APUSH chapter 5 

In the 1700’s, there were fewer than 300,000 people living in North America, and around 20,000 of them were black. By 1775, 2.5 million people inhabited the 13 colonies, and about half a million were black.

Colonists we’re doubling their numbers every 25 years, and Dr. Samuel Johnson stated that the Americans were “multiplying like rattlesnakes.”

In 1700 there were 20 English subjects for each American colonist. By 1775, the numbers became a ratio of 3:1, a giant shift in the balance of power.

Germans settled chiefly in Pennsylvania around 1775, fleeing religious persecution, economic oppression, and the ravages of war.

The Scots-Irish were an important non-English group, even thought they spoke English. They were Scots lowlanders that had had enough of Ireland, and came in masses to Pennsylvania.

They led the armed March of the Paxton Boys on Philadelphia in 1764, protesting Quaker leniency towards the Native Americans.

A few years later they spearheaded the Regulator movement in North Carolina, a small but mast insurrection against the eastern dominion of the colony’s affairs. Many of these people, including Andrew Jackson, eventually joined the embattled American Revolutionaries.

The population of the thirteen colonies was perhaps the most mixed to be found anywhere in the world at the time. The middle colonies boasted a great variety of people, more so than the mostly puritan colony of New England.

Slavery exploded in the colonies in the 18th century. The South Carolina rice and indigo plantations were hellscapes, where mostly male African-Americans toiled.

In the Tobacco growing Chesapeake region, work was somewhat easier, as tobacco was a less physically demanding crop.

By the eve of the revolutionary war, the not to even colonies contained about 48,000 slaves.

Slaves naturally lined for freedom, resulting in revolts. The New York Slave Revolt that took place in 1712 cost the lives of nine white people, and caused the execution of 21 black people.

The South Carolina Slave Revolt took place in 1739 when more than 50 black people along the Stono River tried to March to Spanish Florida, but were stopped by the local militia.

The Triangular Trade was incredibly profitable, though small in relation to colonial commerce.

The Molasses act was passed in order to try and eliminate North American trade with the French West Indies.

Taverns were places that housed gossip, political talk, and crystallized public opinion. They proved to be hotbeds of agitation as the revolutionary movement gathered momentum.

Most threatening to the Calvinist doctoring of predestination was Arminianism, named after the Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius, who preached that an individual’s free will, not divine decree, determined a person’s eternal fate and that all humans, not just the elect, could be saved.