Colonial Life

• Life in the colonies was similar to English society

  • Male dominated

  • Wealthy had higher status

  • Whites had a higher social status than other races.

• 13 Colonies

  • Economic opportunity allowed people to have large families.

  • Land was abundant

  • People started families earlier

  • Low taxes

• England

  • Poverty limited size of family

  • Land was scarce

  • People waited longer to start families

  • High taxes

Colonial Life

• The South:

  • Ill health and poor living conditions

  • Men greatly outnumbered women

    • Slow population growth

  • Tobacco production increased; labor became scarce

  • “Headright system”: those paying for the servant’s passage received the right to acquire 50 acres of land.

  • Wealthy planters used this system to establish huge plantations.

  • By the late 1600s, indentured servants, or “white slaves” made up the majority of the population in the upper southern colonies.

    • Most servants were penniless at the end of their term, and often agreed to further servitude, some choosing to remain with their original master, and others choosing a new one.

  • Bacon’s Rebellion

    • Participants in Bacon’s Rebellion were ex-servants, left destitute due to the cyclical nature of their situation.

    • Participation in the rebellion brought to the surface a simmering dispute: wealthy planters vs. disenfranchised, landless common people.

  • Considered a social burden by some, ex-servants fell out of favor with planters who looked for a more problem-free source of manual labor.

• Stunted Growth

  • A reliance on agriculture obstructed the growth of large, urban areas. As a result, big cities and universities would be fewer in number in the years to come, than in the North.

• The North:

  • Life expectancy was about 70 years

  • Family unit was strong

    • Large families, started at a young age

    • Fewer premarital pregnancies

    • Puritan authorities worked diligently to preserve marriages

      • scarlet letter, public whipping

  • Expansion was conducted in an orderly fashion

    • Land was granted legally and towns laid out with prior planning.

  • Religion:

    • Puritan preachers used the jeremiad in the mid 1600s to scare people back to a more pious existence.

    • A decline in “conversions”, led Puritan leaders to adopt the Half-Way Covenant. However, Puritan zealotry was eventually relaxed in an effort to increase religious participation.

  • Education:

    • High literacy rates because Puritan leaders stressed reading the Bible.

    • Massachusetts passed laws requiring towns of 50 or more families to hire a teacher and 100 or more families to establish a school.

  • Higher Education:

    • College prepared lawyers and ministers for their vocations

    • Only wealthy people attended college

    • Harvard- 1636

    • William and Mary- 1693

    • Yale- 1701

The Salem Witch Trials

• Several young women claimed to be possessed by the devil and others were accused of being witches.

• A wave of fear and false accusations swept the community; trials resulted in 20 people executed (19 were lynched) before a sense of reason returned to the community.

• Most of the accused were from families involved in the expanding commercial economy.

  • Their accusers were from more rural families.

  • This points to an emerging gulf in social distinctions in New England: Old school Puritanism vs. Yankee commercialism

Northern Colonial Life

• The introduction of livestock had a negative impact on the landscape: deforestation and flooding

• Fishing supported the New England colonies, as the soil was less arable than in other colonies.

• “Yankee ingenuity” and the “New England conscience” were born during this period.

Slavery in the Colonies

• Slave codes established a distinction between whites and black people.

• Slavery is hereditary.

• 20% of slaves die in the Middle Passage.

• Many slaves go to the deep South and work on plantations.

• Africans are able to maintain some of their culture, but they were also often merged

  • Gullah was created, which was a combination of many African languages.

  • Ring Shout

  • Surrogate family members

  • Music as a way of expression

• Slaves resist

  • Sabotage

  • Slow down production

  • Escape

  • Rebellion (least common)

• There are a small number of free blacks in the colonies

  • They could buy their freedom

  • It was hard to get a job

  • Could be kidnapped, especially in the deep south

  • Have to provide for themselves entirely

  • Very difficult

• Slave Revolts

  • New York

  • Stono Rebellion; South Carolina

  • As a result, slave laws increased heavily; they can't read, write, leave the plantation etc.

• The colonies wanted to stop the slave trade to the colonies, however Britain veteoed it to protect wealthy English slave traders.

• Slavery was a brutal existance.

• More slaves than whites in South Carolina and Georgia.

Vocabulary

William Berkeley: the Virginia governor who refused to defend the backcountry settlers from the Native Americans. Eventually, these backcountry settlers had to protect themselves against the Natives, leading to Bacon’s Rebellion.

Bacon’s Rebellion: an uprising of backcountry settlers and indentured servants against the Natives led by Nathanial Bacon. After not being protected by the governor, these settlers broke out in a battle with the Natives. They later burned down the Virginia capital, and the conflict turned into a problem between wealthy masters and poor settlers.

Half-Way Covenant: a covenant in which people who had not undergone a conversion could baptize their children into to Puritan church. This covenant was a first step towards everyone being allowed in the Puritan church and was a sign that Puritan demands were extreme.

The Headright System: a system set up by England used in colonial Virginia and Maryland that allowed masters to buy indentured servants from England and receive 50 acres of land in return. This system was used to increase indentured servitude in the colonies, and masters took advantage of it.

Jeremiads: lively sermons about how the settlers were losing their faith. These sermons were inspired by the doom-saying prophet Jeremiah.

The Middle Passage: the nautical voyage from Africa to colonial America for the slave trade. This was the slave passage, and death rates were extremely high.