THE EVOLUTION OF COLONIAL SOCIETY- HISTORY OF COLONIAL AMERICA

The character of the social order in British North America differed markedly among the three main geographic regions: the Southern colonies, New England, and the Middle Colonies of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. These differences were a result of the natural environment and of social policy. The great majority of migrants came from the landless classes of Europe, and their fate depended in large measure on access to land.

A

The South

In the Chesapeake colonies of Virginia and Maryland, wealthy planters owned much of the settled land. From 1620 to 1700, planters imported about 100,000 poor young English men and women through a system called indentured servitude. In return for their passage across the Atlantic, food and shelter, and the promise of 50 acres of land, these servants agreed to work four years for the planter. Primarily as a result of disease, a majority of these servants died during their terms of service. Only one-half of those who survived were able to become landowners. The rest worked as tenant farmers or wage laborers on estates owned by large planters.

By 1700 indentured servitude ended as the dominant labor system because England’s population growth slowed, leaving a dwindling supply of indentured servants. In response, planters, who had emerged as the most powerful political and economic figures in the Southern colonies, began purchasing enslaved Africans as a labor force. By 1776 tobacco planters in the Chesapeake colonies and rice planters in South Carolina had imported 250,000 African slaves, and using their power in the colonial assemblies, the planters had enacted laws making slavery hereditary. Even Georgia, which was founded in the 1730s as a refuge for the British poor, had evolved by 1760 into a society that contained a small elite of rich planters, a larger group of farm families, and a mass of enslaved Africans.

African slaves in the tobacco-growing Chesapeake colonies lived much longer than slaves on the sugar islands of the West Indies. Tobacco crops did not require as much intense physical labor to cultivate as sugar did, and there were also fewer epidemics on the mainland. In addition, tobacco planters could not afford to purchase new Africans continually and so treated their slaves better. By 1720 Africans in the Chesapeake were able to maintain their population levels by natural reproduction (which did not happen under slavery in the sugar islands). American-born slaves spoke English and created ties of family and kinship that united various African ethnic groups—Ibo, Yoruba, Kongo—in a single African American community. This community retained many African ways of doing things—carving wood in African designs, using traditional giant wooden mortars and pestles to hull rice, and building their cabins in customary ways.

Slave life in the rice-growing lowlands of South Carolina, where Africans represented 80 percent of the population, was more oppressive than slave life in the Chesapeake region. Many slaves died from disease and overwork, and wealthy planters continued to purchase more slaves from Africa, thus maintaining the influence of African culture. Because all slaves in the British colonies lacked individual legal rights or any form of self-government, they could assert themselves politically only through personal acts of resistance to the work demands of their owners (see Slavery in the United States).

B

The North

In 17th-century New England, Puritan-dominated governments used land distribution policies to create a society of small independent farmers, who were often called yeomen. These yeomen owned more than 70 percent of the land and worked to maintain a society of relatively equal property owners or freeholders. The rapid increase in New England's population—from approximately 100,000 in 1720 to 400,000 in 1760—threatened their hopes. The first settlers divided their ample farms to provide land for their children, and the next generations did the same. By the mid-18th century, however, many farmers faced a dilemma because their holdings were too small to split.

New England farmers pursued a variety of strategies to preserve a society of freeholders. Some parents chose to have smaller families so that they could provide land for their children. Other settlers joined with their neighbors to petition the government for new land grants and migrated into the interior where they could carve new communities out of the forest. Eventually the more adventuresome populated the frontier regions of New Hampshire and what would later become Vermont. Still other farmers used their small plots more productively by growing high-yield crops such as potatoes and Indian corn rather than wheat. Corn offered a hearty food for humans, and its leaves furnished feed for cattle and pigs. Gradually New England developed a livestock economy and was able to preserve its freehold ideal.

C

The Mid-Atlantic

A freeholding society also developed throughout most parts of the mid-Atlantic colonies of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. However, the ethnic and religious diversity of this region shaped its character more than landholding status. In 1748 a European visitor to Philadelphia would have found no fewer than 12 religious denominations in the city, including Quakers, Anglicans (Church of England), Swedish and German Lutherans, Scots-Irish Presbyterians, and Roman Catholics. Many Quakers settled in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. In Pennsylvania, they were the largest religious group and controlled the state’s representative assembly until the 1750s. Because Quakers were pacifists, they avoided war with Native Americans by negotiating treaties and by purchasing, rather than seizing, their lands.

The Quaker vision of a “peaceable kingdom” with peace and harmony among all people attracted many Europeans seeking to escape war, religious persecution, and poverty. Some Germans migrated to Pennsylvania as early as the 1680s, and thousands more followed in the 1720s. The largest group of German immigrants, nearly 37,000, landed in Philadelphia from 1749 to 1756. Many of these Germans (who were sometimes called the “Pennsylvania Dutch” to distinguish them from the residents of New York who spoke the similar-sounding Dutch language) settled in eastern Pennsylvania, but a significant number migrated down the Shenandoah Valley into the western parts of Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas. Most lived in communities where English settlers controlled the political organizations. German colonists engaged in politics primarily to protect their religious liberty and property rights.

After 1720, tens of thousands of Scots-Irish also settled in Pennsylvania and in the southern backcountry. The Scots-Irish were descendants of Presbyterians from Scotland who helped the English conquer Catholic Ireland in the 1650s. Now these people sought greater religious freedom and economic opportunity in America. Many Scots-Irish pushed to the frontier, both in central Pennsylvania and in the backcountry of the Carolinas, where they wrested territory from Native Americans. Like the Germans, the Scots-Irish were determined to keep their own culture, holding firm to their Presbyterianism and promoting marriage within their own group. In this way the mid-Atlantic colonies remained a patchwork of diverse ethnic and religious communities, tied to one another by trade and by English-run political institutions.

D

Colonial Economies

As the colonial farm economy grew in size and as thousands of migrants arrived from Europe and Africa, a wealthy merchant community developed in seaport towns to promote trade with the rest of the world. Although British merchants dominated the trade between Britain and the West Indies, colonial residents took over the trade between North America and the West Indies. They also carried exports allowed by the Navigation Acts, such as rice, flour, and fish, to markets in Europe. In Charleston, South Carolina, merchants imported slaves and carried rice to The Netherlands and southern Europe. In Baltimore and Philadelphia, traders shipped wheat and corn to England and the West Indies. Merchants in Boston and New York bought English manufactures and distributed them throughout the colonies; they also imported molasses from sugar islands and distilled it into rum. Traders in smaller coastal towns in New England financed hundreds of fishing voyages and carried their catch to markets in southern Europe and the West Indies.

Merchants financed boatyards near every port to provide ships for these enterprises. Timber was plentiful and cheap, so colonial shipwrights could build relatively inexpensive vessels. By 1760 nearly one half of the merchant marine in the British empire was American-built.

Urban merchants and manufacturers became a powerful force in American colonial society. These wealthy gentlemen had contacts throughout the world and brought new ideas to the colonies as well as a wide range of goods. They also dominated the politics of coastal cities, using their economic power to intimidate the artisan classes and enacting property qualifications to keep landless laborers from voting.

European colonists, despite differences in social class, national origin, and religious beliefs, lived together rather harmoniously under the English political system established by the first settlers. And their numbers grew rapidly—from 250,000 in 1700 to nearly 1.6 million by 1760. The peaceful intermixing of groups was so striking that by the mid-18th century, Europeans, and the colonists themselves, were speaking of a new people called Americans.