Chapter 4

Provincial America and the Struggle for a Continent

How did the economies of the southern colonies compare with those of the northern colonies in 1700s?

What part did the Enlightenment play in the intellectual and social structure of the colonies?

What was the Great Awakening and how did it change colonial society? Did it relate to the Enlightenment?

Discuss the causes and effects of the Seven Years War. Did it have an effect on British–Colonial Relations?

Expansion versus Anglicization

Hampered by increased importation of English goods during 17th century

As colonial population increased, some English traditions were altered

– Colonies had to educate and train their own ministers

Emergence of colonial class of “gentlemen”

Women became more English the 1600s

– Dowry and dower right

– Coverture

Loss of inheritance rights

Adoption of double standard of sexual behavior

Freehold Society in New England

Farm Families: Women’s Place

Abundant land in the American colonies, which allowed the average farmer considerable social and political autonomy and freedom, continued to draw streams of immigrants from Great Britain and northern Europe in the eighteenth century. Wherever they settled, these immigrants created a pluralist society and political order that prefigured the nature of American life a century later.

Men claimed power in the state and authority in the family; women were subordinate.

Women in the colonies were raised to be dutiful “helpmates” to their husbands.

The labor of the Puritan women was crucial to rural household economy.

Bearing and rearing children were equally crucial. Most women married in their early twenties and by their early forties had given birth to six or seven children.

More women than men joined the churches so that their children could be baptized.

A gradual reduction in farm size prompted couples to have fewer children.

With fewer children, women had more time to enhance their families’ standard of living.

Most New England women’s lives were tightly bound by a web of legal and cultural restrictions; they were excluded from an equal role in the church and overall abided by the rule that they should be employed only in the home and only doing women’s work.

Expansion, Immigration, and Regional Differentiation

African slave trade reached its peak between 1730 and 1775

– Transformed political life, as great planters assumed leadership positions

– Rice Planters of Carolina became richest members of colonial society

– Life for slaves in Upper South (Maryland, Virginia, Albermarle region of North Carolina)

– Paternalism

• Task system

• Gullah

Slavery in the Chesapeake and South Carolina

After 1700 planters in Virginia and Maryland imported thousands of slaves and created a "slave society."

Slavery was increasingly defined in racial terms; in Virginia virtually all resident Africans were declared slaves.

Living conditions in Maryland and Virginia allowed slaves to live relatively long lives.

By the middle of the 1700s, American-born slaves formed a majority among Chesapeake blacks.

The slave population in South Carolina suffered many deaths and had few births; therefore, the importation of new slaves "re-africanized" the black population.

There were no American colonies in which any one African people or language became dominant

African American Community

The acquisition of a common language and a more equal gender ratio were prerequisite for the creation of an African American community.

As enslaved blacks forged a new identity in America, their lives continued to be shaped by their African past.

African creativity was limited because slaves were denied education and had few material goods.

Slaves who resisted their rigorous work routine were punished with bodily harm, including amputation.

Regional Differentiation (cont)

• Utilized gang system to supervise slaves

• A small percentage of slaves learned skills

• Encouraged family life among slaves

– Life for slaves in Lower South (from Cape Fear in North Carolina through South Carolina and eventually Georgia)

• Utilized task system of slave supervision

• Relied on white artisans for manufactured products

• Slaves in deep South slower to assimilate into the British world

As the southern colonies became slave societies, life changed for whites as well as blacks.

As men lived longer, patriarchy within the fam ily reappeared.

The planter elite exercised authority over yeomen and black slaves.

To prevent rebellion, the southern gentry paid attention to the concerns of middling and poor whites.

By 1770 the majority of English Chesapeake families owned a slave, giving them a stake in the exploitive labor system.

6. Taxes were gradually reduced for the poorer whites, and poor yeomen and some tenants were allowed to vote.

7. In return, the planter elite expected the yeomen and tenants to elect them to office and defer to their power.

By the 1720s the gentry took on the trappings of wealth, modeling themselves after the English aristocracy.

The profits of the South Atlantic system helped form an increasingly well-educated, refined, and stable ruling class.

Men who migrated to the colonies escaped many traditional constraints, including lack of land.

Parents with small farms who could not provide their sons and daughters with land placed them as indentured servants.

When indentures ended, some propertyless sons climbed from laborer to tenant to freeholder.

Farm Property: Inheritance

Children in successful farm families received a “marriage portion.”

Parents chose their children’s partners because the family’s prosperity depended on it.

Brides relinquished ownership of their land and property to their husbands.

Fathers had a cultural duty to provide inheritances for their children.

Farmers created whole communities composed of independent property owners.

The Crisis of Freehold Society

With each generation the population of New England doubled, mostly from natural increase.

Parents had less land to give their children, so they had less control over their children’s lives.

By using primitive methods of birth control, many families were able to have fewer children.

Families petitioned the government for land grants and hacked new farms out of the forests.

Land was used more productively; crops of wheat and barley were replaced with high yielding potatoes and corn.

Gradually New England changed from a grain to a livestock economy.

A system of community exchange helped preserve the freeholder ideal.

Economic Growth and Social Inequality

The Middle Atlantic: Toward a New Society, 1720–1765

Mid-Atlantic Colonies:the “Best Poor Man’s Country”

Fertile lands and long growing seasons attracted migrants to the Middle Atlantic and profits gained from grain exports financed their rapid settlement.

The manorial lords of New York’s Hudson River Valley attracted tenants by granting long leases and the right to sell their improvements, such as barns and houses, to the next tenant.

Inefficient farm implements kept most tenants from saving enough to acquire freehold farmsteads.

Rural Pennsylvania and New Jersey were initially marked by relative economic equality.

The rise of the wheat trade and an influx of poor settlers created social divisions, resulting in a new class of agricultural capitalists.

By the 1760s, one-half of all white men in the Middle Atlantic owned no property.

Merchants and artisans took advantage of the supply of labor and organized an “outwork” manufacturing system.

As colonies became crowded and socially divided, farm families feared a return to peasant status.

The middle colonies were a patchwork of ethnically and religiously diverse communities.

Migrants tried to preserve their cultural identities by marrying within their own ethnic groups or maintaining the customs of their native lands.

Cultural Diversity

Quakers, the dominant social group in Pennsylvania, were pacifists who dealt peaceably with Native Americans and condemned slavery.

The Quaker vision attracted many Germans fleeing war, religious persecution, and poverty.

Germans guarded their language and cultural heritage, encouraging their children to marry within the community.

Emigrants from Ireland formed the largest group of incoming Europeans.

Most were Presbyterian Scots-Irish who had faced discrimination and economic regulation in Ireland.

Thousands of Scots-Irish sailed for Philadelphia beginning in the 1720s, first moving to central Pennsylvania and southward down the Shenandoah Valley into Maryland and Virginia.

The Scots-Irish also held onto their culture by holding firm to the Presbyterian faith.

Most pluralistic region of North America from the start

Ireland and Germany main sources of immigrants after 1720

– Ulster

– Germans often arrived as “redemptioners”

New immigrants populated backcountry and created distinct society there

– Violent, heavy drinking

– Hated Indians

Religious Identity and Political Conflict

German ministers criticized the separation of church and state in Pennsylvania, believing the church needed legal power to enforce morality.

Religious sects in Pennsylvania enforced moral behavior through communal self-discipline.

Communal sanctions sustained a self-contained and prosperous Quaker community.

In the 1750s, the Scots-Irish Presbyterians challenged the Quaker political dominance by demanding a more aggressive Indian policy.

Many German migrants opposed the Quakers because they were denied fair representation in the assembly and wanted laws that respected their inheritance customs.

The region’s cultural and religious diversity prefigured the ethnic and social conflicts that would characterize much of American society in the centuries to come.

New England: A Faltering Economy and Paper Money

Economy weakened after colonial wars ended in 1713

– Wheat blast

Molasses act of 1733

– Imposed tax on West Indies molasses

– Increased bribery and smuggling

Region made its mark on Atlantic commerce through shipbuilding

Massachusetts invented fiat money in 1690

– Problems with depreciation

Anglicizing Provincial America

Influence of newspapers and the printed word

– Few settlers owned books

– Newspaper printing widespread in the colonies by 1700s

• John Peter Zenger

• Seditious libel

• Benjamin Franklin at the Pennsylvania Gazette began branching out to other sources and original works

Spread of Enlightenment values through the colonies

– Found ready audience among colonial elites

Rise of professions

– Emergence of trained lawyers and doctors also helped to spread Enlightenment ideas through the colonies

The Enlightenment and the Great Awakening, 1740–1765

The Enlightenment in America

Many early Americans believed in folk wisdom while others relied on a religion that believed that Earth was the center of the universe and that God intervened directly and continuously in all kinds of human affairs.

In the century between Newton’s Principia Mathematica (1687) and the French Revolution in 1789, the philosophers of the European Enlightenment used empirical research and scientific reasoning to study all aspects of life, including social institutionsand human behavior.

The Enlightenment in America

Enlightenment thinkers advanced four fundamental principles:

– the law like order of the natural world

– the power of human reason

– the natural rights of individuals (including the right to self-government)

– and the progressive improvement of society.

John Locke, 1632-1704, Englishphilosopher, political theorist, and founder of Empiricism

John Locke proposed that lives were not fixed but could be changed through education and purposeful action.

In Locke’s Two Treatises on Government, he advanced the theory that political authority was not divinely ordained but rather sprang from social compacts people made to preserve their natural rights to life, liberty, and property.

The function of the state is to protect the natural rights of its citizens, primarily to protect the right to property.

Society is rational, tolerant, and cooperative.

The social contract is an implicit agreement between all members of a society to respect a legal authority, a supreme sovereign, so as to enable the pursuit of happiness.

In his Two Treatises of Government he advocated removing a ruler who fails to live up to his end of the social contract

– this had a great deal of influence on the intellectuals who spawned the American Revolution

European Enlightenment ideas began to affect influential colonists’ beliefs about science, religion, and politics.

Some influential colonists, including inventor and printer Benjamin Franklin, turned to deism, the belief that God had created the world to run in accordance with the laws of nature and natural reason without his intervention.

The Enlightenment added a secular dimension to colonial intellectual life.

Georgia: The Failure of an Enlightenment Utopia

Founded in 1733 as experiment in Enlightenment belief in social improvement

– James Oglethorpe

Land would be given away rather than sold

Founders planned to produce silk and wine, items no other colony had yet succeeded in producing

Banned slavery and hard liquor

In practice, the experiment failed miserably

– Land unsuited for planned crops

– Settlers demanded access to alcohol

– Gradually came to accept need to use slave labor

The Great Awakening

Swept Protestant world in 1730s and early 1740s

– Evangelical

Emphasis on personal conversion experience

– Revival

– Presbytery and Synod

More women than men experienced conversion

Split established denominations

– Evangelical and non-evangelical sects

Gave rise to Baptists, Methodists, and other evangelical denominations

Spawned founding of several new colleges

– George Whitefield

Resulted in religious transformation of America

American Pietism and the Great Awakening

While educated Americans turned to deism, other colonists turned to Pietism, which came to America with German migrants in the 1720s and sparked a religious revival.

Pietism emphasized pious behavior, religious emotion, and the striving for a mystical union with God

In Pennsylvania and New Jersey, the Dutch minister Theodore Jacob Frelinghuysen preached rousing, emotional sermons to German settlers

in New England, Jonathan Edwards did the same for Congregational churches in the Connecticut River Valley

Beginning in 1739, the compelling George Whitefield, a follower of John Wesley’s preaching style, transformed local revivals into a “Great Awakening.”

Hundreds of colonists felt the “New Light” of God’s grace and were eager to spread Whitefield’s message throughout their communities.

Religious Upheaval in the North

Conservative, or “Old Light,” ministers condemned the emotional preaching of traveling “New Light” ministers for their emotionalism and their allowing women to speak in public.

In Connecticut, traveling preachers were prohibited from speaking to established congregations without the ministers’ consent.

Some farmers, women, and artisans condemned the Old Lights as “unconverted” sinners.

The Awakening undermined support of traditional churches and challenged their tax supported status; “separatist” churches were founded that favored the separation of church and state.

The Awakening gave a new sense of religious authority to many colonists through its challenge to the authority of ministers and reaffirmed communal values as it questioned the pursuit of wealth.

One tangible and lasting product of the Awakening was the founding of colleges — such as Princeton, Rutgers, Columbia, and Brown — to train ministers for various denominations.

The true intellectual legacy of the Awakening was not education for the few but a new sense of religious — and ultimately political —authority among the many.

Social and Religious Conflict in the South

The Great Awakening in the South challenged both the dominance of the Church of England and the planter elite.

The social authority of the Virginia gentry was threatened as freeholders left the established church for New Light revivals.

Religious pluralism threatened the government’s ability to impose taxes to support the established church.

Anglicans closed down Presbyterian meeting houses to prevent the spread of the New Light doctrine.

During the 1760s, many poorer Virginians were drawn to enthusiastic Baptist revivals, where even slaves were welcome.

The gentry reacted violently to the Baptist threat to their social authority and way of life, though Baptist congregations continued to multiply.

The revival in the Chesapeake did not bring radical changes to the social order; Baptist men kept church authority in the hands of "free born male members."

As Baptist ministers spread Christianity among slaves, the revival helped to shrink

the cultural gulf between blacks and whites, undermining one justification for slavery and giving blacks a new religious identity.

Political Culture in the Colonies

Came to resemble English politics, adopting values that took hold after the Glorious Revolution

Important powers vested in colonial assemblies

– Patronage

Suffrage more widespread than in England

Dominance of “country” ideas in the South

– Politics of harmony

– Tensions remained in Maryland

Dominance of “Court” principles in North

– Governors sought to keep the peace by rewarding all factions and groups

The triumph of the South Atlantic system changed the politics of empire. The British were content to rule the colonies with a gentle hand.

American representative assemblies wished to limit the powers of the crown and maintain their authority over taxes.

The colonial legislatures gradually won partial control of the budget and the appointment of local officials.

The rising power of the colonial assemblies created an elitist rather than a democratic political system.

Neither elitist assemblies nor wealthy property owners could impose unpopular edicts on the people.

Crowd actions were a regular part of political life in America and were used to enforce community values.

By the 1750s most colonies had representative political institutions that were responsive to popular pressure and increasingly immune to British control.

Salutary Neglect

"Salutary neglect," more relaxed royal supervision of internal colonial affairs, was a by product of the political system developed by Sir Robert Walpole.

Radical Whigs argued that Walpole used patronage and bribery to create a strong Crown Party.

Renewal of Imperial Conflict

The French and Indian “republics”

Stono Rebellion, 1739

– Rebellion south of Charleston

– Stemmed from Spanish promises of freedom to any slave who reached Florida

Raised fears of Spanish treachery

War of Jenkin’s Ear, 1741–1742

– Conflict between Spain and England over Atlantic coast supremacy

– Inconclusive; large losses on both sides

King George’s War, 1744–1747

– France joined Spain in its battle with England and the colonists

– Ended with Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748

The Stono rebellion in South Carolina was the largest slave uprising of the eighteenth century.

White militiamen killed many of the Stono rebels and dispersed the rest, preventing a general uprising.

Stono Rebellion

Slave Rebellion and Revolution

Collective (group) actions also included running away together, but could also mean organized rebellion.

Most important rebellions:

– Stono Rebellion, South Carolina, 1739

– New York City, 1712, 1741

– Gabriel’s Rebellion, Richmond, 1800

– Vesey’s Rebellion, Charleston, 1822

– Nat Turner, Virginia, 1830

• Religious prophet led revolt of 60 slaves

• Killed 55 whites

War of Jenkin’s Ear

To resist British expansion, Spanish naval forces sparked the War of Jenkins's Ear in 1739.

Walpole used this provocation to launch a predatory war against Spain's American Empire.

The War of Jenkins's Ear became a part of a general European conflict bringing a new threat from France

Militiamen captured the French naval fortress of Louisbourg but had to return it at war's end in 1748.

Colonial merchants took advantage of a loop hole in the Navigation Acts that allowed Americans to own ships and transport goods.

King George’s War

a precursor to the French and Indian War (1754-63), and an outgrowth of British and French antagonisms in the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-48).

The War for North America

French and Indian (Seven Years War), 1756–1763

– Origins in desire of English colonists to expand west

• Led to clashes with both the French and the Indians

– Colonies not united

• 1754 plans for joint action at Albany Congress failed

Irregular war

– Fort Duquesne

• Washington and Braddock

– War went initially against British

• William Pitt

– Colonist forces changed course of war

• Canada surrendered after fall of Montreal in 1760

The French and Indian War Becomes a War for Empire

Indians, who in 1750 still controlled the interior of North America, used their control of the fur trade to bargain with both the British and the French.

The Iroquois strategy of playing off the French against the British was breaking down as European resentment of the costs of "gifts" of arms and money rose.

Indian alliances crumbled in the face of escalating Anglo-American demands for land.

The Ohio Company obtained a royal grant of 200,000 acres along the upper Ohio River —land controlled by Indians.

To counter Britain’s movement into the Ohio Valley, the French set up a series of forts.

The French seized George Washington and his men as they tried to support the Ohio Company’s claim to the land.

Britain dispatched forces to America, where they joined with the colonial militia in attacking French forts.

In June 1755, British and New England troops captured Fort Beauséjour in colonial

Nova Scotia (Acadia) and deported 10,000 French Catholic Acadians to France, Louisiana, or the West Indies.

In July, General Edward Braddock and his British and colonial troops were soundly defeated by a small group of French and Indians at Fort Duquesne.

By 1756, the fighting in America had spread to Europe, where it arrayed France, Spain, and Austria against Britain and Prussia in a conflict known as the Seven Years' War in Europe and the French and Indian War in the colonies.

Britain saw France as its main obstacle to further expansion in profitable overseas trading.

William Pitt, a committed expansionist, planned to cripple France by attacking its colonies.

The fall of Quebec, the heart of France's American empire, was the turning point of the war.

The British in India, West Africa, the French sugar islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe, the Spanish colonies in Cuba, and the Philippines seized French trade and territory.

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Conquest of Canada, 1758–1760Web

The Treaty of Paris of 1763 granted British sovereignty over half the continent of North America; French territory was reduced to a handful of islands in the West Indies and two islands off the coast of Newfoundland.

– Major British/Colonial victory

– Peace of Paris in 1763

• France surrendered North America east of the Mississippi, except for New Orleans, to England

• Spain ceded Florida to England

• France gave Louisiana west of the Mississippi and New Orleans to Spain

• Western Indians, whose lands were being transferred, were not consulted

Cherokee War

In an effort to take advantage of the great burden of England’s war with France, southern Indians commenced the Cherokee War, while the Spanish intervened in the South.

The Cherokee War was fought from 1759 to 1761 between Cherokee Native Americans and settlers along the western borders of Virginia and the Carolinas. The Cherokee became British allies as the result of a treaty negotiated in 1730.

In 1758 they assisted in capture of the Fort Duquesne, a French stronghold on the site of present-day Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but on the road home they quarreled with the Virginian and Carolinian settlers. Several people were killed on both sides. Cherokee chiefs went to Charleston, West Virginia, to settle the dispute but were badly treated by the governor.

An armed force of settlers were sent against the Cherokee, although only a few Native American hostages were taken when it was found that the Cherokee were ready for war. Soon after, the hostages were murdered by the settlers and the Cherokee went to war in earnest. It was not until June 1761 that the Cherokee began negotiations for peace.

Britain's victory also alarmed Indian peoples who feared an influx of Anglo-American settlers.

In 1763, the Ottawa chief Pontiac led a group of loosely confederated tribes in a major uprising known as "Pontiac's rebellion" against the British, capturing many British garrisons and killing or capturing over 2,000 settlers.

Pontiac

The Indian alliance gradually weakened, and they accepted the British as their new political "fathers.“

In return, the British established the Proclamation Line of 1763 barring settlers from going west of the Appalachians.

British Economic Growth and the Consumer Revolution

Britain had unprecedented economic resources and, by 1750, its combination of strong commerce and industry made it the most powerful nation in the world.

The new machines and business practices of the Industrial Revolution allowed Britain to sell goods at lower prices, particularly in the mainland colonies.

Americans paid for British imports by increasing their exports of wheat, rice, and tobacco.

The Peace of Paris of 1763 marked the pinnacle of the first British Empire. Britain gained control over half the North American continent, including French Canada, all French territorial claims east of the Mississippi River, and Spanish Florida. In return, Britain gave Cuba and the Philippines back to Spain, and France compensated its Spanish ally for the loss of Florida by giving it title to all of Louisiana west of the Mississippi River.

As the colonists of provincial America struggled to secure more land and greater security, they created a socially stratified society of richer and poorer, ins and outs that increasingly resembled England through the eighteenth century. The costs and consequences of a succession of imperial struggles set the stage for the demise of the empire.