The Colonial Population

• Not until long after the beginning of European colonization did Europeans and Africans in North America outnumber the native population.

• But after uncertain beginnings at Jamestown and Plymouth, the nonnative population grew rapidly and substantially

• A few of the early English settlers were members of the upper classes

Indentured Servitude

• The system of temporary servitude in the New World developed out of existing practices in England.

• Young men and women bound themselves to masters for a fixed term of servitude (usually four to five years). In return they received passage to America, food, and shelter

• Upon completion of their terms of service, male indentures were supposed to receive such benefits as clothing, tools, and occasionally land; in reality, however, many left service without anything, unprepared and unequipped to begin earning a living on their own

• Most indentured servants came to the colonies voluntarily, but not all

• The English government occasionally dumped shiploads of convicts in America to be sold into servitude, although some criminals

• It was not difficult to understand why the system of indentured servitude proved so appealing to colonial employers

• The indenture system provided a means of coping with the severe labor shortage in the New World

• The headright system offered another incentive

• Those who came voluntarily often did so to escape troubles in England;

• Others came in the hope of establishing themselves on land or in trades of their own when their terms of service expired

• Some former indentures managed to establish themselves successfully as farmers, tradespeople, or artisans.

• Others (mostly males) found themselves without land, without employment, without families, and without prospects.

• Indentured servitude remained an important source of population growth well into the eighteenth century

• A decrease in the English birth rate and an increase in English prosperity reduced the pressures on many men and women who might otherwise have considered emigrating

• Landowners themselves began to find the indenture system less attractive

Birth and Death

• After the 1650s, natural increase became the most important source of population.

• The New England population more than quadrupled through reproduction alone in the second half of the seventeenth century.

• This was less a result of unusual fertility

• The next generation’s life expectancy declined somewhat—to sixty-five

• Conditions improved much more slowly in the South

• The average life expectancy for white men in the region was just over forty years and, for white women, slightly less.

• One in four children died in infancy, and fully half died before the age of twenty.

• Widows, widowers, and orphans formed a substantial proportion of the white population of the Chesapeake.

• Natural increases in the population, wherever they occurred, were largely a result of a steady improvement in the sex ratio through the seventeenth century.

Medicine in the Colonies

• The very high death rates of women who bore children illustrate the primitive nature of medical knowledge and practice in the colonies

• One result of the limited extent of medical knowledge was that it was relatively easy for people to enter the medical field, even without professional training

• Midwives were popular because they were usually friends and neighbors of the people they treated, unlike physicians, who were few and therefore not often well known to their patients

• Male doctors felt threatened by the midwives and struggled continually to drive them from the field, although they did not make substantial progress in doing so until the nineteenth century.

• That seventeenth-century medicine rested so much on ideas produced 1,400 years before

Women and Families in the Chesapeake

• The importance of reproduction in the labor-scarce society of seventeenth-century America had particularly significant effects on women

• The high sex ratio meant that few women remained unmarried for long

• The average European woman in America married for the first time at twenty or twenty-one years of age, considerably earlier than in England; in some areas of the Chesapeake, the average bride was three to four years younger.

• Women in the Chesapeake could anticipate a life consumed with childbearing.

• The average wife becomes pregnant every two years.

• Those who lived long enough bore an average of eight children apiece

• men were plentiful and women scarce, females had considerable latitude in choosing husbands

• Because women generally married at a much younger age than men, they often outlived their husbands (even though female life expectancy was somewhat shorter than male).

• Widows were often left with several children and with responsibility for managing a farm or plantation, a circumstance of enormous hardship but one that also gave them significant economic power.

• Widows seldom remained unmarried for long, however.

• Since many widows married men who were themselves widowers, complex combinations of households were frequent

• By the early eighteenth century, the character of the Chesapeake population was beginning to change, and with it the nature of the typical family

• As families grew more stable, traditional patterns of male authority revived

Women and Families in New England

• Family structure was much more stable than it was in the Chesapeake and hence much more traditional.

• Because the sex ratio was reasonably balanced, most men could expect to marry.

• Women, however, remained in the minority; and as in the Chesapeake, they married young, began producing children early

• Northern children were more likely to survive

• Fewer New England women become widows, and those who did generally lost their husbands later in life.

• White parents in New England usually lived to see their children and even their grandchildren grow to maturity

• The lives of most New England women were near as consumed by childbearing and child-rearing as those of women in the Chesapeake

• Puritanism placed a high value on the family

• Women were expected to be modest and submissive

• Popular girls’ names as Prudence, Patience, Chastity, and Comfort suggest something about Puritan expectations of female behavior.

• A wife was expected to devote herself to serving the needs of her husband and household.

The Beginnings of Slavery in British America

• The demand grew rapidly once tobacco cultivation became a staple of the Chesapeake economy.

• But the supply of African laborers was limited during much of the seventeenth century, because the Atlantic slave trade did not at fi rst serve the English colonies in America.

• As the commerce in slaves grew more extensive and sophisticated, it also grew more horrible.

• Until the late eighteenth century, the number of African immigrants to the Americas was higher than that of Europeans.

• On such ships, the African prisoners were sometimes packed together in such close quarters that they were unable to stand, hardly able to breathe.

• Some ships supplied them with only minimal food and water.

• Women were often victims of rape and other sexual abuse.

• Those who died en route were simply thrown overboard.

• Upon arrival in the New World, slaves were auctioned off to white landowners and transported, frightened and bewildered, to their new homes.

• The first African laborers arrived in English North America before 1620

• As English seamen began to establish themselves in the slave trade, the flow of Africans to the colonies gradually increased.

• Less than 5 percent of the Africans imported to the Americas went directly to the English colonies on the mainland.

• Most blacks who ended up in what became the United States spent time first in the West Indies.

• Not until the 1670s did traders start importing blacks directly from Africa to North America

• Royal African Company of England, maintained a monopoly on trade in the mainland colonies and managed as a result to keep prices high and supplies low.

• A turning point in the history of the African population in North America came in the mid-1690s when the Royal African Company’s monopoly was finally broken

• Prices fell and the number of Africans arriving in North America rapidly increased

• By the end of the seventeenth century, only about one in ten of the residents of the colonies were Africans

• Between 1700 and 1760, the number of Africans in the colonies increased tenfold to about a quarter of a million

• It was not entirely clear at first that the status of African laborers in America would be fundamentally different from that of white indentured servants

• Some blacks were treated much like white hired servants, and some were freed after a fixed term of servitude.

• A few Africans themselves became landowners, and some apparently owned slaves of their own.

• In the early eighteenth century, colonial assemblies began to pass “slave codes,” limiting the rights of blacks in law and ensuring almost absolute authority to white masters

• Any African ancestry was enough to classify a person as black.

Changing Sources of European Immigration

• The flow of immigrants from England itself began to decline substantially—a result of better economic conditions there and of new government restrictions on emigration in the face of massive depopulation

• But as English immigration declined, French, German, Swiss, Irish, Welsh, Scottish, and Scandinavian immigration continued and increased.

Headright System: by which masters received additional land grants for every servant they imported

3.1: The Colonial Economies

• The English colonies often appeared so small and isolated as to seem virtually at the end of the world.

• American colonists engaged in a wide range of economic pursuits

The Southern Economy

• In the Chesapeake region, tobacco quickly became the basis of the economy.

• A strong European demand for the crop enabled some planters to grow enormously wealthy and at times allowed the region as a whole to prosper.

• But production frequently exceeded demand, and as a result the price of tobacco periodically suffered severe declines

• The first major bust in the tobacco economy occurred in 1640, and the boom-and-bust pattern continued throughout the colonial period and beyond.

• Growing more tobacco only made the problem of overproduction worse, but Chesapeake farmers never understood that

• The staple of the economies of South Carolina and Georgia was rice.

• By building dams and dikes along the many tidal rivers, farmers managed to create rice paddies that could be flooded and then drained.

• Rice cultivation was arduous work, performed standing knee-deep in the mud of malarial swamps under a blazing sun, surrounded by insects.

• It was a task so difficult and unhealthful that white laborers generally refused to perform it.

• As a result, planters in South Carolina and Georgia were even more dependent than those elsewhere on African slaves.

• It was not only because Africans could be compelled to perform difficult work that whites found them so valuable. It was also because they were much better at it.

• They showed from the beginning a greater resistance to malaria and other local diseases (although the impact of disease on African workers was by no means inconsiderable).

• And they proved more adept at the basic agricultural tasks required, in part because some of them had come from rice-producing regions of West Africa

• In the early 1740s, another staple crop contributed to the South Carolina economy: indigo.

• Because of the South’s early dependence on large-scale cash crops, the southern colonies developed less of a commercial or industrial economy than the colonies of the North

• The trading in tobacco and rice was handled largely by merchants based in London and, later, in the northern colonies

Northern Economic and Technological Life

• In the North, agriculture was the single most important part of the economy.

• But unlike in the South, the northern colonies were less dominated by farming.

• The northern economy was more diverse than the economy in the South in part because conditions for farming were less favorable there.

• In northern New England, in particular, colder weather and hard, rocky soil made it difficult for colonists to develop the kind of large-scale commercial farming system that southerners were creating.

• Conditions for agriculture were better in southern New England and the middle colonies, where the soil was fertile and the weather more temperate

• Occasionally these home industries provided families with surplus goods they could trade or sell.

• Beyond these domestic efforts, craftsmen and artisans established themselves in colonial towns as cobblers, blacksmiths, rifle makers, cabinetmakers, silversmiths, and printers.

• In some areas, entrepreneurs harnessed water power to run small mills for grinding grain, processing cloth, or milling lumber.

• And in several places, large-scale shipbuilding operations began to flourish.

The Extent and Limits of Technology

• Despite the technological progress that was occurring in some parts of America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, much of colonial society was conspicuously lacking in even very basic technologies.

• Up to half the farmers in the colonies were so primitively equipped that they did not even own a plow.

• Substantial numbers of households owned no pots or kettles for cooking.

• And only about half the households in the colonies owned guns or rifles—with rural people almost as unlikely to have firearms as urban people.

• The relatively low levels of ownership of these and other elementary tools was not because such things were difficult to make, but because most Americans remained too poor or too isolated to be able to afford them.

• Many households had few if any candles, because they were unable to afford candle molds or tallow (wax), or because they had no access to commercially produced candles.

• In the early eighteenth century, very few farmers owned wagons.

• The most commonly owned tool on American farms was the ax, which suggests how much time most farmers had to spend clearing land

• The popular image of early American households is of people who had little connection to the market, who grew their own food, made their own clothes, and bought little from anyone else

The Rise of Colonial Commerce

• Perhaps the most remarkable feature of colonial commerce in the seventeenth century was that it was able to survive.

• American merchants faced such bewildering and intimidating obstacles, and lacked so many basic institutions of trade, they managed to stay afloat only with great difficulty.

• Despite these and other problems, commerce in the colonies not only survived but grew.

• There was an elaborate coastal trade, through which the colonies did business with one another and sold goods to the West Indies

• The mainland colonies bought sugar, molasses, and slaves from the Caribbean markets in return.

• There was also an expanding transatlantic trade, which linked the North American colonies in an intricate network of commerce with England, continental Europe, and the west coast of Africa.

• This commerce has often been described, somewhat inaccurately, as the “triangular trade”

The Rise of Consumerism

• The growing prosperity and commercialism of British America created both new appetites and new opportunities

• The growth of eighteenth-century consumerism was partly a result of the increasing division of American societies by class.

• To facilitate the new consumer appetites, merchants and traders began advertising their goods in journals and newspapers.

• Another result of consumerism was the association of material goods

3.2: Patterns of Society

The Plantation

• The plantation defined a distinctive way of life for many white and black southerners that would survive, in varying forms, until the Civil War.

• The first plantations emerged in the early settlements of Virginia and Maryland, once tobacco became the economic basis of the Chesapeake.

• Some plantations were enormous—much like some of the great estates of England.

• The economy of the plantation, like all agricultural economies, was precarious.

• In good years, successful growers could earn great profits and expand their operations.

• But since they could not control their markets, even the largest planters were constantly at risk.

• When prices for their crops fell—as tobacco prices did, for example, in the 1660s—they faced ruin

• Because plantations were sometimes far from cities and towns—which were relatively few in the South—they tended to become self-contained communities.

• On the larger plantations, the presence of a substantial slave workforce altered not only the economy but also the family lives of the planter class.

• The wives of plantation owners, unlike the wives of small farmers, could rely on servants to perform ordinary household chores.

• They could thus devote more time to their husbands and children than people in poorer parts of colonial society.

• Wealthy planters also shaped the livelihoods of small farmers, who could not effectively compete with the wealthy planters and thus depended on them to market crops and receive credit.

• Small farmers, working modest plots of land with few or no slaves to help them, formed the majority of the southern agrarian population, but it was the planters who dominated the southern agrarian economy.

• Most landowners lived in rough cabins or houses, with their servants or slaves nearby.

• Few landowners lived in anything resembling aristocratic splendor.

Plantation Slavery

• African slaves, of course, lived very differently than white planters.

• On the smaller farms with only a handful of slaves, there was not always a rigid social separation between whites and blacks.

• But by the mid-eighteenth century, over three fourths of all blacks lived on plantations of at least ten slaves; nearly half lived in communities of fifty slaves or more.

• In these larger establishments, Africans developed a society and culture of their own—influenced by their white masters, to be sure, but also partly independent of them

• African workers also developed languages of their own.

• Nevertheless, slave society was heavily tied to white society.

• African house servants, for example, at times lived in what was, by the standards of slavery, great luxury; but they were also isolated from their own community and under constant surveillance from whites.

• Black women were often subjected to unwanted sexual advances from owners

The Puritan Community

• A very different form of community emerged in Puritan New England, but one that was also distinctively American.

• The structure of the towns reflected the spirit of the covenant

• A town was generally able to run its own affairs with little interference from the colonial government

• Residents held a yearly “town meeting” to decide important questions and to choose a group of “selectmen,” who governed until the next meeting

• The father divided his lands among all his sons.

• As the years passed and the communities grew, the tight-knit social structure of the Puritans experienced strains.

• This was partly because of the increasing commercialization of New England society.

• As towns grew larger, residents tended to cultivate lands farther and farther from the community center.

• Some farmers moved out of the town center to be nearer their lands and thus began to find themselves far away from the church.

• Outlying residents would often apply for permission to build a church of their own, which was usually the first step toward creation of a new town.

The Witchcraft Phenomenon

• By the late seventeenth century, growth and diversity had begun to undermine the cohesiveness of many New England communities

• The Salem experience was only one of many. Accusations of witchcraft spread through many New England towns in the early 1690s

• Witchcraft controversies were a reflection of the highly religious character of these societies.

• New Englanders believed in the power of Satan and his ability to assert his power in the world

Cities

• To call the commercial centers that emerged along the Atlantic coast in the eighteenth century “cities” would be to strain the modern definition of that word.

• Even the largest colonial community was scarcely bigger than a modern small town

• By the standards of the eighteenth century, cities did indeed exist in America.

• Colonial cities served as trading centers for the farmers of their regions and as marts for international trade.

• Their leaders were generally merchants who had acquired substantial estates

• Unlike smaller towns, cities were required to establish elaborate governments.

• They set up constables’ offices and fire departments.

• They developed systems for supporting the urban poor, whose numbers grew steadily and became especially large in times of economic crisis.

• Cities were also particularly vulnerable to fluctuations in trade. When a market for a particular product became glutted and prices fell, the effects on merchants and other residents could be severe.

• In the countryside, the impact of economic instability was generally more muted than in cities.

• Farmers were still somewhat independent from the larger world of the markets.

Inequality

• “Some must be rich and some poor,” John Winthrop

• Elites were called “ladies” and “gentleman,” while people in the lower levels of society were known as “goodman” or “goodwife.”

• Elites were given the best seats in their churches and had the most influence over the parish.

• Men had more power than women.

• Servants had few rights

• The church itself taught that inequality reflected God’s intention.

Primogeniture: the passing of all inherited property to the firstborn son

3.3: Awakenings and Enlightenments

The Pattern of Religions

• Religious toleration flourished in many parts of America to a degree unmatched in any European nation

• The Church of England was established as the official faith in Virginia, Maryland, New York, the Carolinas, and Georgia.

• All Baptists shared the belief that rebaptism, usually by total immersion, was necessary when believers reached maturity

• Jews in provincial America totaled no more than about 2,000 at any time

The Great Awakening

• First major American revival: the Great Awakening.

• The Great Awakening began in earnest in the 1730s, reached its climax in the 1740s, and brought a new spirit of religious fervor to the colonies

• Powerful evangelists from England helped spread the revival

• The Great Awakening led to the division of congregations between “New Light” revivalists and “Old Light” traditionalists.

The Enlightenment

• The Great Awakening caused one great upheaval in the culture of the colonies.

• The Enlightenment, a very different—and in many ways competing—phenomenon, caused another.

• The Enlightenment was largely the product of some of the great scientific and intellectual discoveries in seventeenth-century Europe.

• In the early seventeenth century, Enlightenment ideas in America were largely borrowed from abroad

• Americans as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and James Madison made their own contributions to the Enlightenment tradition.

Education

• Even before Enlightenment ideas became common in America, colonists had placed a high value on education, despite the difficulties they confronted in gaining access to it

• Some families tried to teach their children to read and write at home, although the heavy burden of work in most agricultural households limited the time available for schooling.

• The Quakers and other sects operated church schools.

• And in some communities, widows or unmarried women conducted “dame schools” by holding private classes in their homes.

• In cities, master craftsmen set up evening schools for their apprentices

• At least a hundred such schools appeared between 1723 and 1770.

• Only a relatively small number of children received education beyond the primary level

• White male Americans, at least, achieved a high degree of literacy.

• By the time of the Revolution, well over half of all white men could read and write, a rate substantially higher than in most European countries.

• African slaves had virtually no access to education.

• Occasionally a master or mistress would teach slave children to read and write, but they had few real incentives to do so

• Harvard, the first American college, was established in 1636 by the General Court (legislature) of Massachusetts

The Spread of Science

• The clearest indication of the spreading influence of the Enlightenment in America was an increasing interest in scientific knowledge

Concept of Law and Politics

• Americans of European descent believed that they were re-creating in the New World the practices and institutions of the Old.

• Changes in the law in America resulted in part from the scarcity of English-trained lawyers

• Americans created a group of institutions of their own that gave them a large measure of self-government

• Communities also expected to maintain strict control over their delegates to the colonial assemblies