One of the first acts of King Charles II upon the Stuart Restoration was to punish those responsible for his father’s beheading. With their own necks on the line, two of the late king’s judges fled to New England. Charles II ordered their arrest and return, but colonial officials enabled them to escape to the wilderness of Connecticut. Irate at the colonials, Charles II began to take steps that would fundamentally alter the relationship between Britain and New England, and Massachusetts in particular. He ordered that the colonials take a new oath of allegiance to him, that the crown review all laws and legal proceedings of the Massachusetts General Court, and that members of the Church of England have free and equal rights of worship, as well as political rights in the colony.

The leaders of the Massachusetts colony ignored the King’s demand and delayed its implementation. The colony won a reprieve as the King’s attention was diverted by a war with the Dutch and by the rebuilding after the Great Fire of London in 1666. But Massachusetts could not avoid the King’s authority forever.

Political-Economy after the Restoration

With complete political control over the colonies out of its reach, the crown focused on controlling the colonial economy. The last half of the seventeenth century witnessed significant expansion of the colonial economy.

Not only did the Chesapeake find its staple cash crop—tobacco—but it also found a stable labor source in black slaves.

New England began to develop its economy as a growing merchant sea power—a shipbuilding industry and merchants keeping close ties to the West Indies trade and developing the controversial “triangular trade” in “molasses to rum to slaves.”

Finally, with the taking of New Netherland and creation of the proprietary colonies of the mid-Atlantic and South all colonies, save Georgia, were firmly established by 1700 and more than a quarter of a million souls resided in British colonial America. The population and economic growth caused the British government to take a much closer look a what the colonies could do for the mother country.

Wealth = power

Gain wealth through trade/commerce

Improve “balance of trade”

Increase exports and decrease imports

Create colonies

Control the colonial economy

Navigation Acts

As early as Hakluyt’s Discourse on Western Planting, Britons saw the economic value of creating colonies. By the mid-seventeenth century, the idea had developed into a full-fledged economic theorem, called mercantilism. A mercantile is a store; the key element of mercantilism is trade. England established its empire to produce the goods needed to make it “self-sufficient”: colonies supplied England with needed raw resources and a ready market for English industrial goods, making the country richer and more powerful.

The English believed that the colonies should provide England with raw resources--furs, lumber, and fish--as well as a market for English manufactured goods.

Beginning in 1651, Parliament passed laws to ensure this symbiotic relationship between the colonies and the mother country, implementing a regulatory system under the Navigation Acts of 1651. This law excluded nearly all foreign shipping from English and colonial trade. It required that all goods imported into England or into the colonies arrive on English ships and that at least half the crew be English. Goods produced in Europe that could not be duplicated in England or the colonies were excluded from the act.

Charles II, upon restoration in 1660, expanded the Navigation Acts. Crews had to be 3/4 English. Moreover, certain enumerated goods, such as tobacco, sugar, indigo, and ginger could not be shipped outside of an English-English colony trade system.

In 1704, rice and molasses were added to the list of enumerated goods; in 1705, naval stores--tar, lumber, barrel staves; in 1721--copper and furs. In 1729, the list of naval stores was expanded.

The Staple Act of 1663 meanwhile, gave England a monopoly on the sale of European manufactured goods to the colonies. This enabled England to tax the goods and protected British manufacturers from foreign competition. It also guaranteed a market in America for British-made goods.

The crown also established a new bureaucracy to implement the policy. It created the Lords of Trade and Plantations in 1675. The committee was ineffective, for the most part, because of understaffing and distance. Colonials frequently flouted the laws, smuggling goods from the West Indian holdings of Spain and France. Then it was overwhelmed by the tensions that led to the Glorious Revolution. But it did establish a framework for British control that would follow during the reign of King William.

Though many historians have painted the Navigation Acts as pernicious, they actually allowed for some sense of rationality to invade the economy. One must remember that this was a time of great volatility in the economy. Unstable markets and production, and a chronic money shortage left the economy in perpetual cycles of boom and bust. Crops and ships were at the mercy of weather. In the West Indies, sugar crops were often destroyed by ocean storms; blights and droughts damaged crops on the mainland. Over-production often existed: as planters watched tobacco prices rise more leapt into tobacco production, and so increased supply that prices plummeted. Just as the laws created a market for British goods in America, they ensured a market for colonial produce in the mother country.

Boom and Bust Cycle:The South Sea Bubble

Between 1675 and 1689, a power struggle developed between the colonies and mother country, as well as between the powerful and powerless within the colonies. Five rebellions occurred, involving each of the four colonial regions. Each of the rebellions had causes particular to their colony, but they also reflected a struggle to answer the question: “Who’s in charge.”

We have looked at Bacon’s Rebellion already. Other challenges to the governing authority occurred in North Carolina, Maryland, New York, and New England.

In North Carolina, John Culpeper led a gang of farmers in trying to stop government officials from collecting tariffs. As noted earlier, the Duke of Albemarle incorporated the colony in the early 1660s. By 1666, a General Assembly was created and small settlements dotted the coast from Wilmington to the Dismal Swamp.

From the outset, the colony saw a wide discrepancy of wealth between the powerful and powerless. But a general lack of authority in the colony offered opportunity for all manner of failed farmers, businessmen, and tradesmen, as well as scamps on the make and even pirates such as the famous Blackbeard, to flock to the region. It seems the colony’s inhabitants preferred liberty to order, exhibiting a fierce independence and distaste for law that would make North Carolinians the first to declare their separation from England one hundred years later. Indeed, even the colonial governors were famous for their hard-drinking, violent tendencies, and economic corruption.

In 1677, when colonial leaders who had been losing money on their venture since founding tried to end smuggling of tobacco and to force payment of tariffs Culpeper and his followers rose up in rebellion. What Culpeper’s Rebellion lacks in altruism it makes up for in confusion. It is named for a former surveyor-general from the southern settlements, but it really was a conflict between several factions all fighting each other. Culpeper and his men seized the government to stop collection of taxes, jailed the acting governor, and petitioned England for support. Culpeper governed for two years in relative calm as England delayed action. By 1680, the rebellion was over, the proprietors were back in control, and settlers went back to their business of avoiding authority.

Even as New Englanders fought King Philip’s War, Britain undertook to enforce the Navigation Acts which hitherto had not been enforced in New England.

The Lords of Trade sent Edward Randolph to Massachusetts as customs inspector and comptroller of revenues. Colonials admitted that the laws needed to be enforced but argued that the General Court should enforce them. Allowing the Lords to tax them, they reasoned, would negate their right to self-government and would nullify the original charter. That it seems was Britain’s plan; so Randolph rejected the argument. That Massachusetts had begun coining its own money further upset Randolph.

In his report to the king, Randolph suggested that Massachusetts was invading the king’s prerogatives. James, Duke of York, had a suspicious mind and was the real master of the English colonies convinced Charles II of the threat.

Conditions between crown and colony worsened until James had the Lords revoke the Massachusetts Bay Company’s charter. Making matters worse was that as the news about the charter reached Massachusetts in 1685 added to it was news of the death of Charles II. Since Charles left no legitimate heir James II came to the throne.

King James II moved quickly to re-establish the power of the monarchy in England and in the colonies.

To stifle the independent thoughts of Massachusetts, James established a new entity to unite and govern the entire region, the Dominion of New England, under his absolute authority.

The move made sense administratively. The colonies held certain interests in common, notably defense against the Indians and inter-colonial trade, and having one government would help create a better organization. It benefited Britain’ mercantilist objectives.

But important differences among the colonies also existed. Each had developed distinct political and social cultures. New York had a diverse polity of Europeans, Indians, and Africans. It had a social and economic structure that borrowed heavily from the European manorial model. Rhode Island existed as a counterpoint to strict Puritan authority. Connecticut and New Hampshire were tiny. Massachusetts, meanwhile, was founded by two groups who had expressly rejected the kind of royal authority James was imposing on them; self-governance in the New England town was the essence of the colonial character.

James II’s agent, Governor-General Edmund Andros, arrived in Boston in December 1686. Even had Andros not been overly authoritarian, he would have faced a discontented citizenry; but Andros’ officiousness and the excesses of King James II back in England combined to create the short and very unhappy history of the Dominion of New England.Older, larger, and more independent minded, Massachusetts bristled at the new regime. Andros tried to appease the colony by guaranteeing that laws enacted by the General Court and not in direct violation of new principles would remain in effect, but in areas of taxation, representation, and religion the citizens found his authority unacceptable.

One of Andros’ first acts was to levy new taxes. Relative to taxes in England, the taxes were not onerous but the colonials had always had the right to tax themselves. When citizens published handbills protesting the measures, Andros appointed a censor to block any pamphlets on public affairs that the Dominion government found offensive.

Most troubling for citizens of Massachusetts was the plan to establish the authority of the Church of England. He turned the South Meeting House into an Anglican church. He required all marriages to be “solemnized” by an Anglican minister. When a prominent minister preached against the new regime, he was arrested and denied a writ of habeas corpus informing him of the charges. When challenged on it, Andros responded, “The scabbard of an English redcoat shall quickly signify as much as a justice of the peace!”

Andros’ plan to negate property agreements with the Indians represented the final straw for the colonials. The Indians had sold land to the settlers and signed deeds or provided some tribal symbol to record the deal. Andros rejected all the sales until he reviewed them. Andros and the crown took complete authority even over property, making the “freemen” of Massachusetts and the other colonies merely tenants of the king’s land. The colonials protested, but events in England soon overwhelmed all other issues and brought an end to the tenure of Edmund Andros.

James II, an avowed Roman Catholic, began to exploit his royal prerogatives to enhance Catholic influence in government. “We cannot but heartily wish,” the king declared, “that all the people of our dominions were members of the Catholic Church.”

The king’s excesses caused England’s latent political factions to develop into the more clearly defined Court Party (King’s Court; a.k.a Tories) and Country Party (Parliament; a.k.a. Whigs). When James remarried, a French Catholic woman who was “with child,” his opponents in Parliament saw a future of bloody religious conflict. They rebelled, soliciting the aid of the Dutch husband of James’ daughter Mary, William of Orange. Armed with the promise of the kingdom, William and his troops landed to “rescue Protestantism.” Within six weeks, James fled to France and the bloodless Glorious Revolution of 1688 ended. William became King William III and his wife Queen Mary II.

Rock-a-bye Baby, on the treetop, When the wind blows the cradle will rock,

When the bough breaks the cradle will fall, And down will come baby, cradle and all.

When Andros learned of the overthrow of James II, he had the messenger thrown in jail. But the news could not be contained and neither could the wrath of colonials. Bostonians wrote a declaration of Andros’ “crimes” and arrested him and other of James’ agents. Andros tried to escape, but was shipped back to England for hearings there. The Massachusetts General Court reconvened as the government of the colony and petitioned the new regime for restoration of their charter. King William appointed a governor friendly to the colonials, Sir William Phips, but Massachusetts remained a royal colony.

The Glorious Revolution bred other conflicts in America, as colonials challenged James’ authority. In Maryland, a long-running tension between the Protestant majority and the ruling Catholic minority erupted as the largely-Congregationalist Protestant Association took advantage of William’s ascension. It petitioned the new king suggesting that the Calverts were plotting to give the colony to the French. The crown revoked the family’s charter, establishing Maryland as a royal colony. The Calverts were restored to power in the colony in 1715, by which time the family had converted to Anglicanism, but the king had to approve any governmental appointments and all legislation.

When word of the Glorious Revolution reached New York, Andros’ lieutenant, Francis Nicholson, ordered Manhattan’s garrison fortified with militiamen under the pretext that the French might invade the colony in retaliation for James’ ouster. Many of the militia believed that Nicholson really intended to use the military to impose Catholic rule over them. Jacob Leisler led a revolt that proclaimed the colony for the new king and queen. Supporters of King James fled to Albany and held out there until a French attack actually did occur, the attack that would grow into King William’s War. In December 1689, King William blessed the rebellion, telling Leisler to “stay in his post.”

Leisler governed Manhattan and parts of downstate New York for two years until a royal governor arrived in 1691. While in power, he convened a representative assembly that reformed many of the most obvious political and economic evils. He initiated the collection of customs duties and organized a military expedition against Canada.

By May 1691, Leisler’s support had ebbed. He refused to give up control, but was quickly overwhelmed. He and his son-in-law were tried and hanged for treason. Among his chief opponents were members of the Livingston family who would come to govern New York and represent it at the continental congresses during the revolutionary era.

Although wrapped up in larger geo-political and imperial issues, Leisler’s, Bacon’s, and Culpeper’s Rebellions, and the Protestant Association exposed a deep rift between those in power and those out of power, between an economic and/or social ruling elite and the populace. Each colony had to accommodate the rights and interests of the many as well as the few if it was going to survive and prosper.

They did not evince a desire to overthrow British rule, as each of the colonies willingly submitted to the new regime, indeed when Virginia established the second college in the colonies (after Harvard, 1636) in 1693, it was named the College of William and Mary.

The Glorious Revolution occurred as Europe, and particularly Britain, was experiencing an important change in world-view. Known as the “English Enlightenment,” it reflected the advance of the scientific revolution that had been ongoing for more than a century.

The most important scientist of the revolution was Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727). Newton went to Cambridge University, excelling in physics, theoretical mathematics, and optics. A devout Christian, he was also interested in metaphysics and alchemy. Newton came up with his basic theories of physics at the age of 24, but could not prove them. Twenty years later, he developed theoretical proofs for his “laws of physics.” Working day and night, seldom stopping to eat the meals brought to him, breaking away only to teach his classes. A year before the Glorious Revolution, Newton published Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, or more commonly the Principia. The most important laws included a definition of a law of gravity and his three laws of motion.

The scientific revolution bred new approaches to other elements of life, including politics. The most important political thinker of the English Enlightenment is John Locke (1632-1704). The eldest son of a respectable Somersetshire Puritan family, Locke’s formative years were surrounded by religious and political tension. He was strongly influenced by the events of the English Civil War and Interregnum. Freedom of thought and to a lesser degree action became the foundation on which he built his philosophy. Two works by Locke stand out: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690); and Two Treatises of Government (1690).

First, and paramount, in Locke’s view of political society is the idea that mankind at the beginning of time were free and endowed with certain natural rights: life, liberty, and property. It was in a complete state of nature, free from obligation, free to do whatever they chose to do.

While this state of nature had its advantages, it was not satisfactory for the maintenance of a sustained existence. Nature is dangerous because the strong can devour the weak. One’s life, liberty, or property were constantly at risk. Locke’s predecessor, Thomas Hobbes, described life in a state of nature as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

To survive, men joined together in the spirit of community to protect their rights. They left a state of nature and created government. Man kept his freedoms--the right freely to pursue property, the right to mobility, and the right to life. But his freedoms were not absolute. By joining society, man had to conform to the will of that society’s laws. This is, in a sense, a contract between individual man and society: a social contract.

To this point, Locke is not radically different from his predecessor Hobbes. Where the two part company is over what happens if the contract is broken not by man, but by government. Locke’s answer is that in such times man has a right to revolt against the government. The revolution is a conservative one, however: to restore the community to the original terms of the contract.

Locke’s writing is a justification of the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding is an inquiry into “the original, certainty, and extent of human knowledge.” In other words, Locke wanted to know how men think and how they come to “know” or “understand” things. It arose out of a debate between Locke and his friends over the “principles of morality and revealed religion” as related to questions of faith and reason.

According to Locke, “we are of necessity ignorant, and want knowledge of all sorts, where we want ideas . . . we are ignorant, and want rational knowledge, where we want proofs . . . we want probability to direct our assent in matters where we have neither knowledge of our own nor testimony of others to bottom our reason upon.”

“I find every sect, as far as reason will help them, make use of it gladly: and where it fails them, they cry out, It is matter of faith and above reason.” John Locke

Because we lack physical certainty in religious questions, there is religious conflict—one opinion battling another. “For till it be resolved how far we are guided by reason, and how far by faith,” he argues, “we shall in vain dispute, and endeavor to convince one another in matters of religion.”

Thus, we have the distinction between what is knowable and what is only suspected or taken on faith. Part of the appeal of the Puritan faith at its inception was its resolution of reason and piety. As we can see by Locke’s discussion, however, that balance was beginning to break down. Locke’s resolution of the problem, his emphasis on reason over faith, satisfied many of the more educated in the colonies, such as Jonathan Edwards. But it left the masses cold; they preferred a more emotional response to the shifts occurring in society around them. The opposing trends in religion merged into an often contradictory movement during the 1730s and 40s—the Great Awakening.

European War Major Participants

Colonial War Dates Treaty

War of the League of Augsburg

England & Holland vs.

France

King William’s War

1689-1697

Treaty of Ryswick

(1697)

War of the Spanish

Succession

England, Austria & Holland

vs. France & Spain

Queen Anne’s War

1701-1713

Treaty of Utrecht

(1713)

War of the Austrian

Succession

England & Austria

vs. France & Prussia

King George’s War

1744-1748

Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle

(1748)

Seven Years’ War

England & Prussia

vs. France, Spain, Austria,

& Russia

French and Indian War

1754-1763

Treaty of Paris

(1763)

European Wars Also Fought In North America

King William’s War, (1689-1697): A tie, the French take English territories of Newfoundland and Hudson Bay, and England gets Gibraltar at the entrance of the Mediterranean Sea.

Queen Anne’s War, (1701-13): Colonists from Charleston destroy St. Augustine. New Englanders attack Quebec, but fail to take it. England regains Hudson Bay, Acadia, and Newfoundland.

King George’s War, (1744-48): As a world war, it is a tie. In North America, England took a major French fort, Louisburg, showing her naval dominance and paving the way for an assault on Quebec.

The wars with France left the British government deep in debt. As Chancellor of the Exchequer, Robert Walpole had devised methods to keep the British treasury solvent, including creating a “Sinking Fund” through which to pay down (but not pay off) the debt from Queen Anne’s War. The debt was one of the causes of the South Sea Bubble in 1720.

The debt and the economic collapse forced Walpole, now Prime Minister, to find ways to cut spending. In 1723, he created the policy called Salutary Neglect. It relaxed enforcement of the Navigation Acts and allowed the colonial economy to run along essentially unregulated. But the loosening of oversight had broader effects on the colonies than just economic. The colonies grew closer together and developed a sense of identity different from England.

Salutary Neglect ended with the French and Indian War when, Britain started controlling the colonies by imposing new economic regulations, taxes, and restrictions on movement.

During the brief time of unsupervised growth, the colonies experienced a Great Awakening and the Enlightenment. When it was abruptly ended, it caused a groundswell of opposition that would eventually grow into an American Independence movement.

Many elements combined to create the revival movement of the mid-1700s known as the Great Awakening. Beginning in New England, many people believed that churches no longer met their spiritual needs. Many preachers, meanwhile, were frightened by the lack of piety among the citizens, especially on the frontier. Religious tensions had occurred before, in New England particularly, but this time it seemed the masses were rejecting the “city upon the hill” altogether.

The Great Awakening

Church membership had never been easy to obtain. It was important, however, because many of the rights of citizens derived from church membership. Additionally, much of the orderliness of Massachusetts society derived from church membership: those outside the church were also outside the ruling structure of the colonies.

One source of tension was church membership for the unconverted. In the late 1650s, the question arose as to whether children of original church members were properly converted to Puritanism. Second generation church members had been baptized and admitted to the church on the strength of their fathers’ conversion, but few confessed their own “calling” to the church. Thus, the question arose as to whether the children of these unconverted should be baptized and admitted to the congregation.

In 1657, the issue reached a head and a group of ministers met to see if they could come to some agreement over the matter. Confirmed in 1662, the agreement was known as the half-way covenant: unconverted members could transmit membership to their children, but the membership only went “halfway;” children would be baptized, but not take communion. And as adults, they would not be allowed to vote; halfway members had to pledge to obey the church and to raise their children as Christians; they also sat separated from full church members.

Slowly over time, the halfway distinctions disappeared. The blurring of the line troubled conservatives who fretted over the decay of the church. So what had been an unstable compromise became even less satisfactory, particularly after some churches started inviting all congregants to take communion. To regain order, Massachusetts churches trended away from congregational authority and began to centralize, a reform that proved a move in the wrong direction.In other colonies, churches were even less capable of meeting citizens’ spiritual needs.

In Virginia, the state church was the Church of England, which tried to establish a religious orthodoxy among the settlers. Missionaries of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG) had been sent to the colonies to convert the Indians, but they soon found that their time would be better spent trying to sustain the Church of England against the rise of Scots-Irish Presbyterianism. SPG tactics caused many settlers to oppose them.

In the hyper-religious or supernatural world of colonial America, these tensions played out in eerie and often destructive ways. The witch hysteria that overtook Salem and other New England towns, in part, grew out of conflicts within congregations.

In 1734-1735, Jonathan Edwards, a Congregationalist minister from Northampton in western Massachusetts, began a rekindling of the American spirit of piety.

It is no mystery why it occurred on the extremities of the colony first. A Baptist clergyman had once called frontiersmen, “A Gang of frantic lunatics broke out of Bedlam.” Edwards stirred his audience with explicit descriptions of the torment of hell-fire and damnation. In 1737, Edwards published his account of the event, Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God.

Religious tension mingled with social unrest, natural disasters, and an apparent increase in immoral behavior to create the “Great Awakening.”

The real catalyst of the Great Awakening, however, was George Whitefield, a 27 year old Anglican minister from England.

In 1739, he arrived in Philadelphia to stir up piety. By December, he had won renown preaching to crowds of as many as 6000. He continued his tour of the colonies in Georgia and then New England.

Whitefield was a showman. He performed in the pulpit--acting out the horrors of damnation and the joy of the regenerate.

Whitefield’s meetings were so popular they often were moved outside to accommodate the audience. The core of Whitefield’s message was the idea of “new birth”--the need for a sudden and emotional moment of conversion and salvation where a sinner would testify his (or more often her) finding Christ. Imitators of Whitefield popped up all over the colonies. Itinerant preachers traveled throughout the frontier regions of the colonies to spread the word.

The Awakening caused tension between conservatives and revivalists. Presbyterians split into “Old Side” and “New Side;” Congregationalists became “New Light” or “Old Light.” Newer sects, such as Baptist and Methodist, made inroads into the colonial population. Puritanism was decimated. The balance between reason and faith broke down and piety and the emotional extravagance of the conversion experience as something beyond reason became eminent.

Jonathan Edwards led this new theology. He took a more intellectual approach than Whitefield, though. Indeed, he wrote some of the most eloquent sermons and religious tracts ever composed in America. He tried to reconcile Calvinism with the Enlightenment. In 1754, he published what might be his most important work: Of Freedom of the Will, but his best known work is a sermon entitled, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (1741).

The upheaval of the Great Awakening brought different reactions from colony to colony. In Massachusetts, backlash against the emotionalism of the revival led to the rise of the rationalist sects, such as Unitarianism. In Virginia, reaction was slower to come (1760s) but when it did arrive the “New Light” Baptists and Presbyterians began a consolidated effort to overwhelm the Church of England.

The Great Awakening affected colonial society in several ways.

First, the sects established colleges. The original three schools --Harvard (Puritan, 1636), William and Mary (Anglican, 1693), and Yale (Puritan, 1701)--did not serve colonists’ needs. Thus were founded: Presbyterian College of New Jersey (Princeton, 1746); Anglican King’s College of New York (Columbia, 1754); Baptist College of Rhode Island (Brown, 1764); Dutch Reformed Queen’s College in New Jersey (Rutgers, 1766); Congregationalist Dartmouth in New Hampshire (1769). A secular school was created in Philadelphia in 1754, known as the Philadelphia Academy, it became the University of Pennsylvania.

Secondly, territorial boundaries between churches broke down. Itinerant preachers spread sects across borders, helping to create a more national, as opposed to regional, religious culture.

Thirdly, religion became increasingly an individual choice. According to Bernard Bailyn, the Great Awakening brought the “near destruction of institutional religion as the organizing framework of small group society.”

Finally, the rise of individual conscience fostered the breakdown of the “state church.” Religious libertarians began to push for the freedom of conscience that would become a rallying cry after the revolution.

The Enlightenment, symbolized by Newton and Locke, was largely limited to the upper and the educated middle classes. It had less effect on the poor or peasantry of America than the Great Awakening. But because the upper class were politically powerful in the colonies, the Enlightenment is significant.

Beginning in the late seventeenth century, the Enlightenment did not really reach its peak in America until 1750. John Winthrop, Jr., governor of Connecticut and member of the Royal Society of London, brought the first telescope to the colonies. His grandson, John Winthrop IV (1714-1779), was also a scientist. He became Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy at Harvard where he introduced the study of calculus to the colonies. He also dabbled in astronomy, geology, chemistry, and the study of electricity. Winthrop IV, Cadwallader Colden (botany and physics), David Rittenhouse (a Philadelphia clock-maker, who built the first telescope made in America), and several other scientists and natural philosophers in 1744 joined together in the American Philosophical Society.

The Enlightenment

The most prominent member and principal founder of that organization was Benjamin Franklin.

Perhaps the smartest man in the colonies and certainly the most famous, Franklin came to embody the Enlightenment in America as a man of science and letters, and as a deist.

Franklin was born in Boston in 1706, the son of a candle and soap maker. He was apprenticed to his older brother as a printer, but at the age of seventeen he decided he'd had enough of that and ran away, finally ending up in Philadelphia.

By 1730, Franklin had established a print shop and was editor and publisher of the Pennsylvania Gazette. Colonial newspapers were the main means of getting information about local activities. But they were also a reservoir of axioms. In 1733, Franklin gathered some of these sayings, added several more and created the first almanac in the colonies.

Poor Richard's Almanac included maxims, home remedies, astrological information, an index of English monarchs, weather forecasts, and other tidbits. The almanac was revised many times. In 1748, it was expanded and called Poor Richard Improved. In each of its editions, it was enormously popular; in Franklin's words, “it was generally read, scarce any neighborhood in the province being without it.” Just a few of the proverbs Franklin collected (i.e. stole or dreamed up) include:

It is hard for an empty sack to stand upright.

The rotten apple spoils his companion.

God heals and the doctor takes the fee.

Marry your sons when you will, but your daughters when you can.

Women age from the top down.

Of particular interest to Franklin were sayings regarding economy and thrift. In 1758, he created the character of Father Abraham to deliver a sermon on frugality and the evils of idleness. The popularity of Father Abraham was astronomical. He became popular not just in the colonies. Father Abraham raised the celebrity of Franklin in England and France, as well.

Franklin retired from the printing business in 1748 to pursue his interest in science and public service.

Franklin devised many practical inventions, including: the bifocal lens (to save having to switch spectacles to read and see at a distance); the Franklin stove (a small fireplace that generated great heat with minimal fuel); swim fins that fit onto one's hands like gloves; and the odometer (to measure distance and speed up the mail) among other things.

His greatest scientific achievement, however, related to the studies of electricity and weather. His most famous experiment involved the discovery that lightning was really electrified air. He also created the lightning rod, a vitally important invention which reduced the danger of fires started by lightning hitting homes, barns, and other buildings.

His Experiments and Observations on Electricity was published in 1751.

Franklin was also a statesman and public servant. He founded the University of Pennsylvania. He helped organize the first volunteer fire department in America. He organized the financing of a sewer system and paved roads in Philadelphia. He created the first lending library in the colonies.

In 1754, he devised the Albany Plan of Union to enable the colonies better to protect themselves. Delegates met in Albany, New York, to form an alliance with the Iroquois against the French and their Huron allies; and potentially to create a new governing council for all the colonies. It was not an independence movement; it intended only to bring the colonies closer together. Some colonies thought it was a good idea, but a majority did not want to give up any power over their own affairs to another layer of government.