Thursday 9 January 2014

Life in Colonial America


I INTRODUCTION
Life in Colonial America, the combination of customs, traditions, and social practices that governed the daily lives of the citizens of the British colonies in North America that became the United States. This article provides a portrait of social and cultural life in the American colonies in the middle of the 18th century, when colonial culture was at its most developed and most dynamic. For a treatment of the political history of colonial America, see Colonial America, History of.
II THE LAND AND ITS PEOPLES
To understand the lives of the colonists, it is necessary to know the surroundings in which they lived. In 1750 North America was still a new world—a world dominated less by human beings than by the natural environment. Even after a century and a half of European and African settlement (and after at least 10,000 years of Native American inhabitancy), towering forests of pine, oak, maple, elm, beech, and chestnut covered most of eastern North America. These forests were home to tens of thousands of deer and other wildlife. An intricate network of streams, rivers, and lakes crisscrossed the landscape, draining the land and providing homes for millions of beaver and freshwater fish. Even larger numbers of saltwater fish inhabited the relatively shallow waters off the northeastern coast of the continent. These fish and animals had long provided food and fur clothing for Native Americans and yielded valuable exports for the European inhabitants.
Many Europeans and Africans lived in the southeastern part of North America, raising crops on the broad coastal plain that extended inland from the ocean up to a distance of 240 km (150 mi). This fertile lowland area of the coastal plain stretched from present-day Florida northward to Delaware Bay. From this plain the terrain rose gently to the west in a rolling upland called the Piedmont Plateau, a region that in 1750 was just being settled. The Piedmont, which means “foot of the mountain,” extended for another 80 km (50 mi) to the ridges of the Appalachian Mountains, which defined the western edge of British settlement. To the north of Delaware Bay, and especially in what is now New England, the coastal plain was much narrower and much less suited to agriculture. Numerous hills and valleys filled the landscape, stretching inland from the ocean to the mountains—a distance at this point of only 80 to 160 km (50 to 100 mi).
III A REGIONAL PORTRAIT
In 1750 British North America comprised the territory from the Atlantic Coast in the east to the Appalachians in the west, and from what is now Maine in the north to the border of Spanish Florida in the south. Hundreds of villages and towns and tens of thousands of farms were set in this natural landscape. These settlements were home to approximately 900,000 Europeans, 240,000 Africans, and 200,000 Native Americans. Despite their large numbers, by 1750 the inhabitants had changed the land very little. Except for the Native Americans, most of the population had arrived within the previous 50 years—in 1700 there were only 230,000 Europeans and 20,000 Africans. British North America was still a new creation, an undertaking by a diverse mixture of immigrant peoples amid a great expanse of nature.
Gradually, distinct colonial societies began to emerge in each of the three geographical areas of British North America: New England, the mid-Atlantic region, and the South. This social diversity was not the result of conscious planning but rather of the different origins and cultures of each of these populations and of the different agricultural opportunities offered by the natural environments in which people chose to live. The distinctive economic, religious, and cultural character of the colonial regions meant that their inhabitants lived in different ways. They built different types of houses, grew different crops, worshiped in different churches, and held different values. In 1750 there was not one 'American' colonial society, but three regional social orders united by political bonds of the British Empire and the common English origins of the majority of their inhabitants.
A unique social order developed in New England, an area that included the colonies of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire. English Puritans (see Puritanism), who were members of a radical Protestant sect that followed the teachings of the Swiss theologian John Calvin, settled the region between 1620 and 1640, seeking freedom from religious persecution. A century later the descendants of these first settlers formed the overwhelming majority of the population and made New England the most culturally and religiously homogeneous of the three colonial regions. Because of its cold climate and rocky soils, New England was also the poorest region. Unlike the other regions of North America, its farms could not grow valuable export crops to ship to markets in Europe.
A very different society developed in the so-called mid-Atlantic colonies of Pennsylvania (which at that time also included Delaware), New York, and New Jersey. Immigrants from England and Wales who were members of the religious Society of Friends (more commonly known as Quakers) initially settled in Pennsylvania and parts of New Jersey, while Dutch settlers founded what would become New York and formed a majority of its population until 1700. After 1700 all of the mid-Atlantic colonies received tens of thousands of German and Scots-Irish immigrants and lesser numbers of French Protestants (Huguenots) and Irish Catholics. Thus, by 1750 many of the inhabitants of the mid-Atlantic colonies differed from one another in language and culture. Differences in ethnicity and religion—not homogeneity, as in New England—were the most striking features of the mid-Atlantic colonies.
The English settlers in the South—the colonies of Virginia, Maryland, North and South Carolina, and Georgia—came to North America looking primarily for economic gain. These immigrants took advantage of the region’s mild climate, which permitted the cultivation of many crops, and they established large plantations to produce tobacco and rice for export to markets in Europe. The wealthy planters who dominated the early settlements initially imported English indentured servants, who worked the planters’ lands for a specified period of time in return for their passage from England. After 1670 plantation owners increasingly turned to slave labor from Africa. By 1750 they had brought in so many Africans that the Southern colonies had become slave societies, sharply divided along the lines of race and class.
A New England: A Society of Yeoman Farmers
As they settled New England, the Puritans created self-governing communities and religious congregations composed of independent landowning farmers, or yeomen, and their families. The Puritan political leadership granted large areas of land to groups of male settlers, known as the proprietors, who then divided the land among themselves. Men of higher social standing usually received larger portions, but every male received enough land to support a family. Equally important, every male had a voice in the town meeting. As the main institution of local government, the town meeting levied taxes, built roads, and elected officials to manage town affairs.
Because of Puritan beliefs that God singled out only a few specific people for salvation, the residents of New England did not automatically become part of the Congregational Church, the church the Puritans founded. Instead, membership was limited to those who could testify convincingly before members of the church that they had experienced religious conversion, or had been saved. Those who had been saved were known as “the elect,” or “Saints,” and they represented less than 40 percent of the New England population. Because of the power wielded by Saints and men of high status, the New England system of landowning and politics was not fully democratic, but it gave ordinary people more autonomy than their ancestors in England had enjoyed.
A1 Ways of Life
A1a Farm Life
The overwhelming majority of New England families lived on farms. Within these farm families, and English families in other regions as well, husbands had virtually complete legal power over the property and person of their wives. At marriage English women lost their maiden names and their legal identity; in general, they could not own property, file legal suits, or participate in political life. The prescribed social role of wives was to bear and nurture healthy children and to work as helpmates to their husbands. Most women diligently carried out these duties. In the mid-18th century, New England women usually married in their early 20s and bore six to eight children, most of whom survived to adulthood. Farm women also provided nearly all of the goods used by their families—spinning yarn from wool and knitting it into sweaters and stockings, making candles and soap, and churning milk into butter and cheese.
Most New England parents tried to help their children establish farms of their own. As sons and daughters reached the age of marriage, fathers provided them with gifts of land, livestock, or farm equipment. Parents also selected the marriage partners of their children, so that their children would have hard-working spouses who would maintain or increase the family's farm property. Despite this custom of arranged marriages, parents usually allowed their children to refuse an unacceptable match.
Partly because of the abundance of trees, New England yeoman families usually lived in wooden houses. The typical house was one-and-a-half stories in height and had a strong frame (usually of large, square timbers) that was covered by wooden clapboard siding. A large stone chimney stood in the center of the house, providing cooking facilities and heat during the long winters. One side of the ground floor contained a hall, a general-purpose room where the family worked and ate. On the other side was the parlor, which contained the best furniture and the parents' bed and was used to entertain guests. The children slept in the loft above the main rooms, while the kitchen was either part of the hall or in an attached shed along the rear of the house. Because colonial families were large, there was much activity and little privacy in these small dwellings.
New England families worked on their own farms. The family and its livestock consumed most of the crops that the family farm produced; any surplus was exchanged for needed manufactured goods. The first settlers grew the traditional English crops of wheat and barley (for bread and beer), but over time they adapted their production to the new environment. After 1700 many New England farmers grew mainly corn and raised cattle and hogs. The ears of corn offered food for humans, and corn stalks and leaves furnished feed for cows, bulls, steers, and pigs. The cows, in turn, provided milk products, and steers and pigs were slaughtered and sold in the form of preserved meat.
By the middle of the 18th century this way of life was facing a crisis. The region's population had nearly doubled each generation—from 100,000 in 1700, to 200,000 in 1725, to 350,000 by 1750—because farm families had many children and most people lived until they were over 60 years old. As colonists in long-settled areas of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island divided and then subdivided their lands, the farms increasingly became too small to support single families, threatening the New England ideal of a society of independent yeoman farmers.
Farm families responded creatively to this challenge to their traditional way of life. To provide land for the next generation, some farmers obtained land grants in undeveloped parts of Massachusetts and Connecticut or bought land from speculators in New Hampshire or in what later became Vermont. Other farmers became agricultural innovators. They planted nutritious English grasses such as red clover and timothy, which provided more forage for their livestock, and they planted potatoes, whose high yield partially offset the disadvantage of smaller farms. Finally, many of these farm families increased their productivity by exchanging goods and labor among themselves. They loaned draft animals and grazing land to one another and worked cooperatively to spin yarn, sew quilts, and shuck corn. These creative measures—migration, agricultural innovation, and economic cooperation—preserved New England's yeoman society until the 19th century.
A1b Town Life
By 1750 a variety of artisans, shopkeepers, and merchants provided services to the growing agricultural population. Blacksmiths, wheelwrights (wagon makers), and furniture makers set up shops in many rural villages, where they built and repaired the equipment and goods needed by farm families. Traders also established stores that stocked imported English manufactures such as cloth, iron utensils, and window glass, as well as West Indian products such as sugar and molasses. The storekeepers exchanged these imported goods for farm crops and other local products, including shingles, potash (ashes used to make glass), and barrel staves, all of which they shipped to towns and cities along the Atlantic Coast. To service this transportation system, enterprising men set up horse stables and taverns along the wagon roads.
When these local products arrived in major seaport towns such as Boston and Salem in Massachusetts, New Haven in Connecticut, and Newport and Providence in Rhode Island, merchants there exported them to the West Indies, where they exchanged them for sugar, molasses, gold coins, and bills of exchange (credit slips). They carried the West Indian products back to the New England colonial factories, where the raw sugar was refined into loaves of granulated sugar and the molasses was distilled into rum. The merchants sent the gold and credit slips to England and traded them for manufactures, which they carried back to the colonies and sold along with sugar and rum to rural farmers.
Other New England merchants exploited the rich fishing areas along the northeastern coast of North America, financing a large fishing fleet and transporting its catch of mackerel and cod to markets in southern Europe and the West Indies. Still other entrepreneurs took advantage of the abundant supplies of timber along the coasts and rivers of northern New England. They financed sawmills that provided low-cost wood for houses and shipbuilding. Hundreds of New England shipbuilders, sail makers, and blacksmiths built oceangoing ships, which they sold to British and American merchants.
As merchants grew wealthy by providing commercial services to the farm population, they eventually came to dominate the societies of the seaport cities. Unlike the yeoman farming families, these wealthy merchants imitated the upper classes in England by building large two-and-a-half-story houses designed in the popular new Georgian style. A Georgian house had a symmetrical façade, or front face, with equal numbers of windows on each side of the central door. The interior consisted of a passageway down the middle of the house with specialized rooms—library, dining room, formal parlor, and master bedroom—off to the sides. Each of these rooms served a separate purpose, unlike the multipurpose halls and parlors of yeoman houses. In a Georgian house, men primarily used certain rooms, such as the library, while women frequented others, such as the kitchen. Georgian houses also boasted separate bedrooms on the second floor that gave privacy to the parents and children.
A2 Religion
The Puritans who settled New England were intensely religious men and women. All of these Puritans had experienced a conversion; they had felt God’s grace and were “born again.” Consequently, they tried to make their new society into a holy commonwealth. Following a rule outlined in the Bible, Puritans in Massachusetts divided inheritances among all children, with a double portion going to the oldest son. 'Where there is no law,' the government advised local magistrates, they should rule 'as near the law of God as they can.' Moreover, these devout Christians believed that God intervened constantly in their lives, and they saw signs of God’s (or Satan’s) power in blazing stars, deformed births, and other unusual events. Always on the outlook for wizards or witches, who acted at the command of Satan, civil authorities in Massachusetts and Connecticut accused scores of people of witchcraft during the 17th century and hanged 35 alleged witches.
By the mid-18th century many members of Puritan churches had lost the religious fervor of their ancestors, and their “deadness of soul” worried their ministers. Influenced by resurgences of religious enthusiasm in Germany and Britain, New England ministers led a religious revival known as the Great Awakening. Evangelical ministers traveled through the colonial countryside and made emotional appeals for sinners to repent in order to attain salvation. In the mid-1730s the Puritan minister Jonathan Edwards began a revival in the churches in the Connecticut River valley. Then, in 1739, George Whitefield, a young English preacher, sparked a major revival throughout the British colonies. 'Hearing him preach gave me a heart wound,' confessed one Connecticut farmer, who became convinced that he had sinned and must seek the new light of God's grace.
Support for the new religious message of these evangelists reached its peak during the early 1740s. Thousands of fallen-away Christians returned to their churches, taught moral principles to their children, and vowed to reform their personal lives. The revivalists’ emphasis on “enthusiasm” divided many colonial churches. To some extent, these divisions followed existing lines of occupation and wealth. The revivalists, or New Lights, found many followers among ordinary farmers and artisans, and they supported a more open or democratic approach to religion. Conversely, many wealthy New England merchants became religious traditionalists, or Old Lights, who believed the new movement threatened established religion. In contrast to the New Lights, Old Light ministers preferred church services that were calm and restrained. Like the minister Charles Chauncy of Boston, the Old Lights condemned the 'cryings out, faintings and convulsions' produced by the emotional preaching of the New Lights, especially when these sermons were delivered by traveling evangelists who had no formal education.
The Great Awakening changed religious life throughout the colonies, but its impact in New England was especially profound. New Lights condemned tradition-minded church members as unconverted sinners and challenged the authority of their ministers. In a much-read pamphlet of 1740, The Dangers of an Unconverted Ministry, Presbyterian clergyman and New Light Gilbert Tennent argued that any person who had received the saving grace of God was as qualified to preach as the most-educated minister. Dozens of ordinary men and women heeded Tennent's words, roaming the countryside and preaching to anyone who would listen.
In response, Old Lights in Connecticut won the passage of a law restricting the activities of traveling preachers, and tradition-minded ministers spoke out strongly against enthusiasm. Soon, many churches split in two: New Lights left established churches and founded new churches or joined existing Baptist congregations which, with their emphasis on equality and community and their focus on individual spiritual rebirth, appealed to the revivalists. Equally significant, they refused to pay taxes to support the Congregational Church, which was the official church in Connecticut and Massachusetts. Instead, they argued in favor of the voluntary support of religion and a greater separation between church and state.
A3 Education and Culture
In New England, unlike other colonial regions, elementary education was widespread. The first Puritan settlers believed that everyone should be able to study the Bible, so they taught their children to read at an early age. They also required every town to pay for a primary school. As a result of this law, most boys in New England had some formal schooling, and about ten percent enjoyed secondary education in publicly financed grammar schools in the larger towns. Most boys learned their skills by helping their fathers at farm tasks or as apprentices to artisans. Only a few girls attended local primary schools, but many more received some education at home or in so-called dame schools, where women taught basic writing and reading skills in their homes. In 1750 nearly 90 percent of New England women (and virtually all men) could read and write, giving this region a higher literacy rate than any other area in Europe or America. Many churches in New England also established colleges to train ministers. For example, Puritans founded both Harvard College (now Harvard University) in Massachusetts in 1636 and Yale College (now Yale University) in Connecticut in 1701. Later, Baptists set up the Rhode Island College (now Brown University) in 1764 and a Congregationalist minister received a royal charter to establish Dartmouth College in New Hampshire in 1769. However, only a few people—no women and a very small percentage of men—attended college.
New England produced more literary works—mostly histories, sermons, and personal journals—than the rest of the colonies combined. Many of these writings were either created by ministers or inspired by religion. For example, the Boston minister Cotton Mather published Magnalia Christi Americana (The Great Works of Christ in America, 1702), an epic account of the Puritans’ experience in America, while the great revivalist Jonathan Edwards wrote an impressive philosophical work, A Careful and Strict Enquiry Into…Notions of…Freedom of Will…(1754). Most music was also religious in nature, primarily taking the form of the singing of Psalms. Because of New England's strong religious character, colonies banned those artistic endeavors that lacked religious content or were too “worldly” in their concerns, such as drama and other forms of theatrical entertainment. See also American Literature: Poetry; American Literature: Prose.
B The Mid-Atlantic Region: Cultural Diversity
By 1750 the combined population of the mid-Atlantic colonies of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania reached nearly 300,000, a significant gain from the 1720 population of only 120,000. Unlike New England, which grew overwhelmingly from natural increase, the mid-Atlantic region expanded primarily from immigration. By 1750 about 60,000 Scots-Irish and 50,000 Germans had arrived in British North America, and most of them settled in small farming communities in the mid-Atlantic region. This influx of non-English immigrants made these colonies the most culturally and religiously diverse of all the settlements.
William Penn, who founded the colony of Pennsylvania in 1682, attracted immigrants from many countries with his policies of religious liberty and freehold ownership, which meant that farmers owned their land free and clear from leases and dues to landlords. The great majority of the settlers who came to Pennsylvania and New Jersey before 1700 were English or Welsh Quakers, and they remained the dominant social and political group until the 1750s.
When the English conquered the Dutch possession of New Netherland in 1664 and renamed it New York, the population of the colony was small and, because of the presence of English and Swedish settlers and African slaves, already culturally diverse. Until the 1720s the population of New York grew slowly. Much of the colony’s land was divided into huge estates—owned by Dutch and English landlords—along the Hudson River. Few immigrants wanted to work as tenant farmers on these estates when they could have their own land somewhere else.
The first major influx of new immigrants to the mid-Atlantic region came from Ireland and consisted primarily of Scots-Irish Presbyterians and smaller numbers of Irish Catholics. The Scots-Irish were descendants of Presbyterian Scots who had settled on lands in Ireland that had been seized from Irish Catholics by England's Protestant rulers during the 1600s (see Ulster Plantation). The English government used the Scots-Irish as a way of controlling the power of Ireland’s Catholic population. However, the English government also discriminated against the Scots-Irish, excluding them from public office and taxing their chief export, textiles. When droughts struck Ireland in the 1720s, thousands of Scots-Irish fled to the American colonies. Most arrived in Philadelphia and then migrated to central Pennsylvania or southward down the Shenandoah Valley into the backcountry of Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas.
Beginning in 1720 a steady stream of German immigrants, escaping from religious conflicts and declining economic opportunities in southwestern Germany and Switzerland, also flowed into the mid-Atlantic region. This immigration swelled to a flood between 1749 and 1756, when 37,000 people arrived in Philadelphia. Some of these Germans came as indentured servants, called redemptioners because they had to work for usually three or four years to redeem the cost of their passage from Europe. Because German immigrants often set up their own communities, both in Pennsylvania and in the Southern backcountry, and encouraged marriage within those communities, the German language remained dominant in many areas. Most of the immigrants also retained other German customs, such as the use of stoves rather than fireplaces for cooking and heating.
B1 Ways of Life
The architecture of the mid-Atlantic region reflected the diversity of its peoples. Many buildings in New York City and Albany, New York, were built in the Dutch style, with brick exteriors and high gables at each end. Many Dutch churches were distinctively designed in the shape of an octagon. In Pennsylvania, German and Welsh settlers ignored the ample supplies of timber and, following the custom of their homelands, used cut stone to build their houses and barns. As an example, more than 80 percent of the buildings in Germantown, Pennsylvania, were made of stone. The Scots-Irish, on the other hand, took advantage of the American forests to fell large trees and construct sturdy log cabins.
Ethnic customs also influenced furniture styles. Rural Quakers preferred simple designs in tables, chairs, and chests and shunned elaborate decorations; however, some urban Quakers favored more intricate patterns. The city of Philadelphia emerged as a center of furniture making because of the wealth of its Quaker and Anglican merchants. Philadelphia cabinetmakers crafted elegant desks and highboys, graceful cabinets with many drawers. German artisans in Pennsylvania preserved the folk traditions of their native land, decorating chests with intricate carved designs and painted scenes of flowers and birds. Similarly, German potters turned out an array of ceramic jugs, pots, and plates with traditional shapes and decorations.
Ethnic differences appeared again with respect to women's lives. Among English Puritan settlers in New England, few wives worked alongside their husbands in the fields. In German communities in Pennsylvania, however, a visitor noted that women were 'always in the fields, meadows, stables, etc. and do not dislike any work whatsoever.' In addition, German and Dutch settlers followed the laws and customs of their homelands, which gave wives more control over property than was permitted by English common law. Unlike English colonial women, German and Dutch colonial wives owned their clothes and other personal goods and could write wills disposing of the property they brought to the marriage.
Finally, ethnicity played some role in determining agricultural practice. For example, German farmers generally preferred using oxen rather than horses to pull their plows, and more than other ethnic groups, the Scots-Irish embraced a farming economy based on corn and hogs. But these groups also adapted their traditions to the new environment. In Ireland, the Scots-Irish had engaged primarily in intensive farming, aggressively working small pieces of land to get the largest possible yield from their crops of wheat and potatoes. In the American colonies they turned to mixed farming, raising crops of corn for human consumption and as food for hogs and other farm animals; this type of production was well suited to the hilly, upland regions where many of them settled. In addition, improvement-minded farmers of all ethnic backgrounds used new agricultural practices to raise their output. During the 1750s these innovators discarded the traditional hand sickles and scythes used to harvest hay, wheat, and barley; instead, they used the cradle scythe, a tool with wooden fingers that arranged the stalks of grain for easy collection and binding. This implement doubled or tripled the amount a worker could cut in a day. Farmers also increased their commercial production by fertilizing their fields with dung and lime and by rotating their crops to maintain the fertility of the soil.
Before 1720 colonists in the mid-Atlantic region generally engaged in small-scale farming and paid for imported manufactures by shipping corn and flour to the West Indies. In New York a flourishing fur pelt export trade to Europe provided additional wealth. After 1720 an international demand for wheat stimulated mid-Atlantic agriculture. A population explosion in Europe drove up wheat prices (a bushel of wheat cost twice as much in 1770 as it had in 1720), prompting farmers to increase their output. Farmers also expanded their production of flaxseed, which was in great demand in the Irish linen industry. In addition, farmers boosted their production of corn, which they sold in the West Indies. These booming export markets ushered in an era of agricultural prosperity, especially for established farmers.
Some newly arrived immigrants purchased farms and shared in the export boom, but many German redemptioners and poor Scots-Irish immigrants had to work as agricultural wage laborers. Merchants and artisans also employed these propertyless workers in a so-called putting-out or domestic system for the manufacture of cloth and other goods. In this type of production, the merchants bought wool and flax from farmers and hired new arrivals, many of whom had been textile workers in Ireland and Germany, to work at home spinning these materials into yarn and weaving cloth. As textile production and farm output increased, export-minded farmers and enterprise-minded merchants grew wealthy, while many small farmers and artisans earned only enough for subsistence. Consequently, by 1750 mid-Atlantic society was divided by wealth as well as by ethnicity.
Social distinctions were most apparent in the seaport cities, which expanded as a result of the wheat trade. By 1750 Philadelphia had 25,000 residents, New York had 15,000, and the new port of Baltimore (also a wheat-shipping center) had nearly 7,000 inhabitants. A small group of merchants dominated the societies of these seaports: For example, about 40 merchants controlled over half of Philadelphia's trade. Like their counterparts in New England, some wealthy Philadelphia and New York merchants marked their achievements by building elaborate Georgian-style mansions.
Shopkeepers and artisans—shipwrights, butchers, coopers (barrelmakers), seamstresses, shoemakers, bakers, carpenters, masons, and many other specialized producers—constituted the middle ranks of seaport society. Wives and husbands often worked as a team and passed on their craft to their children. Most of these artisans and traders earned enough income to maintain a modest but dignified existence.
Laboring men and women stood at the bottom of urban society. They worked on the docks, unloading manufactured goods from inbound vessels and stocking outbound ships with barrels of wheat, corn, and flaxseed. Many of these workers were African Americans; some were free, but others were still enslaved under the system of slave labor that existed in the colonies at the time. In 1750 blacks comprised more than 10 percent of the population of Philadelphia and New York. Hundreds of seamen, some of them African American as well, also lived in the port cities and sought work as sailors on merchant vessels.
B2 Religion
Like the Puritans who settled New England, the Quakers were a radical sect of English Protestants. Unlike the Puritans, who believed that only a few specific men and women were predestined to achieve salvation, Quakers believed that all people had the potential to hear the voice of God in their souls (what they called the 'inner light”) and to be saved. Quakers also believed that women as well as men should be active in religious life, and many Quaker women assumed influential roles as elders and leaders.
Quakers had a distinct set of moral ethics. To emphasize that all people were equal in God's eyes, they wore plain clothes and refused to remove their hats to wealthier or more powerful individuals. As early as 1688 some Quakers expanded their belief in equality to include African Americans, and during the 1750s, in response to the urgings of Quaker evangelist John Woolman, some Pennsylvania Quakers began to free their slaves. The Quakers were also pacifists; as a result, until the 1750s Pennsylvania avoided warfare with the Native Americans.
The other major Protestant religious groups in the mid-Atlantic—Scots-Irish Presbyterians, German Lutherans, German Reformed, and Dutch Reformed—were basically similar. They all had a well-educated clergy and expected lay members to have detailed knowledge of the Bible. The Dutch Reformed Church was the most authoritarian, with church leaders in Holland exerting control over congregations in America; the Presbyterians were the most democratic, providing each congregation with representation in the synod (assembly), which decided church doctrine and practice.
Revivalist beliefs from Germany inspired ministers such as Theodore Frelinghuysen, William Tennent, and Gilbert Tennent, who led revivals among German and Scots-Irish immigrants in the 1730s. In addition, members of a number of radical Protestant sects in Germany, such as the Mennonites and the Moravian Church, settled in the mid-Atlantic region.
B3 Education and Culture
Education and culture in the mid-Atlantic colonies were heavily influenced by the Age of Enlightenment, an intellectual movement that had its roots in Europe in the 17th century and emphasized the power of human reason to understand and change the world. The English philosopher John Locke was a major contributor to the political thought of the Enlightenment. Locke argued that the supreme authority of the state was not given by God to kings and queens, but stemmed from the social contracts made among ordinary individuals to preserve their “natural” rights to life, liberty, and property.
Philadelphia became the center of the Enlightenment in America partly because of the presence of Benjamin Franklin, who championed many Enlightenment ideas. Franklin popularized the Enlightenment in annual editions of Poor Richard's Almanack, a collection of practical and humorous information first published in 1732. Thousands of people read the book. In 1743 Franklin was among the founders of the American Philosophical Society of Philadelphia, which sought to promote useful knowledge in the sciences and humanities through scholarly research and community service.
Franklin’s Enlightenment ideals were well received in Philadelphia because the city was home to a merchant class that was both well educated and wealthy. Quaker and Anglican merchants and their wives read Enlightenment tracts that discussed social reforms, and they used their financial resources to put them into practice. They built a hospital to care for the sick, poor, and the insane. It was chartered in 1751 and later was called Pennsylvania Hospital. In 1769 they built a Bettering House, which sheltered the aged and offered jobs to the poor. The city's elite also subsidized the first American medical school in 1765 and created a circulating library filled with Enlightenment literature. Although these ideas appealed to educated men and women in other seaport cities, only in Philadelphia did Enlightenment principles find a significant public expression in the establishment of institutions dedicated to its cause.
Before the Enlightenment, most American intellectuals were ministers. By the 1750s a non-religious culture had developed in Philadelphia and other colonial cities, stimulated in part by easy access to European books and magazines and the appearance of locally published newspapers. Men and women from the families of merchants and lawyers were prominent participants in this new culture, but many skilled artisans also became familiar with the scientific discoveries and radical political philosophies of Enlightenment thinkers.
Enlightenment culture, in combination with merchant wealth, gave a major boost to the production of high art as opposed to popular or folk art. Serious artistic work had previously found little support in the colonies. Merchants began to hire skilled artisans to decorate their houses with elaborate plaster ceilings. Their wives ordered fine furniture and expensive silverware. To dignify their newfound status, merchants commissioned artists to paint their portraits. This patronage subsidized the early careers of the first important American painters, Benjamin West and John Singleton Copley, both born in 1738. Although these two artists were born and did their early work in America, they only attained real fame after moving to London, a city that had a much richer artistic culture than anyplace in the American colonies.
C The South: Slavery and Aristocracy
British culture and values, especially those of the landowning aristocracy and gentry, were greatly prized by wealthy slave-owning planters in Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina. By 1720 the leading families in those colonies stood at the top of a European-like social hierarchy. They presided over large estates that were worked by enslaved African American laborers. Of the 650,000 inhabitants of the Southern colonies in 1750, about 250,000 (or nearly 40 percent) were slaves. The planters used their wealth and social status to dominate the white yeoman and tenant farmers, who formed the great majority of the white population. To control the colonial legislatures, the planters solicited the votes of yeoman farmers at election time by treating them to rum and gifts and promising to lower their taxes.
C1 Ways of Life
C1a Yeomen and Tenants
In Virginia and Maryland, most yeoman and tenant farm families grew tobacco for export to Europe. Each year a typical family produced about 800 kg (1,800 lbs) of good-quality tobacco and used about ten percent of it to pay taxes and another 40 to 50 percent to buy imported cloth and shoes. With the remainder of the tobacco the family paid the rent (if they were tenants) and bought tools and various food items such as salt, sugar, and tea. Until tobacco prices rose in the 1760s, many yeomen barely scraped by and most tenants could not save enough money to buy land of their own. In South Carolina most yeoman farm families lived a considerable distance inland from the rice-growing plantations nearer the coast. These farmers grew a variety of crops, which they exchanged with one another and sold locally.
Most Southern yeomen lived in humble, one-story frame dwellings sided with unpainted clapboard and roofed with wooden shingles. There were often two rooms on the ground floor and usually the windows had no glass, only wooden shutters. At one or both gable ends of the house stood a chimney, which was usually made of wood and coated on the inside with clay to make it fire-resistant. Yeoman families often planted apple orchards on hilly ground and used the apples to make cider. They protected their planted fields of tobacco or corn from wandering livestock with split-rail fences. The cattle, hogs, and horses foraged for their own food in the surrounding woods.
By the 1750s yeoman farmers in Virginia and North Carolina were setting up new tobacco plantations in the Piedmont Plateau, a region of rolling hills at the foot of the Appalachian Mountains. Scottish merchants financed these settlements in order to increase the production of tobacco for export to new markets in central Europe. These merchants granted credit to farmers for the purchase of land, slaves, and equipment and took their tobacco crops in payment. As a result of this expansion into the Piedmont, tobacco exports reached 34 million kg (75 million lb) per year by 1765, up from 24 million kg (52 million lb) in 1740. Planters in Virginia and Maryland also increased their exports by growing wheat as well as tobacco, while planters in South Carolina began to cultivate indigo, a dark blue dyestuff that was in great demand in British textile factories.
C1b Planters
Before 1720 many leading planters were boisterous and poorly educated men who enjoyed the pastimes of common folk. They hunted on foot for deer, got drunk, and gambled on horse races and cockfights. The next generation of planters adopted more refined manners and modeled themselves after the British landed elite. Beginning in the 1720s they built large mansions in the Georgian style and 'rode to the hounds,' donning bright red attire and hunting deer on horseback.
Wealthy women in the Southern colonies shared in the imported culture. They read British magazines, wore clothes of fashionable British design, and imitated British customs such as serving an elaborate afternoon tea.
After women married, they supervised the household slaves and tried to create a refined culture by putting on elaborate dinners and festive balls. These efforts were most successful in South Carolina, where wealthy rice planters maintained townhouses in the busy port city of Charleston. There were also active social seasons in smaller towns like Annapolis, Maryland, and in the tobacco plantations along the James River in Virginia.
C1c Enslaved Africans
The enslaved Africans who worked the indigo, tobacco, and rice fields in the Southern colonies came from western and central Africa, a vast region that stretches for 4,800 km (3,000 mi) from present-day Senegal to Angola. Slavery had existed in Africa for many centuries, but there most slaves retained some rights and their children were often free.
Slavery in the American colonies was more oppressive for it was passed on from generation to generation, and slaves had no legal rights. In 1700 there were about 9,600 slaves in the Chesapeake region and a few hundred in the Carolinas. Over the next five decades, about 170,000 more Africans arrived. By 1750 there were more than 250,000 slaves in British North America, and in South Carolina their numbers had jumped to 60 percent of the total population. Most South Carolina slaves had been born in Africa, but half of the slaves in Virginia and Maryland were born in the American colonies.
Slaves in the Chesapeake region expanded their numbers through natural increases in birth rate, while those in South Carolina did not. This difference was primarily because the Chesapeake slaves lived and worked under better conditions. Tobacco was a less demanding crop to grow than rice. Slaves in the Chesapeake area planted tobacco seedlings in the spring, weeded the crop during the summer, and picked and cured the leaves in the fall and winter. In South Carolina, slaves on rice plantations followed a similar seasonal routine, but workdays and living conditions were much harder. Their homes were in swampy lowlands where they regularly endured epidemics of mosquito-borne diseases. Moreover, slaves on rice plantations had to move tons of dirt to construct rice fields and irrigation systems, and many died from overwork. Finally, because tobacco was a less profitable crop than rice, Chesapeake planters lacked the money to buy new African laborers and so encouraged their slaves to live in families and bear offspring.
At first, enslaved Africans in the colonies saw themselves as members of a specific people—Mandinka, Mende, Igbo, Kongo—and tried to associate with slaves who shared their language and culture. Gradually slaves in South Carolina achieved a broader identity, creating a language called Gullah—which merged elements of several West African languages with elements of English—that most slaves could understand. In the Chesapeake region, the majority of slaves learned English, and as a result, they could converse with one another. As these slaves formed families and had children, they created an African American culture by passing on African traditions and beliefs to the next generation. This heritage appeared in African-inspired wood carvings, the use of African drums and musical instruments, and the persistence of traditional religious beliefs.
The restricted nature of slaves’ lives limited their creativity. Masters insisted on a rigorous routine of work and punished those who disobeyed or ran away with whipping and, in some cases, with the amputation of fingers and toes. Slaveowner violence was particularly evident in the South Carolina lowlands, where slaves greatly outnumbered whites. Some Africans resisted slavery by fleeing to the frontier, where they sometimes intermarried with Native American peoples. A number of African Americans who were fluent in English escaped to the towns of the Chesapeake or mid-Atlantic regions and passed as free blacks. The great majority of African workers remained on plantations and bargained with their owners for various privileges or resisted enslavement by working slowly or stealing.
A few of these plantation slaves attacked their owners or plotted rebellion. In 1739, near the Stono River in South Carolina, 75 Africans, including some Portuguese-speaking Christians from the African kingdom of Kongo (see Democratic Republic of the Congo: Kongo Kingdom), killed their owners and stole guns. They then marched toward Spanish Florida, where the governor had promised freedom to escaped slaves. But South Carolina planters put down the rebellion and tightened plantation discipline. Until the American Revolution (1775-1783), most white colonists did not question the morality of slavery or other forms of personal bondage, such as indentured servitude.
C1d Backcountry Life
By 1750, the Southern backcountry, the area just to the east of the Appalachian Mountains, was peopled by many different European ethnic groups. As early as the 1720s English and Scots-Irish farmers in Pennsylvania had begun to move into western Maryland, down the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, and into the Piedmont regions of the Carolinas and Georgia. They built a better transportation route through the region that became known as the Great Philadelphia Wagon Road. Following their custom in Ireland, the Scots-Irish set up towns that were arranged around an elongated central square, known as the Diamond, where the courthouse and market were located.
By the mid-18th century, Scottish immigrants had arrived in the area as well. Tobacco merchants and artisans from the Lowlands region of Scotland set up stores along the wagon road and the navigable rivers of the region. After 1750 they were joined by shiploads of impoverished farmers from the economically less-advanced Highlands region of northern Scotland. These immigrants came directly from their home country and set up communities in the Cape Fear River valley in North Carolina, the Altamaha River valley in Georgia, and throughout the backcountry. Most of the Highland Scots spoke Gaelic, an early Celtic language (see Celtic Languages: Scottish Gaelic), and they often immigrated and settled in close-knit groups led by ministers and tacksmen, the influential leaseholders for whom they had worked as tenants in Scotland.
This combination of peoples formed a dangerous mix, especially because of the lack of established political institutions to enforce law and order in the backcountry. Different religious groups distrusted one another, and many of their members were armed and organized. A vigilante movement of citizen volunteers who called themselves Regulators tried to restore order and protect the interests of established communities. The Regulators attacked outlaw bands and drove out squatters, who farmed land they did not own, as well as propertyless families who were suspected of stealing livestock.
The Regulators also demanded that the South Carolina government initiate certain political reforms: fairer taxes, lower court fees, and greater representation in the assembly, where the backcountry residents were not represented in proportion to their numbers. The assembly, which was dominated by wealthy rice planters from the coastal region, refused these requests and threw its support to the Moderation, a rival vigilance movement. The breakdown of social authority was so severe that in March 1769 about 600 armed Moderators faced an equal number of armed Regulators near the Saluda River and nearly came to blows. The assembly feared violence in the West and the possibility of slave revolts along the coast, so it agreed to some of the Regulators' demands. However, members refused to reapportion the legislature to give greater representation to backcountry districts and their German and Scots-Irish residents.
In the mid-1760s a new Regulator movement appeared in the backcountry of North Carolina, sparked by falling tobacco prices and a rising number of legal suits for debt. Merchants, who were mostly Lowland Scots, sued bankrupt farmers, many of whom were of German and Scots-Irish descent, asking the courts to seize their property and sell it. To protect their farms, the debtors formed a Regulator movement that closed down the courts. Most Regulators were aspiring property owners, not social revolutionaries; they simply wanted more time to pay their debts. Like the Scots-Irish and Germans in South Carolina, they also wanted the Western areas to have greater representation in the colonial assembly.
C2 Religion
The Church of England, or Anglican Church, was the legally established religion throughout the Southern colonies. Because Anglicanism was the official state religion, its ministers were paid from public taxes. All residents were required to be members of the Church of England, except in Maryland, which had a significant Catholic population and a legal tradition of toleration. Leading planters controlled most congregations and used their power on the local vestries (boards of elected lay leaders) to control church finances and appoint ministers. Anglican ministers paid the most attention to families of the gentry, who represented a very small percentage of the population, and to yeoman farmers. These ministers largely neglected the spiritual needs of white tenant farmers and of enslaved African Americans, who comprised the majority of the population in South Carolina and over a third of it in the Chesapeake region.
The Great Awakening came to Virginia in the mid-1740s. At that time, Samuel Morris, a bricklayer dissatisfied with the policies of the established Church of England, broke away from the church. Morris and his followers invited New Light Presbyterian ministers to preach to them. As the revival spread, the governor condemned the New Lights as Scots-Irish intruders, and Anglican justices of the peace prohibited Presbyterian meetings. Leading planters feared that New Light doctrines of equality would undermine their authority and their ability to collect religious taxes to support the established church. Their ban on Presbyterian services kept most Virginians within the Church of England.
Beginning in the late 1750s, evangelical Baptists, who believed in individual spiritual rebirth and strict faith in Biblical teachings, began a more successful revival in Virginia and other parts of the South. In Europe and the colonies Baptists used emotional services and rituals to win converts among the poor. For example, they baptized adults by immersing them completely in a lake or river, an emotional rite that represented cleansing and rebirth. Thousands of mostly poor yeomen and tenant farmers in Virginia joined Baptist congregations, attracted by their emphasis on equality and community. Baptist preachers welcomed slaves to their congregations, marking the first major attempt to convert African Americans to Protestant Christianity.
Leading planters again resorted to violence and disrupted Baptist meetings by force. Nonetheless, over the next two decades nearly 20 percent of the white population of Virginia joined Baptist congregations. Hundreds of African Americans also became Baptists, thereby diminishing religious differences between the races and setting the stage for the emergence of African American Christian churches. Despite the success of the Baptist revival, the Anglican planter-elite remained in firm control of the society in Virginia and South Carolina. They exercised direct command over their dependents—wives, children, tenants, and slaves—and political authority over yeoman families.
C3 Education and Culture
Education in the South was less widespread than in New England and was primarily reserved for the rich. Often wealthy planters would send their sons to London to study law and to acquire the polish of gentlemen. These planters would hire British tutors to educate their daughters in manners and acquaint them with polite literature. In addition, many of the leading tobacco planters and landlords in Maryland, such as Charles Carroll of Carrollton, were Roman Catholics, and a few of them sent their sons to Jesuit schools in France. Although education for the sons and daughters of yeoman and tenant farmers was less common, German settlers in the backcountry were particularly active in establishing an educational system for their children; by the 1750s German Lutheran congregations had built 40 schools in the Southern backcountry.
IV COLONIAL AMERICA ON THE VERGE OF REVOLUTION
In the 1750s the residents of British North America began to claim greater privileges within the British Empire, a process that culminated in the American Revolution. Despite this common cause, the colonial population was more divided than ever before. The three main geographic regions—New England, the mid-Atlantic, and the South—continued to have distinct social and cultural identities. Moreover, within each of these regions there were new religious, ethnic, and geographic divisions—between New Lights and Old Lights in New England; among Quakers, German, and Scots-Irish in the mid-Atlantic; and among lowland planters, enslaved Africans, and backcountry yeoman farmers in the South. These social divisions would influence the struggle for independence. Some ethnic groups, such as the Scots Highlanders in North Carolina, remained loyal to the British Crown. Because they were pacifists, various religious groups, such as the Quakers and some German sects in the mid-Atlantic region, refused to give full support to the patriot cause. Some enslaved African Americans fled from their patriot owners and won their freedom by assisting the British cause. The regional and racial divisions of the colonial period—between New England and the South and between people of European and African descent—remained important after independence, affecting the history of the new American republic.
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