one’s home. “Superiority” and “dependence,” as one colonial newspaper put it, were natural elements of any society. An image of refi nement served to legitimize wealth and political power. Colonial elites prided themselves on developing aristocratic manners, cultivating the arts, and making productive use of leisure. Indeed, on both sides of the Atlantic, elites viewed work as something reserved for common folk and slaves. Free- dom from labor was the mark of the gentleman.

POVERTY IN THE COLONIES

At the other end of the social scale, poverty emerged as a visible feature of eighteenth-century colonial life. Although not considered by most colonists part of their society, the growing number of slaves lived in impoverished con- ditions. Among free Americans, poverty was hardly as widespread as in Brit- ain, where in the early part of the century between one-quarter and one-half of the people regularly required public assistance. But as the colonial population expanded, access to land diminished rapidly, especially in long-settled areas. In New England, which received few immigrants, the high birthrate fueled population growth. With the supply of land limited, sons who could not hope to inherit farms were forced to move to other colonies or to try their hand at a trade in the region’s towns. By mid-century, tenants and wage laborers were a growing presence on farms in the Middle Colonies.

In colonial cities, the number of propertyless wage earners subsisting at the poverty line steadily increased. In Boston, one-third of the population in 1771 owned no property at all. In rural Augusta County, carved out of Virginia’s Shenandoah River valley in 1738, land was quickly engrossed by planters and speculators. By the 1760s, two-thirds of the county’s white men owned no land

S O C I A L C L A S SE S I N T H E C OLON I E S

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125

and had little prospect of obtaining it unless they migrated farther west. Tak- ing the colonies as a whole, half of the wealth at mid-century was concentrated in the hands of the richest 10 percent of the population.

Attitudes and policies toward poverty in colonial America mirrored British precedents. The better-off colonists generally viewed the poor as lazy, shiftless, and responsible for their own plight. Both rural communities and cities did accept responsibility for assisting their own. But to minimize the burden on taxpayers, poor persons were frequently set to labor in workhouses, where they produced goods that reimbursed authorities for part of their upkeep. Their children were sent to work as apprentices in local homes or workshops. And most communities adopted stringent measures to “warn out” unem- ployed and propertyless newcomers who might become dependent on local poor relief. This involved town authorities either expelling the unwanted poor from an area or formally declaring certain persons ineligible for assistance. In Essex County, Massachusetts, the number of poor persons warned out each year rose from 200 in the 1730s to 1,700 in the 1760s. Many were members of families headed by widowed or abandoned women.

THE MIDDLE RANKS

The large majority of free Americans lived between the extremes of wealth and poverty. Along with racial and ethnic diversity, what distinguished the main- land colonies from Europe was the wide distribution of land and the economic autonomy of most ordinary free families. The anonymous author of the book American Husbandry, published in 1775, reported that “little freeholders who live upon their own property” made up “the most considerable part” of the people, especially in the northern colonies and the nonplantation parts of the South. Altogether, perhaps two-thirds of the free male population were farmers who owned their own land. England, to be sure, had no class of laborers as exploited as American slaves, but three-fi fths of its people owned no property at all.

By the eighteenth century, colonial farm families viewed landownership almost as a right, the social precondition of freedom. They strongly resented efforts, whether by Native Americans, great landlords, or colonial govern- ments, to limit their access to land. A dislike of personal dependence and an understanding of freedom as not relying on others for a livelihood sank deep roots in British North America. These beliefs, after all, accorded with social reality—a wide distribution of property that made economic independence part of the lived experience of large numbers of white colonists.

WOMEN AND THE HOUSEHOLD ECONOMY

In the household economy of eighteenth-century America, the family was the center of economic life. Most work revolved around the home, and all mem- bers—men, women, and children—contributed to the family’s livelihood.

How did patterns of class and gender roles change in eighteenth-century America?

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126 Ch . 3 : CREATING ANGLO-AMERICA

The independence of the small farmer depended in considerable measure on the labor of dependent women and children. “He that hath an industrious family shall soon be rich,” declared one colonial saying, and the high birthrate in part refl ected the need for as many hands as possible on colonial farms. Most farmers concentrated fi rst on growing food for their own consumption and acquiring enough land to pass it along to their sons. But the consumer revolution and expanding networks of Atlantic trade drew increasing num- bers of farmers into production for the market as well.

As the population grew and the death rate declined, family life stabi- lized and more marriages became lifetime commitments. Free women were expected to devote their lives to being good wives and mothers. Already enshrined in law and property relations, male domination took on greater and greater social reality. In several colonies, the law mandated primogeniture— meaning that estates must be passed intact to the oldest son. As colonial soci- ety became more structured, opportunities that had existed for women in the early period receded. In Connecticut, for example, the courts were informal and unorganized in the seventeenth century, and women often represented themselves. In the eighteenth century, it became necessary to hire a lawyer as one’s spokesman in court. Women, barred from practicing as attorneys, disappeared from judicial proceedings. Because of the desperate need for labor, men and women in the seventeenth century both did various kinds of work. In the eighteenth century, the division of labor along gender lines solidifi ed. Women’s work was clearly defi ned, including cooking, cleaning, sewing, mak- ing butter, and assisting with agricultural chores. The work of farmers’ wives and daughters often spelled the difference between a family’s self-suffi ciency and poverty.

“Women’s work is never done.” This popular adage was literally true. Even as the consumer revolution reduced the demands on many women by making available store-bought goods previously produced at home, women’s work seemed to increase. Lower infant mortality meant more time spent in child care and domestic chores. The demand for new goods increased the need for all family members to contribute to family income. For most women, work was incessant and exhausting. “I am dirty and distressed, almost wearied to death,” wrote Mary Cooper, a Long Island woman, in her diary in 1769. “This day,” she continued, “is forty years since I left my father’s house and come here, and here have I seen little else but hard labor and sorrow.”

NORTH AMERICA AT MID -CENTURY

By the mid-eighteenth century, the area that would become the United States was home to a remarkable diversity of peoples and different kinds of social organization, from Pueblo villages of the Southwest to tobacco plantations of

S O C I A L C L A S SE S I N T H E C OLON I E S

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the Chesapeake, towns and small farms of New England, landholdings in the Hudson Valley that resembled feudal estates, and fur trading outposts of the northern and western frontier. Elites tied to imperial centers of power domi- nated the political and economic life of nearly every colony. But large numbers of colonists enjoyed far greater opportunities for freedom—access to the vote, prospects of acquiring land, the right to worship as they pleased, and an escape from oppressive government—than existed in Europe. Free colonists probably enjoyed the highest per capita income in the world. The colonies’ economic growth contributed to a high birthrate, long life expectancy, and expanding demand for consumer goods.

In the British colonies, writes one historian, lived “thousands of the freest individuals the Western world has ever known.” Yet many others found themselves confi ned to the partial freedom of indentured servitude or to the complete absence of freedom in slavery. Both timeless longings for freedom and new and unprecedented forms of unfreedom had been essential to the North American colonies’ remarkable development.

C h a p t e r R e v i e w � R E V I E W Q U E S T I O N S 1. Both the Puritans and William Penn viewed their colonies as “holy

experiments.” How did they differ?

2. The textbook states “Prejudice by itself did not create American slavery.” Examine the economic forces, events, and laws that shaped the experiences of enslaved people.

3. How did English leaders understand the place and role of the American colonies in England’s empire?

4. How did King Philip’s War. Bacon’s Rebellion, and the Salem witch trials illustrate a widespread crisis in British North America in the late seventeenth century?

5. The social structure of the eighteenth-century colonies was growing more open for some but not for others. Consider the statement with respect to: men and women; whites and blacks; and rich and poor.

How did patterns of class and gender roles change in eighteenth-century America?

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128 Ch . 3 : CREATING ANGLO-AMERICA

6. By the end of the seventeenth century, commerce was the foundation of empire and the leading cause of competition between European empires. Explain how the North American colonies were directly linked to Atlantic commerce by laws and trade.

7. If you traveled from New England to the South, how would you describe the diversity you saw between the different colonies?

8. What impact did the family’s being the center of economic life have on gender relations and the roles of women?

9. What experiences caused people in the colonies to be like people in England and what experiences served to make them different?

K E Y T E R M S Metacom (p. 89)

King Philip’s War (p. 89)

mercantalism (p. 89)

Navigation Acts (p. 90)

Covenant Chain (p. 93)

Yamasee uprising (p. 94)

Society of Friends (Quakers) (p. 95)

sugar (p. 99)

Bacon’s Rebellion (p. 102)

Slave Code of 1705 (p. 104)

Anglican Church (p. 105)

Glorious Revolution (p. 105)

English Bill of Rights (p. 106)

Lords of Trade (p. 106)

Dominion of New England (p. 107)

English Toleration Act (p. 106)

Salem witch trials (p. 109)

redemptioners (p. 114)

Walking Purchase (p. 118)

backcountry (p. 118)

artisans (p. 120)

“cousinocracy” (p. 122)

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