Chapter 3 (1660-1750)

The Transformation of Anglo-America (1660–1750)

The Big Question: How did the small, scattered English colonies of 1660 transform into the diverse, slave-dependent, and increasingly unified Anglo-American world of 1750?
Eric Foner’s Overview: The transformation was driven by a series of crises and structural shifts: * Crises: King Philip’s War, Bacon’s Rebellion, the Glorious Revolution, and the Salem Witch Trials. * Structural Shifts: The adoption of mercantilism, the entrenchment of racial slavery, and massive immigration.
The Paradox of Liberty: By 1750, free white men enjoyed unprecedented opportunity, yet this expansion of freedom occurred alongside the "unprecedented unfreedom" of enslaved Africans, dispossessed Native peoples, and women under coverture.

Mercantilism and the Navigation Acts

Mercantilism (Economic Theory): * Core Principle: Colonies exist solely to enrich the mother country. * Government Role: The government must regulate the economy to promote national power. * Goal: Achieve a favorable balance of trade where more gold and silver flow INTO the nation than flow OUT. * Colonial Role: 1. Supply raw materials to the mother country. 2. Serve as a market for manufactured goods FROM the mother country. 3. Refrain from competing with the mother country in manufacturing or trading with other empires.
The Policy: Navigation Acts: * Purpose: These laws (1651, 1660, 1663, 1673) implemented mercantilist theory. * History: First passed under Oliver Cromwell ( $1651$ ) and expanded under Charles II. * Rules for Enumerated Goods: Specific high-value products (‘enumerated goods’) like tobacco, sugar, and indigo had to be shipped on English ships through English ports, even if their final destination was elsewhere in Europe. * Import Rules: Any European goods bound for the colonies were required to pass through England first. * Geopolitics: The acts were specifically aimed at crushing Dutch dominance in international shipping. * Side Effects: The acts provided a boost to the shipbuilding industry in New England, as colonial-built ships were legally classified as ‘English.’ * Evasion: Colonial merchants frequently engaged in smuggling to bypass these laws; British enforcement remained notably lax during a period later termed "salutary neglect."

English Empire Expansion (1660–1700)

The Restoration: Following the return of Charles II to the throne in $1660$ , England aggressively expanded its holdings through conquest and new proprietary grants.
Colonial Chronology: * New York (1664): Seized from the Dutch after three Anglo-Dutch Wars ( $1652\text{–}1674$ ); granted to the Duke of York (James II). * New Jersey (1664): Carved out of New York territory by the Duke of York. * Carolina (1670): Granted to eight proprietors by Charles II; widely considered a ‘colony of a colony’ due to its origins as an offshoot of the Barbados sugar economy. * Pennsylvania (1681): Granted to William Penn by Charles II to settle a debt owed to Penn’s father. * Delaware (1682): A former Swedish-Dutch colony granted to William Penn.
The Carolinas: Model and Trade: * The Barbados Model: Founded in $1670$ , the colony was modeled after the wealthiest Caribbean sugar colony. * Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina (1669): Drafted by John Locke; it proposed a hierarchical ‘feudal’ society (including titles like ‘landgraves’) but also established an elected assembly and religious toleration. * Land Incentives: Offered a generous headright of $150\,\text{acres}$ per family member. * Indian Slave Trade: From $1670$ to $1715$ , Carolina exported more enslaved Native peoples through Charleston than it imported enslaved Africans. Colonists paid Native allies (Yamasee, Muscogee/Creek) to capture other Native people for shipment to the Caribbean. * The Pivot: Following the Yamasee War ( $1715$ ), the colony abandoned the Indian slave trade and shifted to African slavery and rice plantation agriculture.
New York Under English Rule: * Legal Shifts: While religious toleration (a Dutch precedent) was preserved, English coverture laws replaced the legal independence once held by Dutch women. * 1683 Charter of Liberties and Privileges: Drafted by the New York assembly to define the rights of English subjects in the colony. * Political Factions: Governance was often a struggle between powerful landowner families, such as the Livingstons and the De Lanceys.

Pennsylvania: William Penn’s "Holy Experiment"

Quaker Beliefs: * Inner Light: Belief that every person possesses a spark of the divine, making all spiritually equal. * Equality: Rejecting social hierarchies, race distinctions, and gender subordination before God. * Pacifism: Refusal to engage in war or form militias. * Simplicity: Plain speech (refusal of titles) and plain dress. * Structure: No formal clergy; any congregant could speak at a meeting. * Abolitionism: Quakers became the first white group to systematically oppose slavery.
Penn’s Policies: * The Holy Experiment: Penn sought to create a refuge for religious tolerance and ethical colonization. * Native Relations: Penn practiced the rare policy of purchasing land from Native peoples before selling it to colonists. * Charter of Liberty (1701): Guaranteed religious freedom for all who believed in God. * Church and State: No established church was mandated, and attendance was voluntary. * Limits on Tolerance: To hold office, individuals were required to take an oath affirming the divinity of Christ, effectively barring Jews. * Moral Governance: Penn enacted a strict moral code banning swearing, drunkenness, adultery, and cock-fighting.
Factors for Prosperity: * Penn aggressively advertised the colony in Europe, attracting Germans, Scots-Irish, Jews, Mennonites, and Pietists. * The colony offered a healthy climate, fertile soil, and inexpensive land, nicknamed the ‘best poor man’s country.’ * Economic Impact on the South: Pennsylvania’s attractiveness to indentured servants drained the labor supply from Virginia and Maryland, accelerating the Chesapeake’s shift to enslaved African labor.
The Walking Purchase (1737): * Penn’s sons abandoned his fair-dealing policies. * They claimed a treaty allowed them to purchase land extending as far as a man could walk in $36\,\text{hours}$ . * By hiring professional runners and clearing paths beforehand, they covered approximately $65\,\text{miles}$ , more than double the $30\,\text{miles}$ expected by the Delaware people. * This defrauded the Delaware out of roughly $1.2\,\text{million acres}$ and signaled the end of Penn’s vision of peaceful relations.

The Entrenchment of Slavery

Phase 1: Permeable Lines (Early 1600s): * Slavery was not initially a fixed, racial, or hereditary status. * Anthony Johnson: An African man who arrived enslaved in the $1620\text{s}$ but eventually became a free landowner who owned both slaves and white indentured servants. * Free Black men in this era could occasionally vote, own property, sue, and testify in court.
Phase 2: Hardening the Lines (Mid-Late 1600s): * 1640s (VA): Black men were barred from serving in the militia. * 1662 (VA Inheritance Law): Established that a child’s status (free or slave) followed the state of the MOTHER. This reversed European tradition and incentivized the sexual abuse of enslaved women by owners. * 1664 (MD): Mandated that all Black servants remain slaves for life and children inherit that status. * 1667 (VA): Law decreed that Christian conversion did not free an enslaved person, closing a major path to manumission.
Phase 3: Factors Accelerating the Shift: * Falling Death Rates: In Virginia, longer life expectancy meant buying a slave for life was more economical than paying for a few years of an indentured servant’s labor. * Improving English Economy: Fewer English citizens were willing to sell themselves into indenture. * Opening of Pennsylvania: Diverted the supply of indentured servants away from tobacco fields. * End of Monopoly: In the $1690\text{s}$ , the Royal African Company lost its monopoly, leading to more competition and lower prices for enslaved Africans.
Phase 4: The Virginia Slave Code (1705): * Legally defined slaves as property (chattel) that could be bought, sold, and inherited. * Established separate court systems for Black and white individuals. * Prohibited any Black person (free or slave) from owning weapons, striking a white person, or employing a white servant. * Empowered any white person to demand passes or proof of freedom from any Black person.
Conceptual Shift: The Chesapeake transitioned from a "society with slaves" (where slavery is one of many labor systems) to a "slave society" (where slavery is the central economic and social foundation).
Comparative Slavery: Foner notes English slavery became more rigid than Spanish slavery. Under Spanish law (Las Siete Partidas), enslaved people had rights to marriage and property, and the Church encouraged manumission. English law treated all African ancestry as "Black" and made status strictly hereditary through the mother.

Bacon’s Rebellion (1676)

The Context: * Governor William Berkeley: Ran Virginia as a corrupt patronage system for $30\,\text{years}$ , favoring an elite circle of planters. * Land Scarcity: Freed servants were forced into high-tax tenancy or dangerous frontier lands. * Governance: In $1670$ , voting was restricted to landowners, disenfranchising newly freed men. * Native Policy: Berkeley refused to attack Native tribes on the frontier to protect his personal profits from the deerskin trade.
The Conflict: * Nathaniel Bacon: A wealthy aristocrat and Berkeley’s cousin who resented the governor’s inner circle. * The Spark: Characterized by an unauthorized massacre of the Occaneechi (Virginia's Native allies). * The Rebellion: Bacon recruited small farmers, landless men, and both enslaved and free Africans with promises of land, freedom, and lower taxes. * The Siege: They marched on Jamestown, burned the capital, and forced Berkeley to flee. Bacon died of dysentery in October $1676$ , leading to the collapse of the uprising.
Legacy and Consequences: * Elite fear of poor white and Black laborers uniting led to a deliberate shift toward enslaved African labor (‘slaves would never become free’). * The elite cultivated poor white loyalty by emphasizing racial difference over class commonality. * Foner’s Reading: White supremacy was a deliberate strategy to manage class conflict among whites by displacing it onto race. This is the moment American racial politics "crystallized."

King Philip’s War (1675–76)

Key Figures: Metacom (known as King Philip), leader of the Wampanoag, and Weetamoo, female sachem of the Pocasset and co-leader of the war.
Causes: Wampanoag resentment of land encroachment, livestock destroying crops, and the imposition of English law on Native people.
Conflict: A coordinated assault on nearly half of New England’s $90$ towns. Twelve towns were completely destroyed.
Turning Point: Mid- $1676$ , the Mohawk nation joined the English side.
Aftermath: Metacom and Weetamoo were beheaded, their heads displayed on stakes in Plymouth. Survivors were killed, exported to the Caribbean as slaves, or fled to Canada and New York.
Praying Indians: Christianized Natives living in Puritan towns were rounded up and interred on Deer Island, where many died.
Impact: This was the bloodiest war in 17th-century New England; per capita deaths exceeded those of the American Civil War. It permanently broke Native power in southern New England.

The Glorious Revolution and Colonial Crisis (1685–91)

Events in England: * James II: A Catholic king who believed in the divine right of kings. * Dominion of New England (1686–89): James II combined Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Plymouth, New York, and New Jersey into a single super-colony ruled by Sir Edmund Andros, who governed without an assembly. * 1688: Aristocrats invited William of Orange to invade; James II fled. * 1689 English Bill of Rights: Established parliamentary supremacy and rights such as jury trials and free speech in Parliament. * 1689 Toleration Act: Allowed Protestant dissenters to worship freely (Catholics were still excluded).
Colonial Uprisings (1689): * Massachusetts: The Boston militia arrested Sir Edmund Andros. The $1691$ charter eventually combined Massachusetts and Plymouth but required religious toleration for all Protestants. * New York: Jacob Leisler, a wealthy Calvinist, seized power but was later executed for treason. * Maryland: The Protestant Association overthrew the Catholic Lord Baltimore’s government; the crown revoked Baltimore’s charter.
Imperial Shift: Colonists began to view themselves as entitled to "English liberties," which later provided the ideological foundation for the American Revolution.

The Salem Witch Trials (1692)

Context of Crisis: Massachusetts was reeling from the loss of its original charter, the imposition of royal rule, forced religious toleration, and Native raids on the frontier.
The Trials: * Begun with fits experienced by young girls in Salem Village. * Tituba: An enslaved Caribbean Native woman was the first accused. * The Snowball Effect: The only way to avoid execution was to confess and name other ‘witches.’ Approximately $150$ people were arrested. * Victims: $19$ were hanged. Giles Corey was pressed to death with stones for refusing to enter a plea. * Demographics: Most accused were women who challenged Puritan gender norms (e.g., widows or outspoken, independent women).
The End: The trials ended when accusations reached the governor’s wife. Increase Mather’s Cases of Conscience Concerning Evil Spirits argued against "spectral evidence" (testimony about visions), essentially ending the practice of witch hunts and pushing the elite toward rationalism.

The 18th-Century Colonial World

Massive Immigration: By $1750$ , the colonies were more ethnically and religiously diverse than England. * Germans: Often arrived as "redemptioners" (family-scale indentured servants). * Scots-Irish: Settled heavily in the backcountry of Pennsylvania and the southern colonies.
The Consumer Revolution: British manufactured goods (ceramics, tea, ribbons, glass) flooded the colonies. Tea shifted from a luxury to a necessity, and trade integrated the empire, making colonists feel "more British" through shared consumption.
Social Structure: * Elite: The top $10\%$ of planters (VA/SC) held roughly half of the wealth. South Carolina’s rice aristocracy was the wealthiest group on the mainland. * Middle Class: Approximately $\frac{2}{3}$ of free men owned land. * Poverty: Growing urban poverty led to the policy of "warning out" newcomers.
Coverture: In the 18th century, legal restrictions on women became more rigid. As legal proceedings required professional lawyers (who had to be male), women virtually disappeared from court records.

Beyond British Colonies: French and Spanish Power

New France: Expanded into the Great Lakes and built Louisiana (Biloxi $1699$ , New Orleans $1718$ ). The Natchez War ( $1729\text{–}31$ ) saw the French and Native allies crush Natchez resistance to plantations.
New Spain: Franciscan friars expanded into Texas (San Antonio $1718$ ) to counter French influence. However, actual Spanish settler populations remained tiny.
The Great Plains: The acquisition of horses from the Spanish transformed Native cultures into powerful equestrian, bison-hunting societies. By the mid- $1700\text{s}$ , the Comanche dominated trade networks across the southern Plains.
Foner’s Conclusion: Regardless of European maps, Native peoples still held most of the actual power across most of the North American continent in $1750$ .