Chapter 3
The process of establishing a new civilization in America often involved violent clashes between European, African, and Indian cultures, leading to warfare, deception, displacement, and enslavement. Beyond conflict, this period also saw blending and adaptation as diverse peoples built homes, cultivated crops, traded goods, raised families, established laws, and practiced their religions. The colonization of America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was part of a major social migration across Europe and Africa, with people continuously moving from rural areas to urban centers and from their native lands to the colonies.
People migrated for various reasons. Many English and European settlers were driven by rapid population growth and the rise of commercial agriculture, which forced poor farm workers off their land. These landless and jobless rural poor often moved to cities like London and Paris, where they struggled to survive in burgeoning urban ghettos. The widespread poverty in Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries explains why so many were willing to risk migration to the American colonies. Other motivations included a desire for political security or religious freedom. Africans, however, were a tragic exception, captured and forcibly transported to new lands against their will.
Early settlers in colonial America were predominantly young (over half were under twenty-five), male, and poor. Almost half arrived as servants or slaves. In the eighteenth century, England transported over 50,000 convicts to the North American colonies to relieve overcrowded jails and address labor shortages. Only about a third of the settlers came with their families. Many newcomers continued to move within and across colonies in search of better lands or new business ventures, such as the lucrative fur trade with Native peoples. This significant migration of adventurous individuals contributed to the development of many of America’s lasting institutions, values, and its unique spirit of restless energy.
The Shape of Early America
Population Growth
After a harsh initial period marked by disease, starvation, and conflict with Native Americans, England’s colonies in America grew rapidly. The American population doubled approximately every twenty-five years during the colonial period, reaching over 1 million by 1750 and nearly 2.5 million by 1775. In comparison, the combined population of England, Scotland, and Ireland in 1750 was about 6.5 million.
Benjamin Franklin attributed this extraordinary colonial population increase to two key factors: land in America was abundant and inexpensive, while labor was scarce and costly. The opposite conditions prevailed in Europe, where the “enclosure movement” led nobles to fence off traditional common lands for large-scale commercial farming, displacing many landless farmers and creating widespread unemployment and poverty. Consequently, America’s plentiful lands attracted migrants eager to own farms. Once in the colonies, settlers tended to have large families, partly because children could assist with farm labor and later find new land for themselves.
Birth and Death Rates
Colonists generally married and started families at an earlier age compared to Europe. The average marriage age for women in America dropped to twenty, compared to twenty-six in England, and men also married younger. This led to a higher birth rate, as women had time for about two additional pregnancies during their childbearing years.
Equally significant for the fast-growing colonial population was a much lower death rate than in Europe. By the mid-seventeenth century, infants in New England had a better chance of reaching maturity than in England, and adults lived longer in the colonies. Lower mortality rates resulted from several factors: fertile land minimized famine after the early colonization years, and firewood was abundant despite harsher winters. Americans, with an average age of sixteen in 1790, were generally less susceptible to disease than Europeans, and their more scattered settlements reduced exposure to infectious diseases. However, this began to change by the mid-eighteenth century as colonial cities grew larger and more densely populated, leading to disease levels similar to those in European cities.
“Women’s Work” in the Colonies
English America had a significantly higher number of women than the colonies of New Spain or New France, which helps explain the differing population growth rates among European empires in the Americas. However, a greater presence of women did not translate to greater equality. Most European colonists brought with them deeply entrenched beliefs about women's inferiority. As a New England minister emphasized, “the woman is a weak creature not endowed with [the] strength and constancy of mind [of men].” For centuries, women were expected to obey and serve their husbands, nurture children, and perform the rigorous daily work required to maintain their households, a role defined as “domestic” life. Women in most colonies could not vote, hold office, attend schools or colleges, initiate lawsuits, sign contracts, or become ministers.
In the eighteenth century, “women’s work” typically encompassed activities in the house, garden, and fields. Yet, the scarcity of workers in the colonies created new opportunities for women. In towns, women commonly worked as tavern hostesses and shopkeepers, and occasionally as doctors, printers, upholsterers, painters, and silversmiths. Often, these working women were widows who continued their deceased husbands’ trades, gaining some social authority in the male-dominated economic sphere of the eighteenth century. For example, South Carolinian Elizabeth Lucas Pinckney (1722-1793), at fifteen, managed three plantations worked by enslaved Africans and successfully cultivated indigo, a valuable blue dye, which brought significant wealth to her family and many other plantation owners on the Carolina coast.
The initial shortage of women in colonial settlements sometimes led to them being more highly valued than in Europe. Furthermore, the Puritan emphasis on a well-ordered family life resulted in laws protecting wives from physical abuse and allowing for divorce. Colonial laws also granted wives greater control over property they brought into a marriage or inherited after a husband's death. However, these exceptions did not fundamentally alter the basic status of women, as age-old notions of female subordination remained firmly rooted in colonial America. As a boy in Massachusetts stated in 1662, the superior aspect of life was “masculine and eternal; the feminine inferior and mortal.”
Society and Economy in the Colonies
In the early eighteenth century, following the Act of Union in 1707, England and Scotland merged to form Great Britain. Its colonies, now referred to as the British American colonies, were part of a complex North Atlantic commercial network. They traded commodities such as sugar, wheat, tobacco, rum, rice, and African and Indian slaves with Great Britain and its highly profitable island colonies in the West Indies, including Bermuda, Barbados, and Jamaica. American merchants also engaged in unofficial trade, often called smuggling, with Spain, France, Portugal, Holland, and their colonies, many of whom were frequently at war with Britain. Colonists were dependent on Britain and Europe for manufactured goods and luxury items like wine, glass, and jewelry.
The colonies, while rich in natural resources, struggled to find enough laborers for their rapidly expanding economy. The primary solution was indentured servitude, where individuals, mostly white settlers from England, Ireland, Scotland, or Germany, agreed to work for four to seven years in exchange for their passage to America. These unfree workers introduced their diverse cultures to the regions where they lived, particularly in the southern and middle colonies. However, during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the southern colonies increasingly shifted from using indentured servants to purchasing lifelong Indian or African slaves to satisfy the growing demand for agricultural workers on vast tobacco and rice plantations.
The Southern Colonies
As the southern colonies developed, wealth inequality became more pronounced, and social life grew increasingly divided by stark differences in status. The use of enslaved Indians and Africans to cultivate tobacco, sugar cane, rice, and indigo generated immense wealth for a small number of large landowners and their families. These planters and merchants formed a distinct class, dominating colonial legislatures, importing luxury goods from London and Paris, and constructing brick mansions with formal gardens, all while viewing their social “inferiors,” both white and black, with disdain.
The warm climate and abundant rainfall in the southern colonies were ideal for growing staple crops—the most profitable market crops—valued by Great Britain, such as tobacco, rice, sugar cane, and indigo. In the Chesapeake region of the Upper South, particularly Virginia, tobacco was paramount; a royal official in 1629 remarked that “tobacco… is our All, and indeed leaves no room for anything else.” Similarly, rice cultivation flourished along the South Carolina coast, making rice planters the wealthiest group in the British colonies. They compelled their slaves to endure long hours of strenuous labor in mud and water, using hand tools to transform swamps into productive rice fields with complex floodgate systems.
As plantations expanded, the demand for enslaved laborers, initially male Indians and later Africans, rose dramatically. Almost 90 percent of Africans transported to the American mainland were sent to the southern colonies. South Carolina, for example, had a black majority throughout the eighteenth century, leading one visitor to observe, “Carolina looks more like a negro country than like a country settled by white people.”
New England
Colonial America exhibited remarkable diversity. In New England, for instance, few colonists owned vast tracts of land, unlike in Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, and Dutch New Netherland. Instead, settlers, often organized into church congregations, would petition the general court for a township and then divide its acreage into roughly equal parcels, with larger allocations for those who invested more, had larger families, or held higher social status. Over time, as the population grew, land was further divided into separate farms located further from the original village.
Religion in New England
Whenever New England towns were founded, the first public structure typically built was a church. New England Puritans believed that God had established a covenant, or contract, in which people formed a congregation for common worship. This concept extended to the idea of people joining to form governing bodies, although “democracy” as we know it was not part of Puritan political thought. Puritan leaders aimed to enact God’s will, not the will of the people, with the Bible, as interpreted by ministers and magistrates, serving as the ultimate source of authority. By law, every town collected taxes to support a church, and every resident, regardless of church membership, was required to attend midweek and Sunday religious services. The average New Englander heard an estimated 7,000 sermons in a lifetime.
Over time, Puritan New England experienced a gradual erosion of religious commitment. More descendants of the original “visible saints” were unable to provide the required testimony of spiritual conversion. In 1662, Boston ministers created the “Half-Way Covenant,” which allowed baptized children of church members to achieve a “halfway” membership, though they could neither vote in church matters nor take communion. A further challenge to Puritan ideals came with the Massachusetts royal charter of 1691, which mandated toleration for religious dissenters (such as Quakers) and based the right to vote in public elections on property ownership rather than church membership.
The Salem Witch Trials
The tensions accompanying Massachusetts's transition from a Puritan utopia to a royal colony culminated tragically in the witchcraft hysteria at Salem Village (now Danvers) in 1692. Belief in witchcraft was widespread across Europe and the colonies in the seventeenth century. Before the dramatic events in Salem, nearly 300 New Englanders, mostly middle-aged women, had been accused of practicing witchcraft, and over 30 had been hanged.
The Salem episode, however, was unique in its scope and intensity. During the winter of 1691-1692, several adolescent girls became engrossed with fortune telling and voodoo practiced by Tituba, a West Indian slave. The girls began to exhibit strange behavior, including shouting, barking, crawling, and twitching without apparent cause. When questioned about their tormentors, the girls accused three women—Tituba, Sarah Good, and Sarah Osborne—of being Satan’s servants. Authorities arrested the accused women, two of whom were subsequently hanged after trial. Within months, the village jail was filled with townspeople, including men, women, and children, all accused of practicing witchcraft.
As accusations escalated, leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony became concerned that the witch hunts were spiraling out of control. The governor intervened only when his own wife was accused of serving the devil, after which he disbanded the special court in Salem and ordered the remaining suspects released. Nineteen people had been hanged, justified by the biblical verse, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” and more than 100 others had been jailed. The witchcraft frenzy concluded a year after it began.
Several theories attempt to explain Salem’s hysteria. Some suggest it was nothing more than theatrical adolescents seeking to enliven their dull daily routines. Other historians emphasize that most accused witches were women who had, in some way, defied traditional female roles. Another interpretation posits that the accusations reflected the anxiety caused by frequent Indian attacks occurring north of Salem along New England’s frontier. Whatever its precise causes, the witchcraft controversy illuminated the distinctive social tensions of Salem Village, an event largely unparalleled elsewhere in the colonies.
Economy in New England
Early New England farmers and their families faced arduous lives. Clearing the rocky, glacier-scoured soil could require 60 days of hard work per acre. The growing season was short, and unlike the southern colonies, the colder climate did not support staple crops like tobacco or rice. Farmers primarily cultivated crops and raised livestock familiar to rural England, such as wheat, barley, and oats, and cattle, pigs, and sheep.
Not all New England towns were founded solely as religious communities. In coastal towns, residents were often more focused on fishing, trade, or operating taverns than on worship. A Puritan minister discovered this when a fisherman in Marblehead scolded him for being overly spiritual, stating, “You think you are preaching to the people of the Bay. Our main end is to catch fish.” Cod, a staple of the European diet for centuries, was abundant in New England's waters, as were whales, which provided oil for lighting and lubrication.
The waters off New England, unlike its farms, provided a surplus of cod for export to Europe, with lower-grade fish sent to the West Indies as food for slaves. These fishing and whaling activities stimulated shipbuilding, which in turn facilitated lucrative trade with Europe and other colonies. The trade system in New England and the middle colonies differed from the South due to the lack of staple crops like tobacco, rice, and indigo for exchange with English goods. However, New England’s shipbuilding, fishing, and maritime trade proved to be highly profitable enterprises. After 1660, to protect England’s own agricultural and fishing economies, the London government imposed high duties (taxes) on certain colonial exports, including fish, flour, wheat, and meat, while favoring timber, furs, whale oil, tobacco, and indigo, which were in high demand in Britain.
New England colonies eventually specialized in shipping goods to foreign markets through what became known as the “triangular trade.” In one version, New Englanders shipped rum to West Africa, where it was exchanged for slaves. These enslaved Africans were then transported for sale in the West Indies, and ships returned home with Caribbean commodities such as molasses, which was then used to manufacture more rum. Another version of this trading triangle involved shipping products like meat and fish to the West Indies to acquire sugar and molasses, which were then transported to England, with ships returning to America with manufactured goods and luxury items from Britain and Europe.
The Middle Colonies
Geographically and culturally, the middle colonies (New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland) served as a bridge between New England and the South, incorporating aspects of both regions. Consequently, they more fully reflected the diversity of colonial life and foreshadowed America’s pluralism.
The primary crops in the middle colonies were similar to those in New England but were more plentiful due to more fertile soil and longer growing seasons. These colonies produced crop surpluses, including wheat, barley, oats, and livestock, for export to the slave-based plantations of the South and the West Indies. Three major rivers—the Hudson, the Delaware, and the Susquehanna—and their tributaries provided the middle colonies with access to the backcountry of Pennsylvania and New York, opening up a rich fur trade with Native Americans. As a result, the region’s bustling trade, centered in New York City, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, rivaled that of New England.
Land policies in the middle colonies often followed the headright system, distributing fifty acres to any settler who paid for their own passage and an additional fifty acres for each servant brought along. In New York, early royal governors continued the Dutch patroonship practice, granting vast estates on Long Island and throughout the Hudson and Mohawk River valleys to influential men called patroons. These patroons controlled self-contained estates farmed by tenants (renters) who paid fees for using the landlord’s mills, warehouses, and docks.
In terms of population, the middle colonies differed from both New England’s Puritan settlements and the biracial plantation colonies to the south. Dutch culture and language persisted in New York and New Jersey. Along the Delaware River near Philadelphia, early Swedish and Finnish settlers were soon outnumbered by an influx of English and Welsh Quakers, followed by other European ethnic groups such as Germans, Irish, and Scots-Irish. By the mid-eighteenth century, the middle colonies were the fastest-growing region in North America.
The Germans, primarily from the Rhineland region of Europe, migrated to America (mainly Pennsylvania) to escape brutal religious wars between Protestants and Catholics. William Penn’s German-translated recruiting brochures, promising religious freedom in Pennsylvania, appealed to many persecuted sects, especially the Mennonites, German Baptists whose beliefs resembled those of the Quakers. In 1683, Mennonites founded Germantown near Philadelphia, initiating a surge of German migration in the eighteenth century. A large proportion of these immigrants paid their way to America as indentured servants, or “redemptioners.” The significant waves of German immigrants during the eighteenth century concerned many British colonists, with Benjamin Franklin expressing worry that the Germans “will soon . . . outnumber us.”
Throughout the eighteenth century, the Scots-Irish moved further into the Pennsylvania backcountry. The term “Scotch-Irish” is a common but less accurate name for this group, who were primarily Presbyterian Scots transplanted to northern Ireland by the English government a century earlier to promote a Protestant presence in Catholic Ireland. So many Scots-Irish streamed into Pennsylvania that many continued southwest into the fertile valleys of central Virginia and western Carolina.
Land was the primary attraction for the Scots-Irish, who, as one recruiting agent noted, were “full of expectation to have land for nothing” and “unwilling to be disappointed.” In many cases, the lands they “squatted on” were claimed by Native Americans. In 1741, a group of Delaware Indians protested to Pennsylvania authorities that Scots-Irish intruders were taking “our land” without compensation, threatening to “drive them off” if colonial government failed to intervene.
The Scots-Irish and Germans became the largest non-English ethnic groups in the colonies. Other minorities enriched the middle colonies’ population: Huguenots (French Protestants whose religious freedom was revoked in 1685), Irish, Welsh, Swiss, and Jews. New York, inherited from the Dutch, had a tradition of ethnic and religious tolerance, fostering a diverse population even before English conquest, including French-speaking Walloons, French, Germans, Danes, Portuguese, Spaniards, Italians, Bohemians, Poles, and New England Puritans. Sephardic Jews who arrived in New Amsterdam in 1654 quickly established a synagogue there.
The eighteenth century saw a soaring population increase in British North America, leading to greater colonial diversity. 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” (including people of mixed origins and free blacks). When adding the 756,770 non-whites to the 3,172,444 whites in the 1790 census, and without counting the almost 100,000 Native Americans, only about half, or fewer, of the nation’s inhabitants could trace their origins to England.
Race-Based Slavery in the Colonies
By the eighteenth century, the economy of the southern colonies became entirely dependent on enslaved workers, either Indians or Africans. The profound economic, political, and cultural impacts of African slavery in the Americas would resonate far into the future. Most Europeans during the colonial period viewed race-based slavery as a normal part of life in an imperfect world and rarely considered it a moral issue. Instead, they believed God determined one’s “station in life.” Slavery was thus considered a “personal misfortune” dictated by God rather than a social evil. It was not until the late eighteenth century that large numbers of white Europeans and Americans began to raise ethical questions about slavery.
Initially, during the early seventeenth century, many of the first Africans in America were treated like indentured servants, with a limited term of service. Those who finished their term of indenture gained their freedom, and some of them, as “free blacks,” themselves acquired black slaves and white servants. Gradually, however, life-long slavery for African Americans became the custom—and the law—of the land. Slaves cost more than indentured servants, but they served for life, making them an increasingly shrewd investment. By the 1660s, colonial legislatures had begun to legalize the institution of race-based slavery, with strict slave codes regulating their lives. During the colonial era, slavery was legal in all the colonies but was most prevalent in the South.
Racial Prejudice
As slavery in the American colonies grew more widespread, the role of race became more prominent. A key question is whether deep-rooted color prejudice led to race-based slavery, or if the practice of slavery over time produced racial prejudice. More than a century before the English arrived in America, the Portuguese and Spanish had established a global trade in enslaved Africans—the word “negro” is Spanish for “black.” English settlers often enslaved Indian captives, as had the Spanish and Portuguese before them. However, Europeans did not enslave other Europeans captured in warfare. Color was the crucial difference, or at least the critical rationalization used to justify the institution of slavery and its brutalities.
In the seventeenth century, the English associated the color black with darkness and evil. They considered the different appearance, behavior, and customs of Africans, as well as indigenous peoples of America, to represent “savagery” and “heathenism.” Colonial Virginians justified slavery by convincing themselves that blacks (and Indians) were naturally lazy, treacherous, and stupid, among other perceived shortcomings. Throughout history, dominant peoples have repeatedly assigned negative traits to those they enslaved. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, American colonists readily justified enslaving Africans because they were deemed both “heathens” and “aliens.”
African Slavery in North America
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the continent of Africa experienced almost constant civil wars among competing groups and kingdoms. Africans kidnapped and sold each other into slavery in large numbers, with slave-trading networks crisscrossing the continent. Eventually, over 10 million Africans made the forced journey into slavery across the Atlantic, most destined for Spanish and Portuguese colonies. Their great ethnic diversity is often overlooked; some came from lands as remote from each other as Angola and Senegal, thousands of miles distant, speaking many different languages. Many of the Africans taken to North America came in ships built in New England and owned by merchants in Boston and Newport. Most enslaved individuals were young, with twice as many men as women, typically between the ages of fifteen and thirty.
Virginia and Maryland plantation owners favored slaves from West Africa, where yam (sweet potato) cultivation was similar to tobacco cultivation. Fulani from West and Central Africa were highly valued as cattle herdsmen. South Carolina rice planters preferred slaves from Africa’s “Rice Coast,” especially Gambia, where rice cultivation was commonplace. Owners of slaves from the lowlands of Africa utilized their skills as boatmen in coastal waterways. Within the new colonial society, many slaves became skilled workers: blacksmiths, carpenters, coopers (barrel makers), bricklayers, and the like. Many enslaved women worked as household servants and midwives, assisting with deliveries.
Colonial Race Relations
Enslaved workers were eventually utilized in virtually every activity within the expanding colonial economy. The vast majority were agricultural workers, often performing strenuous labor from dawn to dusk in oppressive heat and humidity. Jedidiah Morse, a prominent minister in Charleston, South Carolina, admitted in the late eighteenth century that “no white man, to speak generally, ever thinks of settling a farm, and improving it for himself, without negroes.”
In 1750, the vast majority of slaves in the American colonies were in Virginia and Maryland, numbering about 150,000, compared with 60,000 in South Carolina and Georgia, and only 33,000 in all the northern colonies. Most slaves in the northern colonies lived in towns or cities, affording them more opportunities to interact within the larger society than their southern counterparts living on large, isolated plantations. By 1740, New York City was second only to Charleston in its percentage of slaves among colonial cities. Most enslaved blacks in New York City came from the Caribbean sugar islands rather than directly from Africa. As the number of slaves increased in the congested city, racial tensions mounted and occasionally erupted.
In 1712, several dozen slaves in New York City revolted. They started fires and then used swords, axes, and guns to kill whites who rushed to fight the fires. Called out to restore order, the militia captured twenty-seven slaves. Six committed suicide, and the rest were executed; some were burned alive. New York officials subsequently passed a series of ordinances—a “black code”—strictly regulating slaves. For instance, any slave caught with a weapon would be whipped, and owners could punish their slaves as they saw fit, provided they did not kill them. New York and other states modeled their slave codes after South Carolina’s, written in 1691, which allowed whites to verbally and physically abuse blacks. In 1680, the Virginia legislature ordered thirty lashes with a whip “if any negro or other slave shall presume to lift up a hand in opposition against any Christian.” Even the enlightened Thomas Jefferson, who owned almost three hundred slaves, ordered that runaways be “severely flogged.”
At its most basic level, slavery is a system where the powerless are brutalized by the powerful. Slaves who ran away in colonial America faced ghastly punishments when caught; many were hanged or burned at the stake. Antonio, a West African man shipped as a slave to New Amsterdam and then to Maryland during the first half of the seventeenth century, worked in tobacco fields alongside indentured servants and enslaved Native Americans. Antonio attempted to escape several times. After his last attempt in 1656, his owner, a young Dutch planter named Syman Overzee, recaptured Antonio (a “dangerous Rogue”), whipped his “bare back” with pear tree branches, poured hot grease into his wounds, and then tied him to a ladder where he slowly died. Overzee was charged with murder—and acquitted.
In a few cases, as in New York City, slaves organized armed rebellions, stealing weapons, burning and looting plantations, and occasionally killing their masters. In 1739, some twenty slaves attacked a store in Stono, South Carolina, south of Charleston. They killed the owner, seized weapons, and headed toward freedom in Spanish-controlled Florida, gathering more recruits along the way. Within a few days, the slaves participating in the Stono Rebellion had killed twenty-five whites, whereupon the militia caught up with them. Most rebels were killed, and in the weeks that followed, some sixty more were captured by enraged planters who “cut off their heads and set them up at every Mile Post.”
Slavery in the Western Hemisphere was a rapidly growing phenomenon by the time of the American Revolution, driven by high profits and justified by pervasive racism. Although race-based slavery entailed the dehumanization of an entire class of human beings, white Europeans believed they were justified due to 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 rapidly growing and maturing. Schools and colleges were emerging, and the standard of living was rising. More colonists were able to read about the latest ideas circulating in London and Paris while purchasing the newest consumer goods from Europe.
During the eighteenth century, prosperous Americans became eager consumers of the latest “baubles” from Britain. The demand for British luxury goods, particularly fine clothing and beaver hats, intensified social inequality, especially in cities. Many ministers and laymen complained that wealthy Americans were so preoccupied with buying luxury goods from London that they were neglecting their religious commitment to Christian ideals. In 1714, a Bostonian expressed regret over 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 purchase their goods only with specie (gold or silver coins). This left little “hard money” in the colonies themselves. American merchants attempted various methods to address 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 from England. The issue of money—its type and quantity—would become one of the major subjects of dispute between the colonies and Britain leading to the Revolution.
Colonial Cities
The American colonies were primarily populated by farmers or farm workers. Colonial cities were located along the coastline or, like Philadelphia, emerged on rivers large enough to accommodate oceangoing vessels. While never comprising more than 10 percent of the colonial population, these large coastal cities wielded 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. New York City, with about 25,000, ranked second; Boston numbered 16,000; Charleston, 12,000; and Newport, Rhode Island, 11,000.
The urban social elite was dominated by wealthy merchants and property owners, served by a middle class of shop owners, innkeepers, and skilled craftsmen. Nearly two-thirds of the urban male workers were artisans—people who earned their living through handicrafts. This group included 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. The use of open fireplaces for heating frequently led to fires, which in turn spurred the development of fire companies. Rising crime and violence necessitated increased policing of neighborhoods by sheriffs and local militias. Colonists were also concerned about the poor and homeless. The number of Boston’s poor receiving assistance from colonial authorities rose from 500 in 1700 to 4,000 in 1736; in New York City, the number increased from 250 in 1698 to 5,000 in the 1770s. In colonial America, those deemed “helpless” among the destitute poor—especially the disabled, elderly, widows, and orphans—were often provided money, food, clothing, and firewood by the county, town, or city. In some towns, “poorhouses” were built to shelter the homeless poor and provide them with jobs.
Urban Web and Travel
The first American roads were widened Indian trails. Overland travel initially relied on horses or walking. The first public stagecoach line opened in 1732. Taverns and inns were crucial in the colonial era, as night travel was perilous. By the end of the seventeenth century, there were more taverns in America than any other business. Colonial taverns and inns served as places to eat, drink, relax, read a newspaper, play cards, gossip, learn news from travelers, or conduct business.
Taverns provided forums for social interaction, but long-distance communication was more complex. Postal service in the seventeenth century was almost nonexistent; people typically gave letters to travelers or sea captains hoping for delivery. Under a parliamentary law of 1710, the postmaster of London appointed a deputy for the colonies, leading to a postal system that eventually covered most of the Atlantic seaboard. Benjamin Franklin, who served as deputy postmaster for the colonies from 1753 to 1774, expedited service through shorter routes and night-traveling mail riders.
More reliable mail delivery fostered the rise of newspapers in the eighteenth century. Before 1745, twenty-two newspapers had been started: seven in New England, ten in the middle colonies, and five in the South. An important milestone for freedom of the press was John Peter Zenger’s trial in 1735 for publishing criticisms of New York’s royal governor in his newspaper, the New-York Weekly Journal. Zenger was imprisoned for ten months and brought to trial. English common law held that one could be punished for “libel,” or criticism that fostered “an ill opinion of the government.” Zenger’s lawyer surprised the court by claiming the editor had published the truth—a defense typically deemed unacceptable by the judge. However, the jury held the editor not guilty. While the libel law remained unchanged, editors thereafter felt more emboldened to criticize officials.
The Enlightenment in America
The most significant new European ideas circulating in eighteenth-century America emerged from a burst of innovative intellectual activity known as the Enlightenment. This movement celebrated rational inquiry, scientific research, and individual freedom. Enlightened individuals sought truth wherever it might lead, rather than passively accepting dogmas passed down through ages or derived solely from the Bible. Curious, well-educated, and well-read people were no longer willing to simply accept biblical explanations of the universe as sufficient and complete. Immanuel Kant, the eighteenth-century German philosopher, encapsulated the Enlightenment perspective by urging, “Dare to know! Have the courage to use your own understanding.” He and others employed reason to analyze nature's workings, utilizing new tools like microscopes and telescopes for close observation, scientific experimentation, and precise mathematical calculation.
The Enlightenment, often referred to as the Age of Reason, was triggered by a scientific revolution. The ancient geocentric view of the universe was overturned in the early sixteenth century by Nicolaus Copernicus, a Polish astronomer and Catholic priest, who proposed the controversial heliocentric (sun-centered) solar system in 1533. His theory, initially scorned by Catholic officials, was later confirmed by other scientists. The climax of the scientific revolution came in 1687 when Englishman Isaac Newton (1642-1727) announced his controversial theory of the earth’s gravitational pull. Newton challenged biblical notions of the world’s workings by depicting a mechanistic universe operating according to natural laws that human reason could grasp and mathematics could explain. He implied that natural laws, rather than God’s direct actions, govern all things, from planetary orbits to human relations: politics, economics, and society.
Some enlightened individuals embraced Deism, which logically extended Newton’s scientific outlook. Deists asserted that God created the world and designed its “natural laws,” and these laws, not God directly, govern the universe’s operation. They believed God planned the universe and set it in motion but no longer interacted directly with the earth and its people. Thus, the rational God of the Deists differed significantly from the intervening God of Christian tradition, to whom believers prayed for daily guidance and direct support. According to Deists, such as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, evil in the world 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 both society and human nature was by cultivating Reason, which was considered the highest Virtue (Enlightenment thinkers often capitalized both words). Through education, reason, and scientific analysis, societies were believed to improve their knowledge and quality of life. Faith in human progress was thus one of the most important beliefs of the Enlightenment.
Equally important was the enlightened notion of political freedom. Both Jefferson and Franklin were influenced by the English political philosopher John Locke (1632-1704), who maintained that “natural law” called for a government based on the consent of the governed and respect for the “natural rights” of all. This idea provided justification for revolution against tyrannical monarchies, such as those governing Great Britain and France.
The Age of Reason in America
Benjamin Franklin epitomized the Enlightenment in the eyes of both Americans and Europeans. Born in Boston in 1706, a descendant of Puritans, Franklin left home at seventeen for Philadelphia. Before he was twenty-four, he purchased a print shop where he edited the Pennsylvania Gazette, one of the leading colonial newspapers. At twenty-six, he published Poor Richard’s Almanack, a collection of seasonal weather forecasts, puzzles, household tips, and witty sayings about success and happiness. Before retiring from business at forty-two, Franklin had founded a public library, started a fire company, helped establish the academy that became the University of Pennsylvania, and organized a debating club that evolved into the American Philosophical Society.
Benjamin Franklin was dedicated to scientific investigation. Skeptical, curious, pragmatic, and irreverent, he was an inventive genius. His wide-ranging scientific experiments spanned medicine, meteorology, geology, astronomy, and physics, among other fields. He developed the Franklin stove, the lightning rod, bifocal spectacles, and a glass harmonica.
Franklin’s love of science and reason conflicted with prevailing Christian beliefs. Although raised as a Presbyterian, he became a Deist who valued science and reason over orthodox religion. He questioned the divinity of Jesus and the assumption that the Bible was truly the word of God. Like European Deists, Franklin came to believe in a God who had created a universe governed by natural laws—laws that curious individuals could discover through reason and the scientific method. For Franklin and others in the eighteenth century, to be “enlightened” meant developing the confidence and capacity to think for oneself, critically questioning tradition rather than simply accepting it as truth.
The Great Awakening
The growing popularity of Enlightenment rationalism posed a direct threat to traditional religious life in Europe and America. However, religious faith has consistently shown remarkable resilience in the face of challenging new ideas. This was certainly true in the early eighteenth century, when the American colonies experienced a widespread revival of spiritual zeal aimed at restoring the primacy of emotion in the religious realm.
Between 1700 and 1750, as the controversial ideas of the Enlightenment circulated among the best-educated colonists, hundreds of new Christian congregations were founded. Most Americans (85 percent) lived in colonies with an “established” church, meaning the colonial government officially endorsed—and collected taxes to support—a single official denomination. The Church of England, or Anglicanism, was the “established” church in Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, and the Carolinas. Puritan Congregationalism was the official faith in New England. In New York, Anglicanism vied with the Dutch Reformed Church for control. Pennsylvania had no single 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 based on well-regulated local parishes, which defined their theological boundaries and defended them against those of different faiths. In colonies with official religions, people of other faiths could not preach without permission from the local parish. Then, in the 1730s and 1740s, the parish system was disrupted by outspoken traveling evangelists, called itinerants, who claimed that most local parish ministers were incompetent. In their emotionally charged sermons, these itinerants, some of whom were white women and African Americans, insisted that Christians must be “reborn” in their convictions and behavior.
During the early 1730s, a widespread sense of religious decline and the need for “rebirth” helped spark a series of emotional revivals known as the Great Awakening. These revivals began in the southern colonies and quickly spread up the Atlantic coast to New England. Entire towns were swept up in the ecstasy of renewed spiritual passion. Unlike the Enlightenment, which primarily affected the intellectual elite, the evangelical energies unleashed by the Great Awakening appealed mostly to the masses. As a skeptical Benjamin Franklin observed of the Awakening, “Never did the people show so great a willingness to attend sermons. Religion is become the subject of most conversation.” The Awakening was the first popular movement before the American Revolution that affected all thirteen colonies, thereby helping to forge ties across the colonies that would later aid in coordinating revolutionary activities against the British government.
In 1734-1735, a remarkable spiritual transformation occurred in the congregation of Jonathan Edwards, a prominent Congregationalist minister in Northampton, western Massachusetts. One of America’s most brilliant philosophers and theologians, Edwards entered Yale College in 1716 at age thirteen and graduated at the top of his class four years later. In 1727, Edwards was appointed minister of the Congregational church in Northampton. He was shocked by the town’s lack of religious conviction, claiming that the young people were preoccupied with sinful pleasures and indulged in “lewd practices” that “corrupted others.” Christians had also become obsessed with making and spending money. He warned that the rebellious new ideas associated with the Enlightenment were eroding the importance of religious life, attacking Deists for believing that “God has given mankind no other light to walk by but their own reason.”
To counteract the secularizing forces of the Enlightenment, Edwards resolved to restore the emotional side of religion. He stated, “Our people… do not so much need to have their heads stored [with new scientific knowledge] as to have their hearts touched [with spiritual intensity].” His vivid descriptions of the sufferings of hell and the delights of heaven helped rekindle spiritual intensity among his congregants. By 1735, Edwards reported that “the town seemed to be full of the presence of God; it never was so full of love, nor of joy.” To gauge the power of the religious awakening, he noted, one needed only observe that “it was no longer the Tavern” that drew local crowds, “but the Minister’s House.”
While Jonathan Edwards promoted a revival of religious emotion in Puritan New England, William Tennent, an Irish-born Presbyterian revivalist, stirred souls in Pennsylvania. He and his sons criticized many local ministers as “cold and sapless,” afraid to “thrust the nail of terror into sleeping souls.” Tennent’s oldest son, Gilbert, defended their aggressive (and often illegal) tactics by explaining that he and other traveling evangelists invaded parishes only when local ministers showed no interest in “Getting of Grace and Growing in it.” The Tennents caused significant anxiety because they preached to those at the bottom of the social scale—farmers, laborers, sailors, and servants. By promoting passionate piety, urging people to renounce their ministers, and attacking the luxurious excesses of the wealthiest and most powerful colonists, these radical evangelists threatened to disrupt the social order in the colonies. This emerging competition in colonial religious life led worried members of the colonial elite to charge that the radical revivalists were spreading “anarchy, levelling, and dissolution.”
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. He claimed congregations were lifeless “because dead men preach to them,” describing many ministers as “slothful shepherds and dumb dogs.” Whitefield aimed to rekindle religious intensity in American congregations. In the autumn of 1739, the twenty-five-year-old evangelist began preaching to huge crowds across the colonies. 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.” Benjamin Franklin, who saw Whitefield preach in Philadelphia, was so moved by the fiery sermon that he emptied his pockets into the collection plate.
Jonathan Edwards utilized the energies stirred up by Whitefield to spread his own revival gospel throughout New England. The Great Awakening reached its peak in 1741 when Edwards delivered his most famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” This sermon was designed in part to frighten people into seeking salvation. Edwards 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 Edwards finished, he had to wait several minutes for the agitated congregants to quiet down before leading them in a closing hymn.
The Great Awakening made religion intensely personal by creating both a deep sense of spiritual guilt and a yearning for redemption. However, while it saved souls, it also undermined many established churches by emphasizing that individuals, regardless of wealth or social status, could receive God’s grace without the guidance of their local ministers. It also expanded people’s religious choices. During the Great Awakening, major denominations fractured: Presbyterians divided into “Old Side” critics of revivalism and “New Side” supporters; Congregationalists split into “Old Light” and “New Light” factions. Jonathan Edwards regretted the emergence of these warring factions, stating, “We are like two armies, separated and drawn up in battle array, ready to fight one another.” New England religious life would never be the same.
Individualism and Colonial Culture
The energies of the Great Awakening subsided by 1750, but like its very different counterpart movement, the Enlightenment, it set in motion powerful currents that still flow through American life. Ministers could no longer control the direction of religious life as more and more people took charge of their own spirituality, and new denominations sprouted abundantly. The Great Awakening implanted in American culture the evangelical impulse and the emotional appeal of revivalism. By encouraging the creation of new denominations, the Awakening heightened the need for toleration of many religious persuasions rather than just one’s own.
In some respects, the conflict between the emotional forces unleashed by the Awakening and the rational analyses of the Enlightenment led by different roads to similar ends. Both movements cut across all the colonies and thereby helped bind them together. Both movements emphasized that individuals should have the freedom to take responsibility for their own lives and salvation. By urging believers to exercise their own spiritual judgment, the revivals weakened the authority of the established churches and their ministers, just as colonial resentment of British economic regulations would later weaken the colonists’ loyalty to the king. As such, the Great Awakening and the Enlightenment helped nurture an American commitment to individual freedom and resistance to authority that would play a key role in the rebellion against British tyranny in $$1776