1) What was the first permanent (surviving) English settlement in the New World? What was the major American Indian group that inhabited and controlled that area prior to the arrival of the English settlers? Describe the interactions between those two groups. How did they get along? In what ways were the English reliant upon Powhatan’s people, and vice versa? What were sources of conflict between them?
2) Describe the Triangle Trade and Mercantilism.
3) What were the similarities and differences between indentured servants and African slaves? How was slavery a fundamental part of colonial societies in the Americas?
4) Who initially established Plymouth colony? Why? How was it different from the Virginia colony?
5) How did European migration to the English/British colonies change between the 1600s and the mid-1700s? What groups of Europeans tended to settle where?
6) Describe the French and Indian War (part of the Seven Years War). What factors motivated the French, the British, and American Indian tribes that allied with either side?
7) How did the French and Indian War ultimately lead to the colonies’ push for independence from Great Britain?
8) Describe the Enlightenment and the Great Awakening.
9) Compare the Declaration of Independence to George Mason’s Virginia Declaration of Rights. How did Mason’s work influence Jefferson?
For thousands of seekers and adventurers, America in the seventeenth century was a vast unknown land of new beginnings and new opportunities. The English settlers who poured into coastal America and the Caribbean islands found not a “virgin land” of uninhabited wilderness but a developed region populated by Native Americans. As was true in New Spain and New France, European diseases such as smallpox overwhelmed the Indians and wiped out whole societies. William Bradford of the Plymouth colony in Massachusetts reported that the Indians “fell sick of the smallpox, and died most miserably… like rotten sheep.”
Native Americans dealt with Europeans in different ways. Many resisted, others retreated, and still others developed thriving trade relationships with the newcomers. In some areas, land-hungry colonists quickly displaced or decimated the Indians. In others, Indians found ways to live in cooperation with English settlers—if they were willing to adopt the English way of life.
After creating the Virginia, Maryland, and New England colonies, the English would go on to conquer Dutch-controlled New Netherland, settle Carolina, and eventually establish the rest of the thirteen original American mainland colonies. The diverse English colonies had one thing in common: To one extent or another, they all took part in the enslavement of other peoples, either Native Americans or Africans or both. Slavery, common throughout the world in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, enriched a few, corrupted many, and compromised the American dream of equal opportunity for all.
The English Background
Over the centuries, the island nation of England had developed political practices and governing principles similar to those on the continent of Europe—but with key differences. European societies were tightly controlled hierarchies. From birth, people learned their place in the social order. Commoners bowed to priests, priests bowed to bishops, peasants pledged their loyalty to landowners, and nobles knelt before the monarchs, who claimed God had given them absolute power to rule over their domain.
Since the thirteenth century, however, English monarchs had shared power with the nobility and with a lesser aristocracy, the gentry. England’s tradition of parliamentary monarchy began with the Magna Carta (Great Charter) of 1215, a statement of fundamental rights and liberties that nobles forced the king to approve. The Magna Carta established that England would be a nation ruled by laws. Everyone was equal before the law, and no one was above it.
The people’s representatives formed the national legislature known as Parliament, which comprised the hereditary and appointed members of the House of Lords and the elected members of the House of Commons. The most important power allocated to Parliament was the authority to impose taxes. By controlling tax revenue, the legislature exercised leverage over the monarchy.
Religious Conflict and War
When Queen Elizabeth, who never married, died in 1603, her cousin, James VI of Scotland, became King James I of England. He called his joint kingdom Great Britain. While Elizabeth had ruled through constitutional authority, James claimed to govern by “divine right,” which meant he answered only to God.
James I confronted a divided Church of England, with the reform-minded Puritans in one camp and the Anglican establishment, headed by the archbishop and bishops, in the other. In seventeenth-century England, those who criticized the Anglican Church were called Dissenters.
The Puritans believed that the Church of England needed further “purifying.” All “papist” (Roman Catholic) rituals must be eliminated. No use of holy water, candles, or incense. No “Devil’s bagpipes” (pipe organs). No priestly robes (then called vestments). No lavish cathedrals, stained glass windows, or statues of Jesus. They even sought to ban the use of the term priest.
The Puritans wanted to simplify religion to its most basic elements: people worshipping God in plain, self-governing congregations without the formal trappings of Catholic and Anglican ceremonies. They had hoped the new king would support their efforts, but James I, who had been baptized in the Catholic faith, embraced the Anglican Church to avoid a civil war and sought to banish the Puritans from England.
Some Puritans decided that the Church of England was so corrupt and corrupting that it could not be reformed, so they created their own separate congregations, thus earning the name Separatists, derived in part from Paul’s biblical command to “come out from among them, and be ye separate.” Such rebelliousness infuriated the leaders of the Church of England, who required people by law to attend Anglican church services.
During the late sixteenth century, the Separatists (also called Nonconformists) were “hunted and persecuted on every side.” Many left England, and some, who would eventually be known as Pilgrims, decided to sail for America. James’s son, Charles I, succeeded his father in 1625 and proved to be an even more stubborn defender of absolute royal power. He raised taxes without consulting Parliament, harassed the Puritans, and actually disbanded Parliament from 1629 to 1640.
The monarchy went too far, however, when it forced Anglican forms of worship on Presbyterian Scots. In 1638, Scotland rose in revolt, and in 1640, Charles, desperate to save his skin, revived Parliament, ordering its members to raise taxes for the defense of his kingdom. Parliament, led by militant Puritans, refused.
In 1642, when the king tried to arrest five members of Parliament, a civil war erupted in England between Royalists and Parliamentarians, leading many New England Puritans to return home to fight against the Royalist army. In 1646, parliamentary forces led by Puritan Oliver Cromwell captured Charles and, in a public trial, convicted him of high treason and contempt of Parliament, labeling him a “tyrant, traitor, murderer, and public enemy.” He was beheaded in 1649. As it turned out, however, the Puritans had killed a king but not slain the monarchy.
Cromwell ruled like a military dictator, calling himself Lord Protector. He outlawed Roman Catholics and Anglicans. Many Anglican Royalists, called Cavaliers, escaped by sailing to Virginia. After Cromwell’s death in 1658, the army allowed new elections for Parliament and in 1660 supported the Restoration of the monarchy under Charles II, eldest son of the executed king.
Unlike his father, King Charles II agreed to rule jointly with Parliament. His younger brother, the Duke of York (who became King James II in 1685), was more rigid. James openly embraced Catholicism, murdered or imprisoned political opponents, and defied Parliament.
The English tolerated James II’s rule so long as they expected one of his Protestant daughters, Mary or Anne, to succeed him. In 1688, however, the birth of a royal son who would be raised Roman Catholic stirred a revolt. Political, religious, and military leaders urged the king’s daughter Mary and her Protestant husband, William III of Orange (the ruling Dutch prince), to oust her father and assume the English throne as joint monarchs. A month after William landed in England with a huge army, King James II fled to France.
Amid this dramatic transfer of power, which became known as the Glorious Revolution, Parliament reasserted its right to counterbalance the authority of the monarchy. Kings and queens could no longer suspend Parliament, create armies, or impose taxes without Parliament’s consent. The monarchy would henceforth derive its power not from God (“divine right”) but from the people through their representatives in Parliament.
American Colonies
People and Profits During these eventful years of the seventeenth century, all but one of England’s North American colonies—Georgia— were founded. From the outset, English colonization differed in important ways from the Spanish pattern, in which the government regulated all aspects of colonial life.
The monarchy treated its original American colonies much like it dealt with neighboring Ireland. The English had brutally conquered the Irish during the reign of Queen Elizabeth and thereafter extended their control over Catholic Ireland through the “planting” of Protestant settlements in Ireland called plantations. By confiscating Irish lands and repopulating them with 120,000 Protestants, the government sought to reduce the influence of Roman Catholicism and smother any rebellious Irish nationalism.
English soldiers and colonizers inflicted a variety of cruelties on the Irish, whom they regarded as every bit as “savage” and “barbarous” as the Indians of North America. In time, the English would impose their rule and religion upon the Native Americans.
England envied the riches taken from the New World by Spain, especially the enormous amounts of gold and silver. Much of the wealth and lands the Spanish accumulated in the Americas, however, became the property of the monarchs who funded the conquistadores. In contrast, English colonization in the Americas was led by churches and companies: those seeking freedom from religious persecution, both Protestants and Catholics, and those seeking land and wealth.
Planting colonies in America was an expensive undertaking. Investors banded together to buy shares in what were called joint-stock companies. That way, large amounts of money could be raised and, if a colony failed, no single investor would suffer the entire loss. If a colony succeeded, the investors would share the profits based on the amount of stock (shares) they owned. The joint-stock companies represented the most important organizational innovation of the Age of Exploration and provided the first instruments of English colonization in America.
Self-sustaining Colonies The English settlements in America were much more compact than those in New Spain, and the native peoples along the Atlantic coast were less numerous and less wealthy than the Mexica and the Incas.
England’s colonies were also much more populous than the Spanish, French, and Dutch colonies. In 1660, for example, there were 58,000 colonists in New England, Virginia, and Maryland, compared with 3,000 in New France and 5,000 in Dutch New Netherland. By 1750, English colonists (male and female) still outnumbered the French (mostly male) nearly twenty to one, while in the northernmost areas of New Spain—the lands that became Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Florida, and California—there were only 20,000 Spaniards.
The English government and individual investors had two primary goals for their colonies: (1) to provide valuable raw materials, such as timber for shipbuilding, tobacco for smoking, and fur pelts for hats and coats; and (2) to develop a thriving market for English manufactured goods. To populate the colonies, the English encouraged social rebels, religious dissenters, and the homeless and landless to migrate to America, thereby reducing social and economic tensions at home.
In some cases, immigrants had no choice. Some 50,000 British convicts were shipped to America as servants for hire, as were several thousand Royalist prisoners, mostly Scots. Many of them did very well. In 1665, a Scottish minister in Virginia reported that several exiled Royalist soldiers were “living better than ever their forefathers” after being “sold as slaves here.”
The most powerful enticement to colonists was to offer them land and the promise of a better way of life—what came to be called the American dream. Land, plentiful and cheap, was English America’s treasure—once it was taken from the Native Americans.
What virtually all immigrants shared was an impulse to escape the constraints and corruptions of the old and the courage to risk everything for a life of freedom and adventure in the new. In the process of discovering a New World of opportunities and dangers, they also re-created themselves as Americans.
The landless English During the late sixteenth century, England experienced a population explosion that created a surplus of landless workers. Many of the jobless laborers found their way to America. An additional social strain for the English poor was the enclosure of farmlands on which peasants had lived and worked for generations. As trade in woolen products grew, landlords decided to “enclose” farmlands and evict the farmworkers in favor of grazing sheep.
The enclosure movement, coupled with the rising population, generated the great number of beggars and vagrants who wandered across England during the late sixteenth century. The problems created by this uprooted peasant population provided a compelling reason to send many of them to colonies in America and the Caribbean. As the Reverend Richard Hakluyt explained, “Valiant youths rusting [from] lack of employment” would flourish in America and generate trade that would enrich England.
Virginia In 1606, King James I chartered a joint-stock enterprise named the Virginia Company. It was owned by investors, called “adventurers,” who sought to profit from the gold and silver they hoped to find in America. King James also gave the Virginia Company a spiritual mission by ordering the settlers to take the “Christian religion” to the Indians, who “live in darkness and miserable ignorance of the true knowledge and worship of God.”
In December 1606, the Virginia Company sent to America three ships carrying 104 colonists, all men and boys. In May 1607, after five storm-tossed months at sea, they reached the broad expanse of Chesapeake Bay, which extends 200 miles along the coast of Virginia and Maryland. To avoid Spanish raiders, the colonists chose to settle about forty miles inland along a large river. They called it the James, in honor of the king, and named their settlement Jamestown.
The ill-prepared settlers had expected to find gold, friendly Indians, and easy living. Instead they found disease, drought, starvation, violence, and death. Virtually every colonist fell ill within a year. “Our men were destroyed with cruel diseases,” a survivor wrote, “but for the most part they died of mere famine.”
In the colony’s desperate early weeks and months, the settlers struggled to find enough to eat, for many of them were either poor townsmen unfamiliar with farming or “gentlemen” who despised manual labor. All most of them did, according to one colonist, was “complain, curse, and despair.” For fifteen years, the Jamestown settlers blundered their way from one mishap to another. Unwilling to invest the time and labor in growing their own food, they stole or traded for Indian corn.
The 14,000 Indians living along the Virginia coast were dominated by the Powhatan Confederacy, which had conquered or intimidated the other Indian peoples in the region. Powhatan, as the English called the imperial chieftain, lorded over several hundred villages (of about 100 people each) organized into thirty chiefdoms in eastern Virginia. When the colonists arrived, Powhatan was preoccupied with destroying the Chesapeakes, who lived along the Virginia coast.
At the time, the Powhatan Confederacy may have been the most powerful group of native peoples along the Atlantic coast. Focused on raising corn and conquering their neighbors, they lived in oval-shaped houses framed with bent saplings and covered with bark or mats. Their walled villages included forts, buildings for storing corn, and temples.
Chief Powhatan lived in an imposing lodge on the York River not far from Jamestown, where he was protected by forty bodyguards and supported by 100 wives. Colonist John Smith reported that Powhatan “sat covered with a great robe, made of raccoon skins, and all the tails hanging by,” flanked by “two rows of men, and behind them as many women, with all their heads and shoulders painted red.”
The Powhatans, Smith observed, were “generally tall and straight,” “very ingenious,” and handsome. Some attached feathers and chains to their pierced ears, and many painted their bodies. During the winter, they wore fur skins; in the summer, they were mostly naked.
The Powhatans lived in family clusters. Some villages had 20 huts; others had 200. The Powhatan men, Smith stressed, avoided “woman’s work.” When they were not hunting, fishing, or fighting, they sat watching the “women and children do the rest of the work”: gardening, making baskets and pottery, cooking, and “all the rest.”
Powhatan was as much an imperialist as the English or Spanish. He forced the peoples he had conquered to give him corn. Upon learning of the English settlement at Jamestown, he planned to impose his will on the “Strangers.” When Powhatans discovered seventeen Englishmen stealing their corn, they killed them, stuffing their mouths with ears of corn. Only too late did Powhatan realize that the English had not come to Virginia to trade but “to invade my people, and possess my country.”
The colonists found a match for Powhatan in twenty-seven-year-old John Smith, a canny, iron-willed international mercenary (soldier for hire). At five feet three inches, he was a stocky runt of a man full of tenacity, courage, and overflowing confidence.
The Virginia Company, impressed by Smith’s exploits, had appointed him to help manage the new colony. Smith imagined “abounding America” as a land of freedom and opportunity. “Here every man may be master of his own labor and land,” he wrote, “so long as settlers were willing to work patiently at humble tasks such as farming and fishing.”
Smith confronted a colony on the verge of collapse. Of the original 105 settlers, only 38 survived the first nine months. At one point, said Smith, all their food was gone, “all help abandoned, each hour expecting the fury of the savages.” He imposed strict military discipline and forced everyone to work long days in the fields. He also bargained effectively with the Indians. Through his efforts, Jamestown survived—but only barely.
The influx of new settlers nearly overwhelmed the struggling colony. During the winter of 1609–1610, the food supply again ran out, and most of the colonists died. Desperate settlers consumed their horses, cats, and dogs, then rats, mice, and snakes. A few even ate their leather shoes and boots and the starch in their shirt collars. Some summoned the effort to “dig up dead corpses out of graves and to eat them.” One hungry man killed, salted, and ate his pregnant wife. Horrified by such cannibalism, his fellow colonists tried, convicted, tortured and executed him. Still, the cannibalism continued as the starvation worsened. “So great was our famine,” Smith wrote, “that a savage we slew and buried, the poorer sort [of colonists] took him up again and ate him.”
In late May 1610, Sir Thomas Gates brought some 150 new colonists to Jamestown. They found the settlement in shambles. The fort’s walls had been torn down, the church was in ruins, and cabins had been “rent up and burnt.” Only sixty or so skeletal colonists remained, and most were bedridden from disease and malnourishment. They greeted the newcomers by shouting, “We are starved! We are starved!”
Gates loaded the surviving colonists on his ships and they made their way downriver, headed for the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic. But no sooner had they started than they spied three relief ships headed upriver. The ships carried a new governor, Thomas West, known as Lord De La Warr (Delaware would be named for him), several hundred men, and plentiful supplies. De La Warr ordered Gates to turn around; Jamestown would not be abandoned.
That chance encounter was a turning point for the struggling colony. After De La Warr returned to England in 1611, Gates rebuilt the settlements and imposed a strict system of laws. The penalties for running away included shooting, hanging, and burning. Gates also ordered the colonists to attend church services on Thursdays and Sundays. Religious uniformity became an essential instrument of public policy and civil duty in colonial Virginia.
Over the next several years, the Jamestown colony limped along until at last the settlers found a profitable crop: tobacco. The plant had been grown on Caribbean islands for years, and smoking had become a popular habit in Europe. In 1612, settlers in Virginia began growing tobacco for export to England. By 1620, the colony was shipping 50,000 pounds of tobacco each year; by 1670, Virginia and Maryland were exporting 15 million pounds annually.
Large-scale tobacco farming required additional cleared lands for planting and more laborers to work the fields. A Jamestown planter said he needed lots of “lusty laboring men… capable of hard labor, and that can bear and undergo heat and cold.”
Indentured Servants To support their investment in tobacco lands, planters employed indentured servants. The colonists who signed a contract (“indenture”) exchanged several years of labor for the cost of passage to America and, they hoped, an eventual grant of land. Indentured servitude increased the flow of immigrant workers and became the primary source of laborers in English America during the colonial period. Of the 500,000 English immigrants to America from 1610 to 1775, some 350,000 came as indentured servants, most of them penniless young men and boys. In the 1630s, the gender ratio in Virginia was 6 men to every woman; by the 1650s, it had dropped to three men to every one woman.
Not all indentured servants came voluntarily. Many homeless children in London were “kid-napped” and sold into servitude in America. In addition, Parliament in 1717 declared that convicts could avoid prison or the hangman by relocating to the colonies, and some 50,000 were banished to the New World.
Once in America, servants were provided food and a bed, but life was harsh and their rights were limited. They could be sold, loaned, or rented to others, and masters could whip them or chain them in iron collars and extend their length of service as penalty for bad behavior. Marriages required the master’s permission.
Being indentured was almost like being a slave, but servants, unlike slaves, could file a complaint with the local court. Elizabeth Sprigs, a servant in Maryland, told of “toiling day and night, and then [being] tied up and whipped to that degree you would not beat an animal, scarce [fed] anything but Indian corn and salt.”
The most important difference between servanthood and slavery was that it did not last a lifetime. When the indenture ended, usually after four to seven years, the servant could claim the “freedom dues” set by custom and law: tools, clothing, food, and, on occasion, small tracts of land.
Some former servants did well. By 1629, seven members of the Virginia legislature had arrived as indentured servants, and by 1637, fifteen were serving in the Maryland Assembly. Such opportunities were much less common in England or Europe, giving people even more reason to travel to America.
Pocahontas One of the most remarkable Powhatans was Pocahontas, the favorite daughter of Chief Powhatan. In 1607, then only eleven years old, she figured in perhaps the best-known story of the settlement, her plea for the life of John Smith. After Indians attacked Smith and a group of Englishmen trespassing on their land, killing two of them and capturing the rest, Chief Powhatan asked Smith why they were on his territory. Smith lied, claiming they had been chased there by wicked Spaniards. Powhatan saw through the ruse and ordered his warriors to kill Smith. They told him to kneel and place his head on a stone altar. As they prepared to smash his skull with war clubs, according to the unreliable Smith, young Pocahontas made a dramatic appeal for his life, convincing her father to release him in exchange for muskets, hatchets, beads, and trinkets.
Schoolchildren still learn the story of Pocahontas and John Smith, but through the years the story’s facts have become distorted or even falsified. Pocahontas and John Smith were friends, not Disney World lovers. Moreover, the Indian princess saved Smith on more than one occasion, before she herself was kidnapped by English settlers in an effort to blackmail Powhatan.
Pocahontas, however, surprised her English captors by choosing to join them. She embraced Christianity, was baptized and renamed Rebecca, and fell in love with John Rolfe, a twenty-eight-year-old widower who introduced tobacco to Jamestown. After their marriage, they moved in 1616 with their infant son, Thomas, to London. There the young princess drew excited attention from the royal family and curious Londoners. Just months after arriving, however, Rebecca, only twenty years old, contracted a lung disease and died.
The Virginia Company Prospers Jamestown remained fragile until 1618, when Sir Edwin Sandys, a prominent member of Parliament, became head of the Virginia Company. He created a headright (land grant) program to attract more colonists. Any Englishman who bought a share in the company and could pay for passage to Virginia could have fifty acres upon arrival, and fifty more for each servant he brought along.
The Virginia Company also promised the settlers all the “rights of Englishmen,” including an elected legislature, arguing that “every man will more willingly obey laws to which he has yielded his consent.” Such a commitment to representative democracy was a crucial development, for the English had long enjoyed the broadest civil liberties and the least-intrusive government in Europe. Now the colonists in Virginia were to have the same rights.
They were also to have the benefits of marriage. In 1619, a ship carrying ninety young women arrived at Jamestown. Men rushed to claim them as wives by providing 125 pounds of tobacco to cover the cost of their transatlantic passage. Also in 1619, a Dutch ship, the White Lion, stopped near Jamestown and unloaded “20 Negars,” the first enslaved Africans known to have reached English America. These captives from the Portuguese colony of Angola in West Africa were sold into slavery, the first of some 450,000 people who would be shipped from Africa to America as slaves. Thus began an inhumane system that would spur dramatic economic growth, sow moral corruption, and generate horrific suffering for African Americans.
By 1624, some 8,000 English men, women, and children had migrated to Jamestown, although only 1,132 had survived or stayed, and many of them were in “a sickly and desperate state.” In 1622 alone, 1,000 colonists had died of disease or were victims of an Indian massacre. In 1624, the Virginia Company declared bankruptcy, and Virginia became a royal colony.
The settlers were now free to own property and start businesses. The king, however, would thereafter appoint their governors. Sir William Berkeley, who arrived in 1642, presided over the colony’s rapid growth for most of the next thirty-five years. Tobacco prices surged, and wealthy planters began to dominate social and political life.
The Jamestown experience did not invent America, but the colony’s gritty will to survive, its mixture of greed and piety, and its exploitation of both Indians and Africans formed the model for many of the struggles, achievements, and ironies that would come to define the American spirit.
Bacon’s Rebellion The relentless stream of new settlers into Virginia exerted constant pressure on Indian lands and created growing tensions among whites. The largest planters sought to live like the wealthy “English gentlemen” who owned huge estates in the countryside. In Virginia, these men acquired the most fertile land along the coast and rivers, compelling freed servants to become farmworkers or forcing them inland to gain their own farms. In either case, the poorest Virginians found themselves at a disadvantage. By 1676, one-fourth of the free white men were landless. They roamed the countryside, squatting on private property, working odd jobs, poaching game, and struggling to survive.
The simmering tensions among the landless colonists contributed to what came to be called Bacon’s Rebellion. The discontent erupted when a squabble between a white planter and Native Americans on the Potomac River led to the murder of the planter’s herdsman and, in turn, to retaliation by frontier vigilantes, who killed some two dozen Indians. When five native chieftains were later murdered, enraged Indians took revenge on frontier settlements.
When Governor Berkeley refused to take action against the Indians, Nathaniel Bacon, a young planter, led more than 1,000 men determined to terrorize the “protected and darling Indians.” Bacon said he would kill all the Indians in Virginia and promised to free any servants and slaves who joined him.
Bacon’s Rebellion quickly became a battle of landless servants, small farmers, and even some slaves against Virginia’s wealthiest planters and political leaders. Bacon’s ruthless assaults against Indians and his lust for power and land (rather than any commitment to democratic principles) sparked his conflict with the governing authorities and the planter elite.
For his part, Berkeley opposed Bacon’s efforts because he didn’t want to disrupt the profitable deerskin trade the colonists enjoyed with the Native Americans. Bacon issued a “Declaration of the People of Virginia” accusing Berkeley of corruption and attempted to take the governor into custody. Berkeley’s forces resisted—feebly—and Bacon’s men burned Jamestown in frustration.
Bacon, however, fell ill and died a month later, after which the rebellion disintegrated. Berkeley had twenty-three of the rebels hanged. For such severity, the king denounced Berkeley as a “fool” and recalled him to England, where he died within a year.
Maryland In 1634, ten years after Virginia became a royal colony, a neighboring settlement appeared on the northern shore of Chesapeake Bay. Named Maryland in honor of English queen Henrietta Maria, its 12 million acres were granted to Sir George Calvert, Lord Baltimore, by King Charles I. It became the first proprietary colony—that is, an individual owned it, not a joint-stock company.
Calvert had long been one of the king’s favorites. In 1619, he became one of two royal secretaries of state for the nation. Forced to resign after a squabble with the king’s powerful advisers, Calvert announced that he had converted from Anglicanism to Catholicism. Thereafter, he asked the new king, James II, to grant him a charter for an American colony north of Virginia. However, Calvert died before the king could act, so the charter went to his devoted son Cecilius, the second Lord Baltimore, who actually founded the colony and spent the rest of his life making it sustainable.
Cecilius Calvert wanted Maryland to be a refuge for English Catholics. Yet he also wanted the colony to be profitable and to avoid antagonizing Protestants. To that aim, he instructed his brother, Leonard, the colony’s first proprietary governor, to ensure that Catholic colonists worshipped in private and remained “silent upon all occasions of discourse concerning matters of religion.”
In 1634, the Calverts planted the first settlement in coastal Maryland at St. Marys, near the mouth of the Potomac River, about eighty miles up the Chesapeake Bay from Jamestown. Cecilius sought to avoid the mistakes made at Jamestown, so he recruited a more committed group of colonists—made up of families intending to stay rather than just single men seeking quick profits.
In addition, the Calverts did not want a colony of scattered farms and settlements vulnerable to Indian attack, like Virginia, or to be dependent solely on tobacco. They sought to create a more diversified agriculture and to build fortified towns designed to promote social interaction. The Calverts also wanted to avoid the extremes of economic wealth and poverty that had developed in Virginia. In that vein, they provided 100 acres to each adult and 50 more for each child. Maryland also had an explicit religious objective: the “conversion and civilizing of those barbarous heathens that live like beasts without the light of faith.” Jesuit priests served as missionaries to the Indians. To avoid the chronic Indian wars suffered in Virginia, the Calverts resolved to purchase land from the Native Americans rather than take it by force.
Still, the early years in Maryland were as difficult as in Virginia. Nearly 30 percent of infants born in the colony died in their first year, and nearly half of the colonists died before reaching age twenty-one. Some 34,000 colonists would arrive between 1634 and 1680, but in 1680 the colony’s white population was only 20,000.
The charter from the king gave the Calverts the power to make laws with the consent of the freemen (all property holders). Yet they could not attract enough Roman Catholics to develop a self-sustaining economy. The majority of the servants who came to the colony were Protestants, both Anglicans and Puritans. To recruit servants and settlers, the Calverts offered “a quiet life sweetened with ease and plenty” on small farms. In the end, Maryland succeeded more quickly than Virginia because of its focus on growing tobacco from the start. Its long coastline along the Chesapeake Bay gave planters easy access to shipping.
Despite the Calverts’ caution “concerning matters of religion,” sectarian squabbles impeded the colony’s early development. Catholics and Protestants feuded as violently as they had in England. When Oliver Cromwell and the Puritans took control in England and executed King Charles I in 1649, Cecilius Calvert feared he might lose his colony.
To avoid such a catastrophe, Calvert appointed Protestants to the colony’s ruling council and wrote the Toleration Act (1649), a revolutionary document that acknowledged the Puritan victory and welcomed all Christians, regardless of their denomination or beliefs. (It also promised to execute anyone who denied the divinity of Jesus.)
Still, Calvert’s efforts were not enough to prevent the new government in England from installing Puritans in positions of control in Maryland. They rescinded the Toleration Act in 1654, stripped Catholic colonists of voting rights, and denied them the right to worship.
The once-persecuted Puritans had become persecutors themselves, at one point driving Calvert out of his own colony. Were it not for its success in growing tobacco, Maryland may well have disintegrated. In 1692, following the Glorious Revolution in England, Catholicism was effectively banned in Maryland. Only after the American Revolution would Marylanders again be guaranteed religious freedom.
Settling New England
Very different English settlements were emerging north of the Chesapeake Bay colonies. Unlike Maryland and Virginia, the New England colonies were intended to be self-governing religious utopias based on the teachings of John Calvin. The New England settlers were not indentured servants as in the Chesapeake colonies; they were mostly middle-class families that could pay their own way across the Atlantic. Most male settlers were small farmers, merchants, seamen, or fishermen. New England also attracted more women than did the southern colonies.
Although its soil was not as fertile as that of the Chesapeake region and its growing season was much shorter, New England was a healthier place to live. Because of its colder climate, settlers avoided the infectious diseases like malaria that ravaged the southern colonies. Still, only 21,000 colonists arrived in New England, compared to the 120,000 who went to the Chesapeake Bay colonies. By 1700, however, New England’s thriving white population exceeded that of Maryland and Virginia.
The land-hungry Pilgrims and Puritans who arrived in Massachusetts were willing to sacrifice everything to create a model Christian society. These selfdescribed “visible saints” intended to purify their churches of all Catholic and Anglican rituals and enact a code of laws and a government structure based upon biblical principles. Unlike the Anglican Church, which allowed anyone, including sinners, to join, the Puritans limited membership in their churches only to saints—those who had been chosen by God for salvation. They also sought to stamp out gambling, swearing, and Sabbath breaking. Their blameless lives and holy communities, they hoped, would provide a beacon of righteousness for a wicked England to emulate.
Plymouth The first permanent English settlement in New England was established by the Plymouth Company, a group of seventy British investors. Eager to make money by exporting the colony’s abundant natural resources, the joint-stock company agreed to finance settlements in exchange for the furs, timber, and fish they would ship back to England for sale.
Among the first to accept the company’s offer were Puritan Separatists, or Pilgrims, who were forced to leave England because of their refusal to worship in Anglican churches. The Separatist “saints” demanded that each congregation govern itself rather than be ruled by a bureaucracy of bishops and archbishops.
The Separatists, mostly simple farm folk, sought to live in “peace, love, and holiness.” Tired of being “clapped up in prison,” they made the heartbreaking choice to leave England for Holland, where, over time, they worried that their children were becoming Dutch. Such concerns led them to leave Europe and create a holy community in America.
In September 1620, about 100 women, men, and children, some of whom were called “strangers” rather than saints because they were not part of the religious group, crammed aboard the tiny Mayflower, a leaky, three-masted vessel only 100 feet long, and headed across the Atlantic bound for the Virginia colony, where they had obtained permission to settle. Each colonist received one share in the enterprise in exchange for working seven years in America.
Storms, however, blew the ship off course to Cape Cod, southeast of what became Boston, Massachusetts. Having exhausted most of their food and water after sixty-six days at sea, they had no choice but to settle there in “a hideous and desolate wilderness full of wild beasts and wild men.”
Now safely on land, William Bradford, who would become the colony’s second governor, wrote, “they fell upon their knees and blessed the God of Heaven who had brought them over the vast and furious ocean.” They would call their hillside settlement Plymouth, after the English port city from which they had embarked. Like the Jamestown colonists, they too would experience a “starving time” of drought, famine, bitter cold, desperation, and frequent deaths.
Since they were outside the jurisdiction of any organized government, the forty-one Separatists signed the Mayflower Compact, a covenant (group contract) to form “a civil body politic” based on “just and civil laws” designed for “our better ordering and protection.” But the Mayflower Compact was not democracy in action. The saints granted themselves the rights to vote and hold office. Their inferiors—the strangers and servants—would have to wait for their civil rights.
At Plymouth, the civil government grew out of the church government, and the members of each were identical. The signers of the Mayflower Compact at first met as the General Court of Plymouth Plantation, which chose the governor and his assistants (or council). Other property owners were later admitted as members, or freemen, but only church members were eligible to join the General Court. Eventually, as the colony grew, the General Court became a legislative body of elected representatives from the various towns.
The colonists settled in a deserted Wampanoag Indian village that had been devastated by smallpox. Like the Jamestown colonists, they, too, experienced a difficult “starving time.” During the first winter, half of them died, including thirteen of the eighteen married women. Only the discovery of stored Indian corn buried underground enabled the survivors to persist.
Eventually, a local Indian named Squanto taught the colonists how to grow corn, catch fish, gather nuts and berries, and negotiate with the Wampanoags. Still, when a shipload of colonists arrived in 1623, they “fell a-weeping” as they found the original colonists in such a “low and poor condition.” By the 1630s, Governor Bradford was lamenting the failure of Plymouth to become the thriving holy community he and others had envisioned.
Massachusetts Bay The Plymouth colony’s population never rose above 7,000, and after ten years it was overshadowed by its much larger neighbor, the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Like Plymouth, the new colony was also intended to be a holy commonwealth for Puritans, but the Massachusetts Bay Puritans were different from the Pilgrims. They remained Anglicans—they wanted to purify the Church of England from within. They were called nonseparating Congregationalists because their churches were governed by their congregations rather than by an Anglican bishop in England. Like the Pilgrims, the Puritans limited church membership to “visible saints”—those who could demonstrate that they had received the gift of God’s grace.
In 1629, King Charles I gave a royal charter to the Massachusetts Bay Company, a group of Calvinist Puritans led by John Winthrop, a lawyer with intense religious convictions and mounting debts. Winthrop wanted the colony to be a haven for Puritans and a model Christian community where Jesus Christ would be exalted and faith would flourish. They would create “a City upon a Hill,” as he declared, borrowing the phrase from Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount. “The eyes of all people are on us,” Winthrop said, so they must live up to their sacred destiny.
Winthrop shrewdly took advantage of an oversight in the company charter: It did not require that the joint-stock company maintain its home office in England. The Puritans took the royal charter with them, thereby transferring government authority from London to Massachusetts, where they hoped to govern themselves.
In 1630, Winthrop, his wife, three of his sons, and eight servants joined some 700 Puritan settlers on eleven ships loaded with cows, horses, supplies, and tons of beer, which remained safely drinkable much longer than did water. Unlike the first colonists in Virginia, most of the Puritans in Massachusetts arrived as family groups.
On June 12, Winthrop’s ships landed at Salem. The Puritans then moved to the mouth of the Charles River, where they built a village and called it Boston, after the English town of that name. Winthrop was delighted to discover that the local Indians had been “swept away by the smallpox… so God hath hereby cleared our title to this place.” Yet disease knew no boundaries. Within eight months, some 200 Puritans had died, and many others had returned to England.
Planting colonies was not for the faint-hearted. Anne Bradstreet, who became one of the first colonial poets, spoke for many when she lamented the difficult living conditions: “After I was convinced it was the way of God, I submitted to it.” Such submissiveness to divine will sustained the Puritans through many trials. What allowed the Massachusetts Bay Colony eventually to thrive was a flood of additional colonists who brought money, skills, and needed supplies.
Winthrop was a commanding figure determined to enforce religious devotion and ensure social stability. He and other Puritan leaders prized law and order and hated the idea of democracy—the people ruling themselves. As the Reverend John Cotton explained, “If the people be governors, who shall be governed?” Cotton, Winthrop, and others spent much of their time trying to convince or force the growing population to conform to their beliefs.
New England villages were fractious places; people loved to argue and judge their neighbors’ conduct. John Winthrop never embraced religious toleration, political freedom, social equality, or cultural diversity. The only freedom he tolerated was the freedom to do what was “good, just, and honest.” He and the Puritans worked to suppress other religious views in New England. Catholics, Anglicans, Quakers, and Baptists were punished, imprisoned, banished, and sometimes executed.
Anne Hutchinson Puritans who spoke out against religious or political policies were quickly condemned. For example, Anne Hutchinson, the strongwilled wife of a prominent merchant, raised thirteen children, served as a midwife helping deliver neighbors’ babies, and hosted meetings in her home to discuss sermons.
Soon, however, the discussions turned into large twice-weekly gatherings at which Hutchinson shared her passionate convictions about religious matters. According to one participant, she “preaches better Gospel than any of your black coats [male ministers].” Blessed with vast biblical knowledge and a quick wit, Hutchinson criticized mandatory church attendance and the absolute power of ministers and magistrates. Most controversial of all, she claimed to know which of her neighbors had been saved and which were damned, including ministers. Puritan leaders saw her as a “dangerous” woman who threatened their authority.
A pregnant Hutchinson was hauled before the all-male General Court in 1637. For two days she sparred with the Puritan leaders, at one point reminding them of the biblical injunction that “elder women should instruct the younger.” She steadfastly refused to acknowledge any wrongdoing. Her ability to cite chapter-and-verse biblical defenses of her actions led an exasperated Governor Winthrop to explode: “We are your judges, and not you ours…. We do not mean to discourse [debate] with those of your sex.” As the trial continued, Hutchinson was eventually lured into convicting herself by claiming direct revelations from God—blasphemy in the eyes of mainstream Puritans. In 1638, Winthrop and the General Court banished Hutchinson as a “leper” not fit for “our society.”
Hutchinson initially resettled with her family and about sixty followers on an island south of Providence, Rhode Island. The hard journey took its toll, however. Hutchinson grew sick, and her baby was stillborn, leading her critics to claim that the “monstrous birth” was God’s way of punishing her.
Her spirits never recovered. After her husband’s death in 1642, she and her followers resettled along a river in the Bronx, near New Amsterdam (New York City), which was then under Dutch control. The following year, Indians massacred Hutchinson, six of her children, and nine others. Her murder, wrote John Winthrop, was “a special manifestation of divine justice.” Recent research suggests that Winthrop may have encouraged the Indian raid.
Representative Government The transfer of the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s royal charter, whereby an English trading company evolved into a provincial government, was a unique venture in colonization. Unlike “Old” England, New England had no lords or bishops, kings or queens. The Massachusetts General Court, wherein power rested under the royal charter, consisted of all shareholders, or property owners, called freemen. At first, the freemen had no power except to choose “assistants,” who in turn elected the governor and deputy governor. In 1634, however, the freemen turned themselves into the General Court, with two or three deputies to represent each town.
The Puritans, having fled religious persecution, ensured that their liberties in America were spelled out and protected. Over time, membership in a Puritan church replaced the purchase of stock as the means of becoming a freeman (and thus a voter) in Massachusetts Bay. In sum, the vital godliness and zeal of the New England Puritans shaped their society and governed their lives.
Rhode Island More by accident than design, the Massachusetts Bay Colony became the staging area for other New England colonies created by people dissatisfied with Puritan ways. Roger Williams (1603–1683), who had arrived from England in 1631, was among the first to cause problems, precisely because he was the purest of Puritans—a Separatist who criticized “impure” Puritans for not abandoning the “whorish” Church of England.
Where John Winthrop cherished strict governmental and clerical authority, Williams championed individual liberty. The Puritan leaders were mistaken, he claimed, in requiring everyone, including nonmembers, to attend church. To Williams, true puritanism required complete separation of church and state and freedom from all coercion in matters of faith. “Forced worship,” he declared, “stinks in God’s nostrils.”
Williams held a brief pastorate in Salem, north of Boston, and then moved south to Separatist Plymouth, where he took the time to learn Indian languages and continued to question the right of English settlers to confiscate Native American lands. He then returned to Salem, where he came to love and support the Indians.
Williams posed a radical question: If one’s salvation depends solely upon God’s grace, as John Calvin had argued, why bother to have churches at all? Why not give individuals the right to worship God directly, in their own way? His belief that a true church must include only those who had received God’s gift of grace eventually convinced him that no true church was possible, unless perhaps it consisted of his wife and himself.
Such “dangerous opinions” threatened the foundations of New England Puritanism and led Governor Winthrop and the General Court to banish Williams to England. Before authorities could ship him back, however, he and his wife slipped away and found shelter among the Narragansett Indians. He studied their language, defended their rights as human beings, and in 1636 he bought land from them to establish a town he named Providence, at the head of Narragansett Bay. It was the first permanent settlement in Rhode Island and the first in America to allow complete freedom of religion and to give voting rights to all “free inhabitants,” meaning those property owners who were not enslaved or indentured servants.
From the beginning, Rhode Island was the most democratic of the colonies, governed by the heads of households rather than by church members. The colony welcomed all who fled religious persecution. For their part, Puritans in Boston came to view Rhode Island as “Rogue Island,” a refuge for rebels and radicals. A Dutch visitor reported that the colony was “the sewer of New England.” Yet by the 1670s, an English official would describe Rhode Island as the “most profitable part of New England.”
Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Maine Other New England colonies had more conventional beginnings. In 1636, the Reverend Thomas Hooker led three church congregations from the Boston area to Connecticut, where they organized a self-governing colony and founded the town of Hartford. Hooker resented John Winthrop’s iron grip on politics in the Bay Colony and believed that all men, not just church members, should be able to vote.
In 1639, the Connecticut General Court adopted the Fundamental Orders, a series of laws that provided for a “Christian Commonwealth” like that of Massachusetts, except that all freemen could vote. The Connecticut constitution specified that the Congregational Church would be the colony’s official religion, and it commanded each governor to rule according to “the word of God.”
In 1622, territory north of Hartford was granted to Sir Ferdinando Gorges and Captain John Mason. In 1629, Mason took the southern part, which he named the Province of New Hampshire, and Gorges took the northern part, which became the Province of Maine.
During the early 1640s, Massachusetts took over New Hampshire, and in the 1650s it extended its authority to the scattered settlements in Maine. This led to lawsuits, and in 1678 English judges decided against Massachusetts in both cases. In 1679, New Hampshire became a royal colony, but Massachusetts continued to control Maine. A new Massachusetts charter in 1691 finally incorporated Maine into Massachusetts.
The English Civil War in America
By 1640, English settlers in New England and around Chesapeake Bay had established two great beachheads on the Atlantic coast, with the Dutch colony of New Netherland in between. After 1640, however, the struggle between king and Parliament in England diverted attention from colonization, and migration to America dwindled. During the English Civil War (1642–1651) and Oliver Cromwell’s Puritan dictatorship (1653–1658), the mother country pretty much left its American colonies alone.
The Restoration in the Colonies
The restoration of Charles II to the English throne in 1660 revived interest in colonial expansion. Within twelve years, the English would conquer New Netherland and settle Carolina. In the middle region, formerly claimed by the Dutch, four new colonies would emerge: New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware. The king awarded them to men (proprietors) who had remained loyal to the monarchy during the civil war. In 1663, Charles II granted a vast parcel of land south of Virginia to eight prominent supporters who became lords proprietor (owners) of the region they called Carolina, from the Latin spelling of Charles.
The Carolinas From the start, the southernmost mainland colony in the seventeenth century consisted of two widely separated areas that eventually became the colonies of North Carolina and South Carolina. The northernmost, initially called Albemarle, had been settled in the 1650s by colonists from Virginia. For half a century, Albemarle was an isolated cluster of farms along the shores of Albemarle Sound. Not until 1712 would Carolina be separated into northern and southern colonies.
The eight lords proprietor focused on more-promising sites in southern Carolina. To speed their efforts to generate profits from sugarcane, they recruited English planters from the Caribbean island of Barbados, the oldest, richest, and most heavily populated colony in English America.
Barbados The mostly male English in Barbados had developed a hugely profitable sugar plantation system based on the hard labor of enslaved Africans. The “king sugar” colony, the easternmost island in the Caribbean, was dominated by a few extraordinarily wealthy planters who exercised powerful political influence in the mother country. In a reference to Barbados and the other “sugar colonies,” an Englishman pointed out in 1666 that “these Settlements have been made and upheld by Negroes and without constant supplies of them cannot subsist.”
By 1670, Barbados hosted some 25,000 whites and more than 35,000 enslaved Africans. All available land on Barbados had been claimed, and the sons and grandsons of the planter elite were forced to look elsewhere to find estates of their own. Many seized the chance to settle Carolina and bring the Barbadian plantation system to the new American colony.
Carolina The first English colonists in South Carolina arrived in 1669 at Charles Town (later Charleston). Over the next twenty years, half the colonists came from Barbados and other island colonies in the Caribbean, such as Nevis, St. Kitts, and Jamaica.
From the start, South Carolina was a slave-based colony. Planters from the Caribbean brought enormous numbers of enslaved Africans to Carolina to clear land, plant crops, and herd cattle. Carolina, a Swiss immigrant said, “looks more like a negro country than like a country settled by white people.”
The government of Carolina grew out of a unique document, the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, drafted by one of the eight proprietors, Lord Anthony Ashley Cooper. It awarded large land grants to prominent Englishmen. From the beginning, however, every immigrant who could pay for passage across the Atlantic received headright land. The Fundamental Constitutions granted religious toleration, which gave Carolina a greater degree of religious freedom (extending to Jews and “heathens”) than in England or any other colony except Rhode Island.
In 1712, the Carolina colony was formally divided into North and South. After rebelling against the lords proprietor, South Carolina became a royal colony in 1719. North Carolina remained under the proprietors’ rule until 1729, when it, too, became a royal colony.
Rice became the dominant commercial crop in South Carolina because it was perfectly suited to the hot, humid growing conditions. Rice, like sugarcane and tobacco, was a labor-intensive crop, and planters preferred enslaved Africans to work their plantations, in part because West Africans had been growing rice for generations. Both Carolinas also had huge forests of yellow pine trees that provided lumber and other materials for shipbuilding. The sticky resin from pine trees could be boiled to make tar, which was needed to waterproof the seams of wooden ships (which is why North Carolinians came to be called Tar Heels).
Enslaving Indians One of the quickest ways to make money in Carolina’s early years was through trade with Indians. In the late seventeenth century, English merchants began traveling southward from Virginia into the Piedmont region of Carolina, where they developed a prosperous commerce in deerskins with the Catawbas. Between 1699 and 1715, Carolina exported an average of 54,000 deerskins per year to England, where they were transformed into leather gloves, belts, hats, work aprons, and book bindings.
English traders also quickly became interested in buying enslaved Indians. To do so, the traders at times fomented war between Indian tribes; they knew that the best Indian slave catchers were other Indians. That Native Americans had for centuries captured and enslaved other indigenous peoples helped the Europeans justify and expand the sordid practice.
In Carolina, as many as 50,000 Indians were sold as slaves in Charles Town between 1670 and 1715, with many being shipped to faraway lands—Barbados, Antigua, New York. More enslaved Indians were exported during that period than Africans were imported, and thousands of others were sold to “slavers” who took them to islands in the Caribbean.
The growing commerce in people, however, triggered bitter struggles between rival Indian nations and helped ignite unprecedented violence. In 1712, the Tuscaroras of North Carolina attacked German and English colonists who had encroached upon their land. North Carolina authorities appealed to South Carolina for aid, and the colony, eager for more slaves, dispatched two expeditions made up mostly of Indian allies of the English—Yamasees, Cherokees, Creeks, and Catawbas. They destroyed a Tuscarora town, executed 162 male warriors, and took 392 women and children captive for sale in Charles Town. The surviving Tuscaroras fled north, where they joined the Iroquois.
The Tuscarora War sparked more conflict in South Carolina. The Yamasees felt betrayed when white traders paid them less for their Tuscarora captives than they wanted. In April 1715, Yamasees attacked coastal plantations and killed more than 100 whites.
The governor mobilized all white and black men to defend the colony; other colonies supplied weapons. But it wasn’t until the governor bribed the Cherokees to join them that the Yamasee War ended—in 1717. The defeated Yamasees fled to Spanish-controlled Florida. By then, hundreds of whites had been killed and dozens of plantations destroyed and abandoned. To prevent another conflict, the colonial government outlawed all private trading with Indians.
The Middle Colonies and Georgia
The area between New England and the Chesapeake—Maryland and Virginia—included the “middle colonies” of New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania, which were initially controlled by the Netherlands, a newly independent republic of 2 million people. By 1670, the mostly Protestant Dutch had the largest merchant fleet in the world and controlled northern European commerce. They had become one of the most diverse and tolerant societies in Europe—and England’s fiercest competitor in international commerce.
New Netherland becomes New York In London, King Charles II decided to pluck out that old Dutch thorn in the side of the English colonies in America: New Netherland, which was older than New England. The Dutch East India Company (organized in 1602) had hired English sea captain Henry Hudson to explore America in hopes of finding a northwest passage to the Indies. Sailing along the coast of North America in 1609, Hudson crossed Delaware Bay and then sailed ninety miles up the “wide and deep” river that eventually would be named for him in New York State.
The Hudson River would become one of the most strategically important waterways in America; it was wide and deep enough for oceangoing vessels to travel far north into the interior, where the Dutch traded various goods for the fur pelts harvested by Indian trappers. In 1625, Dutch traders acquired 5,295 beaver pelts and 463 otter skins, which they shipped to the Netherlands.
Like Virginia and Massachusetts, New Netherland was created as a profitmaking enterprise. “Everyone here is a trader,” explained one resident. And like the French, the Dutch were interested mainly in the fur trade, as the European demand for beaver hats created huge profits. In 1610, the Dutch established fur-trading posts on Manhattan Island and upriver at Fort Orange (later called Albany).
In 1626, the Dutch governor purchased Manhattan (an Indian word meaning “island of many hills”) from the Indians for 60 guilders, or about $1,000 in current values. The Dutch then built a fort and a fur-trading post at the lower end of the island. The village of New Amsterdam (eventually New York City), which grew up around the fort, became the capital of New Netherland.
New Netherland was a corporate colony governed by the newly organized Dutch West India Company. It controlled political life, appointing the colony’s governor and advisory council and forbid any form of elected legislature. All commerce with the Netherlands had to be carried in the company’s ships, and the company controlled the beaver trade with the Indians.
In 1629, the Dutch West India Company decided that it needed more settlers outside Manhattan to help protect the colony from Indian attacks. To encourage settlers to move into the surrounding countryside, it awarded wealthy individuals a large estate called a patroonship in exchange for peopling it with fifty adult settlers within four years. Like a feudal lord, the patroon (from the Latin word for father) provided cattle, tools, and buildings. His tenants paid him rent, used his gristmill for grinding flour, gave him first option to purchase surplus crops, and submitted to a court he established.
These arrangements, which amounted to transplanting the feudal manor to America, met with little success. Most settlers took advantage of the company’s provision that they could have as farms (bouweries) all the lands they could improve.
Unlike most of the other European colonies in the Americas, the Dutch embraced ethnic and religious diversity, since their passion for profits outweighed their social prejudices. In 1579, the treaty creating the Dutch Republic declared that “everyone shall remain free in religion and… no one may be persecuted or investigated because of religion.”
Both the Dutch Republic and New Netherland welcomed exiles from Europe: Spanish and German Jews, French Protestants (Huguenots), English Puritans, and Catholics. There were even Muslims in New Amsterdam, where in the 1640s the 500 residents communicated in eighteen different languages. So from its inception, New York City was America’s first multiethnic community, and immigrant minorities dominated its population.
But the Dutch did not show the same tolerance for Native Americans. Soldiers regularly massacred Indians in the region around New Amsterdam. At Pound Ridge, Anglo-Dutch soldiers surrounded an Indian village, set it ablaze, and killed all who tried to escape. Such horrific acts led the Indians to respond in kind.
Dutch tolerance had other limitations. In September 1654, a French ship arrived in New Amsterdam harbor carrying twenty-three Sephardim, Jews of Spanish-Portuguese descent. They had come seeking refuge from Portuguesecontrolled Brazil and were the first Jewish settlers to arrive in North America.
The colonial governor, Peter Stuyvesant, refused to accept them, however. A short-tempered leader who had lost a leg to a Spanish cannonball, Stuyvesant dismissed Jews as a “deceitful race” and “hateful enemies.” Dutch officials in Amsterdam overruled him, however, pointing out that it would be “unreasonable and unfair” to refuse to provide the Jews a safe haven. They wanted to “allow everyone to have his own belief, as long as he behaves quietly and legally, gives no offense to his neighbor, and does not oppose the government.”
It would not be until the late seventeenth century that Jews could worship in public, however. Such restrictions help explain why the American Jewish community grew so slowly. In 1773, more than 100 years after the first Jewish refugees arrived, Jews represented only one tenth of 1 percent of the entire colonial population. Not until the nineteenth century would the American Jewish community experience dramatic growth.
In 1626, the Dutch West India Company began importing enslaved Africans to meet its labor shortage. By the 1650s, New Amsterdam had one of the largest slave markets in America.
The extraordinary success of the Dutch economy also proved to be its downfall, however. Like imperial Spain, the Dutch Empire expanded too rapidly. They dominated the European trade with China, India, Africa, Brazil, and the Caribbean, but they could not control their far-flung possessions. It did not take long for European rivals to exploit the sprawling empire’s weak points.
The New Netherland governors were mostly corrupt or inept autocrats who were especially clumsy at Indian relations. They depended upon a small army for defense, and the residents of Manhattan, many of whom were not Dutch, were often contemptuous of the government. In 1664, the colonists showed almost total indifference when Governor Stuyvesant called on them to defend the colony against an English flotilla carrying 2,000 soldiers. Stuyvesant finally surrendered without firing a shot.
The English conquest of New Netherland had been led by James Stuart, Duke of York, who would later become King James II. Upon the capture of New Amsterdam, his brother, King Charles II, granted the entire region to him. The Dutch, however, negotiated an unusual surrender agreement that allowed New Netherlanders to retain their property, churches, language, and local officials. The English renamed the harbor city of New Amsterdam as New York, in honor of the duke.
New Jersey Shortly after the conquest of New Netherland, the Duke of York granted the lands between the Hudson and Delaware Rivers to Sir George Carteret and Lord John Berkeley and named the territory for Carteret’s native Jersey, an island in the English Channel. In 1676, by mutual agreement, the new royal colony was divided into East and West Jersey, with Carteret taking the east and Berkeley the west. Finally, in 1682, Carteret sold out to a group of investors.
New settlements gradually arose in East Jersey. Disaffected Puritans from New Haven founded Newark, Carteret’s brother brought a group to found Elizabethtown, and a group of Scots founded Perth Amboy. In the west, a scattering of Swedes, Finns, and Dutch remained, but they were soon overwhelmed by swarms of English and Welsh Quakers, as well as German and Scots-Irish settlers (mostly Presbyterian Scots who had been encouraged by the English government to migrate to Ireland and thereby dilute the appeal of Catholicism). In 1702, East and West Jersey were united as the single royal colony of New Jersey.
Pennsylvania The Quakers, as the Society of Friends was called (because they believed that no one could know Christ without “quaking and trembling”), became the most uncompromising and controversial of the radical religious groups that emerged from the English Civil War. Founded in England in 1647 by George Fox, the Friends rebelled against all forms of political and religious authority, including salaried ministers, military service, and paying taxes. They insisted that everyone could experience a personal revelation from God, what they called the “Inner Light” of the Holy Spirit.
Quakers believed that people were essentially good rather than depraved and could achieve salvation through a personal communion with God. They demanded complete religious freedom for everyone, promoted equality of the sexes, and discarded all formal religious creeds and rituals, including an ordained priesthood. When gathered for worship, they kept silent, knowing that the “Inner Light” would move them to say what was fitting at the right moment.
The Quakers were also pacifists who stressed the need to lead lives of service to society. Some early Quakers went barefoot; others wore rags, and a few went naked and smeared themselves with excrement to demonstrate their “primitive” commitment to Christ.
The Quakers suffered often violent abuse for their odd behavior because their beliefs were so threatening to the social and religious order. Authorities accused them of disrupting “peace and order” and undermining “religion, Church order, and the state.” Quakers were especially hated because they refused to acknowledge the supremacy of Puritanism. New England Puritans first banned Quakers, then lopped off their ears, pierced their tongues with a red-hot rod, and finally executed them. Still, the Quakers kept coming. In fact, they often sought out abuse and martyrdom as proof of their intense Christian commitment. As the French philosopher Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) said, “Getting persecuted is a great way of making converts” to one’s religious views.
The settling of English Quakers in West Jersey encouraged other Friends to migrate, especially to the Delaware River side of the colony, where William Penn’s Quaker commonwealth, the colony of Pennsylvania, soon arose. Penn, the son of wealthy Admiral Sir William Penn, had attended Oxford University, from which he was expelled for criticizing the university’s requirement that students attend daily chapel services. His furious father banished his son from their home.
The younger Penn lived in France for two years, then studied law before moving to Ireland to manage the family’s estates. There he was arrested in 1666 for attending a Quaker meeting. Much to the chagrin of his parents, he became a Quaker and was arrested several more times for his religious convictions.
Upon his father’s death, Penn inherited a fortune, including a huge tract of land in America, which the king urged him to settle as a means of ridding England of Quakers. The land was named, at the king’s insistence, for Penn’s father—Pennsylvania (literally, “Penn’s Woods”)—and it was larger than England itself. Penn encouraged people of different religions from different countries to settle in the new colony, which he considered a “holy experiment” for people of all faiths and nations to live together in harmony. By the end of 1681, thousands of immigrants had responded, and a bustling town emerged at the junction of the Schuylkill and Delaware Rivers. Penn called it Philadelphia (meaning “City of Brotherly Love”).
The relations between the Native Americans and the Pennsylvania Quakers were unusually good because of the Quakers’ friendliness and Penn’s policy of purchasing land titles from the Native Americans. For some fifty years, the settlers and Native Americans lived in peace.
The colony’s government, which rested on three Frames of Government drafted by Penn, resembled that of other proprietary colonies except that the freemen (owners of at least fifty acres) who professed their belief in Jesus Christ elected the council members as well as the assembly. The governor had no veto, although Penn, as proprietor, did. Penn hoped to show that a colonial government could operate in accordance with Quaker principles, that it could maintain peace and order, and that religion could flourish without government support and with absolute freedom of conscience.
Over time, however, the Quakers struggled to forge a harmonious colony. In Pennsylvania’s first ten years, it went through six governors. A disappointed Penn wrote from London: “Pray stop those scurvy quarrels that break out to the disgrace of the province.”
Delaware In 1682, the Duke of York granted Penn the area of Delaware, another part of the former Dutch territory. At first, Delaware—named for the Delaware River—became part of Pennsylvania, but after 1704 it was granted the right to choose its own assembly. From then until the American Revolution, Delaware had a separate assembly but shared Pennsylvania’s governor.
Georgia Georgia was the last of the English colonies to be founded. In 1732, King George II gave the land between the Savannah and Altamaha Rivers to twenty-one English trustees appointed to govern the Province of Georgia, named in honor of the king.
In two respects, Georgia was unique among the colonies. It was established to provide a military buffer protecting the Carolinas against Spanish-controlled Florida and to serve as a social experiment bringing together settlers from different countries and religions, many of them refugees, debtors, or “miserable wretches.” General James E. Oglethorpe, a prominent member of Parliament, was appointed to head the colony.
In 1733, colonists founded Savannah on the Atlantic coast near the mouth of the Savannah River. The town, designed by Oglethorpe, featured a grid of crisscrossing roads graced by numerous parks. Protestant refugees from Austria began to arrive in 1734, followed by Germans and German-speaking Moravians and Swiss. The addition of Welsh, Highland Scots, Sephardic Jews, and others gave the colony a diverse character like that of Charleston, South Carolina.
As a buffer against Spanish Florida, the Georgia colony succeeded, but as a social experiment, it failed. Initially, landholdings were limited to 500 acres to promote economic equality. Liquor was banned, as were lawyers, and the importation of slaves was forbidden. The idealistic rules soon collapsed, however, as the colony struggled to become self-sufficient. The regulations against rum and slavery were widely disregarded and finally abandoned.
In 1754, Georgia became a royal colony, and it began to grow rapidly after 1763. Georgians exported rice, lumber, beef, and pork, and they carried on a profitable trade with Caribbean islands. Almost unintentionally, the colony became an economic success and a slave-centered society.
Native Peoples and English Settlers
Most English colonists adopted a strategy for dealing with the Indians quite different from that of the French and the Dutch, who focused on exploiting the fur trade. The thriving commerce in animal skins helped spur exploration of the vast American continent. It also enriched and devastated the lives of Indians.
To protect a steady supply of fur pelts, the French and Dutch built outposts in upper New York and along the Great Lakes, where they established friendly relations with the Hurons and Algonquians who sought French support in their wars with the Iroquois nations. In contrast to the French experience in Canada, the English colonists were more interested in pursuing their “Godgiven” right to hunt and farm on Indian lands and to fish in Indian waters.
Native Americans and Christianity The New England Puritans aggressively tried to convert Native Americans to Christianity and “civilized” living. They insisted that Indian converts abandon their religion, language, clothes, names, and villages, and forced them to move to what were called “praying towns” to separate them from their “heathen” brethren.
The Pequot War Indians in the English colonies who fought to keep their lands were forced out or killed. In 1636, settlers in Massachusetts accused a Pequot of murdering two white traders. The English took revenge by burning a Pequot village. As the Indians fled, the Puritans killed them. The militia commander declared that God had guided his actions “to smite our Enemies… and give us their land for an Inheritance.”
Sassacus, the Pequot chief, organized the survivors and counterattacked. During the ensuing Pequot War of 1637, the colonists and their Mohegan and Narragansett allies set fire to a Pequot village and killed hundreds, including women and children. William Bradford, the governor of Plymouth, admitted that it was “a fearful sight” to see the Indians “frying in the fire and the streams of blood quenching” the flames, but “the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice” delivered by God.
The scattered remnants of the Pequot Nation were then hunted down. Under the terms of the Treaty of Hartford (1638), the Pequot Nation was dissolved. Captured warriors and boys were sold as slaves to plantations on Barbados and Jamaica in exchange for African slaves. Pequot women were enslaved in New England as house servants.
King Philip’s War For almost forty years after the Pequot War, relations between colonists and Indians improved somewhat, but the continuing influx of English settlers and the decline of the beaver population eventually reduced the Native Americans to poverty. In the process, the Indians and English settlers came to fear each other deeply.
The era of peaceful coexistence ended in 1675. Native American leaders, especially the chief of the Wampanoags, Metacom (known to the colonists as King Philip), resented the efforts of Europeans to take their lands and convert Indians to Christianity. In the fall of 1674, John Sassamon, a Christian Indian who had graduated from Harvard College, warned the Plymouth governor that the Wampanoags were preparing for war.
A few months later, Sassamon was found dead in a frozen pond. With little evidence to go on, colonial authorities nevertheless convicted three Wampanoags of murder and hanged them. Enraged Wampanoag warriors then burned Puritan farms on June 20, 1675. Three days later, an Englishman shot a Wampanoag; the Wampanoags retaliated by ambushing a group of Puritans, “beheading, dismembering, and mangling” the bodies in a “most inhumane” manner.
The shocking violence soon spun out of control in what came to be called King Philip’s War, or Metacom’s War. Over fourteen months, the fighting resulted in more deaths and destruction in New England in proportion to the population than any conflict since. Rival Indian nations fought on opposite sides. The colonists launched a surprise attack that killed 300 Narragansett warriors and 400 women and children. The Narragansetts retaliated by destroying Providence, Rhode Island, and threatening Boston itself, prompting a minister to call it “the saddest time with New England that was ever known.” A Boston merchant lamented that unless the tide was reversed, “these colonies will soon be ruined.” The situation grew so desperate that the colonies passed America’s first conscription laws, drafting into the militia all males between the ages of sixteen and sixty.
In the end, 600 colonists, 5 percent of the white male population, died during the war. Some 1,200 homes were burned and 8,000 cattle killed. The Wampanoags and their allies suffered even higher casualties, perhaps as many as 4,000 dead. The colonists destroyed numerous villages and shipped off hundreds of Indians as slaves to the Caribbean islands.
The war and its aftermath slashed New England’s Indian population in half, to fewer than 9,000. Those who remained were forced into villages supervised by English officials. Metacom initially escaped, only to be hunted down and killed. The victorious New Englanders marched Metacom’s severed head to Plymouth, where it stayed atop a pole for twenty years, a grisly reminder of the English determination to ensure their dominance over Native Americans.
The Iroquois League The same combination of forces that wiped out the Indian populations of New England and the Carolinas affected the native peoples around New York City and the lower Hudson Valley. The inability of Indian groups to unite effectively, as well as their vulnerability to infectious diseases, doomed them to conquest and exploitation. Yet indigenous peoples throughout the colonies, drawing upon their spiritual traditions in the face of barbarous suffering, came together to reconstruct their devastated communities.
In the interior of New York, for example, the Iroquois nations—Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, and Mohawk—were convinced by Hiawatha, a Mohawk, to forge an alliance. The Iroquois League, known to its members as the Haudenosaunee, or Great Peace, became so strong that the Dutch and, later, English traders were forced to work with them. By the early seventeenth century, a council of some fifty sachems (chieftains) oversaw the 12,000 members of the Iroquois League.
The League benefited from a remarkable constitution, called the Great Law of Peace, which had three main principles: peace, equity, and justice. Each person was to be a shareholder in the wealth of the nation. The constitution established a Great Council of fifty male royaneh (religious and political leaders), each representing one of the female-led clans of the Iroquois nations. The Great Law of Peace insisted that every time the royaneh dealt with “an especially important matter or a great emergency,” they had to “submit the matter to the decision of their people,” both men and women, for their consent.
The search for furs and captives led Iroquois war parties to range widely across what is today eastern North America. They gained control over a huge area from the St. Lawrence River to Tennessee and from Maine to Michigan. For more than twenty years, warfare raged across the Great Lakes region between the Iroquois (supported by Dutch and English fur traders) and the Algonquians and Hurons (and their French allies).
In the 1690s, the French and their Indian allies destroyed Iroquois crops and villages, infected them with smallpox, and reduced the male Iroquois population by more than a third. Facing extermination, the Iroquois made peace in 1701. During the first half of the eighteenth century, they stayed out of the almost constant wars between the English and French, which enabled them to play the two European powers off against each other while creating a thriving fur trade for themselves.
Slavery in the Colonies
Slavery in north America By 1700, enslaved Africans made up 11 percent of the total American population. (Slaves would comprise more than 20 percent by 1770.) But slavery differed greatly from region to region. Africans were a tiny minority in New England (about 2 percent). Because there were no large plantations there and fewer slaves were owned, “family slavery” prevailed, with masters and slaves usually living under the same roof.
Slavery was much more common in the Chesapeake colonies and the Carolinas. By 1730, the black slave population in Virginia and Maryland had achieved a self-sustaining rate of growth, enabling the population to replenish itself naturally, thereby removing the need for slaves imported from Africa.
Slavery’s African Roots The transport of African captives to the Americas was the largest forced migration in world history. More than 10 million people eventually made the journey to the Western Hemisphere, the vast majority of them going to Portuguese Brazil or Caribbean sugar islands such as Barbados and Jamaica.
Enslaved Africans spoke as many as fifty different languages and worshipped many different gods. In their homelands, Africans had preyed upon other Africans. Warfare was almost constant, as rival tribes conquered, kidnapped, enslaved, and sold one another.
Slavery in Africa, however, was less brutal than in the Americas. In Africa, slaves lived with their captors, and their children were not automatically enslaved. The involvement of Europeans in transatlantic slavery, whereby captives were sold and shipped to other nations, was much worse.
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, African slave traders brought captives to dozens of “slave forts” along the West African coast. After languishing for weeks or months, the captured Africans would be led to waiting ships owned by Europeans. As one of them remembered, “it was a most horrible scene; there was nothing to be heard but rattling of chains, smacking of whips, and groans and cries of our fellow men.”
Once purchased, the captives were branded on the back or buttocks with a company mark, put in chains, and loaded onto slave ships. They were packed below deck and subjected to a transatlantic voyage that could last up to six months. It was known as the Middle Passage because it served as the middle leg of the so-called triangular trade in which British ships traveled on the first leg to West Africa, where they exchanged rum, clothing, and guns for slaves. The slaves then were taken on the second leg to American ports, where they were sold. The ships were then loaded with commodities and timber before returning to Britain and Europe on the final leg of the triangular trade. By the mid–eighteenth century, Britain was the largest slaving nation in the world.
The rapid growth of slavery was driven by high profits and justified by a widespread racism that viewed Africans as beasts of burden rather than human beings. Once in America, Africans were treated as property (chattel), herded in chains to public slave auctions, and sold to the highest bidder.
On large southern plantations that grew tobacco, sugarcane, or rice, slaves were organized into work gangs supervised by black “drivers” and white overseers. The slaves were often quartered in barracks, fed like livestock, and issued ill-fitting clothes and shoes. They were whipped, branded, shackled, castrated, or sold away, often to the Caribbean islands, where few survived the harsh working conditions.
The enslaved Africans, however, found ingenious ways to cope. Some rebelled by resisting work orders, sabotaging crops and stealing tools, faking illness or injury, or running away. If caught, runaways faced terrible punishment. If successful, however, they faced uncertain freedom. Where would they run to in a society ruled by whites and governed by racism?
Slave Culture While being forced into lives of bondage, Africans forged a new identity as African Americans. At the same time, they wove into American culture many strands of their heritage, including new words such as tabby, tote, goober, yam, and banana. More significant were African influences upon American music, folklore, and religious practices. Slaves often used songs, stories, and religious preachings to circulate coded messages expressing their distaste for masters or overseers. The fundamental theme of slave religion, adapted from the Christianity that was forced upon them, was deliverance: God would free them and open the gates to heaven’s promised land.
Thriving Colonies
By the early eighteenth century, the English colonies in the New World had outstripped those of both the French and the Spanish. English America had become the most populous, prosperous, and powerful of the European empires. Yet many settlers found hard labor, desperation, and an early death in the New World. Others flourished only because they were able to exploit Indians, indentured servants, or Africans.
The English colonists did enjoy crucial advantages over their European rivals. While the tightly controlled colonial empires of Spain and France stifled innovation, the English colonies were organized as profit-making enterprises with a minimum of royal control. Where New Spain was dominated by Thriving Colonies By the early eighteenth century, the English colonies in the New World had outstripped those of both the French and the Spanish. English America had become the most populous, prosperous, and powerful of the European empires. Yet many settlers found hard labor, desperation, and an early death in the New World. Others flourished only because they were able to exploit Indians, indentured servants, or Africans. The English colonists did enjoy crucial advantages over their European rivals. While the tightly controlled colonial empires of Spain and France stifled innovation, the English colonies were organized as profit-making enterprises with a minimum of royal control. Where New Spain was dominated by wealthy men who often intended to return to Spain, many English colonists ventured to America because, for them, life in England had grown intolerable. The leaders of the Dutch and non-Puritan English colonies, unlike the Spanish and French, welcomed people from a variety of nationalities and religions. Perhaps most important, the English colonies enjoyed a greater degree of self-government, which made them more dynamic and creative than their French and Spanish counterparts.
Throughout the seventeenth century, geography reinforced England’s emphasis on the concentrated settlements of its American colonies. The farthest western expansion of English settlement stopped at the eastern slopes of the Appalachian Mountains. To the east lay the wide expanse of ocean, which served as a highway from Europe to America. But the ocean also served as a barrier that separated old ideas from new, allowing the English colonies to evolve from a fragile stability to a flourishing prosperity in a “new world”— while developing new ideas about economic freedom and political liberties that would emerge in the eighteenth century.
Chapter 3
The daring people who colonized America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were part of a massive social migration occurring throughout Europe and Africa. Everywhere, it seemed, people were in motion—moving from farms to villages, from villages to cities, and from homelands to colonies. Rapid population growth and the rise of commercial agriculture squeezed poor farmworkers off the land and into cities, where they struggled to survive. That most Europeans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were desperately poor helps explain why so many were willing to migrate to the American colonies. Others sought political security or religious freedom. A tragic exception was the Africans, who were captured and transported to new lands against their will.
Whatever their origins or social status, by the late eighteenth century a French immigrant living in New York named J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur could announce that the diverse peoples in America were being “melted into a new race of men, whose labors and posterity [children and grandchildren] will one day cause great changes in the world.”
Those who initially settled in colonial America were mostly young (more than half were under twenty-five), male, single, and poor, and almost half were indentured servants or slaves. A young servant girl in Maryland wrote her father that she was “toiling almost day and night,” had “scarce anything but Indian corn and salt to eat,” and had “no shoes nor stockings to wear.”
Once in America, many of the newcomers kept moving within and across colonies in search of better lands or business opportunities. This extraordinary mosaic of adventurous, resilient, and often ingenious people created America’s enduring institutions and values, as well as its distinctive spirit and restless energy.
The Shape of Early America
Life in early America was hard and often short. Many of the first colonists died of disease or starvation; others were killed by Native Americans. The average death rate in the early years of settlement was 50 percent. Once colonial life became more settled, however, the colonies grew rapidly. On average, the population doubled every twenty-five years during the colonial period. By 1750, the number of colonists had passed 1 million; by 1775, it approached 2.5 million. By comparison, the combined population of England, Scotland, and Ireland in 1750 was 6.5 million. An English visitor reported in 1766 that America would surely become “the most prosperous empire the world had ever seen.” But that meant trouble for Britain: “How are we to rule them?”
Population Growth Benjamin Franklin, a keen observer of life in British America, said that the extraordinary growth in the colonial population came about because land was plentiful and cheap, and laborers were scarce and expensive. In contrast, Europe suffered from overpopulation and expensive farmland. From this reversal of conditions flowed many of the changes that European culture underwent during the colonization of America— not the least being that more land and good fortune lured enterprising immigrants and led the colonists to have large families, in part because farm children could help in the fields.
Colonists, men and women, tended to marry and start families at an earlier age than was common in Europe. In England, the average age at marriage for women was twenty-five or twentysix; in America, it was twenty. The birth rate rose accordingly, since women who married earlier had time for about two additional pregnancies during their childbearing years. On average, a married woman had a child every two to three years before menopause. Some women had as many as twenty pregnancies over their lifetimes.
Birthing children, however, was also dangerous, since most babies were delivered at home in unsanitary conditions. Miscarriages were common. Between 25 and 50 percent of women died during birthing or soon thereafter, and almost a quarter of all babies did not survive infancy, especially during the early stages of a colonial settlement. More deaths occurred among young children than any other age group.
Disease and epidemics were rampant in colonial America. Half of the children born in Virginia and Maryland died before reaching age twenty. In 1713, Boston minister Cotton Mather lost three of his children and his wife to a measles epidemic. (Mather lost eight of fifteen children in their first year of life.) Martha Custis, the Virginia widow who married George Washington, had four children during her first marriage. They all died young, at ages two, three, sixteen, and seventeen. Overall, however, mortality rates in the colonies were lower than in Europe. Between 1670 and 1700, the white population of the English colonies doubled, while the black population increased fivefold.
During the eighteenth century, the average age in the colonies was about sixteen; because the colonial population was younger, Americans were less susceptible to disease than were those living in Europe. The majority of colonists lived in sparsely populated settlements and were less likely to be exposed to infectious diseases. That began to change, however, as colonial cities grew larger and more congested, and trade and travel increased. By the mid– eighteenth century, the colonies were beginning to see levels of contagion much like those in the cities of Europe.
Anti-immigrant Prejudices Nativism began to emerge in the colonies during the eighteenth century. Although Pennsylvania was founded as a haven for people from all countries and religions, by the mid-eighteenth century, concerns arose about the influx of Germans. Benjamin Franklin described the German arrivals as “the most ignorant” group in Pennsylvania. Many of them refused to learn English, and they “herded together” in their own communities. He feared that they would “soon outnumber us” and be a source of constant tension. Why, Franklin asked, “should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens?” He was “not against the admission of Germans in general, for they have their Virtues,” but he urged that they be spread across the colonies so as not to allow them to become a majority anywhere.
Women in the Colonies
In contrast to New Spain and New France, English America had far more women, which largely explains the difference in population growth rates among the European empires in the Americas. More women did not mean more equality, however. As a New England minister stressed, “The woman is a weak creature not endowed with [the] strength and constancy of mind [of men].”
Women, as had been true for centuries, were expected to focus on what was called “housewifery,” or the “domestic sphere.” They were to obey and serve their husbands, nurture their children, and maintain their households. Governor John Winthrop insisted that a “true wife” would find contentment only “in subjection to her husband’s authority.” The wife’s role, said another Puritan, was “to guide the house etc. and not guide the husband.”
Not surprisingly, the lopsided power relationship in colonial households at times generated tensions. One long-suffering wife used the occasion of her husband’s death to commission the following inscription on his tombstone: “Stranger, call this not a place of fear and gloom\ To me it is a pleasant spot— It is my husband’s tomb.” Another woman focused on her own tombstone. It read: “She lived with her husband fifty years/ And died in confident hope of a better life.”
Women in most colonies could not vote, hold office, attend schools or colleges, bring lawsuits, sign contracts, or become ministers. Divorces were allowed only for desertion or “cruel and barbarous treatment,” and no matter who was named the “guilty party,” the father received custody of the children. A Pennsylvania court did see fit to send a man to prison for throwing a loaf of hard bread at his wife, “which occasioned her Death in a short Time.”
“Women’s Work” Virtually every member of a household worked, and no one was expected to work harder than women. As John Cotton, a Boston minister, admitted in 1699, “Women are creatures without which there is no Comfortable living for a man.” Women who failed to perform the work expected of them were punished as if they were servants or slaves.
In 1643, Margaret Page of Salem, Massachusetts, was jailed “for being a lazy, idle, loitering person.” In Virginia, two seamstresses were whipped for fashioning shirts that were too short, and a female indentured servant was forced to work in the tobacco fields even though she was sick. She died in a furrow, with a hoe still in her hands. Such harsh conditions prompted a song popular with women and aimed at those back in England: “The Axe and Hoe have wrought my overthrow. If you do come here, you will be weary, weary, weary.”
During the eighteenth century, women’s work typically involved activities in the house, garden, and fields. Many unmarried women moved into other households to help with children or to make clothes. Others took in children or spun thread into yarn to exchange for cloth. Still others hired themselves out as apprentices to learn a skilled trade or craft, or operated laundries or bakeries. Technically, any money earned by a married woman was the property of her husband.
Farm women usually rose and prepared breakfast by sunrise and went to bed soon after dark. They were responsible for building the fire and hauling water. They fed and watered the livestock, cared for the children throughout the day, tended the garden, prepared lunch (the main meal) and dinner, milked the cows, and cleaned the kitchen before retiring. Women also combed, spun, spooled, wove, and bleached wool for clothing; knitted linen and cotton, hemmed sheets, and pieced quilts; made candles and soap; chopped wood, mopped floors, and washed clothes. Female indentured servants in the southern colonies commonly worked as field hands.
One of the most lucrative trades among colonial women was the oldest: prostitution. Many servants took up prostitution after their indenture was fulfilled, and port cities had thriving brothels. They catered to sailors and soldiers, but men from all walks of life frequented what were called “bawdy houses,” or, in Puritan Boston, “disorderly houses.” Local authorities frowned on such activities. In Massachusetts, convicted prostitutes were stripped to the waist, tied to the back of a cart, and whipped as it moved through the town. In South Carolina, several elected public officials were dismissed because they were caught “lying with wenches.” Some enslaved women whose owners expected sexual favors turned the tables by demanding compensation.
Elizabeth Lucas Pinckney On occasion, circumstances forced women to exercise leadership outside the domestic sphere. Such was the case with South Carolinian Elizabeth Lucas Pinckney (1722–1793). Born in the West Indies, raised on the island of Antigua, and educated in England, “Eliza” moved to Charleston, South Carolina, at age fifteen, when her father, George Lucas, inherited three plantations. The following year, however, Lucas, a British army officer and colonial administrator, was called back to Antigua, leaving Eliza to care for her ailing mother and younger sister—and to manage three plantations worked by slaves. She wrote a friend, “I have the business of three plantations to transact, which requires much writing and more business and fatigue… [but] by rising early I find I can go through much business.”
Eliza loved the “vegetable world” and experimented with several crops before focusing on indigo, a West Indian plant that produced a coveted blue dye for coloring fabric, especially military uniforms. Indigo made Eliza’s family a fortune, as it did for many other plantation owners. In 1744, she married Charles Pinckney, a wealthy widower twice her age, who was speaker of the South Carolina Assembly. She made him promise that she could continue to manage her plantations.
In 1758, Pinckney died of malaria. Now a thirty-six-year-old widow, Eliza responded by adding her husband’s plantations to her already substantial managerial responsibilities. Self-confident and fearless, Eliza signaled the possibility of women breaking out of the confining tradition of housewifery and assuming roles of social prominence and economic leadership.
Women and Religion During the colonial era, no denomination allowed women to be ordained as ministers. Only the Quakers let women hold church offices and preach (exhort) in public. Puritans cited biblical passages claiming that God required “virtuous” women to submit to male authority and remain “silent” in congregational matters.
Women who challenged ministerial authority were usually prosecuted and punished. Yet by the eighteenth century, as is true today, women made up the overwhelming majority of church members. Their disproportionate attendance at services and revivals worried many ministers, since a feminized church was presumed to be a church in decline.
In 1692, the influential Boston minister Cotton Mather observed that there “are far more Godly Women in the world than there are Godly Men.” In explaining this phenomenon, Mather argued that the pain associated with childbirth, which had long been interpreted as the penalty women paid for Eve’s sinfulness, was in part what drove women “more frequently, & the more fervently” to commit their lives to Christ.
In colonial America, the religious roles of black women were different from those of their white counterparts. In most West African tribes, women frequently served as priests and cult leaders. Although some enslaved Africans had been exposed to Christianity or Islam, most tried to sustain their traditional African religion once they arrived in the colonies.
The acute shortage of women in the early settlement years made them more highly valued in the colonies than they were in Europe; thus over time, women’s status improved slightly. The Puritan emphasis on a well-ordered family life led to laws protecting wives from physical abuse and allowing for divorce. In addition, colonial laws gave wives greater control over the property that they had brought into a marriage or that was left after a husband’s death. But the age-old notion of female subordination and domesticity remained firmly entrenched in colonial America.
Society and Economy in the Southern Colonies
As the southern colonies matured, inequalities of wealth became more visible, and social life grew more divided. The use of enslaved Indians and Africans to grow and process crops generated enormous wealth for a few landowners and their families. Socially, the planters and merchants increasingly became a class apart from the “common folk.” They dominated the legislatures, bought luxury goods from London and Paris, and built brick mansions with formal gardens—all the while looking down upon their “inferiors,” both white and black.
Warm weather and plentiful rainfall helped the southern colonies grow the profitable staple crops (also called cash crops) valued by the mother country: tobacco, rice, sugarcane, and indigo. Tobacco production soared during the seventeenth century. “In Virginia and Maryland,” wrote a royal official in 1629, “tobacco… is our All, and indeed leaves no room for anything else.”
The same was true for rice in South Carolina and Georgia. Using only hand tools, slaves transformed the coastal landscapes, removing trees from swamps and wetlands infested with snakes, alligators, and mosquitos. They then created a system of floodgates to allow workers to drain or flood the fields as needed. Over time, rice planters became the wealthiest group in the British colonies. As plantations grew, the demand for enslaved laborers rose dramatically.
The first English immigrants to Virginia and Maryland built primitive one-room huts that provided limited protection and rotted quickly. Eventually, colonists built cabins on stone or brick foundations, roofed with thatched straw. The spaces between the log timbers were “chinked” with “wattle and daub”—a mix of mud, sand, straw, and wooden stakes that when dried formed a sturdy wall or seam. Most colonial homes had few furnishings; residents slept on the floor. Rarely did they have glass to fill windows. Instead, they used wooden shutters to cover the openings.
Society and Economy in New England
Environmental, social, and economic factors contributed to the remarkable diversity among the early American colonies. New England was quite different from the southern and middle Atlantic regions: it was more governed by religious concerns, less focused on commercial agriculture, more engaged in trade, more centered on village and town life, and much less involved with slavery.
Townships Whenever New England towns were founded, the first public structure built was usually a church. By law, every town had to collect taxes to support a church, and every resident—church member or not—was required to attend midweek and Sunday religious services. The average New Englander heard more than 7,000 sermons in a lifetime.
The Puritans believed that God had created a covenant, or contract, in which people formed a congregation for common worship. This led to the idea of people joining to form governments, but the principles of democracy and equality were not part of Puritan political thought. Puritan leaders sought to do the will of God, and the ultimate source of authority was not majority rule but the Bible as interpreted by the ministers and magistrates (political leaders).
Unlike the settlers in the southern colonies or in Dutch New York, few New Englanders received huge tracts of land. Township grants were usually awarded to organized groups of settlers, often already gathered into a church congregation. They would request a “town” (what elsewhere was commonly called a township), then would divide the land according to a rough principle of equity. Those who invested more or had larger families or greater status might receive more land. The town retained some pasture and woodland in common and held other tracts for future arrivals.
Dwellings and Daily Life The first colonists in New England initially lived in caves, tents, or cabins, but they eventually built simple woodframe houses with steeply pitched roofs to reduce the buildup of snow. By the end of the seventeenth century, most New England homes were plain but sturdy dwellings. Interior walls were often plastered and whitewashed, but it was not until the eighteenth century that the exteriors of most houses were painted, usually a deep “Indian” red, as the colonists called it. The interiors were dark, illuminated by candles or oil lamps, both of which were expensive; most people usually went to sleep soon after sunset.
There were no bathrooms (“privies”). Most families relieved themselves outside, often beside the walls of the house, indifferent to the stench. Family life revolved around the main room on the ground floor, called the hall, where meals were cooked in a fireplace and where the family lived most of the time. Hence, they came to be called living rooms.
Food was served at a table of rough-hewn planks, called the board, and the only eating utensils were spoons and fingers. The father was sometimes referred to as the “chair man” because he sat in the only chair (the origin of the term chairman of the board). The rest of the family usually stood or sat on stools or benches. A typical meal consisted of corn, boiled meat, and vegetables washed down with beer, cider, rum, or milk. Cornbread was a daily favorite, as was cornmeal mush, known as hasty pudding.
The new England Economy As John Winthrop and the Puritans prepared to embark for New England in 1630, he stressed that God had made some people powerful and rich and others helpless and poor—so that the elite would show mercy and the masses would offer obedience. He reminded the Puritans that all were given a noble “calling” by God to work hard and ensure that material pursuits never diminished the importance of spiritual devotion.
Once in New England, the Puritans implanted their Protestant work ethic and the primacy of religion as bedrock American values. They also celebrated the idea that newness was the prime creator of culture, and they lived in the expectation of something new and dramatic: Christ’s second coming and his reign on earth, the Millennium. Newness was to Americans what antiquity was to Europeans—a sign of integrity, the mark of a special relationship to history and to God. It affirmed the idea of American exceptionalism. Puritanism, in this sense, underwrote the American Revolution with its promise of political renewal.
Early New England farmers and their families led hard lives. Clearing rocks might require sixty days of hard labor per acre. The growing season was short, and no staple crops grew in the harsh climate. The crops and livestock were those familiar to the English countryside: wheat, barley, oats, some cattle, pigs, and sheep.
Many New Englanders turned to the sea for their livelihood. Codfish had been a regular element of the European diet for centuries, and the waters off the New England coast had the heaviest concentrations of cod in the world. Whales supplied ambergris, a waxy substance used in the manufacture of perfumes, as well as oil for lighting and lubrication.
New Englanders exported dried fish to Europe, with lesser grades going to the West Indies as food for slaves. The thriving fishing industry encouraged the development of shipbuilding and spurred transatlantic commerce. Rising incomes and a booming trade with Britain and Europe soon brought a taste for luxury goods in New England that clashed with the Puritan ideal of plain living and high thinking.
Shipbuilding The forests of New England represented a source of enormous wealth. Old-growth trees were prized for use as ships’ masts and spars (on which sails were attached). Early on, the British government claimed the tallest and straightest trees, mostly white pines and oaks, for use by the Royal Navy. At the same time, British officials encouraged the colonists to develop their own shipbuilding industry, and American-built ships quickly became known for their quality and price. It was much less expensive to purchase ships built in America than to transport timber to Britain for ship construction, especially since a large ship might require as many as 2,000 trees. Nearly a third of all British ships were made in the colonies during the eighteenth century.
Trade By the end of the seventeenth century, the New England colonies had become part of a complex North Atlantic commercial network, trading not only with the British Isles and the British West Indies but also—often illegally—with Spain, France, Portugal, the Netherlands, and their colonies.
Trade in New England and the middle colonies differed from that in the South in two respects. The lack of staple crops to exchange for English goods was a relative disadvantage, but the success of shipping and commercial enterprises worked in their favor. After 1660, to protect its agriculture and fisheries, the English government placed prohibitive duties (taxes) on fish, flour, wheat, and meat, while leaving the door open to high-demand products such as timber, furs, and whale oil. Between 1698 and 1717, New England and New York bought more from England than they exported to it, creating an unfavorable trade balance.
These circumstances gave rise to the triangular trade. New England merchants shipped rum to the west coast of Africa, where it was exchanged for slaves. Ships then took the enslaved Africans to Caribbean islands to sell. The ships returned home with various commodities, including molasses, from which New Englanders manufactured rum. In another version, they shipped provisions to the Caribbean, carried sugar and molasses to England, and returned with goods manufactured in Europe.
Puritanical Puritans? The Puritans were religious fundamentalists who looked to the Bible for authority and inspiration. For most, the Christian faith was a living source of daily inspiration and obligation.
Although the Puritans sailed to America to create pious, prosperous communities, the traditional caricature of the dour, black-clothed Puritan, hostile to anything that gave pleasure, is false. Yes, they banned card playing, dancing in taverns, swearing, and bowling. They even fined people for celebrating
Christmas, for in their view only pagans marked the birth date of their rulers with merrymaking. Puritans also frowned on hurling insults, disobeying parents, and disrespecting civil and religious officials. In 1631, a servant named Phillip Ratcliffe had both of his ears cut off for making scandalous comments about the governor and the church in Salem.
Yet Puritans also wore colorful clothing, enjoyed secular music, and imbibed prodigious quantities of beer and rum. “Drink is in itself a good creature of God,” said the Reverend Increase Mather, “but the abuse of drink is from Satan.” Drunks were arrested, and repeat offenders were forced to wear the letter D in public.
Moderation in all things except piety was the Puritan guideline, and it applied to sexual life as well. Although sexual activity outside of marriage was strictly forbidden, New England courts overflowed with cases of adultery and illicit sex. A man found guilty of coitus with an unwed woman could be jailed, whipped, fined, and forced to marry the woman. Female offenders were also jailed and whipped, and in some cases adulterers were forced to wear the letter A in public.
Witches in Salem At times, the religious zeal of Puritan communities boiled over. The strains of Massachusetts’s transition from Puritan utopia to royal colony reached a tragic climax in 1692–1693 amid the witchcraft hysteria at Salem Village (now called Danvers), a community on the northern edge of Salem Town, a flourishing port some fifteen miles north of Boston.
Belief in witchcraft was widespread in the seventeenth century. Prior to the dramatic episode in Salem Village, almost 300 New Englanders (mostly middle-aged women) had been accused of practicing witchcraft, and more than 30 had been hanged.
The Salem episode was unique in its scope and intensity, however. During the brutally cold winter of 1692, several preteen girls became fascinated with a fortune teller named Tituba, an Indian slave from Barbados. Two of the girls, nine-year-old Betty Parris and eleven-year-old Abigail Williams, the daughter and niece of the village minister, Samuel Parris, began to behave oddly. They writhed, shouted, barked, sobbed hysterically, and flapped their arms as if to fly. When asked who was tormenting them, they replied that three women— Tituba, Sarah Good, and Sarah Osborne—were Satan’s servants.
Parris beat Tituba, his slave, until she confessed to doing Satan’s bidding. (Under the rules of the era, those who confessed were jailed; those who denied the charges were hanged.) Tituba described one of the devil’s companions as “a thing all over hairy, all the face hairy and a long nose.”
Authorities arrested Tituba and the other accused women. Two of them were hanged, but not before they named other supposed witches and more young girls experienced convulsive fits. The mass hysteria extended to surrounding towns, and within a few months, the Salem Village jail was filled with more than 150 men, women, and children—and two dogs—all accused of practicing witchcraft.
When a prominent farmer, Giles Corey, was accused of supernatural crimes, his neighbors stripped off his clothes, lowered him into an open grave, placed a board over his body, and began loading it with heavy boulders to force a confession. After three days of such abuse, the defiant old man finally died, having muttered only two words: “More weight!”
As the allegations and executions multiplied and spread beyond Salem, leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony began to worry that the witch hunts were spinning out of control. The governor finally intervened when his wife was accused of serving the devil. He disbanded the special court in Salem and ordered the remaining suspects released.
By then, nineteen people (fourteen women and five men, including a former minister) had been hanged—all justified by the biblical verse that tells believers not to “suffer a witch to live.” A little over a year after it had begun, the witchcraft frenzy was finally over.
What explains Salem’s mass hysteria? It may have represented nothing more than theatrical adolescents trying to enliven the dreary routine of everyday life. Others suggest community tensions may have led people to accuse neighbors, masters, relatives, or rivals as an act of spite or vengeance. Some historians have stressed that most of the accused witches were women, many of whom had in some way defied the traditional roles assigned to females.
Still another interpretation suggests that the accusations may have reflected the psychological strains caused by frequent Indian attacks just north of Salem, along New England’s northern frontier. Some of the convulsing girls had seen their families killed or mutilated by Indians and suffered from what today is called post-traumatic stress disorder.
Society and Economy in the Middle Colonies
Both geographically and culturally, the middle colonies (New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland) stood between New England and the South. They reflected the diversity of colonial life and foreshadowed the pluralism of the future nation.
An economic Mix The middle colonies produced surpluses of foodstuffs for export to the slave-based plantations of the South and the West Indies: wheat, barley, oats and other grains, flour, and livestock. Three great rivers—the Hudson, Delaware, and Susquehanna—and their tributaries provided access to the backcountry of Pennsylvania and New York, and to a rich fur trade with Native Americans. The region’s bustling commerce thus rivaled that of New England.
Land policies followed the headright system prevalent in the Chesapeake colonies. In New York, the early royal governors continued the Dutch practice of the patroonship, granting vast estates to influential men (called patroons). The patroons controlled large domains farmed by tenants (renters) who paid fees to use the landlords’ mills, warehouses, smokehouses, and docks. With free land available elsewhere, however, New York’s population languished, and new waves of immigrants sought the promised land of Pennsylvania.
An ethnic Mix In the makeup of their population, the middle colonies differed from New England’s Puritan settlements and the biracial plantation colonies to the south. In New York and New Jersey, Dutch culture and language lingered. Along the Delaware River near Philadelphia, the first settlers—Swedes and Finns—were overwhelmed by an influx of Europeans. By the mid–eighteenth century, the middle colonies were the fastest-growing region in North America.
The Germans came to America (primarily Pennsylvania) mainly from the Rhineland region of Europe, where brutal religious wars had pitted Protestants against Catholics. William Penn’s recruiting brochures circulated throughout central Europe, and his promise of religious freedom appealed to many persecuted sects, especially the Mennonites, German Baptists whose beliefs resembled those of the Quakers.
In 1683, a group of Mennonites founded Germantown, near Philadelphia. They represented the first wave of German migrants, most of whom were indentured servants. The large numbers of German immigrants during the eighteenth century alarmed many English colonists.
Throughout the eighteenth century, the Scots-Irish moved still farther out into the Pennsylvania backcountry. (“Scotch-Irish” is the more common but inaccurate name for the Scots-Irish, a mostly Presbyterian population transplanted from Scotland to northern Ireland by the English government to give Catholic Ireland a more Protestant tone.)
Land was the great magnet for the poor Scots-Irish. They were, said a recruiting agent, “full of expectation to have land for nothing” and were “unwilling to be disappointed.” In most cases, the lands they “squatted on” were claimed by Native Americans. In 1741, a group of Delaware Indians protested that the Scots-Irish were taking “our land” without giving “us anything for it.” If the colonial government did not stop the flow of whites, the Delawares threatened, they would “drive them off.”
The Scots-Irish and Germans became the largest non-English ethnic groups in the colonies. Other ethnic minorities also enriched the population: Huguenots (French Protestants whose religious freedom had been revoked in 1685, forcing many to leave France), Irish, Welsh, Swiss, and Jews. New York had inherited from the Dutch a tradition of ethnic and religious tolerance, which had given the colony a diverse population before the English conquest: French-speaking Walloons (a Celtic people of southern Belgium), French, Germans, Danes, Portuguese, Spaniards, Italians, Bohemians, Poles, and others, including some New England Puritans.
In the eighteenth century, the population in British North America soared, and the colonies grew more diverse. In 1790, the white population was 61 percent English; 14 percent Scottish and Scots-Irish; 9 percent German; 5 percent Dutch, French, and Swedish; 4 percent Irish; and 7 percent “unidentifiable,” a category that included people of mixed origins as well as “free blacks.” If one adds to the 3,172,444 whites in the 1790 census the 756,770 nonwhites, without even considering the almost 100,000 Native Americans who went uncounted, only about half the nation’s inhabitants, and perhaps fewer, could trace their origins to England.
The Backcountry Pennsylvania became the great distribution point for the ethnic groups of European origin, just as the Chesapeake Bay region and Charleston, South Carolina, became the distribution points for African peoples. Before the mid–eighteenth century, settlers in the Pennsylvania backcountry had reached the Appalachian mountain range. Rather than crossing the steep ridges, the Scots-Irish and Germans filtered southward. Germans were the first white settlers in the Upper Shenandoah Valley in southern Pennsylvania, western Maryland, and northern Virginia, and the Scots-Irish filled the lower valley in western Virginia and North Carolina. The German and Scots-Irish settlers built cabins and tended farms on Indian lands, built churches, and established isolated communities along the frontier.
Race-Based Slavery
During the late seventeenth century, slavery was legalized in all colonies but was most prevalent in the South. In 1642, Leonard Calvert paid a ship captain 24,000 pounds of tobacco for fourteen “negro men-slaves, of between 16 & 26 years old, able & sound of body and limbs.” His son acknowledged that “we are naturally inclin’d to love negros [as workers] if our purses would endure it.”
White colonists viewed race-based slavery as a normal aspect of everyday life; few considered it a moral issue. They believed that God determined one’s “station in life.” Slavery was therefore not a social evil but a “personal misfortune.” Not until the late eighteenth century did meaningful numbers of white Europeans and Americans begin to raise ethical questions about slavery.
The first Africans in America were treated much like indentured servants, with a limited term of service, after which they gained their freedom (but not equality). Until the mid–seventeenth century, no laws in the colonies specified the meaning and scope of the word slavery. Gradually, however, lifelong slavery for blacks became the custom—and the law—of the land. By the 1660s, colonial legislatures formalized the institution of race-based slavery, with detailed slave codes regulating most aspects of slaves’ lives. The South Carolina code, for example, defined all “Negroes, Mulattoes, and Indians” sold into bondage as slaves for life, as were the children born of enslaved mothers.
In 1667, the Virginia legislature declared that slaves could not serve on juries, travel without permission, or gather in groups of more than two or three. Some colonies even prohibited owners from freeing their slaves (manumission). The codes allowed owners to punish slaves by whipping them, slitting their noses, cutting their ankle cords, castrating men, or killing them. A 1669 Virginia law declared that accidentally killing a slave who was being whipped or beaten was not a serious crime. William Byrd II, a wealthy Virginia planter, confessed that the “unhappy effect of owning many Negroes is the necessity of being severe.” In 1713, a South Carolina planter punished a slave by closing him up in a tiny coffin to die, only to have the trapped man’s son slip in a knife so that he could kill himself rather than suffocate.
Color Prejudice More than a century before the English arrived in America, the Portuguese and Spanish had established a global trade in enslaved Africans. While English settlers often enslaved Indian captives, as had the Spanish and Portuguese before them, the Europeans did not enslave other Europeans who were captured in warfare. Color was the crucial difference, or at least the rationalization used to justify slavery and its hellish brutalities.
The English associated the color black with darkness and evil. To them, the different appearance, behavior, and customs of Africans and Native Americans represented savagery and heathenism. Colonial Virginians convinced themselves that blacks (and Indians) were naturally lazy, treacherous, and stupid.
Slaves replace Servants During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the profitable sugar-based economies of the French and British West Indies and Portuguese Brazil sparked greater demand for enslaved Africans, as sugar became valued almost as much as gold or silver. By 1675, the island colonies in the Caribbean had more than 100,000 slaves, while the American colonies had about 5,000.
As tobacco, rice, and indigo crops became more established in Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas, however, the number of African slaves in those colonies grew substantially, while the flow of white indentured servants from Britain and Europe to America slowed. Until the eighteenth century, English immigrants made up 90 percent of American colonists. After 1700, the largest number of new arrivals were enslaved Africans, who totaled more than all European immigrants combined.
Slavery was rooted in the ancient Mediterranean societies, both Christian and Muslim. By the sixteenth century, European slave traders, with the encouragement of their monarchs, had established a network of relationships with various African rulers, who provided slaves in exchange for European goods—cloth, metal objects, muskets, and rum. Over some 400 years, more than 11 million Africans were transported to the Americas.
During the late seventeenth century, the profitability of African slavery led to the emergence of dozens of new slave-trading companies both in Europe and America, thus expanding the availability of enslaved Africans and lowering the price. American colonists preferred slaves because they were officially viewed as property with no civil rights, and they (and their offspring) were servants for life. The colonists preferred Africans over enslaved Indians because they could not escape easily in a land where they stood out because of their dark skin. In short, African slaves offered a better investment.
The market in Slaves Once a slave ship arrived at an American port, Africans in chains would be auctioned to the highest bidder and taken away to begin lifelong work for a complete stranger. They were usually forbidden to use their native languages, practice African religions, or sustain their native cultures. With only rare exceptions, slaves were prohibited from owning anything unrelated to their work.
The vast majority of enslaved Africans worked on farms or plantations from dawn to dusk, in oppressive heat and humidity. As Jedidiah Morse, a prominent Charleston minister, admitted in the late eighteenth century, “No white man, to speak generally, ever thinks of settling a farm, and improving it for himself, without negroes.”
During the eighteenth century, the demand for slaves soared in the southern colonies. By 1750, there were almost 250,000 slaves in British America. The vast majority, about 150,000, resided in Virginia and Maryland, with 60,000 in South Carolina and Georgia.
As the number of slaves grew, so, too, did their talents and expertise. Over time, slaves became skilled blacksmiths, carpenters, and bricklayers. Many enslaved women worked as household servants and midwives.
Slave Resistance Despite the overwhelming power and authority of slave owners, slaves found ways to resist and rebel—and escape.
In a newspaper, a Georgia slave owner asked readers to be on the lookout for “a negro fellow named Mingo, about 40 years old, and his wife Quante, a sensible wench about 20 with her child, a boy about 3 years old, all this country born.”
In a few cases, slaves organized rebellions in which they stole weapons, burned and looted plantations, and killed their captors. On Sunday morning, September 9, 1739, while white families were attending church, some twenty African-born slaves attacked a store in Stono, South Carolina, twenty miles southwest of Charleston. Led by a slave named Jemmy, they killed and decapitated two shopkeepers, seized weapons, and headed south toward freedom in Spanish Florida, gathering more recruits along the way. Within a few days, the slaves had burned six plantations and killed about two dozen whites, sparing one white innkeeper because he was “kind to his slaves.”
The growing army of rebel slaves marched in military formation, waving a banner proclaiming “Liberty” and freeing more slaves as they moved southward. Then the well-armed and mounted militiamen caught up with them. Most of the rebels were killed, and sixty were eventually captured and decapitated by enraged planters. In the end, forty-four blacks were killed in the largest slave uprising of the colonial period.
The Stono Rebellion so frightened white planters that they convinced the colonial assembly to ban the importation of African slaves for ten years and pass the so-called Negro Act of 1740, which called for more oversight of slave activities and harsher punishments for rebellious behavior. Slaves could no longer grow their own food, gather in groups, learn to read or write, or earn money on the side. The new law also reduced the penalty for a white killing a slave to a minor offense and banned slaves from testifying in courts.
Slavery in New York City In contrast to their experience in the southern colonies, most slaves in the northern colonies lived in towns or cities, which gave them more opportunities to move about. New York City had more slaves than any American city, and by 1740 was second only to Charleston in the percentage of slaves in its population.
As the number of slaves increased in the city, fears and tensions mounted— and occasionally exploded. In 1712, several dozen slaves revolted; they started fires and used swords, axes, and guns to kill whites who attempted to fight the fires. Called out to restore order, the militia captured twenty-seven slaves, six of whom committed suicide. The rest were executed; some were burned alive. (Authorities postponed the execution of two pregnant African women at the request of their owners so that they could enslave the babies and thereby recover their investment.) New York officials thereafter passed a citywide black code that strictly regulated slave behavior.
The harsh regulations did not prevent another major racial incident. In the bitterly cold March of 1741, city dwellers worried that slaves were setting a series of suspicious fires, including one at the governor’s house. “The Negroes are rising!” shouted terrified whites.
The frantic city council launched an investigation. Mary Burton, a sixteenyear-old white indentured servant, told authorities that slaves and poor whites were plotting to “burn the whole town” and kill the white men. The plotters were supposedly led by John Hughson, a white trafficker in stolen goods. His wife, two slaves, and a prostitute were charged as coconspirators. Despite their denials, all were convicted and hanged. Within weeks, more than half of the adult male slaves in the city were in jail. What came to be called the Conspiracy of 1741 finally ended after seventeen slaves and four whites were hanged. Thirteen more blacks were burned at the stake, while many others were deported.
At its most basic level, slavery is a system in which the powerless are brutalized by the powerful. Many slaves who ran away in colonial America faced ghastly punishments when caught. Antonio, a West African man shipped as a slave to New Amsterdam and then to Maryland, worked in the tobacco fields. He tried to escape several times. After his last attempt, in 1656, his owner, a young Dutch planter named Syman Overzee, tortured and killed him. Authorities charged Overzee with murder—and an all-white jury acquitted him.
Slavery in the Western Hemisphere was a rapidly growing phenomenon by the time of the American Revolution. White Europeans believed they were justified in dehumanizing an entire class of human beings because of the supposed “backwardness” of Africans and Indians. Not even the American Revolution’s ideals of freedom and equality (for whites) would change that attitude.
First Stirrings of a Common Colonial Culture
By the middle of the eighteenth century, the thirteen colonies were growing and maturing. Schools and colleges were springing up, and the standard of living was rising. More and more colonists were able to read about the latest ideas circulating in London and Paris while purchasing the latest consumer goods from Europe.
The rage for luxury goods, especially jewelry, fine clothing, and beaver hats, heightened the recognition of social inequality, particularly in the cities. Many ministers complained that wealthy Americans were ignoring their commitment to Christian ideals. In 1714, a Bostonian regretted the “great extravagance that people are fallen into, far beyond their circumstances, in their purchases, buildings, families, expenses, apparel—generally in their whole way of living.”
English merchants required Americans to buy their goods only with specie (gold or silver coins). This left little “hard money” in the colonies. American merchants tried various ways to get around the shortage of specie. Some engaged in barter, using commodities such as tobacco or rice as currency in exchange for manufactured goods and luxury items. The issue of money—what kind and how much—would become one of the major areas of dispute between the colonies and Britain.
Colonial Cities
Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the colonies were mostly populated by farmers or farmworkers. But a handful of cities blossomed into dynamic centers of political and social life. Economic opportunity drove most city dwellers.
Colonial cities hugged the coastline or, like Philadelphia, sprang up on rivers large enough to handle oceangoing vessels. Never comprising more than 10 percent of the colonial population, the large coastal cities had a disproportionate influence on commerce, politics, society, and culture. By the end of the colonial period, Philadelphia, with some 30,000 people, was the largest city in the colonies, and New York City, with about 25,000, ranked second. Boston numbered 16,000; Charleston, South Carolina, 12,000; and Newport, Rhode Island, 11,000.
The social and political order The urban social elite was dominated by wealthy merchants and property owners served by a middle class of shop owners, innkeepers, and skilled craftsmen. Almost two thirds of urban male workers were artisans—carpenters and coopers (barrel makers), shoemakers and tailors, silversmiths and blacksmiths, sailmakers, stonemasons, weavers, and potters. At the bottom of the social order were sailors, manual laborers, servants, and slaves.
Colonial cities were busy, crowded, and dangerous. Epidemics such as cholera, malaria, and yellow fever were common. The use of open fireplaces caused frequent fires, which in turn led to the development of fire companies. Rising crime and violence required increased policing by sheriffs and local militias.
Colonists also were concerned about the poor and homeless. The number of Boston’s poor receiving aid rose from 500 in 1700 to 4,000 in 1736; in New York City, it rose from 250 in 1698 to 5,000 in the 1770s. Those designated “helpless” were often provided money, food, clothing, and fuel. In some towns, “poorhouses” were built to house the homeless and provide them with jobs.
The urban web The first American roads were Indian trails that were widened with frequent travel. Overland travel was initially by horse or by foot. Inns and taverns (also called public houses, or pubs) were essential social institutions, since travel at night was treacherous—and Americans loved to drink. (It was said that when the Spanish settled an area, they would first build a church; the Dutch would first erect a fort; and the English would first construct a tavern.)
Taverns and inns were places to eat, relax, read a newspaper, play cards, gossip and conduct business, and enjoy alcoholic beverages: beer, hard cider, and rum. But ministers and magistrates began to worry that the pubs were promoting drunkenness and social rebelliousness. Not only were poor whites drinking heavily but also Indians, which, one governor told the assembly, would have “fatal consequences to the Government.”
Early in the eighteenth century, ministers succeeded in passing an antitavern law in Massachusetts Bay Colony. The Act Against Intemperance, Immorality, and Profaneness targeted taverns that had become “nurseries of intemperance.” It tightened the process of issuing licenses for the sale of liquor, eliminated fiddle-playing in pubs, called for public posting of the names of “common drunkards,” and banned the sale of rum and brandy, the most potent beverages.
After a few years, however, the law was rarely enforced, but the concerns remained. In 1726, a Bostonian declared that “the abuse of strong Drink is becoming Epidemical among us, and it is very justly Supposed… that the Multiplication of Taverns has contributed not a little to this Excess of Riot and Debauchery.” The failed law was the last legislative effort to restrict alcohol consumption before the Revolution.
By the end of the seventeenth century, there were more taverns in America than any other business. They were the most important social institutions in the colonies—and the most democratic. They were places where rich and poor intermingled, and by the mid–eighteenth century, they would become gathering spots for protests against British rule.
Long-distance communication was a more complicated matter. Postal service was almost nonexistent—people gave letters to travelers or sea captains in hopes that they would be delivered. Under a parliamentary law of 1710, the postmaster of London named a deputy in charge of the colonies. A postal system eventually emerged along the Atlantic Seaboard, providing the colonies with an effective means of communication that would prove crucial in the growing controversy with Great Britain. More reliable mail delivery also spurred the growing popularity of newspapers.
Citizenship in the empire Prior to the eighteenth century, the individual colonies, except New Hampshire, competed for immigrants from around the world. They needed settlers to generate economic growth and to conquer Native Americans. One way to entice colonists was to give them the opportunity to acquire the same civil rights as those born in the colonies (“birthright citizenship”). To that end, the colonies developed “naturalization” policies outlining the path to citizenship. Each colony had slightly different rules, but the rights of naturalization typically included acquiring property, voting and holding office, and receiving royal grants of land.
From the start, therefore, British America was an immigrant-welcoming society. The preamble to Virginia’s naturalization acts of 1680 and 1705 urged “persons of different nations to transport themselves hither with their families and stocks, to settle, plant or reside, by investing them with all the rights and privileges of his majesty’s natural free born subjects within the said colony.”
But why were the colonies so welcoming? Because, as South Carolina’s law explained, immigrants, “by their industry, diligence and trade, have very much enriched and advanced this colony and settlement thereof.”
By contrast, England sought to restrict immigration to the home country, fearing that Protestant sects such as Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists would undermine the authority of the Church of England. Others feared that naturalized immigrants, if given the right to vote and hold office, “might endanger our ancient polity and government, and by frequent intermarriages go a great way to blot out and extinguish the English race.”
To sustain high levels of immigration to British America, Parliament in 1740 passed the Naturalization Act. It announced that immigrants (“aliens”) living in America for seven years would become subjects in the British Empire after swearing a loyalty oath and providing proof that they were Protestants. While excluding “papists” (Roman Catholics), the new law did make exceptions for Jews.
The Enlightenment in America
The most significant of the new European ideas circulating in eighteenth-century America grew out of a burst of intellectual activity known as the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment celebrated rational inquiry, scientific research, and individual freedom. Enlightened people sought the truth, wherever it might lead, rather than remain content with believing ideas and dogmas passed down through the ages or taken from the Bible.
Immanuel Kant, the eighteenth-century German philosopher, summed up the Enlightenment point of view: “Dare to know! Have the courage to use your own understanding.” He and others used the power of reason to analyze the workings of nature, and they employed new tools like microscopes and telescopes to engage in close observation, scientific experimentation, and precise mathematical calculation.
The age of reason The Enlightenment, often called the Age of Reason, was triggered by a scientific revolution in the sixteenth century that transformed the way educated people observed and understood the world. Just as early explorers alerted Europeans to the excitement of new geographical discoveries, early modern scientists began to realize that social “progress” could occur through a series of intellectual and technological discoveries enabled by the adaptation of mathematical techniques for observing the natural world. The engines of curiosity and inventiveness drove a scientific revolution whose findings over the course of 150 years would prove astonishing.
The ancient Christian view that the God-created earth was at the center of the universe, with the sun revolving around it, was overthrown by the controversial solar system described by Nicolaus Copernicus, a Polish astronomer and Catholic priest. In 1533, Copernicus asserted that the earth and other planets orbit the sun. Catholic officials scorned his theory until it was later confirmed by other scientists using telescopes.
In 1687, Englishman Isaac Newton announced his transformational theory of the earth’s gravitational pull. Using both astronomy and mathematical physics, especially calculus, Newton challenged biblical notions of the world’s workings by depicting a changing, dynamic universe moving in accordance with natural laws that could be grasped by human reason and explained by mathematics. He implied that natural laws (rather than God) govern all things, from the orbits of the planets to the effects of gravity to the science of human relations: politics, economics, and society.
Some enlightened people, called Deists, carried Newton’s scientific outlook to its logical conclusion, claiming that God created the world and designed its “natural laws,” which governed the operation of the universe. In other words, Deism maintained that God planned the universe and set it in motion, but no longer interacted directly with the earth and its people. Their rational God was nothing like the intervening God of the Christian tradition, to whom believers prayed for daily guidance and direct support.
Evil, according to the Deists, resulted not from humanity’s inherent sinfulness as outlined in the Bible but from human ignorance of the rational laws of nature. Therefore, the best way to improve society and human nature, according to Deists such as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, was by cultivating Reason, which was the highest Virtue. (Followers of the Enlightenment thinkers often capitalized both words.)
By using education, reason, and scientific analysis, societies were bound to improve their knowledge as well as their quality of life. In this sense, the word enlightenment meant that people were learning to think for themselves rather than blindly accept what tradition, the Bible, and political and religious elites directed them to believe. In sum, the perspectives of the Enlightenment helped people to stop fearing nature and to begin controlling and manipulating it to improve the quality of life—for all.
Enlightened “freethinkers” refused to allow church and state to limit what they could study and investigate. In this sense, the Enlightenment was a disruptive and even dangerous force in European thought. It spawned not just revolutionary ideas but revolutionary movements.
Faith in the possibility of human progress was one of the most important beliefs of the Enlightenment. Equally important was the notion of political freedom. Both Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, among many other eighteenth-century British Americans, were intrigued by English political philosopher John Locke, who maintained that “natural law” called for a government that rested on the consent of the governed and respected the “natural rights” of all. Those “rights” included the basic civic principles of the Enlightenment—human rights, political liberty, religious toleration— that would later influence colonial leaders’ efforts to justify a revolution.
The american enlighten- ment Benjamin Franklin epitomized the American version of the Enlightenment. Born in Boston in 1706, he left home at the age of seventeen, bound for Philadelphia. Six years later, he bought a print shop and began editing and publishing the Pennsylvania Gazette newspaper. When he was twenty-six, he published Poor Richard’s Almanack, a collection of seasonal weather forecasts, puzzles, household tips, and witty sayings.
Franklin was a pragmatist who focused on getting things done and relished helping people learn to work together and embrace the necessity of compromise. Most of all, he celebrated the virtue and benefit of public service. Before he retired from business at the age of forty-two, Franklin had founded a public library, started a fire company, helped create what became the University of Pennsylvania, and organized a debating club that grew into the American Philosophical Society.
Franklin became a highly regarded diplomat, politician, and educator. Above all, he was an inventive genius devoted to scientific investigation. His wide-ranging experiments extended to the fields of medicine, meteorology, geology, astronomy, and physics. He developed the Franklin stove, the lightning rod, bifocal spectacles, and a glass harmonica.
Although raised as a Presbyterian, Franklin was no churchgoer. A Deist who prized science, reason, and a robust social life, he did not believe in the sacredness of the Bible or the divinity of Jesus. Like the European Deists, Franklin came to believe that God had created a universe directed by natural laws, but thereafter the Creator was not a daily force in human life.
For Franklin and others, to be enlightened meant exercising an allencompassing curiosity about life that in turn nurtured the confidence and capacity to think critically. For them, it was intolerable to accept what tradition dictated as truth without first testing its legitimacy.
Education in the Colo- nies White colonial Americans were among the most literate people in the world. Almost 90 percent of men (more than in England) could read. The colonists were concerned about educating their young, and education in the traditional ideas and manners of society— even literacy itself—was primarily the responsibility of family and church. (The modern concept of free public education would not be fully embraced until the nineteenth century.)
The Puritan emphasis on reading Scripture, which all Protestants shared to some degree, led to the strong focus on literacy. In 1647, the Massachusetts Bay Colony required every town to support a grammar school (a “Latin school” that could prepare a student for college).
The Dutch in New Netherland were as interested in education as the New England Puritans. In Pennsylvania, the Quakers established private schools. In the southern colonies, however, schools were rare. The wealthiest southern planters and merchants hired tutors or sent their children to England for schooling.
The Great Awakening
The growing popularity of Enlightenment rationalism posed a direct threat to traditional religious life in Europe and America. But Christianity has always shown remarkable resilience. This was certainly true in the early eighteenth century, when the American colonies experienced a revival of spiritual zeal designed to restore the primacy of emotion in the religious realm.
Between 1700 and 1750, when the controversial ideas of the Enlightenment were circulating among the best-educated colonists, hundreds of new Christian congregations were founded. Most Americans (85 percent) lived in colonies with an “established” church, meaning that the colonial government endorsed—and collected taxes to support—a single official denomination.
The Church of England, also known as Anglicanism, was the established church in Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, and the Carolinas. Puritan Congregationalism was the official faith in most of New England. In New York, Anglicanism vied with the Dutch Reformed Church for control. Pennsylvania had no state-supported church, but Quakers dominated the legislative assembly. New Jersey and Rhode Island had no official denomination and hosted numerous Christian splinter groups.
Most colonies organized religious life around local parishes, which defined their theological boundaries and defended them against people who did not hold to the same faith. In colonies with official tax-supported religions, people of other faiths could not preach without the permission of the parish. In the 1730s and 1740s, the parish system was thrown into turmoil by the arrival of traveling evangelists, called itinerants, who claimed that most of the local parish ministers were incompetent. In their emotionally charged sermons, the itinerants, several of whom were white women and African Americans, insisted that Christians must be “reborn” in their convictions and behavior.
revivalism During the early 1730s, worries about the erosion of religious fervor helped spark a series of emotional revivals known as the Great Awakening. The revivals spread up and down the Atlantic coast, divided congregations, towns, and families, and fueled popular new denominations, especially the Baptists and Methodists, who accounted for most of the growth. A skeptical Benjamin Franklin admitted that the Awakening was having a profound effect on social life: “Never did the people show so great a willingness to attend sermons. Religion is become the subject of most conversation.”
Jonathan Edwards In 1734–1735, a remarkable spiritual transformation occurred in the congregation of Jonathan Edwards, a prominent Congregationalist minister in the Massachusetts town of Northampton. One of America’s most brilliant philosophers and theologians, Edwards had entered Yale College in 1716, at age thirteen, and graduated at the top of his class four years later.
When Edwards arrived in Northampton in 1727, he was shocked by the town’s lack of religious conviction. He claimed that the young people were preoccupied with sinful pleasures and indulged in “lewd practices” that “corrupted others.” He warned that Christians had become obsessed with making and spending money, and that the ideas associated with the Enlightenment were eroding the importance of religious life.
Edwards rushed to restore the emotional side of religion. “Our people,” he said, “do not so much need to have their heads stored [with new scientific knowledge] as to have their hearts touched [with spiritual intensity].”
Edwards was fiery and charismatic, and his vivid descriptions of the torments of hell and the delights of heaven helped rekindle spiritual intensity among his congregants. By 1735, he reported that “the town seemed to be full of the presence of God; it never was so full of love, nor of joy.”
In 1741, Edwards delivered his most famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” in which he reminded the congregation that hell is real and that God “holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect, over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked…. He looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire.” When he finished, he had to wait several minutes for the congregants to quiet down before he could lead them in a closing hymn.
George whitefield The most celebrated promoter of the Great Awakening was a young English minister, George Whitefield, whose reputation as a spellbinding evangelist preceded him to the colonies.
Whitefield set out to restore the fires of religious intensity in America. In the autumn of 1739, the twenty-five-year-old evangelist began a fourteenmonth tour, preaching to huge crowds in every colony. His critics were as fervent as his admirers. A disgusted Bostonian described a revival meeting’s theatrics: “The meeting was carried on with… some screaming out in Distress and Anguish… some again jumping up and down… some lying along on the floor…. The whole with a very great Noise, to be heard at a Mile’s Distance, and continued almost the whole night.”
Whitefield enthralled audiences with his golden voice, flamboyant style, and unparalleled eloquence. Even Benjamin Franklin, a confirmed rationalist who saw Whitefield preach in Philadelphia, was so excited by the sermon that he emptied his pockets into the collection plate.
Whitefield urged his listeners to experience a “new birth”—a sudden, emotional moment of conversion and salvation. By the end of his sermon, one listener reported, the entire congregation was “in utmost Confusion, some crying out, some laughing, and Bliss still roaring to them to come to Christ, as they answered, I will, I will, I’m coming, I’m coming.”
Radical evangelists Edwards and Whitefield inspired many imitators, the most radical of whom carried emotional evangelism to extremes, stirring up women as well as those at the bottom of society— laborers, seamen, servants, slaves, and landless farm folk—and ordaining their own ministers.
William Tennent, an Irish-born Presbyterian, charged that local ministers were “cold and sapless,” afraid to “thrust the nail of terror into sleeping souls.” Tennent’s oldest son, Gilbert, also an evangelist, defended his tactics by explaining that he and other traveling preachers invaded parishes only when the local minister showed no interest in the “Getting of Grace and Growing in it.”
The Tennents urged people to renounce their ministers and pursue salvation on their own. They also attacked the excesses of the wealthy and powerful. Worried members of the colonial elite charged that the radical revivalists were spreading “anarchy, levelling, and dissolution.”
Equally unsettling to the elite was the Reverend James Davenport, who urged Christians to renounce “rationalist” ministers influenced by the Enlightenment and become the agents of their own salvation through a purely emotional conversion experience. A Connecticut minister warned that Davenport and other extremists were “frightening people out of their senses.”
Women and Revivals
The Great Awakening’s most controversial element was the emergence of women who defied convention by speaking in religious services. Among them was Sarah Haggar Osborne, a Rhode Island schoolteacher who organized prayer meetings that eventually included men and women, black and white. When concerned ministers told her to stop, she refused to “shut my mouth and doors and creep into obscurity.”
Similarly, in western Massachusetts, Bathsheba Kingsley spread the gospel among her neighbors because she had received “immediate revelations from heaven.” When her husband tried to intervene, she pummeled him with “hard words and blows,” praying loudly that he “go quick to hell.”
For all the turbulence created by the revivals, however, churches remained male bastions of political authority.
A changing religious landscape The Great Awakening made religion intensely personal by creating both a deep sense of spiritual guilt and an intense yearning for redemption. Yet it also undermined many of the established churches by emphasizing that all individuals, regardless of wealth or social status, could receive God’s grace without the guidance of ministers. Denominations became bitterly divided as “Old Light” conservatives criticized democratic revivalism and sparred with “New Light” evangelicals who delighted in provoking emotional outbursts and celebrating individual freedom in matters of faith.
New England religious life would never be the same, as the Great Awakening shattered the Puritan ideal of religious uniformity. Isaac Stiles, a crusty Connecticut minister, denounced the “intrusion of choice into spiritual matters” and charged that the “multitudes were seriously, soberly, and solemnly out of their wits” in their embrace of ultra-emotional religion. John Henry Goetschius, a Dutch Reformed evangelist, shot back that Stiles and other Old Lights were determined to “impose on many people, against their will, their old, rotten, and stinking routine religion.”
In the more sedate churches of Boston, a focus on rational or enlightened religion gained the upper hand; ministers found Puritan theology too cold and forbidding, and they considered irrational the Calvinist concept that people could be forever damned by predestination. They embraced Enlightenment rationalism, arguing that God created laws of nature that people could discover and exploit.
religious colleges In reaction to taunts that “born-again” revivalist ministers lacked learning, the Awakening gave rise to denominational colleges that became a distinctive characteristic of American higher education. The three colleges already in existence had religious origins: Harvard College in Massachusetts, founded in 1636 because the Puritans dreaded “to leave an illiterate ministry to the church when our present ministers shall lie in the dust”; the College of William and Mary in Virginia, created in 1693 to strengthen the Anglican ministry; and Yale College, set up in 1701 to educate the Puritans of Connecticut, who believed that Harvard was drifting from the strictest orthodoxy. The College of New Jersey, later Princeton University, was founded by Presbyterians in 1746.
In close succession came King’s College (1754) in New York, later renamed Columbia University, an Anglican institution; the College of Rhode Island (1764), later called Brown University, which was Baptist; New Jersey’s Queens College (1766), later known as Rutgers, which was Dutch Reformed; and Dartmouth College (1769) in New Hampshire, which was Congregationalist.
The heart versus the head Like a ferocious fire that burned intensely before dying out, the Great Awakening subsided by 1750. Like the Enlightenment, however, it influenced the forces leading to the revolution against Great Britain and set in motion powerful currents that still flow in American life.
The Awakening implanted in American culture the evangelical impulse and the emotional appeal of revivalism, weakened the status of the oldfashioned clergy and state-supported churches, and encouraged believers to exercise their own individual judgment. By encouraging the proliferation of denominations, it heightened the need for toleration of dissent.
In some respects, however, the Awakening and the Enlightenment, one stressing the urgings of the spirit and the other celebrating the cold logic of reason, led by different roads to similar ends. Both movements spread across the mainland colonies and thereby helped bind the regions together. Both emphasized the power and right of individual decision-making, and both aroused hopes that America would become the promised land in which people might attain the perfection of piety or reason, if not both.
By urging believers to exercise their own spiritual judgment, revivals weakened the authority of the established churches and their ministers, just as resentment of British economic regulations would later weaken colonial loyalty to the king. As such, the Great Awakening and the Enlightenment helped nurture a growing commitment to individual freedom and resistance to authority that would play a key role in the rebellion against British “tyranny” in 1776.
Chapter 4
Four great European naval powers—Spain, France, England, and the Netherlands (Holland)—created colonies in North America during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as part of their larger fight for global supremacy. Throughout the eighteenth century, wars raged across Europe, mostly pitting the Catholic nations of France and Spain against Protestant Great Britain and the Netherlands. The conflicts spread to the Americas, and by the middle of the eighteenth century, North America had become a primary battleground, involving both colonists and Native Americans allied with different European powers.
Spain’s sparsely populated settlements in the borderlands north of Mexico were small and weak compared to those in the British colonies. Spain had failed to create substantial colonies with robust economies. Instead, it emphasized the conversion of native peoples to Catholicism, prohibited manufacturing within its colonies, strictly limited trade with Native Americans, and searched—in vain—for gold.
The French and British colonies developed a thriving trade with Native Americans at the same time that the fierce rivalry between Great Britain and France gradually shifted the balance of power in Europe. By the end of the eighteenth century, Spain and the Netherlands were in decline, leaving France and Great Britain to fight for dominance. Their nearly constant warfare led Great Britain to tighten its control over the American colonies to raise the funds needed to combat Catholic France and Spain. Tensions over these British efforts to preserve their empire at the expense of American freedoms would lead to rebellion and eventually to revolution.
Competing Neighbors
The bitter rivalry between Great Britain and France fed France’s desire to challenge the English presence in the Americas by establishing Catholic settlements in the Caribbean, Canada, and the region west of the Appalachian Mountains. Yet the French never invested enough people or resources in North America. During the 1660s, the population of New France was less than that of the tiny English colony of Rhode Island. By the mid–eighteenth century, the residents of New France numbered less than 5 percent of British Americans.
New France
The actual settlement of New France began in 1605, when soldier-explorer Samuel de Champlain founded Port-Royal in Acadia, along the Atlantic coast of Canada. Three years later, Champlain established Quebec, to the west, along the St. Lawrence River. Until his death in 1635, Champlain governed New France on behalf of trading companies looking to create a prosperous commercial colony tied to fur trade with the Indians and fishing opportunities off the Atlantic coast.
In 1627, however, the French government ordered that only Catholics could live in New France. This restriction stunted the settlement’s growth—as did the harsh winter climate. As a consequence, the number of French who colonized Canada was much smaller than the number of British, Dutch, and Spanish colonists in other North American colonies, and they were almost all men. From the start, France spent far more to maintain its North American colony than it gained from the furs and fish exported to France for sale.
Champlain knew that the French could survive only by befriending the native peoples. To that end, he dispatched trappers and traders to live with the indigenous nations, learn their languages and customs, and marry their women. Many of these hardy woodsmen pushed into the forested regions around the Great Lakes and developed a flourishing fur trade.
In 1663, French King Louis XIV converted New France into a royal colony led by a governor-general who modeled his rule after that of the absolute monarchy. New France was fully subject to the French king; colonists had no political rights or elected legislature.
To solidify New France, Louis XIV dispatched soldiers and settlers, including shiploads of young women to be wives for the mostly male colonists. He also awarded large grants of land, called seigneuries, to lure aristocratic settlers. The poorest farmers usually rented land from the seigneur.
Still, only about 40,000 French immigrants came to the Western Hemisphere during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By 1750, when the British colonists in North America numbered about 1.5 million, the total French population was only 70,000.
From their Canadian outposts along the Great Lakes, French explorers in the early 1670s moved down the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico. Louis Jolliet, a fur trader born in Quebec, teamed with Father Jacques Marquette, a Jesuit priest fluent in Indian languages, to explore the Wisconsin River south to the Mississippi. Traveling in canoes, they paddled to within 400 miles of the Gulf of Mexico, where they turned back for fear of encountering Spanish soldiers.
Other French explorers followed. In 1682, René-Robert Cavelier, sieur de La Salle, organized an expedition that started in Montreal, crossed the Great Lakes, and went down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, the first European to do so. Near what is today Venice, Mississippi, La Salle erected a cross, claiming for France the vast Ohio and Mississippi Valleys—all the way to the Rocky Mountains. He named the region Louisiana, after Louis XIV. New France had one important advantage over the British: access to the great inland rivers that led to the heartland of the continent and thus to the pelts of such fur-bearing animals as beaver, otter, and mink.
Settlement of the Louisiana Territory finally began in 1699, when the French established a colony near Biloxi, Mississippi. The main settlement then moved to Mobile Bay and, in 1710, to the present site of Mobile, Alabama.
For nearly fifty years, the driving force in Louisiana was Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, sieur de Bienville. In 1718, he founded New Orleans, which soon became the capital of the sprawling Louisiana colony encompassing much of the interior of the North American continent.
That same year, the Spanish, concerned about the French presence in Louisiana, founded San Antonio in the Texas province of New Spain. They built a Catholic mission (later called the “Alamo”) and a fort (presidio) to convert the indigenous people and to fend off efforts by the French to expand into Texas.
The British Colonial System
The diverse British colonies in North America were different from those of New France. Colonial governments were typically headed by a royal governor or proprietor who could appoint and remove officials, command the militia, and grant pardons to people convicted of crimes.
Yet the British colonists enjoyed rights and powers absent in Britain—as well as in New France. In particular, they had elected legislatures. Representatives in the “lower” houses were chosen by popular vote, but only adult males owning a specified amount of property could vote. Because property holding was so widespread in America, however, a greater proportion of the male population could vote in the colonies than could anywhere else in the world.
The most important political trend in eighteenth-century America was the growing power of the colonial legislatures. Like Parliament, the colonial assemblies controlled the budget and could pass laws and regulations. Most assemblies exercised influence over the royal governors by paying their salaries. Throughout the eighteenth century, the assemblies expanded their power and influence. Self-government in British America became first a habit, then a cherished “right.”
Mercantilism The English Civil War during the 1640s sharply reduced the flow of money and people to America and forced English Americans to take sides in the conflict between Royalists and Puritans.
Oliver Cromwell’s victory over the monarchy in 1651 had direct effects in the colonies. As England’s new ruler, Cromwell embraced a more rigidly enforced mercantilism, a political and economic policy adopted by most European monarchs during the seventeenth century in which the government controlled all economic activities. Key industries were regulated, taxed, or “subsidized” (supported by payments from the government), and people with specialized skills or knowledge of new technologies, such as textile machinery, were not allowed to leave the country.
Mercantilism also supported the creation of global empires. Colonies, it was assumed, enriched the mother country in several ways: (1) by providing silver and gold as well as crucial raw materials [furs, fish, grains, timber, sugar, tobacco, indigo, tar, etc.]; (2) by creating a captive market of colonial consumers who were forced to buy goods created in the home country; (3) by relieving social tensions and political unrest in the home country, because colonies could become a haven for the poor, unemployed, and imprisoned; and (4) by not producing goods that would compete with those produced in the home country.
Navigation Acts Such mercantilist assumptions prompted Oliver Cromwell to adopt the first in a series of Navigation Acts intended to increase control over the colonial economies. The Navigation Act of 1651 required that all goods going to and from the colonies be carried only in English-owned ships. The law was intended to hurt the Dutch, who had developed a flourishing shipping business between America and Europe. Dutch shippers charged much less to transport goods than did the English, and they actively encouraged smuggling in the American colonies as a means of defying the Navigation Acts. By 1652, England and the Netherlands were at war—the first of three naval conflicts between 1652 and 1674 involving the two Protestant rivals.
After the monarchy was restored to power in England in 1660, the Royalist Parliament passed the Navigation Act of 1660, which specified that certain colonial products (such as tobacco) were to be shipped only to England or other colonies. The Navigation Act of 1663, called the Staples Act, required that all shipments from Europe to America first stop in Britain to be offloaded and taxed before being sent to the colonies.
In 1664, English warships conquered New Netherland, removing the Dutch from North America. By 1700, the English had surpassed the Dutch as the world’s leading maritime power, and most products sent to and from America via Europe and Africa were carried in English ships. What the English government did not expect was that the mercantile system would arouse intense resentment in the colonies.
Colonial Resentment Colonial merchants and shippers complained about the Navigation Acts, but the English government refused to lift the restrictions. New England was particularly hard hit. In 1678, a defiant Massachusetts legislature declared that the Navigation Acts had no legal standing. In 1684, King Charles II tried to teach the rebellious colonists a lesson by revoking the royal charter for Massachusetts.
The following year, Charles died and his brother, King James II, succeeded him, becoming the first Catholic monarch in more than 100 years. To demonstrate his power, the new king reorganized the New England colonies into a single supercolony called the Dominion of New England.
In 1686, a new royal governor, the authoritarian Sir Edmund Andros, arrived in Boston. Andros stripped New Englanders of their civil rights, imposed new taxes, ignored town governments, strictly enforced the Navigation Acts, and punished smugglers.
The Glorious Revolution
In 1688, the Dominion of New England added the former Dutch provinces of New York, East Jersey, and West Jersey to its control, just a few months before the Glorious Revolution erupted in England. People called the revolution “glorious” because it took place with little bloodshed. Catholic James II, fearing imprisonment in the Tower of London, fled to France and was replaced by the king’s daughter Mary and her husband William III, the ruling Dutch Prince. Both were Protestants.
William III and Mary II would govern England as constitutional monarchs, their powers limited by Parliament. They soon issued a religious Toleration Act and a Bill of Rights to ensure that there never again would be an absolute monarchy in England.
In 1689, Americans in Boston staged their own revolution. A group of merchants, ministers, and militiamen (citizen-soldiers) arrested Governor Andros and his aides and removed Massachusetts Bay Colony from the new Dominion of New England. Within a few weeks, the other colonies that had been absorbed into the Dominion also restored their independence.
William and Mary, however, were determined to crack down on smuggling and rebelliousness. They appointed new royal governors in Massachusetts, New York, and Maryland. In Massachusetts, the governor was given authority to veto acts of the colonial assembly, and he removed the requirement that only church members could vote in elections.
John locke on Revolution The removal of King James II in the Glorious Revolution showed that a monarch could be deposed according to constitutional principles. In addition, the long-standing geographical designation “Great Britain” for the united kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Wales would soon be revived as the nation’s official name.
A powerful justification for revolution appeared in 1690 when English philosopher John Locke published Two Treatises on Government, which had an enormous impact on political thought in the colonies. Locke rejected the traditional “divine” right of monarchs to govern with absolute power and insisted that people are endowed with natural rights to life, liberty, and property. He noted that it was the need to protect those natural rights that led people to establish governments in the first place. When rulers failed to protect the property and lives of their subjects, Locke argued, the people had the right—in extreme cases—to overthrow the monarch and change the government.
An Emerging Colonial System
In early 1689, New Yorkers sent a message to King William thanking him for delivering England from “tyranny, popery, and slavery.” Many colonists were disappointed, however, when the king cracked down on American smugglers. The Act to Prevent Frauds and Abuses of 1696 required royal governors to enforce the Navigation Acts, allowed customs officials in America to use “writs of assistance” (general search warrants that did not have to specify the place to be searched), and ordered that accused smugglers be tried in royal admiralty courts (because juries in colonial courts rarely convicted their peers).
Soon, however, British efforts to enforce the Navigation Acts waned. King George I and George II, German princes who were descendants of James I, showed much less interest in enforcing colonial trade laws. Robert Walpole, the long-serving prime minister (1721–1742) and lord of the treasury, decided that the American colonies should be left alone to export needed raw materials (timber, tobacco, rice, indigo) and to buy manufactured goods from the mother country.
Under Walpole’s leadership, Britain followed a policy of “salutary neglect” of the Navigation Acts, allowing the colonies greater freedom to pursue their economic interests, in part because the British did not want to pay the huge expense of enforcing the imperial regulations. What Walpole did not realize was that salutary neglect would create among many colonists an independent attitude that would eventually blossom into revolution.
Habit of self-government Government within the American colonies evolved during the eighteenth century as the colonial assemblies acquired powers, particularly with respect to government appointments, which Parliament had yet to exercise itself.
The English colonies in America benefited from elected legislative assemblies. Whether called the House of Burgesses (Virginia), Delegates (Maryland), Representatives (Massachusetts), or simply the assembly, the “lower” houses were chosen by popular vote. Only male property owners could vote. Because property holding was much more widespread in America than in Europe, a greater proportion of the male population could vote and hold office. Members of the colonial assemblies tended to be wealthy, but there were exceptions. One unsympathetic colonist observed in 1744 that the New Jersey Assembly “was chiefly composed of mechanicks and ignorant wretches; obstinate to the last degree.”
The most profound political trend during the eighteenth century was the growing power and influence of the colonial assemblies. They controlled the budget through their vote on taxes and expenditures, and they held the power to initiate legislation. Most of the assemblies also exerted leverage on the royal governors by controlling their salaries. By midcentury, the colonies had become largely self-governing.
Warfare in the Colonies
The Glorious Revolution of 1688 transformed relations among the great powers of Europe. Protestants William and Mary, for example, were passionate foes of Catholic France’s Louis XIV. They organized an alliance of European nations against the French in a transatlantic war known in the American colonies as King William’s War (1689–1697).
It would be the first of four major wars fought in Europe and the colonies over the next seventy-four years pitting Britain and its European allies against France or Spain and their allies. By the end of the eighteenth century, the struggle between the British and French would shift the balance of power in Europe.
The prolonged warfare had a devastating effect on New England, especially Massachusetts, which was closest to the battlefields of French Canada. It also reshaped the relationship between America and Great Britain, which emerged from the wars as the most powerful nation in the world. Thereafter, international commerce became increasingly essential to the expanding British Empire, thus making the American colonies even more strategically significant.
The french and indian War The most important conflict between Britain and France (and its Catholic ally Spain) in North America was the French and Indian War (1756–1763), globally known as the Seven Years’ War. Unlike the three earlier wars, the French and Indian War started in America and ended with a decisive victory. It was sparked by French and British competition for the ancestral Indian lands in the vast Ohio Valley; whichever nation or colony (both Pennsylvania and Virginia claimed jurisdiction over it) controlled the “Ohio Country” would control the entire continent because of the strategic importance of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers.
To defend their interests, the French pushed south from Canada and built forts in the Ohio Country. When Virginia’s governor learned of the forts, he sent a twenty-two-year-old militia officer, Major George Washington, to warn the French to leave. But Washington was rudely rebuffed by the French.
A few months later, in the spring of 1754, Washington, now a lieutenant colonel, went back to the Ohio Country with 150 volunteer soldiers and Indian allies. They planned to build a fort where the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio Rivers converged (where the city of Pittsburgh later developed). The socalled Forks of the Ohio was the key strategic gateway to the vast territory west of the Appalachian Mountains, and both sides were determined to control it.
After two months of travel through densely forested, hilly terrain, Washington learned that French soldiers had beaten him to the site and built Fort Duquesne in western Pennsylvania. Washington decided to camp about forty miles away. The next day, the Virginians ambushed a French scouting party, killing ten soldiers, including the commander—the first fatalities in what would become the French and Indian War.
Washington and his troops, reinforced by more Virginians and British soldiers dispatched from South Carolina, hastily constructed a tiny circular stockade. They called it Fort Necessity. Washington remarked that the valley provided “a charming field for an encounter,” but there was nothing charming about the battle that erupted when a large French force surrounded and attacked on July 3, 1756.
After the day-long, lopsided Battle of Great Meadows, Washington surrendered, having seen a third of his 300 men killed or wounded. The French and their Indian allies lost only three men. The French commander then forced Washington to surrender his French prisoners and admit that he had “assassinated” the group of French soldiers at the earlier encounter. On July 4, 1754, Washington and the defeated Virginians began trudging home.
France was now in undisputed control of the Ohio Country. Yet Washington’s bungled expedition wound up triggering what would become a massive world war. As a British politician exclaimed, “the volley fired by a young Virginian in the backwoods of America set the world on fire.”
The albany plan British officials in America, worried about war with the French and their Indian allies, urgently called a meeting of the northern colonies. Twenty-one representatives from seven colonies gathered in Albany, New York. It was the first time that a large group of colonial delegates had met to take joint action.
At the urging of Pennsylvania’s Benjamin Franklin, the Albany Congress (June 19–July 11, 1754) approved the Albany Plan of Union. It called for eleven colonies to band together, headed by a president appointed by the king. Each colonial assembly would send two to seven delegates to a “grand council,” which would have legislative powers. The Union would have jurisdiction over Indian affairs.
The Albany Plan of Union was too radical for the time, however. British officials and the colonial legislatures, eager to maintain their powers, wanted simply a military alliance against Indian attacks, so they rejected the Albany Plan. Franklin later maintained that the Plan of Union, had it been approved, might have postponed or eliminated the eventual need for a full-scale colonial revolution. His proposal, however, would become the model for the form of governance (Articles of Confederation) created by the new American nation in 1777.
War in north america With the failure of the Albany Plan, the British decided to force a showdown with the “presumptuous” French. In June 1755, a British fleet captured the French forts protecting Acadia, along the Atlantic coast of Canada. The British then expelled 11,500 Acadians, the Catholic French residents. Hundreds of them eventually found their way to French Louisiana, where they became known as Cajuns.
In 1755, the British government sent 1,000 soldiers to dislodge the French from the Ohio Country. The arrival of unprecedented numbers of “redcoat” soldiers on American soil would change the dynamics of British North America. Although the colonists endorsed the use of force against the French, they later would oppose the use of British soldiers to enforce colonial regulations.
Braddock’s defeat The British commander in chief in America, General Edward Braddock, was a stubborn, overconfident officer who refused to recruit large numbers of Indian allies. Braddock viewed Indians with contempt, telling those willing to fight with him that he would not reward them with land: “No savage should inherit the land.” His dismissal of the Indians and his ignorance of unconventional warfare would prove fatal.
With the addition of some American militiamen, including George Washington as a volunteer officer, Braddock’s force left northern Virginia to confront the French, hacking a 125-mile-long road west through the Allegheny Mountains toward Fort Duquesne.
On July 9, 1755, as the British neared the fort, they were ambushed by French soldiers, Canadian militiamen, and Indians; they suffered shocking losses. Braddock was shot; he died three days later. Washington, his coat riddled by four bullets, helped lead a hasty retreat.
What came to be called the Battle of Monongahela was one of the worst British defeats in history. The French and Indians captured the British cannons and supplies and killed 63 of 86 British officers and 914 of 1,373 soldiers. TheIndians burned alive twelve wounded British soldiers left behind on the battlefield. A devastated Washington wrote his brother that the vaunted British redcoats had “been scandalously beaten by a trifling body of men” and had “broke & run as sheep pursued by hounds.” The Virginians, he noted, “behaved like Men and died like Soldiers.”
A world war While Braddock’s defeat sent shock waves through the colonies, Indians allied with the French began attacking American farms throughout western Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia, killing, scalping, or capturing hundreds of men, women, and children. Desperate to respond, the Pennsylvania provincial government offered 130 Spanish dollars for each male Indian scalp and 50 dollars for female scalps.
Indians and colonists killed each other mercilessly throughout 1755 and 1756. It was not until May 1756, however, that Protestant Britain and Catholic France formally declared war in Europe. The first true “world war,” the Seven Years’ War in Europe (the French and Indian War in North America) would eventually be fought on four continents and three oceans. In the end, it would redraw the political map of North America.
France, governed by the inept Louis XV, entered the war without excitement, fought with little distinction, and emerged battered, humiliated, and bankrupt. When the war began, the British had the smaller army but three times as many warships. By the end, the French had lost nearly 100 ships, and the British had captured more than 64,000 French sailors.
The onset of war brought into office a new British government, with William Pitt as prime minister. Pitt determined that defeating the French required a different military policy. Realizing that the colonial legislatures had largely resisted British efforts to coerce American colonists into embracing the war as their own, he decided to treat the colonies as allies rather than inferiors. Instead of forcing them to help finance the war, he provided funds that convinced the legislatures to become full partners in the quest to oust the French from Canada.
Pitt’s shrewd approach enabled British commanders to assemble a force of 45,000 British troops and American militiamen, and in August 1759, they captured French forts near the Canadian border at Ticonderoga, Crown Point, and Niagara.
The battle of quebec In 1759, the French and Indian War reached its climax with a series of British triumphs. The most decisive victory was at Quebec, the hilltop fortress city and the capital of French Canada. During the dark of night, some 4,500 British troops scaled the cliffs above the St. Lawrence River and at dawn surprised the French defenders in a battle that lasted only ten minutes. The French surrendered four days later.
The Battle of Quebec marked the turning point in the war. Thereafter, the conflict in North America ebbed, although the fighting dragged on until 1763. In the South, fighting flared between the Carolina settlers and the Cherokee Nation. A force of British regulars and colonial militia broke Cherokee resistance in 1761.
A new british king On October 25, 1760, the ailing British King George II arose at 6 a.m., drank his chocolate milk, and adjourned to his toilet closet. A few minutes later, a servant heard a strange noise, opened the door, and found the king dead, the result of a ruptured artery. His death shocked the nation and brought an untested new king—George II’s twenty-two-year-old grandson—to the throne.
Although initially shy and insecure, King George III would surprise his family by becoming a strong-willed leader who oversaw the military defeat of France and Spain in the Seven Years’ War. the
Treaty of paris (1763) The Treaty of Paris, signed in February 1763, gave Britain control of important French colonies around the world, including many in India, several highly profitable “sugar island” colonies in the Caribbean, and all of France’s North American possessions east of the Mississippi River. This encompassed all of Canada and what was then called Spanish Florida, including much of present-day Alabama and Mississippi. As compensation, the treaty gave Spain control over the vast Louisiana Territory, including New Orleans and all French land west of the Mississippi. France was left with no territory on the North American continent.
British Americans were delighted with the outcome of the war. As a New England minister declared, Great Britain had reached the “summit of earthly grandeur and glory.” The French menace had been removed, and British Americans could now enjoy the highest quality of life of any people in the Western Hemisphere.
Yet Britain’s spectacular military success on land and sea created massive challenges. The national debt had doubled during the war, and the new cost of maintaining the sprawling North American empire, including the permanent stationing of thousands of British soldiers in the colonies, was staggering. Moreover, British leaders developed what one historian has called an “arrogant triumphalism,” which led them to tighten—and ultimately lose—their control over the Indians and colonists in North America. In managing a vastly larger empire, the British would soon find themselves at war with their own colonies.
managing a new empire No sooner was the Treaty of Paris signed than George III and his cabinet, working through Parliament, began regulating the colonies in new ways. With Britain no longer burdened by overpopulation, royal officials now rejected efforts by the colonies to encourage more immigrants, such as paying for their Atlantic crossing.
The king also encouraged his ministers to enforce economic regulations on the American colonies to help reduce the crushing national debt caused by the war. In 1763, the average British citizen paid twenty-six times as much in annual taxes as did the average American colonist. With that in mind, British leaders thought it only fair that the Americans should pay more of the expenses for administering and defending the colonies.
Many Americans disagreed, however, arguing that the various Navigation Acts restricting their economic activity were already a form of taxation. The resulting tension set in motion a chain of events that would lead to revolution and independence. “It is truly a miserable thing,” said a Connecticut minister in December 1763, “that we no sooner leave fighting our neighbors, the French, but we must fall to quarreling among ourselves.”
pontiac’s rebellion After the war, colonists began squabbling over Indian-owned land west of the Appalachian Mountains that had been ceded to the British in the Treaty of Paris. Native American leaders, none of whom attended the meetings leading to the treaty, were shocked to learn that the French had “given” their ancestral lands to the British, who were intent upon imposing a harsh settlement on those Indians who had been allies of the French. The new British commander, General Jeffrey Amherst, announced that the British would no longer provide “gifts” to the Indians, as the French had done. Ohio Indians complained to British army officers that “as soon as you conquered the French, you did not care how you treated us.”
The frustrated Indians fought back in the spring of 1763, capturing most of the British forts around the Great Lakes and in the Ohio Valley. “Never was panic more general,” reported the Pennsylvania Gazette, “than that of the Back[woods] Inhabitants, whose terrors at this time exceed that followed on the defeat of General Braddock.”
Native Americans also raided colonial settlements in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia, destroying farms and killing thousands. “Every day, for some time past,” reported a Marylander, “has offered the melancholy scene of poor distressed families… who have deserted their plantations, for fear of falling into the cruel hands of our savage enemies.”
The widespread Indian attacks came to be called Pontiac’s Rebellion because of the prominent role played by the Ottawa chieftain in trying to unify several tribes in the effort to stop British expansion. Pontiac told a British official that the “French never conquered us, neither did they purchase a foot of our Country, nor have they a right to give it to you.”
In December 1763, frontier ruffians in Pennsylvania took the law into their own hands. Outraged at the unwillingness of pacifist Quakers in the Pennsylvania assembly to protect white settlers on the frontier from marauding Indians, a group called the Paxton Boys, Scots-Irish farmers from Paxton, near Harrisburg, took revenge by massacring and scalping peaceful Conestogas— men, women, and children. Then they threatened to kill the so-called Moravian Indians, a group of Christian converts living near Bethlehem. When the Indians took refuge in Philadelphia, some 1,500 Paxton Boys marched on the capital, where Benjamin Franklin helped persuade them to return home.
The proclamation line To help keep peace with the Indians and to abide by the terms of an earlier agreement with the Delawares and Shawnees, King George III issued the Royal Proclamation of 1763, which drew an imaginary line along the crest of the Appalachian Mountains from Canada to Georgia. Americans (“our loving subjects”) were forbidden to go west of the line to ensure that the Indians would not be “molested or disturbed” on their ancestral lands.
For the first time, royal officials were curtailing territorial expansion, and Americans did not like it. Virginia planter George Washington was among those who objected. Like thousands of other British Americans, he wanted “to secure some of the most valuable lands in the King’s part” even if it meant defying “the Proclamation that restrains it at present.” He interpreted the Proclamation Line as a short-term way to appease Indian concerns about colonial expansion into their ancestral lands.
In practice, the Proclamation Line ended the activities of speculators buying huge tracts of Indian lands but did not keep land-hungry settlers from pushing across the Appalachian ridges into the Indian lands in the Ohio Valley. By 1767, an Indian chief was complaining that whites were “making more encroachments on their Country than ever they had before.”
Immigration soars One unexpected result of the war’s end was a surge in European immigration to the American colonies. With the French no longer a threat, colonists were more comfortable in testing the American wilderness. Between 1763 and 1775, more than 30,000 English, 55,000 Protestant Irish, and 40,000 Scots left the British Isles for the colonies. In addition, 12,000 German and Swiss settlers came in search of a better life. At the same time, some 85,000 enslaved Africans were brought to America’s southern colonies, especially the Carolinas and Virginia. It was the greatest mass migration in history to that point, and it provided the foundation for much of America’s development thereafter.
Most of the new arrivals were young males who had served as apprentices to learn a craft or trade. Many others were poor farm families who emigrated as a group. Half of them could not afford to pay the cost of crossing the Atlantic and therefore arrived as indentured servants.
The settlers were entering an exotic new civilization that had no rigid aristocracy. America was a fluid environment in which people could make their way on their abilities alone. A young English farmer wrote to say that he missed his friends but valued more his chance to become “independent” in ways unavailable at home.
Regulating the Colonies
As Britain tightened its hold over the colonies—and the Indians—after 1763, Americans reminded Parliament that their original charters guaranteed that they should be treated as if they were English citizens, with all the rights and liberties protected by the nation’s constitutional traditions. Why should they be governed by a distant legislature in which they had no elected representatives? Such arguments, however, fell on deaf ears in Parliament. As one member explained, the British were determined “to make North America pay [for] its own army.”
Grenville’s colonial policy Just as the Proclamation of 1763 was being drafted, a new British government, led by prime minister George Grenville, began to grapple with the huge debts the government had accumulated during the Seven Years’ War, along with the added expenses of maintaining troops in America. Grenville insisted that the Americans must pay for the soldiers defending them. He also resented the large number of American merchants who engaged in smuggling to avoid paying British taxes on imported goods. Grenville ordered colonial officials to tighten enforcement of the Navigation Acts and sent warships to capture smugglers.
The sugar act Grenville’s effort to enforce the Navigation Acts posed a serious threat to New England’s prosperity. Distilling rum out of molasses, a sweet syrup made from sugarcane, had become quite profitable, especially if the molasses could be smuggled in from Caribbean islands still controlled by the French.
To generate more money from the colonies, Grenville put through the American Revenue Act of 1764, commonly known as the Sugar Act, which cut the tax on molasses in half. Doing so, he believed, would reduce the temptation to smuggle French molasses or to bribe royal customs officers. The Sugar Act, however, also added new duties (taxes) on other goods (sugar, wines, coffee, spices) imported into America. The new revenues, Grenville believed, would help pay for “the necessary expenses of defending, protecting, and securing, the said colonies.”
With the Sugar Act, Parliament, for the first time, adopted a policy designed to raise revenues from the colonies and not merely to regulate trade with other nations. Colonists claimed that the Sugar Act taxed them without their consent, since they had no elected representatives in Parliament. British officials argued, however, that Parliament’s power over the colonies was absolute and indivisible. If the Americans accepted parliamentary authority in any area, they had to accept it in every area. In the end, however, the cost of enforcing the new sugar tax proved to be four times greater than the revenue it generated.
The currency act The colonies had long faced a chronic shortage of “hard” money (gold and silver coins, called specie), which kept flowing overseas to pay debts in England. To address the lack of specie, many colonies issued their own paper money, which could not be used in other colonies. British creditors feared payment in a currency of such fluctuating value, so Grenville implemented the Currency Act of 1764, a set of regulatory measures that prohibited the colonies from coining or printing money, while requiring that all payments for imported British goods be in gold or silver coins or in a commodity like tobacco. By banning paper money, the value of existing paper money plummeted. As a Philadelphia newspaper complained, “The Times are Dreadful, Dismal, Doleful, Dolorous, and dollar-less.”
The stamp act Grenville excelled at repeatedly doing the wrong thing. In 1765, for example, he persuaded Parliament to pass the Quartering Act, which required Americans to feed and house British troops. Most Americans saw no need for so many British soldiers. If the British were there to defend against Indians, why were they positioned in cities far from the frontier?
Some colonists decided that the Quartering Act was actually an effort to bully them. William Knox, a British colonial official, admitted as much in 1763 when he said that the “main purpose” of keeping an army in America was “to secure the dependence of the colonies on Great Britain.”
In February 1765, Grenville aggravated colonial concerns by pushing through an even more controversial measure. The Stamp Act required colonists to purchase paper with an official government stamp for virtually every possible use: newspapers, pamphlets, bonds, leases, deeds, licenses, insurance policies, college diplomas, even playing cards. The requirement was to go into effect November 1.
The Stamp Act was the first effort by Parliament to place a tax directly on American goods and services rather than levying an “external” tax on imports and exports, and it offended just about everyone. Benjamin Franklin’s daughter Sarah (“Sally”) wrote to her father in London, where he was representing the colonies. She reported that the only subject of conversation in America was the Stamp Act, “and nothing else is talked of…. everybody has something to say” about the hated tax, in part because, when combined with the Sugar and Currency Acts, it promised to bring economic activity to a halt.
The whig point of view Grenville’s colonial policies especially outraged Americans living in the large port cities: Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston. Unwittingly, the prime minister had stirred up protests and set in motion a violent debate about the proper relationship between Great Britain and her colonies. In the late eighteenth century, the Americans who opposed British policies began to call themselves Patriots, or Whigs, a name earlier applied to British critics of royal power. In turn, Whigs labeled the king and his “corrupt” government ministers and Parliamentary supporters as Tories, a term of abuse meaning friends of the king.
In 1764 and 1765, American Whigs felt that Grenville was violating their rights in several ways. A professional army was usually a weapon used by tyrants, and with the French defeated and Canada solidly under British control, thousands of British soldiers remained in America. Were the troops there to protect the colonists or scare them into obedience?
The Whigs also argued that although British citizens had the right to be taxed only by their elected representatives in Parliament, Americans had no such representatives. British leaders countered that the colonists enjoyed virtual representation, but William Pitt, a staunch supporter of American rights in Parliament, dismissed virtual representation as “the most contemptible idea that ever entered into the head of a man.” Many others, in both Britain and America, agreed. Sir Francis Bernard, the royal governor of Massachusetts, correctly predicted that the new stamp tax “would cause a great Alarm & meet much Opposition” in the colonies.
Protests in the colonies The Stamp Act did arouse fierce resentment and resistance. In a flood of pamphlets, speeches, resolutions, and street protests, critics repeated a slogan familiar to Americans: “No taxation without representation [in Parliament].”
Protesters, calling themselves Sons of Liberty, emerged in every colony, often meeting beneath “liberty trees”—in Boston a great elm, in Charleston a live oak. In Virginia, Patrick Henry convinced the assembly to pass the “Stamp Act Resolutions,” which asserted that the colonists could not be taxed without being first consulted by the British government or represented in Parliament by their own elected members.
The nonimportation movement Since the mid–seventeenth century, colonial consumers could not get enough imported British manufactured goods—textiles, ceramics, glassware, and printed products. Now, however, militants saw such consumerism as a bold new weapon of political protest. To put economic pressure on the British government and show that they had not become “dependent” on Britain’s “empire of goods,” patriots by the thousands signed nonimportation agreements pledging not to buy or consume British goods.
The nonimportation movement of the 1760s and 1770s united Whigs from different communities and different colonies. It also enabled women to play a role in the resistance. Calling themselves Daughters of Liberty, many colonial women stopped buying imported British clothes and quit drinking British tea to “save this abused Country from Ruin and Slavery.” Using herbs and flowers, they made “Liberty Tea” instead.
The Daughters of Liberty also participated in public “spinning bees,” whereby they would gather in the town square to spin yarn and wool into fabric, known as “homespun.” In 1769, the Boston Evening Post reported that the “industry and frugality of American ladies” were enabling “the political salvation of a whole continent.”
Colonial unity The boycotts worked; imports of British goods fell by 40 percent. At the same time, the Virginia House of Burgesses struck the first official blow against the Stamp Act with the Virginia Resolves, a series of resolutions inspired by the fiery Patrick Henry. Virginians, Henry declared, were entitled to all the rights of Englishmen, and Englishmen could be taxed only by their elected representatives. Because Virginians had no elected representatives in Parliament, they could only be taxed by the Virginia legislature, for example. Newspapers spread the Virginia Resolves throughout the colonies, and other assemblies hastened to follow Virginia’s example.
In 1765, the Massachusetts House of Representatives invited the other colonial assemblies to send delegates to New York City to discuss opposition to the Stamp Act. Nine responded, and from October 7 to October 25, the Stamp Act Congress formulated a Declaration of the Rights and Grievances of the Colonies. The delegates insisted that they would accept no taxes being “imposed on them” without “their own consent, given personally, or by their representatives.”
Repeal of the stamp act The storm over the Stamp Act had scarcely erupted before Grenville, having lost the confidence of King George III, was replaced by Lord Rockingham in July 1765. The growing violence in America and the success of the nonimportation movement convinced Rockingham that the Stamp Act was a mistake, and a humiliated Parliament repealed it in February 1766. To save face, Parliament passed the Declaratory Act, in which it asserted its power to govern the colonies “in all cases whatsoever.” The repeal of the Stamp Act set off excited demonstrations throughout the colonies.
A British newspaper reported that the debate over the Stamp Tax had led some Americans to express a desire for “independence.” The editor predicted that eventually the colonies would “shake off all subjection. If we yield to them… by repealing the Stamp Act, it is all over.”
The townshend acts In July 1766, George III replaced Lord Rockingham with William Pitt, the former prime minister who had exercised heroic leadership during the Seven Years’ War. For a time, the guiding force in the Pitt ministry was Charles Townshend, the treasury chief whose “abilities were superior to those of all men,” said a colleague, “and his judgment [common sense] below that of any man.”
In 1767, Townshend pushed through Parliament an ill-fated plan to generate more colonial revenue. A few months later, he died at age forty-two, leaving behind a bitter legacy: the Townshend Acts. The Revenue Act of 1767, which taxed colonial imports of glass, lead, paint, paper, and tea, was the most hated. It posed an even more severe threat than Grenville’s taxes had, for Townshend planned to use the new tax revenues to pay the salaries of the royal governors in the colonies. Until that point, the colonial assemblies paid the salaries, thus giving them leverage over the governors. John Adams observed that Townshend’s plan would make the royal governor “independent of the people” and disrupt “that balance of power which is essential to all free governments.” Writing in the Boston Gazette, Adams insisted that such “an independent ruler, [is] a monster in a free state.”
Discontent on the Frontier
While the disputes over British regulatory policy raged along the seaboard, parts of the backcountry stirred with quarrels that had nothing to do with the Stamp and Townshend Acts. Rival claims to lands east of Lake Champlain pitted New York against New Hampshire. Eventually, the residents of the disputed area would form their own state of Vermont, which would be recognized as a member of the Union in 1791.
In South Carolina, frontiersmen issued a chorus of complaints about the lack of military protection from horse thieves, cattle rustlers, and Indians. They organized societies, called Regulators, to administer vigilante justice in the region, and refused to pay taxes until they gained effective government. The assembly finally set up six circuit courts in the region but did not respond to demands for representation.
In North Carolina, the protests were less over the lack of government than over abuses and extortion by appointees from the eastern part of the colony. Western farmers felt especially oppressed by the government’s refusal to issue paper money or accept produce in payment of taxes, and in 1766 they organized to resist. The efforts of these Regulators to stop seizures of property and other court proceedings led to more disorders and the enactment of a bill that made the rioters guilty of treason. That the Regulators tended to be Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians who preached plain living, while the coastal elite tended to be wealthy Anglicans, injected a religious and social element into the squabbles.
In the spring of 1771, William Tryon, the royal governor of North Carolina, led 1,200 militiamen to victory over some 2,000 ill-organized Regulators in the Battle of Alamance. Tryon’s men then ranged through the backcountry, forcing some 6,500 Piedmont settlers to sign an oath of allegiance to the king.
These disputes and revolts illustrated the diversity of opinion and outlook among Americans on the eve of the Revolution. Colonists were of many minds about many things, including British rule, but they also differed with one another about how best to protest against their particular grievances.
The Crisis Grows The Townshend Acts surprised and angered many colonists. As American rage bubbled over, Samuel (“Sam”) Adams of Boston, a failed beer brewer who had become one of the most radical rebels, decided that a small group of determined Whigs could generate a mass movement. “It does not take a majority to prevail,” Adams insisted, “but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men.”
Early in 1768, Adams and Boston attorney James Otis Jr. convinced the Massachusetts Assembly to circulate a letter that restated the illegality of taxation without representation and invited the support of the other colonies. British officials ordered the Massachusetts Assembly to withdraw the letter. They refused, and the king ordered the assembly dissolved.
In October 1768, in response to an appeal by the royal governor concerned about keeping order, 4,000 British troops arrived in Boston, the hotbed of colonial resistance. Loyalists, as the Americans who supported the king and Parliament were often called, welcomed the soldiers; Patriots, those rebelling against British authority, viewed the troops as an occupation force. Meanwhile, in London, the king appointed still another new chief minister, Frederick, Lord North.
The first bloodshed In 1765, Benjamin Franklin had predicted that although British soldiers sent to America would “not find a rebellion; they may indeed make one.” The growing tensions triggered several violent incidents. The first, called the Battle at Golden Hill, occurred in New York City, where “Liberty Boys” kept erecting “liberty poles,” only to see British soldiers knock them down. The soldiers, cursed as “lobsterbacks” or “redcoats,” also began posting signs declaring that the Sons of Liberty were “the real enemies of society.”
On January, 18, 1770, a group of Patriots captured two British soldiers. Soon an angry crowd formed around the twenty British soldiers sent to rescue their comrades, and the outnumbered soldiers retreated. When they reached Golden Hill, more soldiers arrived. At that point, the redcoats turned on the crowd. They attacked, and in the confusion, several on both sides were seriously hurt. The first blood had been shed over American liberties, and it was soon followed by more violence.
The boston massacre (1770) In Boston, the presence of thousands of British soldiers had become a constant source of irritation. Crowds frequently heckled the soldiers, many of whom had earned the abuse by harassing Americans.
On the evening of March 5, 1770, two dozen “saucy” Boston rowdies— teens, Irishmen, blacks, and sailors—began throwing icicles and oyster shells at Hugh White, a British soldier guarding the Customs House. Someone rang the town fire bell, drawing a larger crowd to the scene, as the taunting continued: “Kill him, kill him, knock him down. Fire, damn you, fire, you dare not fire!”
A squad of soldiers arrived to help White, but the surly crowd surrounded them. When someone knocked a soldier down, he arose and fired his musket. Others joined in. After the smoke had cleared, five people lay dead or dying on the cobblestone street, and eight more were wounded. The first one killed, or so the story goes, was Crispus Attucks, a former slave who worked at the docks. The Boston Gazette called it a “horrid massacre.”
The next day, nine British soldiers were arrested and jailed. Never before in Massachusetts had a trial generated such passion and excitement. Samuel Adams and other firebrands demanded quick justice. Months passed, however, before the trial convened. Finally, in late October, two of the British soldiers, convicted of manslaughter, were branded on the thumb.
The so-called Boston Massacre sent shock waves throughout the colonies and all the way to London. Virtually the entire city of Boston attended the funerals for the deceased. Only the decision to postpone the trial for six months allowed tensions to subside. At the same time, the impact of the colonial boycott of British products persuaded prime minister Lord North to modify the Townshend Acts.
Late in April 1770, Parliament repealed all the Townshend duties except for the tea tax, which the king wanted to keep as a symbol of Parliament’s authority. Colonial discontent subsided for two years. The redcoats left Boston but remained in Canada, and the British navy still patrolled the New England coast looking for smugglers.
The gaspée incident In June 1772, a naval incident further eroded the colonies’ fragile relationship with the mother country. Near Warwick, Rhode Island, the HMS Gaspée, a British warship, ran aground while chasing smugglers. Its hungry crew seized local sheep, hogs, and chickens. An enraged crowd, some poorly disguised as Mohawk Indians, then boarded the Gaspée, shot the captain, removed the crew, and looted and burned the ship.
The Gaspée incident symbolized the intensity of growing anti-British feelings among Americans. When the British tried to take the suspects to London for trial, Patriots organized in protest. Thomas Jefferson said it was the threat of transporting Americans for trials in Britain that reignited anti-British activities in Virginia.
In response to the Gaspée incident, Samuel Adams organized the Committee of Correspondence, which issued a statement of American rights and grievances and invited other towns to do the same. Similar committees sprang up across the colonies, forming a unified network of resistance. “The flame is kindled and like lightning it catches from soul to soul,” reported Abigail Adams, the high-spirited wife of future president John Adams. By 1772, Thomas Hutchinson, the royal governor of Massachusetts, could tell the colonial assembly that the choice facing Americans was stark: They must choose between obeying “the supreme authority of Parliament” and “total independence.”
The boston tea party The British prime minister, Lord North, soon provided the spark to transform resentment into rebellion. In 1773, he tried to bail out the struggling East India Company, which had in its warehouses some 17 million pounds of tea that it desperately needed to sell before it rotted. Parliament passed the Tea Act of 1773 to allow the company to send its tea directly to America without paying any taxes. British tea merchants could thereby undercut the prices charged by their American competitors, most of whom were smugglers who bought tea from the Dutch. At the same time, King George III told Lord North to “compel obedience” in the colonies.
In Massachusetts, the Committees of Correspondence alerted colonists that the British government was trying to purchase colonial submission with cheap tea. (“Tea stands for Tyranny!”) The reduction in the price of tea was a clever trick to make colonists accept taxation without consent. In Boston, furious citizens decided that their passion for liberty outweighed their love for tea. On December 16, 1773, scores of Patriots dressed as Indians boarded three British ships in Boston Harbor and dumped overboard 342 chests filled with forty-six tons of East India Company tea.
The Boston Tea Party pushed British officials in London to the breaking point. The destruction of so much valuable tea convinced the king and his advisers that a forceful response was required. “The colonists must either submit or triumph,” George III wrote to Lord North, who decided to make Boston an example to the rest of the colonies.
The coercive acts In 1774, Lord North convinced Parliament to punish Boston and the province of Massachusetts by passing a cluster of harsh laws, called the Coercive Acts. (Americans renamed them the “Intolerable” Acts.) The Port Act closed Boston harbor until the city paid for the lost tea. (It never did.) Many people lost their jobs, and the cost of consumer goods skyrocketed as trade ceased. A new Quartering Act ordered colonists to provide lodging for British soldiers. The Impartial Administration of Justice Act said that any royal official accused of a major crime would be tried in London rather than in the colony.
Finally, the Massachusetts Government Act stripped Americans of their representative governments, effectively disenfranchising them. It gave the royal governor the authority to appoint the colony’s legislative council, which until then had been elected by the people, as well as local judges and sheriffs. It also banned town meetings. In May, Lieutenant General Thomas Gage, commander in chief of British forces in North America, became governor of Massachusetts and assumed command of the British soldiers who had returned to Boston.
The Intolerable Acts shocked colonists. No one had expected such a severe reaction to the Boston Tea Party. Many towns held meetings in violation of the new laws, and voters elected their own unauthorized provincial legislative assemblies—which ordered town governments to quit paying taxes to the royal governor. By August 1774, Patriots across Massachusetts had essentially taken control of local governments. They also began stockpiling weapons and gunpowder in anticipation of an eventual clash with British troops.
Elsewhere, colonists across America rallied to help Boston by raising money, sending supplies, and boycotting, burning, or dumping British tea. In Virginia, George Washington found himself in a debate with Bryan Fairfax, an old friend and self-described Royalist. Fairfax blamed the Boston rebels for the tensions with London. Washington disagreed, defending the “quiet and steady conduct of the people of the Massachusetts Bay.” It was time, he added, for Americans to stand up for their rights or “submit” to being treated like “abject slaves.”
In Williamsburg, when the Virginia assembly (House of Burgesses) met in May, a member of the Committee of Correspondence, Thomas Jefferson, suggested that June 1, the effective date of the Boston Port Act, become an official day of fasting and prayer.
The royal governor responded by dissolving the assembly, whose members then retired to the Raleigh Tavern and decided to form a Continental Congress to represent all the colonies. As Samuel Savage, a Connecticut colonist, wrote in May 1774, the conflict had come down to a single question: “Whether we shall or shall not be governed by a British Parliament.” Each step the colonists might take next was fraught with risk, but the opposition to “tyranny” was growing.
The first continental congress On September 5, 1774, the fifty-five delegates from twelve colonies (Georgia was absent) making up the First Continental Congress assembled in Philadelphia, the largest American city. Never before had representatives from all the colonies met to coordinate resistance to British policies. Now the Continental Congress was serving as a provisional national government. Over seven weeks, the Congress endorsed the Suffolk Resolves, which urged Massachusetts to resist British tyranny with force. The Congress then adopted a Declaration of American Rights, which proclaimed once again the rights of Americans as British citizens and denied Parliament’s authority to regulate internal colonial affairs. “We demand no new rights,” said the Congress. “We ask only for peace, liberty, and security.”
Finally, the Congress adopted the Continental Association of 1774, which recommended that every colony organize committees to enforce a complete boycott of all imported British goods, a dramatic step that would be followed by a refusal to export American goods to Britain. The Association was designed to show that Americans could deny themselves the “baubles of Britain” and demonstrate their commitment to colonial liberties and constitutional rights.
The county and city committees forming the Continental Association became the organizational network for the resistance movement. Seven thousand men across the colonies served on the local committees, and many more women helped put the boycotts into practice. The committees required colonists to sign an oath refusing to purchase British goods. In East Haddam, Connecticut, Patriots tarred, feathered, and rubbed pig dung on a Loyalist, who refused to join the boycott. Such violent incidents led Loyalists to claim that it was better to be a slave to the king than to be enslaved by a Patriot mob.
Thousands of men and women participated in the boycott of British goods, and their sacrifices provided the momentum leading to revolution. It was common people who enforced the boycott, volunteered in Patriot militia units, attended town meetings, and ousted royal officials. As Pittsfield, Massachusetts, affirmed in a petition, “We have always believed that the people are the fountain of power.”
Royal officials marveled at the colonists’ ability to thwart British authority. “The ingenuity of these people,” declared an army officer, “is singular in their modes of mischief.” Loyalist Thomas Hutchinson, however, assured the king that the Americans could not remain united. “A union of the Colonies was utterly impracticable,” he wrote, because “the people were greatly divided among themselves in every colony.”
Hutchinson had no doubt “that all America would submit, and that they must, and moreover would, soon.” Hutchinson could not have been more wrong. The rebellion now extended well beyond simple grievances over taxation. Patriots decided that there was a conspiracy against their liberties among Parliament, the king, and his ministers. By the end of 1774, more and more colonists came to reject the authority of Parliament. Across the colonies, Patriots ousted royal governors, forcing them to take refuge on British ships, and replaced them with provisional “committees of safety” committed to independence. Many committees began secretly purchasing weapons and gunpowder from European nations.
The colonies were mobilizing, and growing numbers of people came to expect an explosion. “Government has now devolved upon the people,” wrote an irritated Tory in 1774, “and they seem to be for using it.” In Boston, an increasingly nervous General Thomas Gage requested more British troops to suppress the growing “flames of sedition.” He reported that “civil government is near its end, the Courts of Justice expiring one after another.”
Last-minute compromise In London, King George fumed. He wrote Lord North that “blows must decide” whether the Americans “are to be subject to this country or independent.” In early 1775, Parliament declared that Massachusetts was officially “in rebellion” and prohibited the New England colonies from trading with any nation outside the British Empire. A few Whigs stood in Parliament to defend the Americans. Edmund Burke, a prominent Irish statesman, stressed that the “fierce spirit of liberty is stronger in the English Colonies probably than in any other people on earth.”
London officials hired Samuel Johnson, a distinguished poet, essayist, and ardent Tory, to write a pamphlet called Taxation No Tyranny (1775), expressing the government’s perspective on the colonists and their slogan, “No taxation without representation.” The people who settled America, Johnson wrote, had left Britain, where they had the vote but little property, for a colonial life where they had no vote but lots of property. However much Americans might complain about taxes, they remained British subjects who should obey government actions. If the Americans wanted to participate in Parliament, Johnson suggested, they could move to England and purchase an estate. Whatever the case, Johnson expressed confidence that the dispute between England and America would be resolved through “English superiority and American obedience.”
Bold talk of war While most Patriots believed that Britain would back down, Patrick Henry of Virginia dramatically declared that war was unavoidable. The twenty-nine-year-old Henry, a full-throated farmer and storekeeper turned lawyer, claimed that the colonies had “done everything that could be done to avert the storm which is now coming on,” but had been met only by “violence and insult.” Freedom, Henry shouted, could be bought only with blood: “We must fight!” If forced to choose, he supposedly shouted, “Give me liberty”—he then paused dramatically, clenched his fist as if it held a dagger, and plunged it into his chest—“Or give me death.”
As Henry predicted, events quickly moved toward armed conflict. By mid- 1775, the king and Parliament had effectively lost control; they could neither persuade nor force the Patriots to accept new regulations and revenue measures. In Boston, General Gage warned that armed conflict would unleash the “horrors of civil war.” But Lord Sandwich, head of the British navy, dismissed the rebels as “raw, undisciplined, cowardly men” without an army or navy. Major John Pitcairn, a British army officer, agreed, writing from Boston that “one active campaign, a smart action, and burning two or three of their towns, will set everything to rights.”
lexington and concord Major Pitcairn soon had his chance to quash the resistance. On April 14, 1775, the British army received secret orders to stop the “open rebellion” in Massachusetts. General Gage had decided to arrest rebel leaders such as Samuel Adams and seize the militia’s gunpowder stored at Concord, sixteen miles northwest of Boston.
After dark on April 18, some 800 British soldiers secretly boarded boats and crossed the Charles River to Cambridge, then set out on foot to Lexington, about eleven miles away. When Patriots got wind of the plan, Paul Revere and William Dawes mounted their horses for their famous “midnight ride” to warn rebel leaders that the British were coming.
In the gray dawn of April 19, an advance unit of 238 redcoats found American Captain John Parker and about 70 “Minutemen” (Patriot militia who could assemble at a “minute’s” notice) lined up on the Lexington town square, while dozens of villagers watched. “Stand your ground,” shouted Parker. “Don’t fire unless fired upon; but if they mean to have a war, let it begin here!”
Parker and his men intended only a silent protest, but Major Pitcairn rode onto the Lexington Green, swinging his sword and yelling, “Disperse, you damned rebels! You dogs, run!” The outnumbered militiamen were backing away when someone fired. (Both sides blamed the other for shooting first.) The British then shot at the Minutemen and charged them with bayonets amid a “continual roar of musketry,” leaving eight dead and ten wounded.
The British officers brought their men under control and led them west to Concord, where they destroyed hidden military supplies. While marching out of the town, they encountered American riflemen. Shots were fired, and a dozen or so British soldiers were killed or wounded. More important, the short skirmish and ringing church bells alerted nearby rebel farmers, ministers, craftsmen, and merchants to grab their muskets. They were, as one of them said, determined to “be free or die.”
By noon, the exhausted redcoats began a ragged retreat back to Lexington. It soon turned into a disaster. Less than a mile out of Concord, they suffered the first of many ambushes. The narrow road turned into a gauntlet of death as rebel marksmen fired from behind stone walls, trees, barns, and houses. “It was a day full of horror,” one of the soldiers recalled.
By nightfall, the redcoat survivors were safely back in Boston, having marched some forty miles and suffered three times as many dead and wounded as the Americans. A British general reported that the colonists had earned his respect: “Whoever looks upon them as an irregular mob will find himself much mistaken.” The Salem newspaper reported that now “we are involved in the horrors of a civil war.” Others found the news exhilarating. When Samuel Adams heard the firing at Lexington, he shouted: “O what a glorious morning is this!”
Warfare may be glorious when heard from long distance, but its deadly results bring home its tragic reality. Hannah Davis, a mother of four living in Acton, was awakened on April 19 by the alarm bells calling the militiamen to assemble. She dutifully helped her thirty-year-old husband Isaac get his musket and powder horn. “He said but little that morning. He seemed serious and thoughtful; but never seemed to hesitate.” His only words were: “Take care of the children.” That afternoon, she recalled, “he was brought home a corpse.”
Until the Battles of Lexington and Concord, both sides had mistakenly assumed that the other would back down. Instead, the clash turned a resistance movement into a war of rebellion. Masses of ordinary people were determined to fight for their freedoms against a British Parliament and king bent on denying them their civil and legal rights. In Virginia, Thomas Jefferson reported that the news from Concord and Lexington had unleashed “a frenzy of revenge” among “all ranks of people.” In Georgia, the royal governor noted that “a general rebellion throughout America is coming on suddenly and swiftly.”
Joseph Warren, a Bostonian, warned: “Our all is at stake. Death and devastation are the instant consequences of delay. Every moment is infinitely precious. An hour lost may deluge our country in blood, and entail perpetual slavery.”
The Spreading Conflict
On June 15, 1775, the Second Continental Congress unanimously selected forty-three-year-old George Washington to lead the new Continental Army. His service in the French and Indian War had made him one of the few experienced American officers. He was also admired for his success as a planter, surveyor, and land speculator, as well as for his service in the Virginia legislature and the Continental Congress. Perhaps more important, he looked like a leader. Standing more than six feet tall and weighing 200 pounds, Washington was a fearless fighter accustomed to command. His courage in battle, perseverance after defeat, and integrity in judgment would earn him the respect of his troops and the nation.
Washington humbly accepted the responsibility of leading the American war effort and refused to be paid. Poet Mercy Otis Warren wrote a friend in London that Washington was “a man whose military abilities & public & private virtue place him in the first class of the Good & the Brave.” Washington’s first act was to draft a will and write his wife, Martha, explaining that he had done his best to avoid being considered for the position, but that in the end it seemed his “destiny” to lead the revolution.
the battle of bunker hill On Saturday, June 17, the day that George Washington was named commander in chief, Patriot militiamen engaged British forces in their first major clash, the Battle of Bunker Hill (Breed’s Hill was the battle’s actual location).
In an effort to strengthen their control over the area around Boston, some 2,400 British troops based in the city boarded boats and crossed over the Charles River to the Charlestown Peninsula, where they formed lines and advanced up Breed’s Hill in tight formation through waist-high grass and across pasture fences, as the American defenders watched from behind their earthworks.
“Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes,” yelled Israel Putnam as he rode along the American lines. “Fire low because you are shooting downhill— and focus your fire on the officers.” The militiamen, mostly farmers, waited until the redcoats had come within thirty paces, then loosed a volley that sent the attackers retreating in disarray. An American said the British fell like “grass when mowed.”
The British re-formed their lines and attacked again, but the Patriot riflemen forced them back a second time. General William Howe could not believe his eyes. All his aides had been killed or wounded, and his professional soldiers were being stymied by a “rabble” of untrained farmers. It was, he said, “a moment that I never felt before.”
During the third British assault, the colonists ran out of gunpowder and retreated in panic and confusion, but the British were too tired to follow. They had suffered 1,054 casualties, more than twice the American losses. “A dearly bought victory,” said British general Henry Clinton. A British officer reported to London that “we have lost a thousand of our best men and officers” because of “an absurd and destructive confidence, carelessness, or ignorance.”
There followed a nine-month stalemate around Boston, with each side hoping for a negotiated settlement of the dispute. Abigail Adams wrote that the Patriots still living in Boston, where the British army governed by martial law, were being treated “like abject slaves under the most cruel and despotic of tyrants.”
Thirty-eight days later, word of the Battle of Bunker Hill reached London. The king and Lord North agreed that this meant all-out war. George III issued a Proclamation of Rebellion that said all his subjects (“unhappy people”) were “bound by law… to disclose all traitorous conspiracies… against us, our Crown and Dignity.” If the American colonies were lost, the king believed, Britain’s other colonies in the West Indies and around the world would fall like dominoes.
“open and avowed enemies” Three weeks after the Battle of Bunker Hill, in July 1775, the Continental Congress sent King George the Olive Branch Petition, urging him to negotiate. When the petition reached London, however, he arrogantly dismissed it and denounced the Americans as “open and avowed enemies.”
Outright rebellion Resistance had grown into outright rebellion, but few Patriots were ready to call for independence. They still considered themselves British subjects. When the Second Continental Congress convened at Philadelphia on May 10, 1775, most delegates still wanted Parliament to restore their rights so that they could resume being loyal British colonists.
Meanwhile, the British army in Boston was under siege by American militia units and small groups of musket-toting men who had arrived from across New England to surround the city. They were still farmers and shopkeepers, not trained soldiers, and the uprising still had no organized command structure or effective support system. The Patriots also lacked training, discipline, ammunition, and blankets. What they did have was a growing sense of confidence and resolve. As a Massachusetts Patriot said, “Our all is at stake. Death and devastation are the instant consequences of delay. Every moment is infinitely precious.”
With each passing day, war fever infected more and more colonists. “Oh that I were a soldier!” John Adams wrote home to his wife, Abigail, from Philadelphia. “I will be. I am reading military books. Everybody must, and will, and shall be a soldier.”
The fever of war excited men of faith as well as militiamen. In early 1776, the Reverend Peter Muhlenberg told his congregation in Woodstock, Virginia: “The Bible tells us ‘there is a time for all things.’ And there is a time to preach and a time to pray. But the time for me to preach has passed away; and there is a time to fight, and that time has now come.” He then stepped down from the pulpit and took off his robe to reveal a Continental army uniform. Drums then sounded outside the church as husbands kissed their wives goodbye and walked down the aisle to enlist. Within an hour, 162 men had followed their minister’s call to arms.
Independence
The Revolutionary War was well under way in January 1776 when Thomas Paine, a thirty-nine-year-old English immigrant who had found work as a radical journalist in Philadelphia, published a stirring pamphlet titled Common Sense. Until it appeared, most Patriots had directed their grievances at Parliament. Paine, however, directly attacked the king.
The “common sense” of the matter, Paine stressed, was that King George III, “the royal brute unfit to be the ruler of a free people,” had caused the rebellion and had ordered the denial of American rights. “Even brutes do not devour their young,” he wrote, “nor savages make war upon their families.” Paine urged Americans to abandon the monarchy: “The blood of the slain, the weeping voice of nature cries, ‘tis time to part.’” It was time for those who “oppose not only the tyranny but the tyrant [King George] to stand forth!… Time hath found us!” The “cause of America,” he proclaimed, “is the cause of all mankind.” It was America that had long “been the asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty from every part of Europe,” and Paine urged Revolutionaries to ensure that America would always be a haven for the oppressed peoples of the world.
Paine’s fiery pamphlet changed the course of history by convincing American rebels that independence was inevitable. Only by declaring independence, he predicted, could the colonists gain the crucial support of France and Spain:
“The cause of America is in great measure the cause of all mankind.” The rest of the world, he said, would welcome and embrace an independent America; it would be the “glory of the earth.” Paine concluded that the “sun had never shined on a cause of greater worth.”
Within three months, more than 150,000 copies of Common Sense were circulating throughout the colonies and around the world, an enormous number for the time. “Common Sense is working a powerful change in the minds of men,” George Washington reported.
Breaking the bonds of Empire Common Sense inspired the colonial population from Massachusetts to Georgia and helped convince British subjects still loyal to the king to embrace the radical notion of independence. “Without the pen of Paine,” remembered John Adams, “the sword of Washington would have been wielded in vain.” During the spring and summer of 1776, some ninety local governments, towns, and colonial legislatures issued declarations of independence.
Momentum for independence was building in the Continental Congress, too, but John Dickinson of Pennsylvania urged delay. On June 1, he warned that independence was a dangerous step since America had no national government or European allies. But his was a lone voice of caution.
In June 1776, one by one, the colonies authorized their delegates in the Continental Congress to take the final step. On June 7, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia moved “that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states.” At first, six colonies were not ready, but Lee’s resolution finally passed on July 2, a date that John Adams predicted would “be the most memorable” in the history of America.
The more memorable date, however, became July 4, 1776, when the Congress formally adopted the Declaration of Independence creating the “United States of America.” A few delegates refused to sign the document; others, said Adams, “signed with regret… and with many doubts.” Most, however, signed wholeheartedly, knowing full well that by doing so they were likely to be hanged if captured by British troops. Benjamin Franklin acknowledged how high the stakes were: “Well, Gentlemen,” he told the Congress, “we must now hang together, or we shall most assuredly hang separately.” Portly Benjamin Harrison injected needed wit at that point, noting that when it was his turn to try on a British noose, his plentiful weight would bring him a mercifully swift death.
jefferson’s declaration In Philadelphia, thirty-three-yearold Thomas Jefferson, a brilliant Virginia planter and attorney serving in the Continental Congress, had drafted a statement of independence that John Adams and Benjamin Franklin then edited.
The Declaration of Independence was crucially important not simply because it marked the creation of a new nation but because of the ideals it expressed and the grievances it listed. Over the previous ten years, colonists had deplored acts of Parliament that impinged on their freedoms. Now, Jefferson directed colonial resentment at King George III himself, arguing that the monarch should have reined in Parliament’s efforts to “tyrannize” the colonies.
In addition to highlighting the efforts to tax the colonists and restrict their liberties, Jefferson also noted the king’s 1773 decree that sought to restrict population growth in the colonies by “obstructing the laws for the naturalization of foreigners.” British authorities had grown worried that the mass migration to America threatened to “de-populate” the home country. So, beginning in 1767, the government began banning “bounties” offered to immigrants by many colonies and ended the practice of providing large land grants in America to encourage settlement.
After listing the objections to British actions, Jefferson asserted that certain truths were self-evident: that “all men are created equal and independent” and have the right to create governments of their own choosing. Governments, he explained, derive “their just powers from the consent of the people,” who are entitled to “alter or abolish” those governments when denied their “unalienable rights” to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Because King George III was trying to impose “an absolute tyranny over these states,” the “Representatives of the United States of America” declared the thirteen “United Colonies” of British America to be “Free and Independent States.”
the contradictions of freedom Once the Continental Congress chose independence, its members revised Jefferson’s draft declaration before sending it to London. Southern representatives insisted on deleting Jefferson’s section criticizing George III for perpetuating the African slave trade. In doing so, they revealed the major contradiction at work in the movement for independence. The rhetoric of freedom that animated the Revolution did not apply to the widespread system of slavery that fueled the southern economy. Slavery was the absence of liberty, yet few Americans confronted the inconsistency of their protests in defense of freedom—for whites.
In 1764, a group of slaves in Charleston watching a demonstration against British tyranny by white Sons of Liberty got caught up in the moment and began chanting, “Freedom, freedom, freedom.” But that was not what southern planters wanted for African Americans. In 1774, when a group of slaves killed four whites in a desperate attempt to gain their freedom, Georgia planters captured the rebels and burned them alive.
James Otis, a Harvard-educated lawyer, was one of the few Whigs who demanded freedom for blacks and women. In 1764, he had argued that “the colonists, black and white, born here, are free British subjects, and entitled to all the essential civil rights of such.” He went so far as to suggest that slavery itself should be ended, since “all men… white or black” were “by the law of nature freeborn.” Otis also asked, “Are not women born as free as men? Would it not be infamous to assert that the ladies are all slaves by nature?” His sister, Mercy Otis Warren, became a tireless advocate of American resistance to British “tyranny” through her poems, pamphlets, and plays. In a letter to a friend, she noted that British officials needed to realize that America’s “daughters are politicians and patriots and will aid the good work [of resistance] with their female efforts.”
Slaves insisted on independence too. In 1773, a group of enslaved African Americans in Boston appealed to the royal governor of Massachusetts to free them just as white Americans were defending their freedoms against British tyranny. In many respects, the slaves argued, they had a more compelling case for liberty: “We have no property, We have no wives! No children! No city! No country!”
A few months later, a group of four Boston slaves addressed a public letter to the town government in which they referred to the hypocrisy of slaveholders who protested against British regulations and taxes. “We expect great things from men who have made such a noble stand against the designs of their fellow-men to enslave them,” they noted. But freedom in 1776 was a celebration to which slaves were not invited.
George Washington himself acknowledged the contradictory aspects of the Revolutionary movement when he warned that the alternative to declaring independence was to become “tame and abject slaves, as the blacks we rule over with such arbitrary sway [absolute power].” Washington and other slaveholders at the head of the Revolutionary movement, such as Thomas Jefferson, were in part so resistant to “British tyranny” because they witnessed every day what actual slavery was like—for the blacks under their control.
Jefferson admitted the hypocrisy of slave-owning Revolutionaries. “Southerners,” he wrote to a French friend, are “jealous of their own liberties but trampling on those of others.” Phillis Wheatley, the first African American writer to publish her poetry in America, highlighted the “absurdity” of white colonists claiming their freedom while continuing to exercise “oppressive power” over enslaved Africans.
“We always had governed ourselves” Historians still debate the causes of the American Revolution. Americans in 1775–1776 were not desperately poor; overall, they probably enjoyed a higher standard of living than most other societies and lived under the freest institutions in the world. Their diet was better than that of Europeans, as was their average life span. In addition, the percentage of free property owners in the thirteen colonies was higher than in Britain or Europe. At the same time, the new taxes forced on Americans after 1763 were not as great as those imposed on the British people. And many American colonists, perhaps as many as half, were indifferent, hesitant, or actively opposed to rebellion.
So why did the Americans revolt? Historians have highlighted many factors: the clumsy British efforts to tighten their regulation of colonial trade, the restrictions on colonists eager to acquire western lands, the growing tax burden, the mounting debts to British merchants, the lack of American representation in Parliament, and the role of radicals such as Samuel Adams and Patrick Henry in stirring up anti-British feelings.
Yet other reasons were not so selfless or noble. Many wealthy New Englanders and New Yorkers most critical of tighter British regulations, such as Boston merchant John Hancock, were smugglers; paying more British taxes would have cost them a fortune. Likewise, South Carolina’s Henry Laurens and Virginia’s Landon Carter, both prosperous planters, worried that the British might abolish slavery.
Overall, however, what Americans most resented were the British efforts to constrict colonists’ civil liberties, thereby denying their rights as British citizens. As Hugh Williamson, a Pennsylvania physician, explained, the Revolution resulted not from “trifling or imaginary” injustices but from “gross and palpable” violations of American rights that had thrown “the miserable colonists” into the “pit of despotism.”
Yet how did the diverse colonies develop such a unified resistance? Although most Patriots were of English heritage, many other peoples were represented: Scots, Irish, Scots-Irish, Welsh, Germans, Dutch, Swedes, Finns, Swiss, French, and Jews, as well as growing numbers of Africans and diminishing numbers of Native Americans.
What most Americans—regardless of their backgrounds—had come to share by 1775 was a defiant attachment to the civil rights and legal processes guaranteed by the English constitutional tradition. This outlook, rooted in the defense of sacred constitutional principles, made the Revolution conceivable. Armed resistance made it possible, and independence, ultimately, made it achievable.
The Revolution reflected the shared political notion that all citizens were equal and independent, and that all governmental authority had to be based on longstanding constitutional principles and the consent of the governed. This “republican ideal” was the crucial force that transformed a prolonged effort to preserve rights and liberties enjoyed by British citizens into a movement to create an independent nation. With their declaration of independence, the Revolutionaries—men and women, farmers, artisans, mechanics, sailors, merchants, tavern owners, and shopkeepers—had become determined to develop their own society. Americans wanted to trade freely with the world and to expand what Jefferson called their “empire of liberty” westward, across the Appalachian Mountains.
The Revolutionaries knew the significance of what they were attempting. They were committing themselves, stressed John Adams, to “a Revolution, the most complete, unexpected, and remarkable of any in the history of nations.”
Perhaps the last word should belong to Levi Preston, a Minuteman from Danvers, Massachusetts. Asked late in life about the British efforts to impose new taxes and regulations on the colonists, Preston responded, “What were they? Oppressions? I didn’t feel them.” He was then asked, “What, were you not oppressed by the Stamp Act?” Preston replied that he “never saw one of those stamps… I am certain I never paid a penny for one of them.” What about the tax on tea? “Tea-tax! I never drank a drop of the stuff; the boys threw it all overboard.” His interviewer finally asked why he decided to fight for independence. “Young man,” Preston explained, “what we meant in going for those redcoats was this: we always had governed ourselves, and we always meant to. They didn’t mean we should.”
What Will You Get?
We provide professional writing services to help you score straight A’s by submitting custom written assignments that mirror your guidelines.
Premium Quality
Get result-oriented writing and never worry about grades anymore. We follow the highest quality standards to make sure that you get perfect assignments.
Experienced Writers
Our writers have experience in dealing with papers of every educational level. You can surely rely on the expertise of our qualified professionals.
On-Time Delivery
Your deadline is our threshold for success and we take it very seriously. We make sure you receive your papers before your predefined time.
24/7 Customer Support
Someone from our customer support team is always here to respond to your questions. So, hit us up if you have got any ambiguity or concern.
Complete Confidentiality
Sit back and relax while we help you out with writing your papers. We have an ultimate policy for keeping your personal and order-related details a secret.
Authentic Sources
We assure you that your document will be thoroughly checked for plagiarism and grammatical errors as we use highly authentic and licit sources.
Moneyback Guarantee
Still reluctant about placing an order? Our 100% Moneyback Guarantee backs you up on rare occasions where you aren’t satisfied with the writing.
Order Tracking
You don’t have to wait for an update for hours; you can track the progress of your order any time you want. We share the status after each step.
From brainstorming your paper's outline to perfecting its grammar, we perform every step carefully to make your paper worthy of A grade.
Preferred Writer
Hire your preferred writer anytime. Simply specify if you want your preferred expert to write your paper and we’ll make that happen.
Grammar Check Report
Get an elaborate and authentic grammar check report with your work to have the grammar goodness sealed in your document.
One Page Summary
You can purchase this feature if you want our writers to sum up your paper in the form of a concise and well-articulated summary.
Plagiarism Report
You don’t have to worry about plagiarism anymore. Get a plagiarism report to certify the uniqueness of your work.
Free Features $66FREE
Most Qualified Writer
$10FREE
Plagiarism Scan Report
$10FREE
Unlimited Revisions
$08FREE
Paper Formatting
$05FREE
Cover Page
$05FREE
Referencing & Bibliography
$10FREE
Dedicated User Area
$08FREE
24/7 Order Tracking
$05FREE
Periodic Email Alerts
$05FREE
Our Services
Join us for the best experience while seeking writing assistance in your college life. A good grade is all you need to boost up your academic excellence and we are all about it.
On-time Delivery
24/7 Order Tracking
Access to Authentic Sources
Academic Writing
We create perfect papers according to the guidelines.
Professional Editing
We seamlessly edit out errors from your papers.
Thorough Proofreading
We thoroughly read your final draft to identify errors.
Thorough Proofreading
We thoroughly read your final draft to identify errors.
Delegate Your Challenging Writing Tasks to Experienced Professionals
Work with ultimate peace of mind because we ensure that your academic work is our responsibility and your grades are a top concern for us!
We Analyze Your Problem and Offer Customized Writing
We understand your guidelines first before delivering any writing service. You can discuss your writing needs and we will have them evaluated by our dedicated team.
Clear elicitation of your requirements.
Customized writing as per your needs.
We Mirror Your Guidelines to Deliver Quality Services
We write your papers in a standardized way. We complete your work in such a way that it turns out to be a perfect description of your guidelines.
Proactive analysis of your writing.
Active communication to understand requirements.
We Handle Your Writing Tasks to Ensure Excellent Grades
We promise you excellent grades and academic excellence that you always longed for. Our writers stay in touch with you via email.
Thorough research and analysis for every order.
Deliverance of reliable writing service to improve your grades.
