Download Chapter 1: A New World

Chapter 3: Creating Anglo-America, 1660–1750
The Mercantilist System
By the mid-1600s, it was apparent to England’s rulers that their North American
colonies could generate tremendous wealth, and it moved to seize control of
Atlantic trade, consolidate its hold over the continent’s eastern coast, and
greater regulate its empire. It acted according to the theory of mercantilism,
in which the government regulated economic activity to promote national
power by encouraging manufacturing and commerce through special
bounties, monopolies, and other measures, primarily in order to
manipulate trade to make sure that more gold and silver entered the
country than left it. The export of goods, which generated revenue from
abroad, should exceed imports, which required paying foreigners for their
products. The colonies’ role was to serve the interests of the mother country by
producing raw materials and importing manufactured goods from England.
The Navigation Acts of 1651 were intended to wrest control over world trade from
the Dutch. They required that valuable goods produced in the colonies, such as
tobacco and sugar, first had to be shipped to and traded in English ships and
ports and that most European goods shipped to the colonies had to be shipped
through England. This enabled the government to collect revenues and allowed
English merchants, manufacturers, shipbuilders and sailors to benefit from trade.
But the benefits of this policy were not all one-sided. American colonists’ ships
were considered English, and in New England the acts stimulated its
considerable shipbuilding industry. Also, colonial growers had a reliable customer
always eager to buy their product, whether it was tobacco, rice, or grain. Finally,
all trade in the British Empire was protected by the British navy, the world’s most
powerful.
Question:
1. Explain mercantilism, how it was implemented in the English Empire, and
whether or not all of its benefits were one-sided.
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The English Conquest of New Netherland
With the restoration of the English monarchy in 1660 under Charles II, England
expanded its colonial reach. It chartered new trading ventures, such as the
Royal African Company, which was given a monopoly on the slave trade, and
soon doubled the number of English colonies in North America. The English
seized New Netherland in 1664 as part of an Anglo-Dutch war that also resulted
in the conquest of Dutch trading posts in Africa. The Dutch colony was seized by
the Duke of York, and was renamed New York. England transformed the minor
military post of New Netherlands into an important imperial seaport and military
base for operations against the French.
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English rule over New York expanded and constricted freedom for certain
groups. The English promised to continue religious toleration and respect
property holdings, but they eliminated some rights for married women and
practices that benefited female colonists. The English also discriminated against
free blacks who had previously enjoyed all the rights of other “freemen.”
English rule also for a time strengthened the Iroquois Confederacy in upstate
New York. In the mid-1670’s, New York’s Governor, Sir Edmund Andros, formed an
alliance with the Iroquois known as the Covenant Chain. This expanded English
and Iroquois power in the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley regions at the expense of
the French and their Indian allies.
At the same time, many English colonists began to complain that they were
being denied their English liberties, particularly the right to consent to taxation.
The Dutch in New Netherland had not had a representative assembly, and
English rule began without one, either. In 1683, the Duke of York agreed to call
an elected assembly, which soon drafted a Charter of Liberties and Privileges
affirming traditional English religious and political rights.
Question:
2. a. Discuss the circumstances behind England’s acquisition of the Dutch colony
of New Netherland. B. What groups were probably worse off under English rule
than under Dutch rule?
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The Founding of Carolina
In the 1660s, English proprietors who were awarded the right to establish a
colony north of Florida by King Charles II, in order to check Spanish expansion,
founded Carolina. Initially the sons of wealthy plantation owners in Barbados,
Carolina colonists traded with local Indians, employed them in raids against the
Spanish, and also raided Indian communities for a burgeoning trade in Indian
slaves. But in 1715, Yamasee and Creek Indians alarmed by their trading debts
and English slave trader’s raids into their territories mounted a rebellion which,
when crushed, resulted in the enslavement or expulsion into Spanish Florida of
most of the Indian tribes. Slavery was fundamental to Carolina and made it the
most hierarchical - and once rice plantation agriculture developed— the
wealthiest of England’s North American colonies.
Question:
3. a. How was Carolina founded? B. Which product and labor system became
central to Carolina’s economy?
William Penn’s Holy Experiment
The last English colony established in the 1600s was Pennsylvania. Its proprietor,
William Penn, an advocate of religious toleration and spiritual freedom, intended
the colony as a space for social harmony between European migrants escaping
religious prosecution and Indians. A devout member of the Society of Friends,
known as the Quakers, Penn encouraged Quaker settlement and helped frame
the colony’s liberal government, which established religious liberty and an
elected assembly with broad suffrage.
Penn envisioned his colony as a “holy experiment” to be governed on Quaker
principles, including the equality of all persons (including women, blacks, and
Indians) under God and the primacy of the Individual conscience. Penn and the
colony’s Quakers treated the Indians with special consideration, making peace
with them (Quakers were pacifists, and did not have militias), and taking pains to
pay all Indian land claims. Above all, Penn emphasized religious freedom, which
was ensured in 1682 in the colony’s Charter of Liberty.
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Penn formed an assembly elected by male taxpayers and freemen—either free
immigrants with 100 acres of land or former indentured servants with 50 acres—
thus giving the vote to a majority of the colony’s men. Penn also owned all the
land and sold it to settlers at low prices to encourage a broad distribution of
landed wealth and social equality. Pennsylvania’s freedom attracted migrants
from all over Europe. This made the colony prosperous, but also increased
tensions with Indians as whites who were not Quakers and pacifists pushed into
Indian territory. It also fostered the growth of African slavery in southern colonies
as more indentured servants chose to migrate to Pennsylvania rather than
Virginia or Maryland.
Question:
4. William Penn called his colony a “holy experiment.” Discuss the development
of Pennsylvania, with particular attention to advantages the colony offered to
settlers. What liberties were guaranteed and to whom?
5. How did the expansion of freedom in Pennsylvania for some lead to
deterioration for others?
Origins of American Slavery
While the English, like all other European colonists in the Americas, did not intend
to rely on African slaves as a labor force, the growing demand for labor for
tobacco cultivation in the Chesapeake region led planters there to turn to the
transatlantic slave trade. White masters saw many advantages in using
African slaves rather than white indentured servants: (1) African slaves
were not protected by English common law, (2) their terms never expired,
(3) they did not become discontented landless men, as had so many
former servants, (4) their children were slaves, (5) their skin color made it
more difficult for them to escape, and (6) they were accustomed to
difficult agricultural work. Also, (7) compared to Native American slaves,
African slaves were already immune from many European diseases.
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While the English did not have modern notions of “race”—in which humankind is
divided into groups associated with skin color—or racism—-an ideology based
on the idea that some races are inherently superior to others and entitled to rule
over them—the English did view other peoples, such as the Irish, Native
Americans, and Africans as uncivilized, pagan, and savage and animal-like. At
the time, the English, like other Europeans, tended to divide humanity between
those were either civilized or barbarian, or Christian or non-Christian. Yet Africans,
because of their skin color, religion, and social practices were seen by the
English as “enslaveable” in a way that poor Englishmen were not.
Slavery has existed for almost all of human history. It was central to ancient
Greece and Rome and survived in northern Europe among Germans, Vikings,
and Anglo-Saxons after the Roman Empire’s collapse. Although slavery existed in
the 1600s in the Mediterranean and Africa, it was quite different from the
plantation form of slavery that developed in the Americas, in which large
numbers of slaves were brought together for very demanding agricultural labor
under a single owner. The large numbers of slaves increased the dangers of slave
rebellion and invited harsh discipline. Unlike in Africa, the death rate was higher,
and African slaves who became free still had a skin color that whites associated
with slavery, and thus were marked as unworthy of equality in a free society.
The African slave trade became a major international and transatlantic business
only in the 1600s. Slavery developed first in the western hemisphere outside of
North America. By 1600, Brazil (a Portuguese colony), had large sugar plantations
worked by African slaves. By the end of the seventeenth century, the profits to be
had from sugar had transformed English, Dutch, French, and Danish colonies in
the West Indies from mixed economies with few slaves and small farms worked
by white servants to those dominated by lucrative sugar plantations worked
exclusively by African slaves. Sugar was the first good to be mass-marketed to
European consumers, and became the most important product of the British,
French, and Portuguese empires.
Compared to its rapid introduction in Brazil and the West Indians, slavery grew
slowly in North America. English indentured servants constituted the majority of
the labor force in the Chesapeake well into the 1680s. The most significant line of
division in this region in the seventeenth century was not between whites and
blacks, but between white plantation owners who dominated politics and
society and everyone else—small farmers, servants, and slaves.
While Spain had liberal laws granting slaves various rights and the Catholic
church often encouraged masters to free their slaves, the legal status of slaves in
the English colonies was initially ambiguous and undeveloped. Beginning in 1619,
small numbers of Africans were brought to the Chesapeake, and while they
were almost certainly treated as slaves, some were freed after serving a term of
years. But racial distinctions were codified into law from the beginning; one such
early Virginia law barred blacks from serving in the militia. But in both Virginia and
Maryland, free blacks could sue and testify in court, and some even acquired
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land and purchased white servants and black slaves. Blacks and whites worked
side by side in the region’s tobacco fields, occasionally ran away together, and
established intimate relationships.
Though evidence shows that slaves were being held for life as early as the 1640s,
only in the 1660s did Virginia and Maryland’s laws refer explicitly to slavery. As
tobacco planting spread and labor demand increased, conditions facing black
and white servants diverged. To encourage migration, colonial authorities tried
to improve the status of white servants. Simultaneously, blacks’ opportunities for
freedom were restricted. By 1680, ideas of racial difference were strongly
reflected in these colonies’ laws, despite their small black population. New laws,
for example, mandated that children of free and slave parents would have the
legal status of the mother—ensuring that masters could profit from sexually
abusing female slaves, since the child would become the master’s property.
Question:
6. Assess the validity of the following statement: The development of slavery in
the English colonies was primarily about economics.
Bacon’s Rebellion: Causes and Effects
The shift from white indentured servants to African slaves as the main plantation
workforce was hastened in 1676 by Bacon’s Rebellion. Governor William Berkeley
had long ruled Virginia through a corrupt regime, forged in alliance with a small
elite of the colony’s wealthiest tobacco planters, giving his supporters the best
lands as white settlement pushed inland. With all the best lands already taken by
wealthy planters, an increasingly poor population of freed white servants and
migrants found it harder to acquire land. Forced to settle frontier areas, these
men were also disenfranchised in 1670 by a new law limiting the vote, once
given to all adult men, to landowners.
In 1676, disgruntled frontier whites demanded that Berkeley exterminate or expel
frontier Indians to make room for white settlers, but the governor, fearing war and
profiting from the Indian trade, refused. Led by planter Nathaniel Bacon, small
farmers, landless men, indentured servants and even some Africans who also
demanded lower taxes and an end to elite rule waged war against the Indians
and the colonial government. They plundered plantations and burned
Jamestown to the ground before English warships helped quell the rebellion.
Virginia’s ruling elite consolidated their rule by both limiting democracy and
expanding social opportunity for poorer whites. They reinforced property
qualifications for voting, but also reduced taxes and adopted aggressive policies
towards Indians to open up more western lands. Most important, tobacco
planters more and more spurned potentially rebellious white servants for African
slaves, making the Chesapeake region a society based on slavery.
Between 1700 and 1750, blacks went from more than 10 percent to almost 50
percent of the colony’s population—and almost all were slaves. Several factors
contributed to the growth of slavery in Virginia. In 1705, Virginia’s legislature
adopted a new slave code, embedding white supremacy in law, clearly
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defining black slaves as property and sharply limiting the freedom of free and
enslaved blacks. Virginia had shifted from being a “society with slaves,” in which
slavery was just one labor system among other systems, to a “slave society,” in
which slavery was central to the society and economy.
Question:
7. What role did Bacon’s Rebellion play in the development of slavery in the
Chesapeake colonies of Virginia nd Maryland?
Europeans, Indians, and Africans alike all feared enslavement. Slaves often tried
to escape, and those who spoke or read English or were familiar with European
culture sometimes contested their condition. Slaves continued to resist their
masters even as legal avenues for freedom receded in the Chesapeake at the
end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries.
Bacon’s Rebellion was only one of many crises in the late seventeenth-century
colonial America. The year before, 1675, witnessed the beginning of a war in
New England between Indians and colonists unprecedented in its scale, ferocity,
and devastation.
Late 17th Century: Colonies in Crisis
King Philip’s War
An alliance of Indian tribes in southern New England attacked English farms and
settlements encroaching on Indian territories. Wrongly believing that the Indians
were led by the Wampanoag leader Metacom, whom they called King Philip,
the far more numerous whites were unprepared for the assault. Suffering, by 1676,
the destruction of nearly half of New England’s ninety towns, they retreated to
the region’s coastline. The settlers, aided by loyal Indian tribes, mounted a
counter-attack that, when combining combat with Indian warriors and the
massacre and burning of Indian villages, killed Metacom and crushed the rebel
natives, some of whom were sold into slavery in the West Indies.
King Philip’s War,, causing the deaths of 1,000 of New England’s 52,000 white
settlers, and 3,000 of its 20,000 Indians, expanded whites’ access to land only by
finally dispossessing the region’s Indians of theirs.
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The Glorious Revolution
Upheaval in England also affected the colonies. In 1688, the struggle for control
over English government between Parliament and the crown culminated in the
Glorious Revolution, a bloodless event that finally established parliamentary
supremacy and a Protestant succession to the throne. Under Charles II’s rule,
Parliament had expanded its authority and powers, but his unpopular successor,
James II, alienated much of England after claiming to rule by divine right and
seeking religious toleration for Protestant Dissenters and Catholics. Fearing that
the throne would go to his Catholic son, English aristocrats invited William of
Orange, a Dutch nobleman and husband to Mary, James II’s Protestant
daughter, to assume the throne in the name of English liberties. In 1688, James II
fled before William’s invading army, and William and Mary took the throne. The
Parliament soon enacted a Bill of Rights, giving the Parliament control over
taxation and establishing individual rights like trial by jury. This peaceful coup
assured the perpetuation of England’s balanced constitutional monarchy,
allowing English subjects at home and in the colonies to celebrate English
Protestantism and “rights and liberties.”
Before the Glorious Revolution, England’s rulers sought to reduce growing
colonial autonomy within the empire. Charles II had revoked Massachusetts’
colonial charter for violations of the Navigation Act, which the Massachusetts
legislature had earlier refused to recognize (because the colony, they alleged,
had no direct representation in Parliament). And by 1688 James II had combined
the colonies of Connecticut, Plymouth, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode
Island, East and West Jersey (Pennsylvania) into a single super-colony, the
Dominion of New England, ruled by New York’s former governor, Sir Edmund
Andros, who was unaccountable to any legislature. The actions of King James
and Andros alienated many colonists.
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Rebellions in Maryland, New York, and Massachusetts
News of King James’s ouster in 1689 caused rebellions in several American
colonies. Boston militia jailed Andros and other imperial officials, whereupon the
New England colonies re-established their governments. In New York, rebels led
by Jacob Leisler took control. Soon thereafter, Protestant rebels in Maryland
overthrew the government of that colony’s Catholic proprietor, Lord Baltimore,
successfully revoked the old charter and created a new, Protestant-dominated
government.
Leisler’s Rebellion was not as successful. Leisler’s government unintentionally
divided the colony along ethnic and economic lines, causing strife between the
Dutch majority and English minority and between poor rebels and the wealthy.
Soon alienated Dutch merchants and prominent English colonists united against
him and convinced King William to suppress Leisler, who was executed, and his
regime. The rebellion and its suppression polarized New York politics for decades.
With the removal of Andros and the dissolution of the Dominion of New England,
the English crown restored most colonies’ old charters. But Massachusetts
received a new charter as a royal colony, which now incorporated Plymouth.
The new charter made property ownership, not church membership, the
qualification for voting in elections for the colony’s legislature, made the
governor a crown appointee, and required religious toleration for all Protestant
denominations. These measures ended the Puritan’s Bible Commonwealth,
empowering non-Puritan merchants and large landowners and increasing
anxiety among Puritans ever alert to the devil’s work.
Question:
8. What were some of the important effects of the Glorious Revolution in the
colonies?
The Salem Witch Trials
Many Puritans, like other Europeans and colonial Americans in the seventeenth
century, believed in magic, astrology, witchcraft, and other supernatural
phenomena, and often interpreted natural events as having religious or
otherworldly meaning. Witchcraft was punishable by hanging in Europe and the
colonies, and occasionally individuals convicted of witchcraft had been hanged
in New England. Most accused of witchcraft were women beyond childbearing
age who were outspoken, economically independent, estranged from their
husbands, or otherwise thought to violate gender norms. A witch’s powers were
held to challenge God’s will and the stature of men as family heads and rulers of
society.
In 1691, in Salem, Massachusetts, initial accusations of witchcraft snowballed into
a full-blown crisis, as more and more of the accused tried to save themselves by
confessing and naming others as witches. The frenzy of accusations led to legal
charges against nearly 150 persons, most of them women, and nineteen men
and women were hanged. Massachusetts religious and civil authorities were
aghast. They dissolved the Salem courts, and warned that courts should no
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longer accept testimony from those claiming to be possessed or accept the
confessions and accusations of those facing execution. The Salem witchcraft
craze discredited the prosecution of witches and encouraged a greater interest
among prominent colonists in finding scientific explanations for natural events.
The Growth of Colonial America
Although the Spanish and French empires remained particularly powerful in the
Americas in the eighteenth century, England’s mainland colonies in North
America soon exceeded those of France and Spain in trade and population,
growing from 265,000 in 1700 to over 2.3 million in 1770. The English colonies grew
so rapidly because of a high birthrate and continuing immigration. Immigrants
were drawn to the colonies for many reasons, chiefly because of greater
economic opportunities and religious and political liberties.
A Diverse Population
Colonial American society in the eighteenth century was very diverse. The
number of African and non-English European arrivals greatly increased, while the
number of English migrants declined. Nearly 40 percent of those emigrating to
the English colonies did so as unfree indentured servants. An increasing number
of migrants were professionals and skilled craftsmen, causing the English
government to stop promoting migration to North America.
While English authorities worried that the colonies might drain England of skilled
workers and professionals, they sent nearly 50,000 convicts to work in the
Chesapeake’s tobacco fields, and still promoted Protestant migration from nonEnglish area of the British Isles and Europe. A law in 1740 offered British citizenship
to European immigrants after seven years of residence. Many thousands came
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from Scotland and northern Ireland, where many Scots (“the Scotch-Irish”) had
settled as part of England’s colonization efforts.
The more than 100,000 Germans who came to America were the largest group of
European migrants in this period. Many were members of the Catholic church or
small dissenting Protestant sects fleeing from persecution, while others migrated
to escape worsening economic conditions. Tending to settle in the frontier areas
of New York, Pennsylvania, and the southern colonies, Germans migrated as
families, often as “redemptioners,” families of indentured servants working to pay
back the cost of passage to America.
While ethnic groups tended to live and worship in relatively homogenous
communities apart from each other, the American colonies, except for New
England, were far more diverse than England. This was especially evident in the
religious makeup of British America. In 1700, the colonies’ churches were almost
entirely Congregational and Anglican. But despite colonies’ commitment to
official churches everywhere except New Jersey, Rhode Island, and
Pennsylvania, de facto religious toleration increasingly defined religious life.
Especially with the Great Awakening of the 1740s, sects such as Lutherans,
Mennonites, Anabaptists, Moravians, Seventh Day Baptists, and Presbyterians
and even Jews and Muslims were increasingly free to worship as they pleased,
even if they were still taxed to support the official church and banned from
holding public office.
Question:
9. “Liberty of conscience,” wrote a German newcomer in 1739, was the “chief
virtue” of British North America, “and on this score I do repent my immigration.”
Explain what he meant by that remark. What did immigrants find attractive about
the British colonies? What liberties and freedoms were available to newcomers?
Indian Life in Transition
Newcomers to America, who equated liberty with secure ownership of land,
threatened surviving Indian populations. By the 1700s, Indian communities had
changed dramatically from the time of the Europeans’ arrival, and were very
much part of the British Empire, trading and using European goods and allying
and fighting for the British in successive imperial wars against the French and
Spanish. New settlers pressured colonial governments to open up new frontier
lands at the expense of Indian tribes. In Pennsylvania, mostly peaceful relations
between the Quaker-dominated government and Indians disintegrated as the
new migrants often fraudulently made purchases or attacked natives for their
lands.
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Regional Diversity
By the mid-eighteenth century, different regions of the British colonies had
developed distinct economic and social orders. New England and frontier
settlements in other colonies were characterized by families laboring on small
farms, producing for local consumption. The frontier “backcountry” areas rapidly
grew in population. In the older “middle colonies” of New York, New Jersey, and
Pennsylvania, more farmers produced for commercial markets and used nonfamily wage or slave labor. In the Southern Colonies, a slave-based plantation
economy predominated, although there were large number of yeoman farmers
as well.
In the 1700s, Great Britain became the leading producer and trader of
inexpensive consumer goods, including colonial goods such as coffee and tea
and manufactured goods like linen, metalware, glassware, ceramics, and
clothing. Trade knit together the British Empire, and the American colonies
shared in this consumer revolution. Even modest farmers and artisans bought
items such as books, ceramic plates, metal cutlery, and tea that were once
considered luxury goods.
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Britain’s mainland colonies were almost entirely rural and agricultural, and only a
very small percentage of the population lived in the small port cities of Boston,
New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston. In 1770, Philadelphia’s 30,000
inhabitants made it the largest city in British North America. These cities were
centers of trade and exchange, and were inhabited by growing numbers of
merchants, artisans (skilled craftsmen), and the poor.
The urban artisan population included furniture makers, jewelers, and silversmiths
serving wealthier citizens, and lesser artisans such as weavers, blacksmiths,
coopers, and construction workers. The typical master artisan owned his own
tools and worked in a small workshop, often his home, assisted by family
members and young journeymen and apprentices learning the trade. The
artisan survived by his skill, which gave him economic independence and
freedom compared to unskilled laborers. Most craftsmen had a reasonable
chance of becoming a master in their lifetime.
The Atlantic ocean was not so much a barrier as a highway, linking communities
and economies within and between empires. Sugar, tobacco, and other
products of the Americas were marketed in Europe, London bankers financed
the slave trade between Africa and Portuguese Brazil, and Spain spent its gold
and silver importing goods from other countries. As trade expanded, the British
colonies in the Americas became the major overseas market for British
manufactured goods. In turn, North Americans shipped farm products to Britain
and the West Indies, imported slaves and rum from Africa and the West Indies,
exported fish and grains to southern Europe, and New Englanders built one-third
of the ships in Great Britain’s trading fleet.
American colonists benefited from membership in the British Empire. Most did not
complain about British regulation of their trade because commerce enriched the
colonies, and lax enforcement of the Navigation Acts allowed smuggling.
Besides, Britain’s powerful Royal Navy protected American ships. Despite
significant differences, British America in many ways became closer and more
similar to its mother country.
As colonial America matured, an elite emerged that increasingly dominated
politics and society, although they were not as powerful or wealthy as England’s
aristocracy. The gap between rich and poor probably grew faster in the 1700’s
than in any other period in American history. In New England, growing trade
created a powerful merchant upper class, often linked by family of business
connections to London’s great trading firms. (With no banks in America, success
often depended on the credit to be had from personal connections.) By 1750,
colonies of the Chesapeake and lower south were dominated by slave
plantations producing tobacco, rice, and other staple crops, and the
enormously wealthy planters who owned them and ruled these colonies’
governments. Even though colonial America had no titled aristocracy or legally
established social ranks as did Britain, men of families with growing landed and
commercial wealth came to control much of the colonies’ political, economic,
and social life.
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In this period, the different colonies were more strongly connected to England
than to each other. In a process that historians call “Anglicization,” they soon
came to see themselves as more English than “American.” Wealthy colonists
imitated emerging British fashions and taste in behavior, consumption, and
architecture.
By far the wealthiest of mainland colonists were South Carolina’s planters, who
spent most of their time in Charleston, the richest city in British North America.
They lived as colonial America’s aristocrats, enjoying theaters, literary societies,
ostentatious social events, and lavish lifestyles of imported luxury goods and
uniformed house slaves. Compared to other colonies, wealth in South Carolina
was highly concentrated.
Question:
10. Make a comparison chart of the three colonial regions (NE, Mid-Atlantic, and
South) and draw 2-3 things in each column that most represent the economy of
that region. (For ex., you could draw a whale under New England to represent
whaling.)
Social Classes in the Colonies
Colonial elites emulated what they saw as England’s balanced and stable social
order. Freedom for them was based in their power as “superiors” to rule over
“dependents,” those without wealth or prominence, within a hierarchical society
differentiated by men with greater or lesser talents. Society was held together by
webs of influence linking patrons and those dependent on them. Each place in
the hierarchy carried certain responsibilities and was revealed in dress, manners,
and possessions. Colonial elites prided themselves on their refinement - their
manners, education, and cultural knowledge—and they favored leisure over
manual labor. Freedom from labor defined the “gentleman.”
Yet poverty increasingly became part of colonial life in eighteenth-century
America. Fewer free colonial Americans were poor compared to Britain, where a
quarter to one-half of all people required public assistance. But slaves lived in
impoverished conditions, and the number of poor without property grew, with
diminishing land and the growth of wage labor. Better-off colonists generally
viewed the poor as lazy and responsible for their poverty, and while rural
communities and cities gave some assistance to their own, they prevented the
unemployed and propertyless newcomers from receiving aid.
Most free Americans were members of ‘the middle ranks,” living between
extremes of wealth and poverty, and the vast majority of these were small farm
families. The wide distribution of land and the economic autonomy that went with
it distinguished colonial America from Europe. Perhaps two-thirds of the free
male population owned their own land, while three-fifths of England’s population
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owned no property at all. By the 1700s, colonial farm families viewed land
ownership as a kind of right, the social precondition of freedom, and strongly
resented the efforts of Native Americans, great landlords, or colonial
governments to limit access to land. Their dislike of personal dependence, and
their understanding of freedom as not relying on others for a livelihood, sank
deep roots in British North America and, to a great extent, reflected social reality
for many white colonists.
The family was the center of economic life in the eighteenth-century American
household economy. Most work revolved around the home, and men, women,
and children all contributed to the family’s well-being. The small farmer’s
independence depended to a great degree on the work of his dependent wife
and children. While most farmers first focused on growing food to survive, as
commerce expanded in the eighteenth century, more and more farmers also
produced for the market. Women were constantly at work, raising children and
working in the home by cleaning, cooking, sewing, and other activities, and also
working in the fields. Women’s work increased in the eighteenth century, despite
the introduction of new consumer goods that replaced items previously made at
home.
By the mid-eighteenth century, the area that would become the modern United
States was remarkably diverse in peoples, cultures, and social organization, from
the Pueblos villages of the southwest to the tobacco plantations of the
Chesapeake, small farms of New England, feudal-like land estates of New York’s
Hudson Valley, and frontier fur trading outposts. While elites tied to imperial
centers of power dominated the political and economic life of most
colonies, large numbers of colonist enjoyed greater opportunities for
freedom—such as access to the vote, land ownership, the right to worship
freely, and an escape from government persecution—than in Europe. Free
colonists probably enjoyed the highest per capita income in the world,
and the colonies’ economic growth made for a high birthrate, long life
expectancy, and expanding demand for consumer goods. Yet many
colonists experienced the partial freedom of indentured servitude or the
complete absence of freedom as slaves, making freedom and hopes for
freedom essential to the development of North America’s colonies.
Question:
11. Many British settlers in North America believed it was the “best poor man’s
country” and that they were the freest people in the world. What factors would
lead to such a claim?
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