American History Powerpoint Assignment

Jack P. Greene SOCIA L A ND CU LT UR AL CAPIT AL IN COLONIA L A MER ICAJA CK P. GR EENE

Social and Cultural Capital in Colonial British America: A Case Study Social capital is a relatively new concept that political scientists and sociologists have developed to distinguish certain social resources from others, namely, � nancial or investment capital, physical capital in the form of � xed or movable material resources, and human capital in the form of individual knowledge and technical skills. As employed by mod- ern social scientists, such as Putnam, social capital consists of the organizations and connections that foster cooperation, trust, par- ticipation, the exchange of information, civil interaction, and coordinated activity in pursuit of social goals. An expression of the traditional social science concern with outcomes, the concept has proven useful to explain or predict the emergence of civil society, the development and growth of market economics, and the achievement of political democracy.1

Whether the concept can be equally useful to historians remains to be seen. Far less concerned with how to attain the speci� c goals that modern society deems desirable, historians are principally interested in understanding and characterizing the myr- iad processes and dynamics that have made societies of all different shapes and sizes work in particular places at speci� c times. For their purposes, the present social science de� nition is too narrow, too instrumental, too whiggish, and too Western. To become a useful tool of analysis for historians, the concept must be rendered applicable to a wide variety of contexts over time and space. More speci� cally, this article suggests that it must be rede� ned and expanded to include not just traditions of civil interaction but the entire range of institutions, practices, devices, and learned behav- iors that enable collectivities and individuals to render physical

Jack P. Greene is Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities, Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of T he Intellectual Construction of America: Exceptionalism and Identity from 1492 to 1800 (Chapel Hill, 1993); Negotiated Authorities: Essays in Colonial Political and Constitutional History (Charlottesville, 1994).

1 See Robert D. Putnam, with Roberto Leonardi and Raffaella Y. Nanetti, Making Democ- racy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton, 1993).

© 1999 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the editors of The Journal of Interdisciplinary History.

Journal of Interdisciplinary History, xxix:3 (Winter, 1999), 491–509.

spaces productive and social and cultural spaces agreeable. In this expanded usage, social capital, or, perhaps better, social and cultural capital, refers to all of those elements of the larger inheritance that cultures pass along to succeeding generations for later members to perpetuate, modify, discard, or reconstitute in new places.

Using the English or, after 1707, British experience as a case study, this article examines the role of social and cultural capital in the construction of new overseas societies during the early modern era, and the transformation of many of those societies into states beginning in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. More speci� cally, it focuses upon three aspects of this subject. First is the extent to which New World settlers relied upon their Old World inheritance in constructing European-style societies in the Americas. Second is the way in which the selective use of inher- ited forms of social capital and their subsequent re� nement and elaboration provided the foundations for the emergence of rec- ognizably civil societies in the New World well before some of those societies undertook to make themselves independent states. Third is the continuing importance of these colonial social crea- tions in determining the character of the new federal nation formed by parts of British North America between 1776 and 1800.

The global dimensions of the Seven Years’ War focused the attention of European analysts as never before upon the scope, signi� cance, and transformative character of European involve- ment overseas. Published in 1757 in two volumes, William and Edmund Burke’s An Account of the European Settlements in America provided the � rst comparative history of European activities in the Americas. In 1770, the Abbé Raynal, issued his much more ambitious multi-volume Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of Europeans in the East and West Indies, which, as the title announced, covered not just the Americas but also Africa and Asia. Although both the Burkes and Raynal were deeply critical of European treatment of Amerindians and the enslavement of millions of Africans for labor throughout the New World, they also displayed a profound appreciation of the achieve- ments of Europeans overseas: their success in expanding their trade over much of the globe and in bringing much of the Americas and portions of Africa and Asia under their hegemony. As Raynal announced in the � rst sentence of his � rst volume, the “discovery of the new world, and the passage to the East Indies by the Cape

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of Good Hope,” had obviously turned out to be “one of the most important events in the history of the human species.”2

What particularly impressed these and other contemporary analysts was what Smith referred to as the extraordinary “progress of all the European colonies in wealth, population, and improve- ment.” Smith’s lengthy discussion “Of Colonies” in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, issued in 1776, provided the most systematic and penetrating analysis of early modern European colonization in the Americas published up to that time. In Smith’s view, the English, many of whose colonies had demonstrated phenomenal growth and development over the previous half century, had been most impressive in this regard. But the Portuguese in Brazil had built “a great and powerful colony” that contained a larger “number of people of European extraction” than any other “colony in America”; the Spanish, presiding over by far the widest extent of country, had built a populous and thriving empire with several cities that were larger than any to be found in the colonies of other nations; and the French colonies, following a series of slow starts, had exhibited “more rapid” development during the eighteenth century. Of the major colonizing powers, only the Dutch, according to Smith, had “been languid and slow” in their colonizing “progress.”3

Among the measures that Smith used to chart this compara- tive “progress”—occupied territory, “wealth, population, and im- provement”—improvement was the most fundamental. Following scores of earlier observers dating back to the earliest encounter between Europeans and Amerindians, Smith emphasized the primitive social state of the Americas at the time of the encounter and the backwardness of the Amerindians who occupied them. Christopher Columbus, he said, encountered “a country quite covered with wood, uncultivated, and inhabited only by some tribes of naked and miserable savages.” The whole of America contained only “two civilized kingdoms,” Mexico and Peru, and even they had “no cattle � t for draught,” the llama, an animal whose “strength” was “a good deal inferior to that of a common

2 William and Edmund Burke, An Account of the European Settlements in America (London, 1808; orig. pub. 1757), 2v.; Guillaume Thomas François (Abbé) Raynal (trans. J. Justamond), Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of Europeans in the East and West Indies (London, 1798), I, 1. 3 Adam Smith (ed. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner) An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Oxford, 1976; orig. pub. 1776), II, 567–571.

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ass,” being the “only beast of burden.” With the plow being wholly “unknown among them,” Amerindians “were ignorant of the use of iron. They had no coined money, nor any established instrument of commerce of any kind. Their commerce was carried on by barter. A sort of wooden spade was their principal instru- ment of agriculture. Sharp stones served them for knives and hatchets to cut with; � sh bones and the hard sinews of certain animals served them for needles to sew with; and these seem to have been their principal instruments of trade.”4

What contemporary European and European-American ob- servers found so remarkable was that in a little less than three centuries, Europeans and their descendants had transformed the “unwholesome,” thinly inhabited, largely uncleared, and almost wholly uncultivated “desert[s]” that they had found in America into cultivated, cleared, populous, and improved spaces, many of which were experiencing rates of economic and demographic growth, and degrees of social and cultural development, without parallel in the known history of the West. Most observers—the Burkes and Raynal, for instance—were content simply to record these phenomena, occasionally pausing to condemn or to praise selected aspects of them. For Smith, however, these phenomena cried out for explanation, and no early modern writer thought more deeply or wrote more penetratingly about them than he.5

The explicit question that Smith posed about Europe’s early modern overseas experience was why so many “new colonies” seemed to prosper: Why, as he put it, did the “colony of a civilized nation which takes possession, either of a waste country, or one so thinly inhabited, that the natives easily give place to the new settlers, [advance] more rapidly to wealth and greatness than any other human society.” As his phrasing of the question suggests, the destruction or retreat of Amerindian cultures provided part of the explanation. So also, he emphasized, did the generous resource endowment that settlers often found in America and their situation far from the metropolitan states to which they were attached. While “plenty of good land” operated both as an invitation to settlement and as an incentive to industry, their location placed “them less in the view and less in the power of their mother country,” thereby providing settlers with a maximum amount of

4 Ibid., II, 559, 567–569; Burke and Burke, Account of the European Settlements, I, 21. 5 Smith, Inquiry, II, 597–598.

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“liberty to manage their own affairs their own way” and to construct economies, societies, and polities that would enable them to make all that they could “of their own produce” and to employ “their stock and industry in the way that they judge[d] most advantageous to themselves.”6

But, to Smith, the principal reason why Europeans turned out to have had such a tremendous competitive advantage over the Amerindians in the development of the Americas was the rich social and cultural baggage that they brought to that project. When they emigrated to the Americas, Europeans carried with them the accumulated cultural inheritance of an old and, in Smith’s view, much more advanced civil society. The principal elements of that inheritance that Smith singled out for special emphasis were “a knowledge of agriculture and of other useful arts,” a “habit of subordination,” and “some notion of the regular government” that took “place in their own country, of the system of laws” that supported that government, and “of a regular ad- ministration of justice.” Smith might have extended this list to include a wide range of social and economic skills, technological know-how, established systems of land tenure and law, and tra- ditions of self-discipline and time management, as well as a variety of economic, legal, social, and civic institutions, tools and tech- nologies, widespread literacy and numeracy, and a knowledge of animal husbandry.7

In effect, Smith called attention to the important extent to which the cultural inheritance of European colonizers provided them with a vast “storehouse of resources” that, in selective combinations, was far “superior to what” could have grown “up of its own accord in the course of many centuries among savage and barbarous nations.” Coming from societies that were already highly commercialized, Europeans entered the contest for Amer- ica with a decided advantage over the less advanced societies of the Amerindians. Reinforced by continuing access to metropoli- tan markets, knowledge, and inventions, settlers had the social and technical capacity to construct new “European-style” societies outside of Europe, thus ensuring that they would be the ones to determine the shape of the social landscapes that developed through interactions with the aboriginal inhabitants, and enabling

6 Ibid., 564, 567, 572–573, 582. 7 Ibid., 564–565.

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them to function effectively within the broader early modern Atlantic economy. In the words of Hume, Smith’s fellow Scot, America was a “noble” and well-endowed country that had been “kept desolate by the wild manners of the antient inhabitants.”8

With this analysis, Smith highlighted the crucial importance of social and cultural capital in European overseas successes during the early modern era. To employ the concept, social and cultural capital, in this context is to liberate it from the usage of modern social science. Building on Smith’s insight, this article examines the new societies of British America to make some preliminary suggestions about the role of social and cultural capital in the early modern colonizing and overseas state-building process.

Several attributes of social and cultural capital, as it functioned in the colonizing process, deserve remark. One was the transfer- ability that Smith emphasized. Settlers could carry social and cultural capital to new places, combine it with labor and invest- ment capital, and transform—often, radically—Amerindian social and cultural landscapes into English-style spaces complete with English-style economies, social systems, and cultural arrangements.

Another attribute of social and cultural capital was its extraor- dinary adaptability. Settlers and other occupants could put the social and cultural capital that they carried with them to a wide variety of uses in many different sorts of socioeconomic contexts and ecological zones. In early modern English America, these zones extended from the lush tropical island of Barbados to the bleak shores of Newfoundland.

A third, and closely related, feature of social and cultural capital was its partibility. Out of the rich storehouse of available social tools and knowledge, settlers could select whatever was most useful to their speci� c efforts at social reconstruction in a particular space. In the process, they discarded much and, in the course of adjusting to the new situations in which they found themselves, simpli� ed or modi� ed everything from economic practices and social organization to law, and even language.9

8 Ibid., 564; E. L. Jones, “The European Background,” in Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman (eds.), T he Cambridge Economic History of the United States. I. T he Colonial Era (Cambridge, 1996), 125; David Hume, T he History of England (London, 1778), VI, 186. 9 The classic, and still most analytically impressive, study of the selectivity and simpli� cation of European social capital in a New World setting is George M. Foster, Culture and Conquest: America’s Spanish Heritage (Chicago, 1960). See also R. Cole Harris, “The Simpli� cation of Europe Overseas,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, LXVII (1977), 469–483.

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A fourth attribute of social and cultural capital in the colo- nizing process was its enhancibility, in two general ways. The � rst was by invention. By trial and error, settlers gained knowledge about such fundamental concerns as crop production, product shipment, or housing forms to meet the new conditions that they found or the speci� c objectives that they developed in their new situations. The second way was by imitation, learning from other peoples and cultures. To cite a few well-known examples, from Amerindians, they borrowed techniques of maize cultivation and processing; from the Portuguese, they imported the culture and technology of sugar production and the institutions of the plan- tation and chattel slavery; and from enslaved Africans, they learned to improve rice cultivation.

Such invention and borrowing produced new pools of social and cultural capital, combinations of transplanted and acquired knowledge, practices, and institutions that constituted important components in the new English-style societies. This new social and cultural capital was also transportable to other and newer settlements—that of Virginia being reproduced in neighboring Maryland and North Carolina, that of eastern New England in western New England, and that of Barbados in the Leeward Islands, Jamaica, and South Carolina. All of it went through a pattern of adaptation, selection, and enhancement similar to that which had characterized the construction of the earliest spaces of English colonial enterprise in the Americas.

In the thinly populated societies that characterized the early generations of English colonizing, the human capital of particular individuals with specialized skills effectively translated into social capital, even though during the initial stages of English occupa- tion, transplanted social and cultural capital everywhere went through a winnowing or simpli� cation process. The simple so- cieties with which settlers began had no outlet, or need, for some of the specialized skills by which some immigrants had sustained themselves in old England. Finding no employment in their trades, weavers, fullers, and dyers from East Anglia, for instance, became farmers in New England, and their clothmaking skills died with them.

Similarly, many of the complexities of Old World societies had no function in simple New World societies. In the process of discarding the super� uous, settlers lost much knowledge and many Old World forms of social and cultural capital. Hence, as

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the earliest colonies—in the Chesapeake, New England, and the West Indies—slowly became more complex and in need of more re� ned forms of social and cultural capital, their inhabitants often lamented the earlier loss of such forms, fearing that they had lapsed into a state of creolean degeneracy that fell far short of metropoli- tan standards. In this situation, as Smith remarked, “there was not, perhaps, at that time either in Europe or America a single person who foresaw or even suspected the rapid progress” that the colo- nies would make during the next half century.10

Indeed, some of the very elements that stimulated such fears provided the means for the colonists’ social and cultural delivery. Trade, continuing immigration, governmental interactions with metropolitan agencies of political supervision, and ongoing cul- tural exchanges in science, religion, and politics made them a part of an expanding transatlantic “information pool,” reinforced their inherited cultural preferences for things British, and, by gaining them access to metropolitan social and cultural capital, held out the possibility for the replenishment, expansion, and updating of that social and cultural capital in New World places. Improved transportation and communication resulting from better naviga- tion aids, more ef� cient and safer ships, more numerous sailings, the development of postal services, and closer economic integra- tion had the same effect. Moreover, high rates of growth and development during the � rst three-quarters of the eighteenth century signalled the colonies’ expanding capacities for acquiring metropolitan social and cultural capital and successfully incorpo- rating their acquisitions into British-American cultures.11

The expansion of Britain’s American colonies in North America was evident in virtually every sector of life, especially after about 1715. Still clustered in a series of noncontiguous nuclei close to the Atlantic seaboard in 1710, the population began to spill out in all possible directions. By the 1760s and 1770s, there was one long continuum of settlement stretching from Georgia to Maine, and new centers emerging in Nova Scotia and in East and West Florida. The white settler population soared during the

10 Smith, Inquiry, II, 597–598. 11 Jones, “European Background,” 104. See Ian K. Steele, T he English Atlantic 1675–1740: An Exploration of Communication and Community (New York, 1986).

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same period, rising from about 318,600 in 1710 to c. 1,326,300 in 1760—an increase of more than 1,100 percent!

Demographic growth was particularly impressive among the continental colonies. The number of whites was doubling every twenty-� ve to thirty years, jumping from 286,785 in 1710 to 1,275,163 in 1760. The black population, the overwhelming ma- jority of which was slave, grew from 181,511 to 646,305 in all the British colonies, and from 44,386 to 317,906 in the continental colonies. Stimulated by the continuing availability of land and the high levels of economic opportunity to meet the demands of both the growing population and an expanding overseas commerce, the increase in the number of whites on the continent was the result of both continuing immigration and a vigorous natural increase that seems to have been a function of a combination of declining mortality, younger marriages, higher fertility, and better nutrition. The growth of black population was testimony to the increasing capital and labor resources of slave purchasers and, in the continental colonies, to a sturdy natural increase.12

Economic growth was also impressive during these years. Every available indicator—number of slaves, personal wealth, vol- ume of agricultural production, value of exports and imports (from Britain), and quantities shipped in the coastal trade—demonstrates steady growth before 1740 and extraordinary growth thereafter. During the six decades after 1700, the volume of agricultural production increased at least sixfold, the value of overseas exports about fourfold, and the value of imports from Britain nearly sevenfold. Recent estimates suggest that the gross national product (gnp) multiplied about twenty-� ve times between 1650 and 1770, increasing at an annual average rate of 2.7 percent for British America as a whole and 3.2 percent for British North America. This increase may have represented a real per capita annual growth rate of 0.6 percent, which was twice that of Britain. By the time of the American Revolution, this vigorous economic growth had produced a standard of living that might have been “the highest achieved for the great bulk of the [free] population in any country up to that time.”13

12 Greene, Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill, 1988), 177–181. 13 John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, T he Economy of British America, 1607–1789 (Chapel Hill, 1985), 51–61; Alice Hanson Jones, “Wealth Estimates for the American Middle

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Accompanying this impressive territorial, demographic, and economic performance was a rapid development and massive accumulation of human, social, and cultural capital. In the eco- nomic sphere, it was manifested in a greater specialization of production, leading to lower production costs; better transporta- tion, resulting in lower distribution costs; more ef� cient markets; tighter organization; and rising technical capacity. Occupational structure became increasingly complex; the commercial sector more highly skilled and internally differentiated; the professions— including law, ministry, and medicine—more specialized; arts, trades, and women’s work more expert; and agricultural output more ef� cient, as farmers and slaves learned to adapt old products and experiment with new ones.

The proliferation of social and human capital was also ob- servable in the social realm. It was responsible for the emergence of an increasingly complex society with an ever-larger range, more dense distribution, and more deeply established agglomeration of social institutions, including families and kinship groups; neigh- borhoods and hamlets; port cities and administrative towns; stores and artisanal establishments; local judicial and administrative insti- tutions; churches; and transportation facilities, including roads, bridges, ferries, and a few canals.14

In the cultural sphere, it was evident in the increasing avail- ability of knowledge through a broad spectrum of educational, cultural, social, economic, and religious institutions and through a rising volume of books, magazines, and newspapers of colonial, British, and European origin accessible to the colonists. It gave rise to a general expansion of schooling, including more institu- tions of higher learning; rising levels of English literacy, which, running well above 70 percent of adult male settlers, was higher than in Britain; the establishment and expansion of both private and public libraries; an increasingly vigorous press with the ca- pacity to publish books, pamphlets, newspapers, and other reading material; and a rash of voluntary associations, such as coffee-house groups, chambers of commerce, professional societies, fraternal

Colonies, 1774,” Economic Development and Cultural Change, XVIII (1970), 130; idem, T he Wealth of a Nation to Be: T he American Colonies on the Eve of the Revolution (New York, 1980), 302–303; idem, “Wealth and Growth of the Thirteen Colonies: Some Implications,” Journal of Economic History, XLIV (1984), 250–252. 14 Greene, Pursuits of Happiness, 184–187.

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organizations, literary clubs, salons, tea tables, assemblies, and other imitations of the forms of polite society that characterized the metropolis.15

The massive increase in colonial social and human capital repre- sented by these developments fostered the emergence of a Euro- pean-style civil society throughout Britain’s American colonies. According to Seligman, the concept of civil society as a voluntary union of people “existing independently of the state” had its origins in eighteenth-century England and Scotland and received “its fullest articulation in the Scottish Enlightenment,” Smith being perhaps its principal analyst and exponent. Yet, as Seligman observes, contemporaries looked across the Atlantic for the pri- mary “historical model of this theory.” The new republican polity of the United States “provided for the philosophers of the eight- eenth and nineteenth centuries (and for many thereafter) the model of civil society, with its voluntary associations, separation of Church and State, federalist (as opposed to Statist) concepts, and protection of individual liberties.”16

Seligman’s observations implicitly raise the question of how much this model of civil society was the product of the American Revolution and how much it was informed by earlier colonial British-American social experience. Some scholars have been so intent upon assimilating the American Revolution to the great European revolutions—emphasizing its revolutionary character and radical discontinuity with the American past—that they have largely neglected to explore the bearing of earlier American social experience upon the events and developments of the American Revolution.

The conception of the Revolution, and the creation of a national political system as the founding and of the people who presided over those events as the founders, has encouraged this

15 See Lawrence A. Cremin, American Education: The Colonial Experience 1607–1783 (New York), 545, 551, 553: David Lundberg and Henry F. May, “The Enlightened Reader in America,” American Quarterly, XXVIII (1976), 262–292; Richard D. Brown, Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700–1785 (New York, 1989); Richard L. Bushman, The Re� nement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York, 1992); David S. Shields, Civil Tongues & Polite Letters in Early America (Chapel Hill, 1997). 16 Adam B. Seligman, T he Idea of Civil Society (New York, 1992), 3, 5, 61–62. On the origins and early development of the idea of civil society, see also Marvin B. Becker, T he Emergence of Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century: A Privileged Moment in the History of England, Scotland, and France (Bloomington, 1994).

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neglect. When it intends nothing more than the founding of the American national state, such language elicits no objection. There was no American state and, hence, no political entity or political society that could be called America before the middle of 1776; the American state so much celebrated by contemporary European philosophers and American political analysts did not come into being until the late 1780s.

Yet, if we are thinking about the civil societies in those areas of America that became the United States, such a conception is fraught with serious problems. As Smith and his American con- temporaries were well aware, those civil societies were not “founded” during the late eighteenth century; they had already constructed themselves through a long process lasting, in all but one case, between a century and a century and three-quarters. When these societies came together to form the American nation between 1775 and 1800, what they experienced was a second founding. This is not merely a semantic or an academic quibble, especially not for a social historian or for any analyst concerned with understanding eighteenth-century American conceptions of civil society. To conceive of the establishment of the colonies as the � rst founding is to call attention both to their long histories as political societies at the time of the Revolution and to open up the possibility of understanding the important relationship between those histories and the contemporary understanding of civil society in late eighteenth-century America.

From the beginnings of English colonization early in the seventeenth century, both the actual process of settlement—of social formation—and contemporary conceptions of that process facilitated the emergence of ideas about the nature of civil society and the priorities that they represented. Indeed, the idea of what a civil society ought to be might well have been the most impor- tant form of social and cultural capital that settlers brought with them from the Old World. Through every stage of the colonizing process, and from Barbados north to New England, this inherited standard operated as a framework for identi� cation. Largely oblivi- ous to its tragic effects upon the indigenous inhabitants, settlers and land developers conceived of it as a massive civilizing project. Deeply aware of its profound transformative effects, they thought of themselves as engaged in a laborious but noble effort to conquer a wilderness by felling forests; creating � elds, orchards, and pas-

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tures; substituting domestic for wild animals; and otherwise bring- ing the land under their mastery. In the process, they deliberately changed landscapes that to them appeared rude and barren, turn- ing them into civil spaces that represented extensions of the English or other European places to which they were politically, economically, culturally, and emotionally attached and on which they relied for their norms of a civil society.17

First founders of every new society in colonial English Amer- ica secured possession of the land by treating with or defeating the Indians, clearing the wilderness, and introducing whatever forms of agriculture seemed most appropriate. To supply their wants during the earliest phases of this process, they frequently reverted to more primitive forms of economic and social activ- ity—hunting, like the Indians, or, in many cases, grazing and raising livestock. But their larger project was always the estab- lishment of settled agricultural, commercial, and civil societies of the kind that they had left behind in the Old World. As they recon� gured the physical landscape into farms, estates, and urban communities, and inscribed it with property lines, they began the slow process of implanting, re� ning, and accumulating the social and cultural capital that would form the foundations for the articulation of a civil society.

Whether they entered into explicit formal compacts (as, for instance, in Plymouth), or whether, far more commonly, they simply adapted the well-known practices and rules of English common law to their new situations, they quickly established civil polities, the principal purposes of which were little more than to protect their habitations against Amerindians or rival Europeans, to govern relations among themselves, and to secure the property that they were creating and accumulating through their own industry and activities. From these early beginnings, the “natural progress” of agriculture, and the development of the commercial networks that made it pro� table, settled “the affairs of society on an easy and secure foundation” and provided settlers with the economic and social wherewithal to cultivate a civil life. The result, as Smith noted, was a “natural progress in the arts” that led ineluctably in the direction of a civility and re� nement that stood

17 See Greene, The Intellectual Construction of America: Exceptionalism and Identity from 1492 to 1800 (Chapel Hill, 1993).

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in stark contrast to conditions among neighboring Amerindians, who, despite the example of the settlers, “still continue[d] in the most rude and uncultivated state of society.”18

In the experience of colonial British-Americans, moreover, this process was not limited to the earliest, or � rst, foundings. Rather, as many late eighteenth-century observers pointed out— among them Crèvecouer and Williams, whose 1794 Natural and Civil History of Vermont is certainly the most extensive, systematic, and sophisticated contemporary analysis of the “state of society” in America—settlers who headed for the “interior parts of the country” continually repeated the experience of the earlier coastal settlers. At � rst, they hunted like the Indians, but slowly, in Crèvecouer’s words, they began changing the “hideous barbarous country” of the “great woods” into “� ne, well-regulated dis- trict[s],” increasingly characterized by “a general decency of man- ners” and sophisticated commercial and social infrastructures, including stores, taverns, courthouses, churches, and other insti- tutions. After the � rst two or three generations of settlement, colonial British North America in its various zones—from the primitive frontier to what Crèvecouer called middle zones and to the polite and more heavily commercialized east—exhibited the full range of stages through which contemporary social theorists conjectured that societies passed in their advance to commercial civilization.19

Dating from the � rst foundings and deeply rooted in the colonial British-American experience, this understanding of social development as progress from rudeness to re� nement, from less to more advanced forms of social organization, and from passion and self-indulgence to reason and self-control was, by the middle decades of the eighteenth century, thoroughly engraved in the collective consciousness of free colonial British-Americans. Long before the American Revolution, colonial British-American social development had functioned as a blueprint—an elaborate histori- cal demonstration, evident in literally thousands of cases—of the process by which civil society took shape.

18 Smith, Inquiry, II, 565; James Wilson, “Lectures on Law,” in Robert Green McCloskey (ed.), T he Works of James Wilson (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), I, 231; William White and Wilson, “The Visitant,” 5, Pennsylvania Chronicle (Philadelphia), 29 Feb. 1768. 19 Samuel Williams, Natural and Civil History of Vermont (Walpole, N.H., 1794), II, 352; J. Hector St. Jean de Crèvecouer, Letters from an American Farmer (New York, 1957), 42–43.

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As settlers and other contemporary analysts conceived of it, the history of the colonies was only incidentally about war and politics or about religious matters (other than in New England, which was atypical of colonial British-American cultural develop- ment). Rather, it was the more signi� cant story of the social transformation of signi� cant portions of North America and the West Indies in little more than a century and a half, a grand story richly and endlessly illustrated in the successful rise of individuals to competence, substance, and fortune. Witness Crèvecouer’s recounting of the career of Andrew, the Hebridean, “a poor man, advancing from oppression to freedom; from obscurity and con- tumely to some degree of consequence—not by virtue of any freaks of fortune, but by the gradual operation of sobriety, honesty, and emigration.” Throughout the colonizing process, this trans- formation of the wilderness into improved, European-style, civil spaces comprised the principal story that informed, connected, and gave meaning to the lives of the millions of free people who took part in it.20

Moreover, the characteristics associated with the societies that had taken shape as a result of this transformation were, in many respects, almost a perfect example of contemporary Scottish En- lightenment theories of civil society. As products of both necessity and volition, the new societies of colonial British America were, preeminently, societies of independent freeholding families com- posed of “free and independent men” and “sensible” women deeply engaged in their pursuits of individual happiness. Notwith- standing the fact that many of those men and women found their happiness in the possession of black slaves, in economic exploita- tion of social dependents, and in sweeping and intensive cultural imperialism, the societies that they created, according to many observers, often exempli� ed the characteristics that Enlightenment thinkers associated with the idea of civil society: concentration on agriculture; economic prosperity; social equality among the free segments of society; well-regulated families; concentric circles of neighborhoods, associations, institutions, and markets that pro- vided public arenas for social interaction and fostered hospitality, industry, activity, and a powerful impulse toward improvement; mild, if not always “perfect freedom and equality” of religion;

20 Ibid., 64.

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benign, cheap, and highly participatory government that was suspicious of the intrusions of foreign power as well as nonlocal authority; modest civil establishment and low taxes; deep hostility to privilege; and “warm and uniform attachment to liberty.”21

Long before they formally became republican in 1776, the British colonies in America were republican in manner and gov- ernment. In Smith’s words, settlers enjoyed virtually complete “liberty . . . to manage their own affairs in their own way.” They were governed by locally elected assemblies that were not only dedicated to that “equal and impartial administration of justice which renders the rights of the meanest British subjects respectable to the greatest, and which, by securing to every man the fruits of his own industry, gives the greatest and most effectual encourage- ment to every sort of industry” but also were far more repre- sentative, far less corrupt, and far more responsive to their constituents than was the British House of Commons. As Wilson later explained, such political arrangements engraved upon the character of colonial British-Americans two of the principal “vir- tues” associated with the idea of civil society, “the love of liberty and the love of law.”22

According to Williams’ explication of Smith’s and Wilson’s insights, “in the state of society which had taken place in Amer- ica,” the foundations of its “freedom were laid, long before the nations of Europe had any suspicion of what was taking place in the minds of men.” Not some “arti� cially contrived” system “of political checks, balances, and arrangements,” then, but the dis- tinctive social conditions that colonial British-Americans had cre- ated during their earlier histories constituted the “extensive and permanent cause” of the “system of American Republicanism.” Williams de� ned it as the belief that government should limit itself to three simple functions: “Do justice, protect property, and defend the country.”23

The “natural, easy, independent situation, and spirit, in which the body of the [free] people were found when the American war

21 Wilson, “Lectures on Law,” I, 81; White and Wilson, “The Visitant,” 3, Pennsylvania Chronicle, 8 Feb. 1768; Greene, Pursuits of Happiness; Williams, Natural and Civil History of Vermont, II, 423; Wilson, “Oration Delivered on the Fourth of July 1788,” in McCloskey (ed.), Works of Wilson, II, 777. 22 Smith, Inquiry, II, 585, 610; Wilson, “Lectures on Law,” I, 72. 23 Williams, Natural and Civil History of Vermont, II, 358–359, 426.

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came on” and the broad “civil freedom” that they enjoyed, Wil- liams explained, were the “constant product and effect” of the societies that the founders—that is, the � rst founders—and their descendants and later immigrants had constructed. In such condi- tions, “the common farmer of America had a more comprehensive view of his rights and privileges than the speculative philosopher of Europe ever could have of the subject.” Political writers during the Revolution, like Thomas Paine, met with such “amazing success,” not “because they taught the people principles, which they did not before understand; but because they placed the principles which they had learned” from “the state of society in America . . . in a very clear and striking light, on a most critical and important occasion.”24

In these essentially self-regulating communities, society, in Wilson’s words, was not “the scaffolding of government” but government “the scaffolding of society.” The end of government and law was to “protect and to improve social life” by making sure that the lands, goods, chattels, and rights “collected by the labour and industry of individuals” should remain, inviolably, “their property”; the measure of a good government was the extent to which it promoted “the peace, happiness, and prosperity, the increase, and the affections of the people.” What better dem- onstration could there have been of that fundamental principle of civil society that “the happiness of society” ought to be “the � rst law of every government”?25

Long before they could have read the works of the Scottish Enlightenment, colonial British-Americans had subscribed to the ideas that society—what the Scots meant by the term civil soci- ety—was anterior to government; that the function of laws, gov- ernments, and constitutions was to promote the ends of civil society, especially to facilitate the pursuit of happiness by the individuals therein; and that for most people, such pursuit would be conducted far more satisfyingly within the family, neighbor- hood, or local civic institutions than in the small political arenas that characterized the colonies.

24 Ibid., 429–431. 25 Wilson, “Lectures on Law,” I, 86, 88, 233; Williams, Natural and Civil History of Vermont, II, 415; Wilson, “Considerations on the Nature and Extent of the Legislative Authority of the British Parliament (1774),” in McCloskey (ed.), Works of Wilson, II, 723.

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In the colonial British-American case, civil societies, in the Euro- pean sense, were not the product of but the precondition for the American Revolution. They were not so much the result of independent nationhood or newfound revolutionary resources or sensibilities as of an ongoing process of social and cultural capital transfer, re� nement, and accumulation that had begun during the century and a half following the � rst founding of English colonies in the Chesapeake, New England, and the West Indies. From this perspective, what historians call the American Revolution needs to be understood as an effort to perpetuate and improve the bene� ts of the civil societies that were already in place by the last decades of the colonial era. Both the civic autonomy that colonial British-Americans sought through independence and the institu- tional structures that they created during the last quarter of the eighteenth century were expressions of the preexistent social and cultural capital that they were determined to preserve.

Neither settlers nor metropolitans during the colonial era fully understood the larger implications of the social accomplishments of American settlers. Settlers did not think of their societies as a “new model of the social order.” On the contrary, like Smith, they continued to consider the Old World as the “great mother” who had supplied and replenished much of the social capital that the settlers and their descendants had been able to re� ne, expand, and accumulate in the process of building English societies in American places. Only gradually during the intense constitutional discussions about the structure of the British Empire, the necessary attributes of republican polities, and the proper “form of govern- ment for an extensive empire” that took place from the mid-1760s to the early 1790s did people on either side of the Atlantic come to an appreciation of the extent to which the “historical develop- ment” of colonial British America was “paradigmatic of a broader and more general change in sensibility, values, and world views.”26

During the late eighteenth century, at the time of the second founding, colonial American social experience had a profound bearing upon American conceptions of civil society and its rela- tionship to government. Experientially and conceptually, the � rst and second foundings were of a piece; any discontinuities between them were little more than an elaborate resolution of political and

26 Seligman, Idea of a Civil Society, 16, 91; Smith, Inquiry, II, 590, 623.

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intellectual contingencies that arose within the radical civil socie- ties that colonial British-Americans had constructed between 1607 and 1776. Precisely because of their radical character, these socie- ties could both construct a profoundly conservative revolution and serve as paradigmatic for the civil societies emerging in the Old World.

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