Life
in the American wilderness was nasty, brutish, and short for the earliest
Chesapeake settlers.
Malaria,
dysentery, and typhoid took a cruel toll, cutting ten years off the life
expectancy of newcomers from England.
Half
the people born in early Virginia and
Maryland did not survive to celebrate their twentieth birthdays.
Few
of the remaining half lived to see their fiftieth--or even their fortieth, if
they were women.
The
disease-ravaged settlements of the Chesapeake grew only slowly in the
seventeenth century, mostly through fresh immigration from England.
The
great majority of immigrants were single men in their late teens and early
twenties, and most perished soon after
arrival.
Surviving
males competed for the affections of the extremely scarce women, whom they
outnumbered nearly six to one in 1650 and still outnumbered by three to two at
the end of the century.
Eligible
women did not remain single for long.
Families
were both few and fragile in this ferocious environment. Most men could not
find mates.
Most
marriages were destroyed by the death of a partner within seven years. Scarcely
any children reached adulthood under the care of two parents, and almost no one knew a grandparent.
Weak
family ties were reflected in the many pregnancies among unmarried young girls.
In
one Maryland county, more than a third of all brides were already pregnant when
they wed.
Yet
despite these hardships, the Chesapeake colonies struggled on.
The
native-born inhabitants eventually acquired immunity to the killer diseases
that had ravaged the original immigrants.
The
presence of more women allowed more families to form, and by the end of the seventeenth century the white
population of the Chesapeake was growing on the basis of its own birthrate.
As
the eighteenth century opened, Virginia, with some fifty-nine thousand people,
was the most populous colony.
Maryland,
with about thirty thousand, was the third largest (after Massachusetts)."
An accumulating mass of footloose,
impoverished freemen was drifting discontentedly about the Chesapeake region by
the late seventeenth century.
Mostly single young men, they were frustrated
by their broken hopes of acquiring land, as well as by their gnawing failure to find single women to marry.
The
swelling numbers of these wretched bachelors rattled the established planters.
The
Virginia assembly in 1670 disenfranchised most of the landless knockabouts,
accusing them of "having little interest in the country" and causing
"tumults at the election to the
disturbance of his majesty's peace."
Virginia's
Governor Berkeley lamented his lot as ruler of this rabble: "How miserable
that man is that governs a people where six parts of seven at least are poor,
endebted, discontented, and
armed."
Berkeley's
misery soon increased.
About
a thousand Virginians broke out of control in 1676, led by a
twenty-nine-year-old planter, Nathaniel Bacon.
Many
of the rebels were frontiersmen who had been forced into the untamed
backcountry in search of arable land.
They
fiercely resented Berkeley's friendly policies toward the Indians, whose
thriving fur trade the governor monopolized.
When
Berkeley refused to retaliate for a series of savage Indian attacks on frontier
settlements, Bacon and his followers
took matters into their own hands.
They
fell murderously upon the Indians, friendly and hostile alike, chased Berkeley
from Jamestown, and put the torch to the capital.
Chaos
swept the raw colony, as frustrated freemen and resentful servants--described as "a rabble of the
basest sort of people"--went on a rampage of plundering and pilfering.
As
this civil war in Virginia ground on, Bacon suddenly died of disease, like so
many of his fellow colonials.
Berkeley
thereupon crushed the uprising with brutal cruelty, hanging more than twenty
rebels.
Back
in England Charles II complained,
"That old fool has put to death more people in that naked country
than I did here for the murder of my father."
The
distant English king could scarcely imagine the depths of passion and fear that
Bacon's Rebellion excited in Virginia.
Bacon
had ignited the smoldering unhappiness of landless former servants, and he had
pitted the hard-scrabble backcountry
frontiersmen against the haughty gentry of the tidewater plantations.
The
rebellion was now suppressed, but these tensions remained.
Lordly
planters, surrounded by a still-seething sea of malcontents, anxiously looked
about for less troublesome laborers to
toil in the restless tobacco kingdom.
Their
eyes soon lit on Africa."
Perhaps
10 million Africans were carried in chains to the New World in the three
centuries or so following Columbus's landing.
Only
about 400,000 of them ended up in North America, the great majority arriving
after 1700.
Most
of the early human cargoes were hauled to Spanish and Portuguese South America
or to the sugar-rich West Indies.
Africans
had been brought to Jamestown as early as 1619, but as late as 1670 they
numbered only about 2,000 in Virginia (out of a total population of some 35,000
persons) and about 7 percent of the 50,000 people in the southern
plantation colonies as a whole.
Hard-pinched
white colonists, struggling to stay alive and to hack crude clearings out of
the forests, could not afford to pay high prices for slaves who might die soon
after arrival.
White
servants might die, too, but they were
far less costly.
Drastic
change came in the 1680s.
Rising
wages in England shrank the pool of penniless folk willing to gamble on a new
life or an early death as indentured servants in America.
At
the same time, the large planters were growing increasingly fearful of the multitudes of potentially
mutinous former servants in their midst.
By
the mid-1680s, for the first time, black slaves outnumbered white servants
among the plantation colonies' new arrivals.
In
1698 the Royal African Company lost its
crown-granted monopoly on carrying slaves to the colonies. Enterprising
Americans, especially Rhode Islanders, rushed to cash in on the lucrative slave
trade, and the supply of slaves increased steeply.
More
than ten thousand Africans were pushed
ashore in America in the decade after 1700, and tens of thousands more
in the next half-century.
Blacks
accounted for nearly half the population of Virginia by 1750. In South Carolina
they outnumbered whites two to one.
Most
of the slaves who reached North America came from the west coast of Africa,
including the area stretching from present-day Senegal to Angola.
They
were originally captured by African coastal tribes, who traded them in crude
markets on the shimmering tropical
beaches to itinerant European--and American--flesh merchants.
Usually
branded and bound, the captives were herded aboard sweltering ships for the
gruesome "middle passage," on which death rates ran as high as 20
percent.
Terrified
survivors were eventually shoved onto auction blocks in New World ports like
Newport, Rhode Island, or Charleston, South Carolina, where a giant slave
market flourished for more than a century.
A
few of the earliest African immigrants gained their freedom, and some even
became slaveowners themselves.
But
as the number of Africans in their midst increased dramatically toward the end
of the seventeenth century, white colonists reacted remorselessly to this supposed racial threat.
Earlier
in the century the legal difference between a slave and a servant was unclear.
But
now the law began to make sharp distinctions between the two--largely on the
basis of race. Statutes appeared that formally decreed the iron conditions of slavery for blacks.
These
earliest "slave codes" made blacks and their children the property
(or "chattels") for life of their white masters.
Some
colonies made it a crime to teach a slave to read or write.
Not
even conversion to Christianity could
qualify a slave for freedom.
Thus
did the God-fearing whites put the fear of God into their hapless black
laborers.
Slavery
might have begun in America for economic reasons, but by the end of the
seventeenth century, it was clear that racial
discrimination also powerfully molded the American slave system."
In
the Northern Colonies
Nature
smiled more benignly on pioneer New Englanders than on their disease-plagued
fellow colonists to the south.
Clean
water and cool temperatures retarded the spread of killer microbes.
In
stark contrast to the fate of Chesapeake immigrants, settlers in seventeenth-century New England added ten years to
their life spans by migrating from the Old World.
One
settler claimed that "a sip of New England's air is better than a whole
draft of old England's ale."
The
first generations of Puritan colonists
enjoyed, on the average, about seventy years on this earth--not very different
from the life expectancy of present-day Americans.
In further contrast with the Chesapeake, New
Englanders tended to migrate not as single individuals but as families, and the
family remained at the center of New England life.
Almost
from the outset, New England's population grew from natural reproductive increase.
The
people were remarkably fertile, even if the soil was not.
Early
marriage encouraged the booming birthrate.
Women
typically wed by their early twenties and produced babies about every two years
thereafter until menopause.
Ceaseless childbearing drained the vitality
of many pioneer women, as the
weather-eroded colonial tombstones eloquently reveal.
A
number of the largest families were borne by several mothers, though claims
about the frequency of death in childbirth have probably been exaggerated.
But
the dread of death in the birthing bed
haunted many women, and it was small wonder that they came to fear
pregnancy.
A
married woman could expect to experience up to ten pregnancies and rear as many
as eight surviving children.
Massachusetts
governor William Phips was one of twenty-seven
children, all by the same mother.
A
New England woman might well have dependent children living in her household
from the earliest days of her marriage up until the day of her death, and child
raising became virtually her full-time occupation.
The
longevity of the New Englanders contributed to family stability.
Children
grew up in nurturing environments where they received love and guidance not
only from their parents but from their grandparents as well.
This
novel intergenerational continuity has
inspired the observation that New England "invented" grandparents.
Family
stability was reflected in low premarital pregnancy rates (again in contrast
with the Chesapeake) and in the generally strong, tranquil social
structure characteristic of colonial
New England.
Still
other contrasts emerged between the southern and New England ways of life.
Oddly
enough, the fragility of southern families advanced the economic security of
southern women, especially of women's property rights.
Because
southern men frequently died young,
leaving widows with small children to support, the southern colonies generally
allowed married women to retain separate title to their property and gave
widows the right to inherit their husband's estates.
But
in New England, Puritan lawmakers
worried that recognizing women's separate property rights would undercut the
unity of married persons by acknowledging conflicting interests between husband
and wife.
New
England women usually gave up their property rights, therefore, when they married.
And
because greater longevity in New England made widowhood less common, women were
generally denied rights of inheritance."
Yet
worries plagued the God-fearing pioneers of these tidy New England settlements.
The
pressure of a growing population was gradually dispersing the Puritans onto
outlying farms, far from the control of church and neighbors.
And
although the core of Puritan belief
still burned brightly, the passage of time was dampening the first generation's
flaming religious zeal.
About
the middle of the seventeenth century a new form of sermon began to be heard
from Puritan pulpits--the "jeremiad."
Taking
their cue from the doom-saying Old Testament prophet Jeremiah, earnest
preachers scolded parishioners for their waning piety.
Especially
alarming was the apparent decline in conversions--testimonials by individuals
that they had received God's grace and
therefore deserved to be admitted to the church as members of the elect.
Troubled
ministers in 1662 announced a new formula for church membership, the
"Half-Way Covenant."
It
offered partial membership rights to people not yet converted.
The
Half-Way Covenant dramatized the difficulty of maintaining at fever pitch the
religious devotion of the founding generation.
Jeremiads
continued to thunder from the pulpits, but as time went on, the doors of the
Puritan churches swung fully open to all comers, whether converted or not.
This
widening of church membership gradually erased the distinction between the
"elect" and other members of society.
In
effect, strict religious purity was sacrificed somewhat to the cause of wider religious
participation.
Interestingly,
from about this time onward women made up a larger proportion of the Puritan
congregations.
Women
also played a prominent role in one of New England's most frightening religious
episodes.
A
group of adolescent girls in Salem, Massachusetts, claimed to have been
bewitched by certain older women.
A
hysterical "witch hunt" ensued,
leading to the legal lynching in 1692 of twenty individuals, nineteen of
whom were hanged and one of whom was pressed to death.
Two
dogs were also hanged.
Larger-scale witchcraft persecutions were
then common in Europe, and several outbreaks had already flared forth in the
colonies.
But
the reign of horror in Salem grew not only from the superstitions of the age
but also from the unsettled social and
religious conditions of the rapidly evolving Massachusetts village.
Most
of the accused witches were associated with Salem's prosperous merchant elite;
their accusers came largely from the ranks of the poorer families in Salem's
agricultural hinterland.
The
episode thus reflected the widening social stratification of New England, as
well as the anxieties of many religious traditionalists that the Puritan
heritage was being eclipsed by Yankee commercialism.
The
witchcraft hysteria eventually ended in
1693 when the governor, alarmed by an accusation against his own wife and
supported by the more responsible members of the clergy, prohibited any further
trials and pardoned those already convicted.
The Salem witchcraft delusion marked an all-time high in American
experience of popular passions run wild.
"Witch
hunting" passed into the American vocabulary as a metaphor for the often
dangerously irrational urge to find a scapegoat for social resentments."
The
common term thirteen original colonies is misleading.
There
were thirty-two colonies under British rule in North America by 1775, including
Canada, the Floridas, and the various islands of the Caribbean.
But
only thirteen of them unfurled the
standard of revolt.
A
few of the nonrebels, such as Canada and Jamaica, were larger, wealthier, or
more populous than some of the thirteen.
And
even among the revolting thirteen, dramatic differences in economic
organization, social structure, and
ways of life were evident.
All the eventually rebellious colonies did
have one outstanding feature in common: their populations were growing by leaps
and bounds.
In 1700 they contained fewer than 300,000
souls, about 20,000 of whom were black.
By
1775, 2.5 million people inhabited the
thirteen colonies, of whom about half a million were black.
White
immigrants made up nearly 400,000 of the increased number, and black
"forced immigrants" accounted for almost as many again.
But
most of the spurt stemmed from the
remarkable natural fertility of all Americans, white and black.
To
the amazement and dismay of Europeans, the colonists were doubling their
numbers every twenty-five years.
Unfriendly
Dr. Samuel Johnson, back in England, growled that the Americans were multiplying like their own
rattlesnakes.
They
were also a youthful people, whose average age in 1775 was about sixteen.
This
population boom had political consequences.
In
1700 there were twenty English subjects for each American colonist.
By
1775 the English advantage in numbers had fallen to three to one--setting the
stage for a momentous shift in the balance
of power between the colonies and England.
The
bulk of the population was cooped up east of the Alleghenies, although by 1775
a vanguard of pioneers had trickled into the stump-studded clearings of
Tennessee and Kentucky.
The
most populous colonies in 1775 were Virginia, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and
Maryland--in that order.
Only
four communities could properly be called cities: Philadelphia, including
suburbs, was first with about 34,000, whereas New York, Boston, and Charleston
were strung out behind.
About
90 percent of the people lived in rural
areas."
In
contrast with contemporary Europe, eighteenth-century America was a shining
land of equality and opportunity--with the notorious exception of slavery.
No
titled nobility dominated society from on high, and no pauperized underclass
threatened it from below.
Most
white Americans, and even some free blacks, were small farmers.
Clad
in buckskin breeches, they owned modest holdings and tilled them with their own
hands and horses.
The
cities contained a small class of skilled artisans, with their well-greased leather aprons, as well
as a few shopkeepers and tradespeople, and a handful of unskilled casual
laborers.
The
most remarkable feature of the social ladder was the rags-to-riches ease with
which an ambitious colonial, even a
former indentured servant, might rise from a lower rung to a higher one,
quite unlike in old England.
Yet
in contrast with seventeenth-century America, colonial society on the eve of
the Revolution was beginning to show signs of stratification and barriers to
mobility that raised worries about the "Europeanization" of America.
The
gods of war contributed to these
developments.
The
armed conflicts of the 1690s and early 1700s had enriched a number of merchant
princes in the New England and middle colonies.
They
laid the foundations of their fortunes with profits made as military suppliers.
Roosting
regally atop the social ladder, these elites now feathered their nests more
finely.
They
sported imported clothing and dined at tables laid with English china and
gleaming silverware.
Prominent
individuals came to be seated in
churches and schools according to their social rank.
(Future
president John Adams was placed fourteenth in a class of twenty-four at
Harvard, where ability also affected one's standing.)
The plague of war also created a class of
widows and orphans, who became dependent for their survival on charity.
Both
Philadelphia and New York built almshouses in the 1730s to care for the
destitute.
Yet
the numbers of poor people remained
tiny compared to the numbers in England, where about a third of the
population lived in impoverished squalor.
In the New England countryside the
descendents of the original settlers faced more limited prospects than had
their pioneering forebears.
As
the supply of unclaimed soil dwindled and families grew, existing landholdings
were subdivided and the average size of
farms shrank drastically.
Younger
sons were increasingly forced to hire out as wage laborers--or eventually, to
seek virgin tracts of land beyond the Appalachians.
In the South the power of the great
planters continued to be bolstered by their disproportionate ownership of
slaves.
The
riches created by the growing slave population in the eighteenth century were
not distributed evenly among the whites.
Wealth
was concentrated in the hands of the largest slaveowners, widening the gap
between the prosperous gentry and the "poor whites," who were
increasingly forced to become tenant farmers.
In
all the colonies the ranks of the lower classes were further swelled by the
continuing stream of indentured servants, many of whom ultimately achieved
prosperity and prestige.
Two
became signers of the Declaration of Independence.
Far less fortunate than the voluntary
indentured servants were the paupers and convicts involuntarily shipped to
America.
Altogether,
about fifty thousand "jayle birds" were dumped on the colonies by the
London authorities.
This
riffraff crowd--including robbers,
rapists, and murderers--was generally sullen and undesirable, and not bubbling
over with goodwill for the king's government.
But
many convicts were the unfortunate victims of circumstances and of a viciously
unfair English penal code that included
about two hundred capital crimes.
Some
of the deportees, in fact, came to be highly respectable citizens.
Least
fortunate of all, of course, were the black slaves.
They
enjoyed no equality with whites and dared not even dream of ascending the
ladder of opportunity.
Oppressed
and degraded, the slaves were America's closest approximation to Europe's volatile lower classes, and fears of black
rebellion plagued the white colonists.
Some
colonial legislatures, notably South Carolina's in 1760, sensed the dangers
present in a heavy concentration of resentful slaves and attempted to restrict
or halt their importation.
But
the British authorities vetoed all such efforts.
Many
colonials looked upon this veto as a callous disregard of their welfare,
although it was done primarily in the interests of imperial policy and of the
British and New England slave trade.
Thomas
Jefferson, himself a slaveholder, assailed such vetoes in an early draft of the
Declaration of Independence, but his proposed clause was finally dropped,
largely out of regard for southern sensibilities."
In
all the colonial churches, religion was less fervid in the early eighteenth
century than it had been a century earlier, when the colonies were first
planted.
The
Puritan churches in particular sagged under the weight of two burdens:
their elaborate theological doctrines
and their compromising efforts to liberalize membership requirements.
Churchgoers
increasingly complained about the "dead dogs" who droned out tedious,
overerudite sermons from Puritan pulpits.
Some
ministers, on the other hand, worried
that many of their parishioners had gone soft and that their souls were no
longer kindled by the hellfire of orthodox Calvinism.
Liberal
ideas began to challenge the old-time religion, and some worshipers now
proclaimed that human beings were not
necessarily predestined to damnation but might save themselves by good works.
A few churches grudgingly conceded that
spiritual conversion was not necessary for church membership.
Together,
these twin trends toward clerical
intellectualism and lay liberalism were sapping the spiritual vitality
from many denominations.
The
stage was thus set for a rousing religious revival.
Known
as the Great Awakening, it exploded in the 1730s and 1740s and swept through
the colonies like a fire through prairie grass.
The
Awakening was first ignited in Northampton,
Massachusetts, by a tall, delicate, and intellectual pastor, Jonathan Edwards.
Perhaps
the deepest theological mind ever nurtured in America, Edwards proclaimed with
burning righteousness the folly of believing in salvation through good works
and affirmed the need for complete
dependence on God's grace.
Warming
to his subject, he painted in lurid detail the landscape of hell and the
eternal torments of the damned.
"Sinners in the Hands of an Angry
God" was the title of one of his most famous sermons.
He
believed that hell was "paved with the skulls of unbaptized children."
Edwards's
preaching style was learned and closely reasoned, but his stark doctrines
sparked a warmly sympathetic reaction among his parishioners in 1734.
Four
years later the itinerant English parson George Whitefield loosed a different
style of evangelical preaching on
America and touched off a conflagration of religious ardor that revolutionized
the spiritual life of the colonies.
A
former alehouse attendant, Whitefield was an orator of rare gifts.
His
magnificent voice boomed sonorously
over thousands of enthralled listeners in an open field.
One
of England's greatest actors of the day commented enviously that Whitefield
could make audiences weep merely by pronouncing the word Mesopotamia and that
he would "give a hundred guineas
if I could only say 'O!' like Mr. Whitefield."
Triumphally
touring the colonies, Whitefield trumpeted his message of human helplessness
and divine omnipotence.
His
eloquence reduced Jonathan Edwards to tears and even caused the skeptical and
thrifty Benjamin Franklin to empty his pockets
into the collection plate.
During
these roaring revival meetings, countless sinners professed conversion, and
hundreds of the "saved" groaned, shrieked, or rolled in the snow from
religious excitation. Whitefield soon inspired American imitators.
Taking
up his electrifying new style of preaching, they heaped abuse on sinners and
shook enormous audiences with emotional appeals.
One
preacher cackled hideously in the face of hapless wrongdoers. Another, naked to
the waist, leaped frantically about in
the light of flickering torches.
Orthodox
clergymen, known as "old lights," were deeply skeptical of the
emotionalism and the theatrical antics of the revivalists.
"New light" ministers, on the other
hand, defended the Awakening for its role in revitalizing American
religion.
Congregationalists
and Presbyterians split over this issue, and many of the believers in religious
conversion went over to the Baptists and other sects more prepared to make room
for emotion in religion.
The
Awakening left many lasting effects.
Its emphasis on direct, emotive spirituality
seriously undermined the older clergy, whose authority had derived from their
education and erudition.
The
schisms it set off in many denominations greatly increased the numbers and the
competitiveness of American churches.
It
encouraged a fresh wave of missionary work among the Indians and even among
black slaves, many of whom also attended the mass open-air revivals.
It
led to the founding of "new light" centers of higher learning such
as Princeton, Brown, Rutgers, and
Dartmouth.
Perhaps
most significant, the Great Awakening was the first spontaneous mass movement
of the American people.
It tended to break down sectional boundaries
as well as denominational lines and contributed to the growing sense that Americans had of themselves as a single
people, united by a common history and shared experiences."