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Introduction: King Philip’s War
Charles Town Harbor
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Q: What was the significance of Pope's rebellion against the Spanish in New Mexico in the 1680s? A: We don't know much about Pope, who was a Pueblo Indian (at least, that is what the Spanish called those people in modern-day New Mexico in the 167080s), but we know he was named as the leader of what we call the "Pueblo revolt." He was a religious leader of the traditional Indian religion, which Spanish missionaries had worked very hard in the seventeenth century to stamp out, to convert Indians to Roman Catholicism with not very much success. But their efforts to stamp out traditional religious worship, breaking up old altars and religious sites and places of worship, and also the economic exploitation of the Indians by the Spanish settlers, eventually culminated in this Pueblo revolt of 1680 led by Pope, who managed to unite many of the Pueblo villages in a common uprising against the Spanish. In some ways it was the most successful rebellion in the colonial era because it was the only one that actually drove the Spanish out of New Mexico. The Indians managed to expel them all (there weren't that many, a few thousand) and drive them back to Mexico City, and for about twelve years there was no Spanish presence. In the 1690s the Spanish reconquered New Mexico, but Pope's rebellion is definitely an indication of the discontent and the grievances of the Pueblo Indians against both the religious and the economic practices of the Spanish in the seventeenth century. Click image to launch video
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Q: How do you make sense of the witchcraft episode in Salem? What was its social and political content? A: The Salem witch trials in the 1690s do seem very mysterious and hard to understand for modern-day readers and students. How could people have actually been executed for being accused of being witches? Nobody today believes that there are really witches, but they did believe that in the seventeenth century. Not only in Massachusetts but also in Europe, many people believed that things that went wrong in the world were the result of some magical powers. If a crop failed, if there was a terrible storm that destroyed one house but another house wasn't hurt, if somebody became ill, people didn't have a scientific explanation. They couldn't explain why does lightning strike here and not there, so they explained it by witchcraft, by magic, by some people exercising supernatural powers against their neighbors. The problem with charges of witchcraft was that they couldn't be disproved. People could confess, but in order to confess you had to prove you were really confessing: you had to name other people as witches. Most of the people accused of being witches were women, middle-aged women who had exhibited some form of independence in the society, which was not really desired by men in Puritan society. Charges of witchcraft, to some extent, became a way of keeping women under control by the society, but the whole episode totally snowballed out of control. People began naming others to save themselves. Eventually, quite a few people were executed, and finally the governor stepped in and stopped it because it was obvious that the judicial system had completely broken down. It certainly revealed tremendous tensions in the Salem society, particularly in the time when Indian warfare was rife. Many of the people involved had been living on the border where there was considerable conflict with Indians in the year or two before, and this atmosphere of fear and hysteria fueled these charges, which then snowballed out of hand. Click image to launch video
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Q: To what degree did the Glorious Revolution in England in 1688 to '89 advance ideas of rights and liberties, and what effect did this have in the American colonies? A: The Glorious Revolution in England, 1689, etc., was stimulated by fear in England that the monarch, James II, was moving toward reestablishing Catholicism, or at least giving greater toleration to Roman Catholics, which indeed he did. A group of Protestants and supporters of Parliament who didn't like the way he was governing the country brought in William of Orange in a coup d'état, basically to overthrow James and become William III. One of the things that comes immediately after that is a decree of religious toleration for Protestants; this does not include Catholics, but all Protestant groups are now going to be allowed to worship freely. Still, people who are not members of the Church of England, the official Church, still suffered certain political disabilities: they could not go to university, they could not hold public office, but in terms of practicing their own religion, they were now free to do so without interference.
This principle of toleration does extend over to the American colonies. For example, the new British government forced Massachusetts, the Puritan colony, to adopt this principle of toleration. The Puritans in the seventeenth century were not tolerant in the slightest; they kicked out of Massachusetts people who didn't adhere to the Puritan beliefs. Roger Williams was thrown out, Anne Hutchinson, who had criticized certain aspects of Puritan practice, was expelled, Quakers were made illegal, and a couple of Quakers were even executed in the early 1660s or late 1650s in Massachusetts. But now, as a result of the Glorious Revolution, Massachusetts was required to accept this principle of toleration for Protestants. It was not complete religious toleration as we would understand it today, but it was an attempt to end these many, many years of battles among different Protestant denominations as to what was going to be the best official form of worship. Click image to launch video
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Q: In the textbook, you quote a German immigrant in 1739, who says that liberty of conscience was the chief virtue of British North America, and on this score, "I do not repent my immigration." How representative would you say that point of view was? A: I think many of those who came to the American colonies were seeking greater religious freedom. Many of them came, of course, for economic reasons, to improve their condition in life; there were specific groups like the Pilgrims, who went to Plymouth, the Puritans; certain German religious sects, who could not practice freely in the Old World, came over here to establish communities where they could worship as they desired. So, this notion of freedom of conscience—that individual, I believe, is writing from Pennsylvania, which is a colony which does give a great deal of religious toleration, and I think that very fact attracted a lot of people. Back in Germany, you didn't have religious toleration. Germany was not a nation then, it was a series of little states, and each state had a king as a ruler and the king chose the religion, basically, and in this state it was Lutheranism, and in this state it was Calvinism, and in this state it was something else, and you had no choice except to move. So this immigrant wanted to be in a place where he could worship as he pleased without the ruler of the government forcing him to be a member of one or another particular Church. Click image to launch video
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Q: By the eighteenth century, we see that there have been steps forward in religious freedom and other civil liberties in the American colonies. How broadly did these apply in colonial society, with specific regard to women and to those in the lower classes? A: Religious freedom in the colonies by the eighteenth century was one of those things which was widely practiced but not really reflected in the law. There was a great variety, because of the immigration in the eighteenth century—the free immigration—of course a lot of slaves were brought from Africa, but they're not entitled to religious freedom at that time—but there were many from Northern Ireland, from Ireland, from Germany, from France, from other parts of Europe, each coming with their own particular religious practices, from many different churches; and then the Great Awakening, which spreads through the colonies in the 1730s and '40s, leads to a proliferation of new religious groups (Baptists, Methodists, etc.).
So there is a wide diversity of religious groups, and a kind of de facto religious pluralism and toleration. But the laws didn't really reflect that. In most colonies, you still had official churches; you had to pay taxes to support that church even if you weren't a member; you're a Baptist in Virginia, you still have to pay taxes to support the Anglican Church. There were still rules about who could vote and who couldn't vote in elections, depending on church membership, so you had this gap, so to speak, between the practice of religious pluralism and the legal recognition of it, which lagged far behind. Click image to launch video
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Q: In the eighteenth century, in the northern and the southern colonies, did slaves have any rights that were recognized in law? A: Slavery existed in all the colonies, all thirteen of the colonies, in the late colonial era: New England, the middle colonies, the South. But it was a rather different institution in those societies. In the South, where the plantation was the basis of the economy and slaves were fifty percent or more of the population, from Virginia southward, the law gave slaves very, very few rights, very, very few rights. The law was meant to control, restrict, police the slave population; very little recognition of any legal rights for the slaves. In New England, where slavery was a minor part of the economy, the law gave slaves more rights. They were still slaves, but, for example, their marriages were recognized in law; I think a slave who was accused of a crime in New England was actually entitled to a trial by jury, which you certainly didn't have in Virginia or South Carolina. In New York there was a tradition, although not probably in the law, that slaves sort of had a say to whom they were sold, in other words if you tried to sell a slave, there was a tradition the slave could sort of veto that if they didn't want to be sold. So in those colonies where slavery was a more peripheral part of the economy, a greater tradition of certain rights for slaves did get into the law. But of course, the fact is, they were all slaves, and when you're a slave, most basic legal rights are denied to you. Click image to launch video
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Global Competition and The Expansion of England’s Empire
The Mercantilist System England attempted to regulate its economy to ensure wealth and national power. Commerce, not territorial plunder, was the foundation of the English empire. The 1651 Navigation Acts required colonial products or “enumerated” goods to be transported in English ships and sold at English ports By the mid-1600s, it was apparent to England’s rulers that their North American colonies could generate tremendous wealth, and it moved to seize control of Atlantic trade, consolidate its hold over the continent’s eastern coast, and greater regulate its empire. It acted according to the theory of mercantilism, in which the government regulated economic activity to promote national power by encouraging manufacturing and commerce through special bounties, monopolies, and other measures, primarily in order to manipulate trade to make sure that more gold and silver entered the country than left it. The export of goods, which generated revenue from abroad, should exceed imports, which required paying foreigners for their products. The colonies’ role was to serve the interests of the mother country by producing raw materials and importing manufactured goods from England. The Navigation Acts of 1651 were intended to wrest control over world trade from the Dutch. They required that valuable goods produced in the colonies, such as tobacco and sugar, first had to be shipped to and traded in English ships and ports and that most European goods shipped to the colonies had to be shipped through England. This enabled the government to collect revenues and allowed English merchants, manufacturers, shipbuilders and sailors to benefit from trade. American colonists’ ships were considered English, and in New England the acts stimulated its considerable shipbuilding industry.
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Global Competition & Expansion of England’s Empire
Restoration of English monarchy with Charles II, and government chartered new trading ventures such as the Royal African Company (Slave Trade). The Conquest of New Netherland In 1664, during an Anglo-Dutch war, New Netherland came under control of the English. With the restoration of the English monarchy in 1660 under Charles II, England expanded its colonial reach. It chartered new trading ventures, such as the Royal African Company, which was given a monopoly on the slave trade, and soon doubled the number of English colonies in North America. The English seized New Netherland in 1664 as part of an Anglo-Dutch war that also resulted in the conquest of Dutch trading posts in Africa. England transformed the minor military post of New Netherlands into an important imperial seaport and military base for operations against the French.
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Global Competition and The Expansion of England’s Empire
New York and the Rights of Englishmen and Englishwomen The terms of Dutch surrender guaranteed some freedoms and liberties but reversed other liberties, especially for blacks. The Duke of York governed New York, and by 1700 nearly 2 million acres of land were owned by only five New York families. English rule over New York expanded and constricted freedom for certain groups. The English promised to continue religious toleration and respect property holdings, but they eliminated some rights for married women and practices that benefited female colonists. The English also discriminated against free blacks who had previously enjoyed all the rights of other “freemen.”
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America in Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries
Map 3.1 Eastern North America in Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries
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Global Competition and The Expansion of England’s Empire
New York and the Indians The English briefly held an alliance with the Five Nations known as the Covenant Chain (the Iroquois), but by the end of the century the Five Nations adopted a policy of neutrality. The Charter of Liberties Demanding liberties, the English of New York got an elected assembly, which drafted a Charter of Liberties and Privileges in 1683. English rule also for a time strengthened the Iroquois Confederacy in upstate New York. In the mid-1670’s, New York’s Governor, Sir Edmund Andros, formed an alliance with the Iroquois known as the Covenant Chain. This expanded English and Iroquois power in the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley regions at the expense of the French and their Indian allies. At the same time, many English colonists began to complain that they were being denied their English liberties, particularly the right to consent to taxation. The Dutch in New Netherland had not had a representative assembly, and English rule began without one, either. In 1683, the Duke of York agreed to call an elected assembly, which soon drafted a Charter of Liberties and Privileges affirming traditional English religious and political rights.
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An engraving representing the Grand Council
of the Iroquois Nations
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Global Competition and The Expansion of England’s Empire
The Founding of Carolina Carolina was established as a barrier to Spanish expansion north of Florida. Carolina was an offshoot of Barbados and, as such, a slave colony from the start. From 1670 until 1720, Carolina engaged in a slave trade that sold captured local Indians to other mainland colonies and to the West Indies. In the 1660s, English proprietors who were awarded the right to establish a colony north of Florida, in order to check Spanish expansion, founded Carolina. Initially the sons of wealthy plantation owners in Barbados, Carolina colonists traded with local Indians, employed them in raids against the Spanish, and also raided Indian communities for a burgeoning trade in Indian slaves. But in 1715, Yamasee and Creek Indians, alarmed by their trading debts and English slave trader’s raids into their territories mounted a rebellion which, when crushed, resulted in the enslavement or expulsion into Spanish Florida of most of the Indian tribes.
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Global Competition and The Expansion of England’s Empire
The Founding of Carolina The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina envisioned a feudal society. The colonial government did allow for religious toleration, an elected assembly, and a generous headright system. The economy grew slowly until planters discovered rice, which would make them the wealthiest elite in English North America. Slavery was fundamental to Carolina and made it the most hierarchical—and once rice plantation agriculture developed—the wealthiest of England’s North American colonies.
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Pennsylvania The Holy Experiment
Pennsylvania was last 17th century colony established was given to proprietor William Penn. A Quaker, Penn envisioned a colony of peaceful harmony between colonists and Indians and a haven for spiritual freedom. Quakers believed that liberty was a universal entitlement. Liberty extended to women, blacks, and Indians. The last English colony established in the 1600s was Pennsylvania. Its proprietor, William Penn, an advocate of religious toleration and spiritual freedom, intended the colony as a space for social harmony between European migrants escaping religious prosecution and Indians. A devout member of the Society of Friends, known as the Quakers, Penn encouraged Quaker settlement and helped frame the colony’s liberal government, which established religious liberty and an elected assembly with broad suffrage. Penn envisioned his colony as a “holy experiment” to be governed on Quaker principles, including the equality of all persons (including women, blacks, and Indians) under God and the primacy of the Individual conscience. Penn and the colony’s Quakers treated the Indians with special consideration, making peace with them (Quakers were pacifists, and did not have militias), and taking pains to pay all Indian land claims.
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A Quaker Meeting
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Pennsylvania Quaker Liberty Land in Pennsylvania
Religious freedom was a fundamental principle. Quakers upheld a strict code of personal morality. Land in Pennsylvania Penn established an appointed council to originate legislation and an assembly elected by male taxpayers and “freemen,” majority of the male population could vote. Above all, Penn emphasized religious freedom, which was ensured in 1682 in the colony’s Charter of Liberty. Penn formed an assembly elected by male taxpayers and freemen—either free immigrants with 100 acres of land or former indentured servants with 50 acres—thus giving the vote to a majority of the colony’s men.
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Global Competition and The Expansion of England’s Empire
Land in Pennsylvania Penn owned all of the colony’s land and sold it to settlers at low prices rather than granting it outright. Pennsylvania attracted immigrants from all over western Europe. Penn also owned all the land and sold it to settlers at low prices to encourage a broad distribution of landed wealth and social equality. Pennsylvania’s freedom attracted migrants from all over Europe. This made the colony prosperous, but also increased tensions with Indians as whites who were not Quakers and pacifists pushed into Indian territory. It also fostered the growth of African slavery in southern colonies as more indentured servants chose to migrate to Pennsylvania rather than Virginia or Maryland.
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Origins of American Slavery
The spread of tobacco led settlers to turn to slavery, which offered many advantages over indentured servants. Englishmen and Africans In the seventeenth century, the concepts of race and racism had not fully developed. Africans were seen as alien in their color, religion, and social practices. While the English, like all other European colonists in the Americas, did not intend to rely on African slaves as a labor force, the growing demand for labor for tobacco cultivation in the Chesapeake region led planters there to turn to the transatlantic slave trade. White masters saw many advantages in using African slaves rather than white indentured servants: African slaves were not protected by English common law, their terms never expired, they did not become discontented landless men, as had so many former servants, their children were slaves, their skin color made it more difficult for them to escape, and they were accustomed to difficult agricultural work. Also, compared to Native American slaves, African slaves were already immune from many European diseases. While the English did not have modern notions of “race”—in which humankind is divided into groups associated with skin color—or racism—an ideology based on the idea that some races are inherently superior to others and entitled to rule over them—the English did view other peoples, such as the Irish, Native Americans, and Africans as uncivilized, pagan, and savage and animal-like. At the time, the English, like other Europeans, tended to divide humanity between those were either civilized or barbarian, or Christian or non-Christian. Yet Africans, because of their skin color, religion, and social practices were seen by the English as “enslaveable” in a way that poor Englishmen were not.
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Origins of American Slavery
Slavery in History Although slavery has a long history, slavery in North America was markedly different. Slavery in the Americas was based on the plantation and the death rate was high in the seventeenth century. Slavery has existed for almost all of human history. It was central to ancient Greece and Rome and survived in northern Europe among Germans, Vikings, and Anglo-Saxons after the Roman Empire’s collapse. Although slavery existed in the 1600s in the Mediterranean and Africa, it was quite different from the plantation form of slavery that developed in the Americas, in which large numbers of slaves were brought together for very demanding agricultural labor under a single owner. The large numbers of slaves increased the dangers of slave rebellion and invited harsh discipline. Unlike in Africa, the death rate was higher, and African slaves who became free still had a skin color that whites associated with slavery, and thus were marked as unworthy of equality in a free society.
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Origins of American Slavery
Slavery in the West Indies By 1600, huge sugar plantations worked by slaves from Africa were well established in Brazil and in the West Indies. By 1600, disease had killed off the Indians, and white indentured servants were no longer willing to do the backbreaking work required on sugar plantations. Sugar was the first crop to be mass-marketed to consumers in Europe. The African slave trade became a major international and transatlantic business only in the 1600s. Slavery developed first in the western hemisphere outside of North America. By 1600, Brazil (a Portuguese colony), had large sugar plantations worked by African slaves. By the end of the seventeenth century, the profits to be had from sugar had transformed English, Dutch, French, and Danish colonies in the West Indies from mixed economies with few slaves and small farms worked by white servants to those dominated by lucrative sugar plantations worked exclusively by African slaves. Sugar was the first good to be mass-marketed to European consumers, and became the most important product of the British, French, and Portuguese empires. Compared to its rapid introduction in Brazil and the West Indians, slavery grew slowly in North America. English indentured servants constituted the majority of the labor force in the Chesapeake well into the 1680s. The most significant line of division in this region in the seventeenth century was not between whites and blacks, but between white plantation owners who dominated politics and society and everyone else—small farmers, servants, and slaves.
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Cutting Sugar Cane an engraving from Ten
Views in Antigua
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Origins of American Slavery
Slavery and the Law The line between slavery and freedom was more permeable in the seventeenth century than it would become later. Some free blacks were allowed to sue and testify in court. The Rise of Chesapeake Slavery It was not until the 1660s that the laws of Virginia and Maryland explicitly referred to slavery. While Spain had liberal laws granting slaves various rights and the Catholic church often encouraged masters to free their slaves, the legal status of slaves in the English colonies was initially ambiguous and undeveloped. Beginning in 1619, small numbers of Africans were brought to the Chesapeake, and while they were almost certainly treated as slaves, some were freed after serving a term of years. But racial distinctions were codified into law from the beginning; one such early Virginia law barred blacks from serving in the militia. But in both Virginia and Maryland, free blacks could sue and testify in court, and some even acquired land and purchased white servants and black slaves. Blacks and whites worked side by side in the region’s tobacco fields, occasionally ran away together, and established intimate relationships. Though evidence shows that slaves were being held for life as early as the 1640s, only in the 1660s did Virginia and Maryland’s laws refer explicitly to slavery.
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Origins of American Slavery
The Rise of Chesapeake Slavery A Virginia law of 1662 provided that in the case of a child born to one free parent and one slave parent, the status of the offspring followed that of the mother. In 1667 the Virginia House of Burgesses decreed that conversion to Christianity did not release a slave from bondage. As tobacco planting spread and labor demand increased, conditions facing black and white servants diverged. To encourage migration, colonial authorities tried to improve the status of white servants. Simultaneously, blacks’ opportunities for freedom were restricted. By 1680, ideas of racial difference were strongly reflected in these colonies’ laws, despite their small black population. New laws, for example, mandated that children of free and slave parents would have the legal status of the mother—ensuring that masters could profit from sexually abusing female slaves, since the child would become the master’s property.
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Origins of American Slavery
Bacon’s Rebellion: Land and Labor in Virginia Virginia’s shift from white indentured servants to African slaves as the main plantation labor force was accelerated by Bacon’s Rebellion. Virginia’s government ran a corrupt regime under Governor Berkeley. Good, free land was scarce for freed indentured servants. The shift from white indentured servants to African slaves as the main plantation workforce was hastened in 1676 by Bacon’s Rebellion. Governor William Berkeley had long ruled Virginia through a corrupt regime, forged in alliance with a small elite of the colony’s wealthiest tobacco planters, giving his supporters the best lands as white settlement pushed inland. With all the best lands already taken by wealthy planters, an increasingly poor population of freed white servants and migrants found it harder to acquire land. Forced to settle frontier areas, these men were also disenfranchised in 1670 by a new law limiting the vote, once given to all adult men, to landowners. In 1676, disgruntled frontier whites demanded that Berkeley exterminate or expel frontier Indians to make room for white settlers, but the governor, fearing war and profiting from the Indian trade, refused.
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Sir William Berkeley, governor of colonial Virginia
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Origins of American Slavery
Bacon’s Rebellion: Land and Labor in Virginia Nathaniel Bacon, an elite planter, called for the removal of all Indians, lower taxes, and an end to rule by “grandees.” His campaign gained support from small farmers, indentured servants, landless men, and even some Africans. Bacon spoke of traditional English liberties. Led by planter Nathaniel Bacon, small farmers, landless men, indentured servants and even some Africans who also demanded lower taxes and an end to elite rule waged war against the Indians and the colonial government. They plundered plantations and burned Jamestown to the ground before English warships helped quell the rebellion.
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Origins of American Slavery
End of Bacon’s Rebellion & Consequences Rebellion’s aftermath left Virginia’s planter elite to consolidate their power. Virginia’s ruling elite consolidated their rule by both limiting democracy and expanding social opportunity for poorer whites. They reinforced property qualifications for voting, but also reduced taxes and adopted aggressive policies towards Indians to open up more western lands. Most important, tobacco planters more and more spurned potentially rebellious white servants for African slaves, making the Chesapeake region a society based on slavery.
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Origins of American Slavery
A Slave Society By the end of the 1600s, a number of factors made slave labor very attractive to English settlers. Slavery began to supplant indentured servitude between 1680 and 1700. Between 1700 and 1750, blacks went from more than 10 percent to almost 50 percent of the colony’s population—and almost all were slaves. Several factors contributed to the growth of slavery in Virginia.
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Origins of American Slavery
A Slave Society By the early eighteenth century, Virginia had transformed from a society with slaves to a slave society. In 1705, the House of Burgesses enacted strict slave codes. From the start of American slavery, blacks ran away and desired freedom. Settlers were well aware that the desire for freedom could ignite the slaves to rebel. In 1705, Virginia’s legislature adopted a new slave code, embedding white supremacy in law, clearly defining black slaves as property and sharply limiting the freedom of free and enslaved blacks. Virginia had shifted from being a “society with slaves,” in which slavery was just one labor system among other systems, to a “slave society,” in which slavery was central to the society and economy. Europeans, Indians, and Africans alike all feared enslavement. Slaves often tried to escape, and those who spoke or read English or were familiar with European culture sometimes contested their condition. Slaves continued to resist their masters even as legal avenues for freedom receded in the Chesapeake at the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries.
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Colonies in Crisis: New England
King Philip’s War In 1675, the year before Bacon’s rebellion, war between Indians and New England colonists erupted. The Indians were led by Metcom, called King Philip. The Indians destroyed nearly half New England’s towns. In response, the colonists killed Metacom and massacred the rebels. Bacon’s Rebellion was only one of many crises in the late seventeenth-century colonial America. The year before, 1675, witnessed the beginning of a war in New England between Indians and colonists unprecedented in its scale, ferocity, and devastation. An alliance of Indian tribes in southern New England attacked English farms and settlements encroaching on Indian territories. Wrongly believing that the Indians were led by the Wampanoag leader Metacom, whom they called King Philip, the far more numerous whites were unprepared for the assault. Suffering, by 1676, the destruction of nearly half of New England’s ninety towns, they retreated to the region’s coastline. The settlers, aided by loyal Indian tribes, mounted a counter-attack that, when combining combat with Indian warriors and the massacre and burning of Indian villages, killed Metacom and crushed the rebel natives, some of whom were sold into slavery in the West Indies. The war, causing the deaths of 1,000 of New England’s 52,000 white settlers, and 3,000 of its 20,000 Indians, expanded whites’ access to land only by finally dispossessing the region’s Indians of theirs.
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Colonies in Crisis England’s Glorious Revolution -1688
Established parliamentary supremacy secured the Protestant succession to the throne. Rather than risk a Catholic succession through James II, a group of English aristocrats invited the Dutch Protestant William of Orange to assume the throne. Upheaval in England also affected the colonies. In 1688, the struggle for control over English government between Parliament and the crown culminated in the Glorious Revolution, a bloodless event that finally established parliamentary supremacy and a Protestant succession to the throne. Under Charles II’s rule, Parliament had expanded its authority and powers, but his unpopular successor, James II, alienated much of England after claiming to rule by divine right and seeking religious toleration for Protestant Dissenters and Catholics. Fearing that the throne would go to his Catholic son, English aristocrats invited William of Orange, a Dutch nobleman and husband to Mary, James II’s Protestant daughter, to assume the throne in the name of English liberties.
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Colonies in Crisis The Glorious Revolution
The overthrow of James II entrenched the notion that liberty was the birthright of all Englishmen. Parliament issued a Bill of Rights (1689) guaranteeing individual rights such as trial by jury. Parliament adopted the Toleration Act (1690), which allowed Protestant Dissenters (but not Catholics) to worship freely, although only Anglicans could hold public office. In 1688, James II fled before William’s invading army, and William and Mary took the throne. The Parliament soon enacted a Bill of Rights, giving the Parliament control over taxation and establishing individual rights like trial by jury. This peaceful coup assured the perpetuation of England’s balanced constitutional monarchy, allowing English subjects at home and in the colonies to celebrate English Protestantism and “rights and liberties.”
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Colonies in Crisis The Glorious Revolution in America
In 1675, England established the Lords of Trade to oversee colonial affairs, but the colonies were not interested in obeying London. To create wealth, between 1686 and 1685 James II created a “super-colony,” the Dominion of New England. The new colony threatened liberties. Before the Glorious Revolution, England’s rulers sought to reduce growing colonial autonomy within the empire. Charles II had revoked Massachusetts’ colonial charter for violations of the Navigation Act, which the Massachusetts legislature had earlier refused to recognize (because the colony, they alleged, had no direct representation in Parliament). And by 1688 James II had combined the colonies of Connecticut, Plymouth, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, East and West Jersey (Pennsylvania) into a single super-colony, the Dominion of New England, ruled by New York’s former governor, Sir Edmund Andros, who was unaccountable to any legislature.
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Colonies in Crisis The Maryland Uprising and Leisler’s Rebellion
News of King James’s ouster in 1689 caused rebellions in several American colon Lord Baltimore’s charter for Maryland was revoked for mismanagement. Jacob Leisler, a Calvinist, took control of New York. Leisler was executed, and New York politics remained polarized for years. The actions of King James and Andros alienated many colonists. News of King James’s ouster in 1689 caused rebellions in several American colonies. Boston militia jailed Andros and other imperial officials, whereupon the New England colonies re-established their governments. In New York, rebels led by Jacob Leisler took control. Soon thereafter, Protestant rebels in Maryland overthrew the government of that colony’s Catholic proprietor, Lord Baltimore, successfully revoked the old charter and created a new, Protestant-dominated government. Leisler’s Rebellion was not as successful. Leisler’s government unintentionally divided the colony along ethnic and economic lines, causing strife between the Dutch majority and English minority and between poor rebels and the wealthy. Soon alienated Dutch merchants and prominent English colonists united against him and convinced King William to suppress Leisler, who was executed, and his regime. The rebellion and its suppression polarized New York politics for decades.
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Colonies in Crisis Changes in New England
In New England, Plymouth was absorbed into Massachusetts, and the political structure of the Bible Commonwealth was transformed. Land ownership, not church membership, was required to vote. A governor was appointed in London rather than elected. The colony had to abide by the Toleration Act. With the removal of Andros and the dissolution of the Dominion of New England, the English crown restored most colonies’ old charters. But Massachusetts received a new charter as a royal colony, which now incorporated Plymouth. The new charter made property ownership, not church membership, the qualification for voting in elections for the colony’s legislature, made the governor a crown appointee, and required religious toleration for all Protestant denominations. These measures ended the Puritan’s Bible Commonwealth, empowering non-Puritan merchants and large landowners and increasing anxiety among Puritans ever alert to the devil’s work.
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Colonies in Crisis The Prosecution of Witches
Witchcraft was widely believed in and punishable by execution. Most accused were women. Many Puritans, like other Europeans and colonial Americans in the seventeenth century, believed in magic, astrology, witchcraft, and other supernatural phenomena, and often interpreted natural events as having religious or otherworldly meaning. Witchcraft was punishable by hanging in Europe and the colonies, and occasionally individuals convicted of witchcraft had been hanged in New England. Most accused of witchcraft were women beyond childbearing age who were outspoken, economically independent, estranged from their husbands, or otherwise thought to violate gender norms. A witch’s powers were held to challenge God’s will and the stature of men as family heads and rulers of society.
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Colonies in Crisis The Salem Witch Trials
In 1691, several girls suffered fits and nightmares, which were attributed to witchcraft. Three women, including a Caribbean slave named Tituba, were named as witches. Accusations snowballed; ultimately fourteen women and six men were executed before the governor halted all prosecutions. In 1691, in Salem, Massachusetts, initial accusations of witchcraft snowballed into a full-blown crisis, as more and more of the accused tried to save themselves by confessing and naming others as witches. The frenzy of accusations led to legal charges against nearly 150 persons, most of them women, and nineteen men and women were hanged. Massachusetts religious and civil authorities were aghast. They dissolved the Salem courts, and warned that courts should no longer accept testimony from those claiming to be possessed or accept the confessions and accusations of those facing execution. The Salem witchcraft craze discredited the prosecution of witches and encouraged a greater interest among prominent colonists in finding scientific explanations for natural events.
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An illustration from Cotton Mather’s
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The Growth of Colonial America
A Diverse Population As England’s economy improved, large-scale migration was draining labor from the mother country. Efforts began to stop promotion of emigration. London believed colonial development bolstered the nation’s power and wealth. 50,000 convicts were sent to the Chesapeake to work in the tobacco fields. Although the Spanish and French empires remained particularly powerful in the Americas in the eighteenth century, England’s mainland colonies in North America soon exceeded those of France and Spain in trade and population, growing from 265,000 in 1700 to over 2.3 million in 1770. Colonial American society in the eighteenth century was very diverse. The number of African and non-English European arrivals greatly increased, while the number of English migrants declined. Nearly 40 percent of those emigrating to the English colonies did so as unfree indentured servants. An increasing number of migrants were professionals and skilled craftsmen, causing the English government to stop promoting migration to North America. While English authorities worried that the colonies might drain England of skilled workers and professionals, they sent thousands of convicts to work in the Chesapeake’s tobacco fields, and still promoted Protestant migration from non-English area of the British Isles and Europe.
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The Growth of Colonial America
A Diverse Population 145,000 Scots and Scots-Irish immigrants came to North America. The German Migration Germans, 110,000 in all, formed the largest group of newcomers from the European continent. Entire German families emigrated as “redemptioners.” Many thousands came from Scotland and northern Ireland, where many Scots (“the Scotch-Irish”) had settled as part of England’s colonization efforts. The more than 100,000 Germans who came to America were the largest group of European migrants in this period. Many were members of the Catholic church or small dissenting Protestant sects fleeing from persecution, while others migrated to escape worsening economic conditions. Tending to settle in the frontier areas of New York, Pennsylvania, and the southern colonies, Germans migrated as families, often as “redemptioners,” families of indentured servants working to pay back the cost of passage to America.
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Table 3.1 Origins and Status of Migrants to British North American colonies, 1700–1775
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The Growth of Colonial America
Religious Diversity In eighteenth-century British America, ethnic groups tended to live and worship in relatively homogenous communities. Dissenting Protestants in most colonies gained the right to worship as they pleased in their own churches. While ethnic groups tended to live and worship in relatively homogenous communities apart from each other, the American colonies, except for New England, were far more diverse than England. This was especially evident in the religious makeup of British America. In 1700, the colonies’ churches were almost entirely Congregational and Anglican. But despite colonies’ commitment to official churches everywhere except New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Pennsylvania, de facto religious toleration increasingly defined religious life. Especially with the Great Awakening of the 1740s, sects such as Lutherans, Mennonites, Anabaptists, Moravians, Seventh Day Baptists, and Presbyterians and even Jews and Muslims were increasingly free to worship as they pleased, even if they were still taxed to support the official church and banned from holding public office.
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European settlement & ethnic diversity on Atlantic coast of
Map 3.2 European settlement & ethnic diversity on Atlantic coast of North America, 1760
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The Growth of Colonial America
Indian Life in Transition Indian communities were well integrated into the British imperial system. Traders, British officials, and farmers all viewed Indians differently. The Walking Purchase of 1737 brought fraud to the Pennsylvania Indians. Newcomers to America, who equated liberty with secure ownership of land, threatened surviving Indian populations. By the 1700s, Indian communities had changed dramatically from the time of the Europeans’ arrival, and were very much part of the British Empire, trading and using European goods and allying and fighting for the British in successive imperial wars against the French and Spanish. New settlers pressured colonial governments to open up new frontier lands at the expense of Indian tribes. In Pennsylvania, mostly peaceful relations between the Quaker-dominated government and Indians disintegrated as the new migrants often fraudulently made purchases or attacked natives for their lands.
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William Penn’s Treaty with the Indians
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The Growth of Colonial America
Regional Diversity The backcountry was the most rapidly growing region in North America. Farmers in the older portions of the Middle Colonies enjoyed a standard of living unimaginable in Europe. Pennsylvania was known as “the best poor man’s country.” By the mid-eighteenth century, different regions of the British colonies had developed distinct economic and social orders. New England and frontier settlements in other colonies were characterized by families laboring on small farms, producing for local consumption. The frontier “backcountry” areas rapidly grew in population. In the older “middle colonies” of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, more farmers produced for commercial markets and used non-family wage or slave labor.
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The Growth of Colonial America
The Consumer Revolution Great Britain eclipsed the Dutch in the eighteenth century as the leader in trade. Eighteenth-century colonial society enjoyed a multitude of consumer goods. Colonial Cities Although relatively small and few in number, port cities like Philadelphia were important. In the 1700s, Great Britain became the leading producer and trader of inexpensive consumer goods, including colonial goods such as coffee and tea and manufactured goods like linen, metalware, glassware, ceramics, and clothing. Trade knit together the British Empire, and the American colonies shared in this consumer revolution. Even modest farmers and artisans bought items such as books, ceramic plates, metal cutlery, and tea that were once considered luxury goods. Britain’s mainland colonies were almost entirely rural and agricultural, and only a very small percentage of the population lived in the small port cities of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston. In 1770, Philadelphia’s 30,000 inhabitants made it the largest city in British North America.
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The Growth of Colonial America
Colonial Cities and Colonial Artisans Cities served mainly as gathering places for agricultural goods and for imported items to be distributed to the countryside. The city was home to a large population of artisans. These cities were centers of trade and exchange, and were inhabited by growing numbers of merchants, artisans (skilled craftsmen), and the poor. The urban artisan population included furniture makers, jewelers, and silversmiths serving wealthier citizens, and lesser artisans such as weavers, blacksmiths, coopers, and construction workers. The typical master artisan owned his own tools and worked in a small workshop, often his home, assisted by family members and young journeymen and apprentices learning the trade. The artisan survived by his skill, which gave him economic independence and freedom compared to unskilled laborers. Most craftsmen had a reasonable chance of becoming a master in their lifetime.
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This piece of china made in England
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The Growth of Colonial America
An Atlantic World Trade helped to create a web of interdependence among the European empires. Membership in the empire had many advantages for the colonists. The Atlantic ocean was not so much a barrier as a highway, linking communities and economies within and between empires. Sugar, tobacco, and other products of the Americas were marketed in Europe, London bankers financed the slave trade between Africa and Portuguese Brazil, and Spain spent its gold and silver importing goods from other countries. As trade expanded, the British colonies in the Americas became the major overseas market for British manufactured goods. In turn, North Americans shipped farm products to Britain and the West Indies, imported slaves and rum from Africa and the West Indies, exported fish and grains to southern Europe, and New Englanders built one-third of the ships in Great Britain’s trading fleet. American colonists benefited from membership in the British Empire. Most did not complain about British regulation of their trade because commerce enriched the colonies, and lax enforcement of the Navigation Acts allowed smuggling. Besides, Britain’s powerful Royal Navy protected American ships. Despite significant differences, British America in many ways became closer and more similar to its mother country.
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Social Classes in the Colonies
The Colonial Elite Expanding trade created the emergence of a powerful upper class of merchants. In the Chesapeake and Lower South, planters accumulated enormous wealth. America had no titled aristocracy or established social ranks. As colonial America matured, an elite emerged that increasingly dominated politics and society, although they were not as powerful or wealthy as England’s aristocracy. The gap between rich and poor probably grew more quickly in the 1700s than in any other period in American history. In New England, growing trade created a powerful merchant upper class, often linked by family of business connections to London’s great trading firms. (With no banks in America, success often depended on the credit to be had from personal connections.) By 1750, colonies of the Chesapeake and lower south were dominated by slave plantations producing tobacco, rice, and other staple crops, and the enormously wealthy planters who owned them and ruled these colonies’ governments. Even though colonial America had no titled aristocracy or legally established social ranks as did Britain, men of families with growing landed and commercial wealth came to control much of the colonies’ political, economic, and social life.
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A 1732 portrait of Daniel, Peter, and Andrew Oliver,
sons of a wealthy Boston merchant.
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Social Classes in the Colonies
Anglicization Colonial elites began to think of themselves as more and more English. Desperate to follow an aristocratic lifestyle, wealthy Americans tried to model their lives on British etiquette and behavior. The tie that held the elite together was the belief that freedom from labor was the mark of the gentleman. In this period, the different colonies were more strongly connected to England than to each other. In a process that historians call “Anglicization,” they soon came to see themselves as more English than “American.” Wealthy colonists imitated emerging British fashions and taste in behavior, consumption, and architecture. Colonial elites emulated what they saw as England’s balanced and stable social order. Freedom for them was based in their power as “superiors” to rule over “dependents,” those without wealth or prominence, within a hierarchical society differentiated by men with greater or lesser talents. Society was held together by webs of influence linking patrons and those dependent on them. Each place in the hierarchy carried certain responsibilities and was revealed in dress, manners, and possessions. Colonial elites prided themselves on their refinement - their manners, education, and cultural knowledge—and they favored leisure over manual labor. Freedom from labor defined the “gentleman.”
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Social Classes in the Colonies
Poverty in the Colonies Although poverty was not as widespread in the colonies as it was in England, many colonists had to work as tenants or wage laborers because access to land diminished. Taking the colonies as a whole, half of the wealth at mid-century was concentrated in the hands of the richest 10 percent of the population. Yet poverty increasingly became part of colonial life in eighteenth-century America. Fewer free colonial Americans were poor compared to Britain, where a quarter to one-half of all people required public assistance. But slaves lived in impoverished conditions, and the number of poor without property grew, with diminishing land and the growth of wage labor. Better-off colonists generally viewed the poor as lazy and responsible for their poverty, and while rural communities and cities gave some assistance to their own, they prevented the unemployed and propertyless newcomers from receiving aid.
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Social Classes in the Colonies
Poverty in the Colonies The better-off in society tended to view the poor as lazy and responsible for their own plight. The Middle Ranks Many in the nonplantation South owned some land. By the eighteenth century, colonial farm families viewed land ownership almost as a right: the social precondition of freedom. Most free Americans were members of “the middle ranks,” living between extremes of wealth and poverty, and the vast majority of these were small farm families. The wide distribution of land and the economic autonomy that went with it distinguished colonial America from Europe. Perhaps two-thirds of the free male population owned their own land, while three-fifths of England’s population owned no property at all. By the 1700s, colonial farm families viewed land ownership as a kind of right, the social precondition of freedom, and strongly resented the efforts of Native Americans, great landlords, or colonial governments to limit access to land. Their dislike of personal dependence, and their understanding of freedom as not relying on others for a livelihood, sank deep roots in British North America and, to a great extent, reflected social reality for many white colonists.
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Social Classes in the Colonies
Women and the Household Economy The family was the center of economic life, and all members contributed to the family’s livelihood. In the eighteenth century, the division of labor along gender lines solidified. North America at Mid-Century As compared to Europe, colonies were diverse, prosperous, and offered many liberties. The family was the center of economic life in the eighteenth-century American household economy. Most work revolved around the home, and men, women, and children all contributed to the family’s well-being. The small farmer’s independence depended to a great degree on the work of his dependent wife and children. While most farmers first focused on growing food to survive, as commerce expanded in the eighteenth century, more and more farmers also produced for the market. Women were constantly at work, raising children and working in the home by cleaning, cooking, sewing, and other activities, and also working in the fields. Women’s work increased in the eighteenth century, despite the introduction of new consumer goods that replaced items previously made at home. By the mid-eighteenth century, the area that would become the modern United States was remarkably diverse in peoples, cultures, and social organization, from the Pueblos villages of the southwest to the tobacco plantations of the Chesapeake, small farms of New England, feudal-like land estates of New York’s Hudson Valley, and frontier fur trading outposts. While elites tied to imperial centers of power dominated the political and economic life of most colonies, large numbers of colonist enjoyed greater opportunities for freedom—such as access to the vote, land ownership, the right to worship freely, and an escape from government persecution—than in Europe. Free colonists probably enjoyed the highest per capita income in the world, and the colonies’ economic growth made for a high birthrate, long life expectancy, and expanding demand for consumer goods. Yet many colonists experienced the partial freedom of indentured servitude or the complete absence of freedom as slaves, making freedom and hopes for freedom essential to the development of North America’s colonies.
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This portrait of the Cheney family
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Chapter 3: Creating Anglo-America, 1660-1750
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