1. Eighteenth-Century America
Chapter 3

2. Colonial Society in 1700 Not a homogeneous society
Ethnic and religious diversity
Free and unfree
No national identity
No common culture
French vs. English
battle for control

3. Colonial Society Population Growth Cities Education
Doubled every 25 years
Cities
Small and isolated from one another.
Education
Rapid expansion.

4. Labor in the Colonies Plantation economy depended upon manual labor.
Indentured Servants (debt slavery)
Worked 4 to 7 years.
Accounted for half the white settlers in all colonies outside New England.
Slavery (chattel slavery) (1619 – Jamestown)
Increased staple crops for commercial markets.
Mortality rate improved.
Racist rationalization based on color differences or heathenism.
Perpetual black slavery became the custom and the law of the land.

5. The Middle Passage
About 21 million people captured in West Africa between 1700 and 1850.
Millions died during the Atlantic crossing and as many as 7 million remained slaves in Africa.
Slaves were captured by other Africans within the interior, brought to the coast, sold to Europeans.
Packed together in slave ships and subjected to a 4 to 6 week passage. So brutal that 1 in 7 died en route.
Once in America they were thrown indiscriminately together and treated like work animals.

8. Slavery in British North America
Great Ethnic Diversity in Slave Population.
Before 1750: Slave importation.
17th century – Brazil & Caribbean
18th century – Directly from Africa
After 1750: Native-born population.
Distinctively African-American culture
20% of colonial population. (40% in south)
British North America bought less than 5 percent of the total slave imports to the Western Hemisphere ( ).
400,000 out of 9.5 million; however, had a better chance for survival.

10. The Slave Family and Community
The differences among blacks lessened as slave importation tapered off and the black population grew through natural increase.
Black families remained vulnerable.
Slave marriages had no legal status and family members were often separated by deaths or debts of masters.

11. Slave Societies in the Eighteenth-Century South
Tense and embattled regions.
Salve resistance
More frequent
More successful

12. Slave Societies in the Eighteenth-Century South
Slavery and Colonial Society in French Louisiana
Natchez Revolt (1729)
Africans challenged French control / importation of slave stopped
Greater freedom for blacks in Louisiana
Freedom granted to those who served in French militia. Became the core of Louisiana’s free black community.
Slave Resistance in 18th-Century British N. America
The Stono Rebellion (1739) (South Carolina)
The largest slave revolt of the colonial period.
Nearly 100 slaves killed several whites before being caught and killed by the white militia.

13. The Enlightenment
A scientific revolution that swept through Europe during the 17th century.
Assumptions
The world is an orderly place. (Natural Law)
Humans can understand order.
Influence in America
Deists – God made world and then left alone
Skepticism – Questioned everything
Laws of nature
John Locke and tabula rosa (people can be corrupted)
Reason and virtue

14. The Great Awakening Causes:
Challenges to religion (Enlightenment), competing denominations, westward expansion
Changes in society and tradition
Revivals (1730s) – A wave of evangelism that swept through the colonies.
George Whitefield - Emphasized “new birth”
Jonathan Edwards - Feared religion had become too intellectual and had lost its animating force.
“Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”

15. The Great Awakening Influence on Colonists Short term results
Old Light (structure)
Intended the Great Awakening to bolster church discipline and order. (Edwards & Whitefield)
New Light (emotion)
Radical evangelists that attacked the established clergy and appealed to the lower classes.
Short term results
New religious groups and the split of more Calvinistic churches: Baptists, Methodists, etc.
New England Puritanism fragmented

16. The Great Awakening Long term results
American style evangelism and revivalism
Denominational colleges
Undermining of state-sponsored churches; toleration of dissent
Individual judgment: Fewer willing to defer to the ruling social and political elite. Emphasized popular resistance to established authority.

17. The Enlightenment and the Great Awakening
Both emphasized the power and right of individual choice and popular resistance to established authority.
Both aroused hopes that America could become the promised land.
Fewer and fewer people were willing to defer to the ruling social and political elite.