1. Alan Brinkley, American History 14/e
Chapter 3 Society and Culture in Provincial America

2. The Colonial Population
America in 1700

3. Growth and Diversity
1700–1750—colonial population rose from 250,000 to over two million
Much growth through natural increase. Exceptional longevity in New England
Large influx of non-English Europeans

4. Scots-Irish Flee English Oppression
Largest non-English group
The Scots fled England for Ireland, then the Scots-Irish came to North America
Concentrated on the Pennsylvania frontier

5. Germans Search for a Better Life
First waves similar to Quakers and sought religious toleration
Later waves sought to improve their material condition
Admired as peaceful, hard-working farmers
Tried to preserve German language and customs
Aroused the prejudice of English neighbors
Scots-Irish and Germans spread into Shenandoah Valley

6. Convict Settlers
Transportation Act of 1718 allowed judges to send convicted felons to American colonies
50,000 convicts to America, 1718–1775
Some felons were dangerous criminals
Most had committed minor crimes against property
Life difficult for transported convicts

8. Immigration Groups
America was already a nation of diverse nationalities in the colonial period. This
map shows the great variety of immigrant groups, especially in Pennsylvania and New York. It also illustrates the tendency
of later arrivals, particularly the Scots-Irish, to push into the backcountry.
Immigrant Groups in 1775
Map 5-1 p79

9. The Colonial Population
From 250,000 in 1700
To 2.8 millions by 1780
The Non-Indian Population of North America,

10. The Spanish Borderlands, ca. 1770

11. The Colonial Population
Indentured Servitude
Origins
Realities of Indentured Servitude
Indenture Contract of Sarah Green (click to read)

12. Economic Transformation
Long-term period of economic and population growth
Colonial manufacture or trade of timber, sugar, hats, and iron restricted
More diverse economy in the North (factory & manufacturing, shipping & trade)
Trade was mainly with England and West Indies; little with Africa

14. Distinct Economic Identities – 18th Century
The northern colonies:
grew grain and raised cattle
harvested timber and fish
built ships.
The Chesapeake colonies and North Carolina:
heavily dependent on tobacco
Southernmost colonies grew:
mostly rice and indigo.
Cotton, so important to the southern economy in the nineteenth century, had not yet emerged as a major crop.
Map 5.2 

15. The Rise of Colonial Commerce
Triangular Trade

16. Birth of a Consumer Society
English mass-production of consumer goods stimulated rise in colonial imports (see Family Life )
Americans built up large debts to English merchants to finance increased imports
Trade between colonies increased
Intercostal trade
Eroded regional and local identities

17. The Impact of European Ideas on American Culture
Rapid change in eighteenth-century colonies
Growth of urban cosmopolitan culture
Aggressive participation in consumption

18. Wealth Distribution in Colonial Cities, 1687-1771
Patterns of Society
Wealth Distribution in Colonial Cities,

19. The Hunting Party, New Jersey Fox hunting began as a necessity in the colonies,
where farmers on foot tried to keep foxes from overrunning the countryside. By the
eighteenth century it had become an organized sport among the well-to-do, mounted
on horseback. George Washington was famed as an ardent fox hunter, breeding his
own hounds and importing a fine hunting wardrobe from England. Huntsmen wore
scarlet coats to be easily visible, even in the depths of the forest, and cork-lined black
hats for protection from low hanging branches or a fall.
Mrs. Elizabeth Freake and Baby Mary This portrait of a
Boston mother and child in about 1674 suggests the strong
family ties that characterized early New England society.

20. The Colonial Economies
The Southern Economy
Tobacco
Rice
Indigo
Early Tobacco Advertising Crude woodcuts like this one
were used to identify various “brands” of tobacco—one of
the first products to be sold by brand-name advertising.
Selling tobacco (American Heritage)

21. Southern Plantation Economy
The Plantation Vagaries of the Plantation Economy
Stratified Southern Society

22. The Southern Colonies
Charleston, South Carolina Founded in 1680, Charleston grew to become the
bustling seaport pictured in this drawing done in the 1730s. Charleston was by then the
largest city in the mostly rural southern colonies. It flourished as a seaport for the
shipment to England of slave-grown Carolina rice.

23. The Southern Transformation
First slave ship arrived in North America, 1619 (Jamestown)
The Beginnings of Slavery in British America
The Middle Passage
Growing Slave Population
Slave Codes (see Virginia Slave Codes)
An African Slave Coffle Yoked and bound, these men, women, and children were on
their way to a coastal slave market, where they would be herded aboard ship for the
Americas.

24. Virginia Slave Code (17th – 18th Century)
ACT XII
WHEREAS some doubts have arrisen whether children get by any Englishman upon a negro woman should be slave or ffree, Be it therefore enacted and declared by this present grand assembly, that all children borne in this country shalbe held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother…
SOURCE: William Waller Hening, Laws of Virginia, (1823), I-III.

25. Virginia Slave Code (17th – 18th Century)
ACT X
…it is hereby enacted by the authority aforesaid, that from and after the publication of this law, it shall not be lawfull for any negrow or other slave to carry or arme himselfe with any club, staffe, gunn, sword or any other weapon of defence or offence, nor to goe or depart from of his masters ground without a certificate from his master, mistris or overseer, and such permission not to be granted but upon perticuler and necessary occasions; and every negroe or slave soe offending not haveing a certificate as aforesaid shalbe sent to the next constable, who is hereby enjoyned and required to give the said negroe twenty lashes on his bare back well layd on, and soe sent home to his said master, mistris, or overseer. And it is further enacted by the authority aforesaid that if any negroe or other slave shall presume to lift up his hand in opposition against any christian, shall for every such offence, upon due proffe made thereof by the oath of the party before a magistrate, have and receive thirty lashes on his bare back well laid on

26. Virginia Slave Code (17th – 18th Century)
1705
. . . XXXIV. And if any slave resist his master, or owner, or other person, by his or her order, correcting such slave, and shall happen to be killed in such correction, it shall not be accounted felony, but the master, owner, and every such other person so giving correction, shall be free and acquit of all punishment and accusation for the same, as if such accident had never happened: And also, if any negro, mulatto, or Indian, bond or free, shall at any time, lift his or her hand, in opposition against any Christian, not being negro, mulatto, or Indian, he or she so offending, shall, for every such offence, proved by the oath of the party, receive on his or her bare back, thirty lashes, well laid on..
XXXVI. And also it is hereby enacted and declared, That baptism of slaves doth not exempt them from bondage; and that all children shall be bond or free, according to the condition of their mothers, and the particular directions of this act . . .

28. Main Sources and Destinations of African Slaves, ca. 1500–1860
More than three centuries of the “African Diaspora” scattered blacks throughout the New World. Britain’s
North American colonies (the future United States) constituted the extreme northern
periphery of this system, receiving about 400,000 of the nearly 10 million arrivals, the
great majority of whom ended up in the West Indies and Brazil

29. The African Population
The African Population of the British Colonies,

30. African Population as a Proportion of Total Population, c. 1775

31. The Middle Passage

32. The Middle Passage
The “middle passage” referred to the transatlantic sea voyage that brought slaves to the New World—the long and hazardous “middle” segment of a journey that began with a forced march to the African coast and ended with a trek into the American interior.

33. A South Carolina Advertisement for Slaves in the
1760s Note the reference to these slaves’ origin on West
Africa’s “Rice Coast,” a reminder of South Carolina’s reliance
on African skill and labor for rice cultivation. Note, too, that
half the slaves were said to have survived smallpox and
thus acquired immunity from further infection—and that
care had been taken to insulate the others from a smallpox
epidemic apparently then raging in Charleston.
p81

34. From Whose Point of View?
(left) Africans Destined for Slavery This engraving from 1830 is an
example of antislavery propaganda in the pre–Civil War era. It shows
hapless Africans being brought ashore in America under the whips of slave
traders and, ironically, under the figurative shadow of the national Capitol.
(right) Advertisements for Slave Sales in Charleston, South Carolina,
1753 Charleston had the largest slave market in the colonies.

36. Human Bondage
What is the purpose of treating slaves with inhumanity and violence?
For what reasons did whites feel justified in their treatment of Africans?
Virginia Legislature (1667): “the conferring of baptism does not alter the condition of the person to his bondage or freedom.” Did a deep-rooted color prejudice lead to slavery, or did the existence of slavery produce the prejudice?

37. America’s First Population Explosion
The African Population of the British Colonies,
In 1700, approximately 250,000 Europeans and African-Americans lived in the colonies. By 1775, that number had risen to two and half million.
The people of the American colonies multiplied more rapidly than almost any other society in recorded history. And these colonists far out-numbered the French and Spanish colonists of North America. By the time of the American Revolution, the Spanish border settlements of Florida and New Mexico were thinly populated outposts of empire.

38. America’s First Population Explosion
The largest of the two, New Mexico, had only about 20,000 settlers. New France, or Canada, at the same time had over 70,000 people. These numbers tell who would control the continent.

39. The Slave Trade
600,000 slaves transported to British North America during the several centuries of the slave trade.
In the four centuries of the slave trade, slavers transported an estimated 11 million Africans to North and South America, about 600,000 of them to British North America. Most slaves were captured in the African interior by raiding parties from more powerful tribes along the coast, and were taken on forced marches to coastal trading forts run by Europeans. There they were inspected by ship captains in the holds of dungeons or in open pits. Those selected for transport were branded, chained together, and rowed out to awaiting slave ships, where they were packed below deck in spaces with no more breathing room than a coffin.

40. Rice and Rebellion
In the 18th century, a different type of slavery developed in the lowland, coastal region extending from Cape Fear, North Carolina, to Georgia, an area whose ecology was unsuited to tobacco cultivation. South Carolina was the richest colony in this region. It had been first settled in the 1660s by land hungry emigrants from the crowded sugar islands of Barbados. Thirty years later, they found a profitable cash crop--rice.
And rice shaped the lowland as strongly as tobacco shaped the Chesapeake. Rice made South Carolina the richest colony in mainland British North America--and the only one with a black majority. Rice cultivation was hard, human-killing work; but greater oppression, ironically, produced greater autonomy for the slaves.
Since tobacco required more constant care than rice, masters closely supervised slave labor. In the Carolina lowlands, masters stayed away from the rice fields, where the death rate from malaria was frightfully high. The Carolina grandees, the richest elite in the colonies, built their magnificent plantation houses on high ground, far away from the rice ditches. In the malaria season they escaped to town houses in fashionable Charleston.
Slaves died earlier in the Low Country than they did in Virginia and reproduced more slowly. So owners had to bring in fresh infusions of Africans, most of them males. These slaves were much more likely to rebel than American-born slaves were.

41. Rice and Rebellion
In these sprawling agricultural factories, slaves didn't work in white-supervised gangs, as they did in Virginia. Instead, they were given daily tasks to perform under the supervision of black foremen, or drivers. The work was done at a killing pace, knee-deep in the thick muck, in mosquito- and snake-infested paddies. But when their tasks were completed, slaves returned to their separate living quarters, where they were free to hunt and fish, grow their own food, and live together as families in individual cabins.

42. Mulberry Plantation in South Carolina, 1770
This rice plantation is unusual in placing slave quarters in the forefront of the picture. The steep roof of the slave cabins, which were built by the slaves themselves, reflected African architectural styles. The high roofs helped keep the cabins cool. The master’s house and adjacent chapel, built in conventional European style, are in the b/g.
On large plantation such as these. Some slaves learned trades and crafts: blacksmithing, carpentry, shoemaking, spinning, weaving, sewing and midwifery. Some, after gaining freedom, set up own shops in cities and towns. Small free black population living in southern cities by time of Revolution.
Except for the most affluent planters, life in the southern colonies was primitive and uncomfortable. Houses were small; furniture and utensils were sparse and crudely made. Clothing for most was rough and, because soap was expensive, usually unwashed. Women only rarely worked in the fields, but their duties included tending animals, making butter and cheese, pickling and preserving, spinning, and sewing. Women also cared not only for their own children but often for orphan children as well. Education in the South was less widespread than in New England. Some middling planters enjoyed a more comfortable lifestyle, but until the early eighteenth century, only a handful of planters achieved real affluence. These large planters controlled politics. The spread-out population made it difficult to support churches. In spite of its standing as the official religion with the support of public funds, the Anglican Church never became a powerful force in the South. In this society, social events such as births, marriages, and funerals were great occasions.

43. Stono Rebellion, 1739
100 Africans rose up, killed 20+ whites and attempted to flee to Florida, quickly crushed by whites. Other slaves tried to run away.
Largest slave uprising in colonial America prior to the Revolution.
It's not coincidental that colonial America's largest slave rebellion, the Stono Uprising, occurred in South Carolina. In 1759, a group of freshly imported Angolans broke into a store on the Stono River, near Charleston, armed themselves, and headed toward Spanish Florida and freedom. Along the way they plundered plantations and killed about two dozen whites before being gunned down by a militia company.
Although slave revolts were rare in mainland North America, as compared, say, to Brazil and the Caribbean, slaves resisted in every way possible, destroying tools, performing work shoddily, running away, and striking, and sometimes killing, their oversees.

44. Stono Rebellion, 1739
In response to the rebellion, the South Carolina legislature passed the Negro Act of 1740 restricting slave assembly, education, and movement. It also enacted a 10-year moratorium against importing African slaves, and established penalties against slaveholders' harsh treatment of slaves.
Even though the Stono Rebellion was well known, the slaves' major act of resistance was not striking back at the master. It was non-violent: the creation of a resilient, richly varied black culture, the slaves' strongest weapon against racial oppression. Southern language, cuisine, folklore, music, and religion were indelibly influenced by this slave culture.
Acculturation did not go only one way. As Africans were being Anglicized, English colonists in the South were also being Africanized. In this way, African slaves contributed to the making of a uniquely American culture.
Slaves played a pivotal role in increasing the wealth, as well as the size and ethnic diversity of early America. By 1776, the two main crops that slaves produced, tobacco and rice, were, with wheat, British America's most profitable exports. This is certainly one reason there was a general colony-wide acceptance of slavery, even though slaves comprised only about 10% of the northern population.

45. Plantation Slavery and its Culture
Living apart from masters who hardly knew them, they developed an autonomous culture that had its own cycle of African feasts and dances. They developed their own language, Gullah. And they also developed a culture that was profoundly confrontational.
The Emergence of an African American Culture In this scene from the mid-nineteenth century, African Americans play musical instruments of European derivation, like the fiddle, as well as instruments of African origin, like the bones and banjo—a vivid illustration of the blending of the two cultures in the crucible of the New World.

46. Set on a rice plantation, this unattributed painting of a slave ceremony provides students with evidence of African and African-American life in the South. At least one slave’s recounting of experiences on a southern plantation described her parents’ marriage ceremony including a broomstick, which the couple jumped over.
1. Describe the actions of the people in this painting. What kind of ceremony might taking place?
(Answers: men and women observing on the periphery; seated man playing musical instrument; man at the center of picture holding a stick (broomstick); woman in white at center appears to be smiling and holding a piece of material with the woman next to her; man and woman wearing formal attire at back right of image; possibly a wedding ceremony.)
2. What specifically can we learn about slave life on the plantation from this image?
(Answers: evidence of slaves’ living quarters from the outside (brown building); substantial distance of slaves’ quarters from the main houses; ceremony depicted is indicative of sense of community existent among slaves.)
3. Are there examples of African and/or English cultural influences present in this painting?
(Answers: clothing reflects both African heritage [head coverings, bare feet] and English influences [dresses, men’s formal jackets]; two musical instruments possibly inspired by life in Africa; ceremonial use of stick.)

47. Sources of Stability: New England Colonies of the 17th Century
New Englanders replicated traditional English social order
Contrasted with experience in other English colonies
Explanation lies in development of Puritan families
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48. The Puritan Community
New England towns were collections of interrelated households
A very different form of community emerged in Puritan New England, but one that was also distinctively American. The characteristic social unit in New England was not the isolated farm, but the town. Each new settlement drew up a “covenant” among its members, binding all residents in a religious and social commitment to unity and harmony. Some such settlements consisted of people who had immigrated to America together (occasionally entire Puritan congregations who had traveled to the New World as a group).
The structure of the towns reflected the spirit of the covenant. Colonists laid out a village, with houses and a meetinghouse arranged around a central pasture, or “common.” They also divided up the outlying fields and woodlands of the town among the residents; the size and location of a family's field depended on the family's numbers, wealth, and social station. But wherever their lands might lie, families generally lived in the village with their neighbors close by, reinforcing the strong sense of community.

49. New England Life – Religion
Once established, a town was generally able to run its own affairs with little interference from the colonial government. Residents held a yearly “town meeting” to decide important questions and to choose a group of “selectmen,” who governed until the next meeting. Only adult males were permitted to participate in the meeting. But even among them, important social distinctions remained, the most crucial of which was membership in the church. Only those residents who could give evidence of grace, of being among the elect (the “visible saints”) confident of salvation as a result of a conversion experience, were admitted to full membership. Residents who had not experienced “conversion” could participate in the church through what was known as the “halfway covenant.”

50. 1. Describe the altar area of each church.
Roman Catholic Church
Ask the students to note similarities and differences between these two houses of worship both established in 18th-century North America.
1. Describe the altar area of each church.
(Answers: Left/Catholic: ornate, colorful, gold-encrusted, candles, images of spiritual leaders; Right/Protestant: simple, plain, no ornamentation, seating is orderly, stairway to minister’s pulpit indicates elevated position of the minister within the church building and the community.)
2. What attributes of the two churches’ histories and/or teachings are reflected in the designs of these two alters?
(Answers: Catholic altar reflects the wealth, power, and pageantry of the church in Europe, including the importance of members honoring church hierarchy; the comparatively plain Protestant altar conforms to Calvinist teachings of simplicity, order, and discipline.

51. New England Life – Religion
A Colonial Primer Religious - instruction loomed large in early colonial schools. This 18th century
textbook from Germantown, Pennsylvania, taught lessons of social duty and Christian faith, as well as
reading and writing.

52. Immigrant Families and New Social Order
Puritans believed God ordained the family
Reproduced patriarchal English family structure in New England
Most New Englanders married neighbors with similar values 3

53. Women’s Lives in Puritan New England
Women’s roles
Farm labor, although not necessarily same tasks as men
Often outnumbered men 2:1 in church membership
Women could not control property
Divorce difficult for a woman to obtain
Both genders accommodated themselves to roles they believed God ordained
In the Puritan Society, women, who were seen as inferior, were expected to serve their husbands and homes obediently in all matters, and wives were considered their husband's property. Women were considered dangerous, and therefore needed to be controlled and watched by men. This idea of danger and inferiority stemmed from the Puritan thought that women had a piece of Eve’s impurity and sin within themselves.
The primary roles of women in a Puritan society were to be wives and mothers, and provide the family with their everyday needs. Women were expected to make the clothing for the family, cook the meals, keep the household clean, and teach the children how to live a Puritan lifestyle. All of these tasks alone could keep a woman busy, yet they got it all done, and still would serve their husbands when they arrived home from work. With this being said, Puritan women were hard workers in everything they did, and still managed to keep the household managed for when the husbands arrived home.
Marriage was a big role in the lives of Puritan women. The Puritans believed that marriage is a gift that was ordained by God.
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54. New England’s Freehold Society
Farm Families: Women in the Household Economy
Husband the Head of the Household
Wife as the “Helpmate”
Motherhood
Restrictions
Farm Property: Inheritance
Family Authority
Children of Wealthy Parents
Marriage
Father’s Duty
New England’s Freehold Society
A. Farm Families
Husband the Head of the Household – in The Well-Ordered Family (1712) Reverend Wadsworth of Boston told women that it was their duty “to love and reverence” their husbands; girls learned from their mothers to be subordinate to their fathers;
Wife as the “Helpmate” – tended gardens, spun thread and yard from flax and wool, wove cloth, knitted, made candles and soap, churned butter, fermented malt for beer, preserved meats.
3. Motherhood – marriage in 20s for women, given birth six to seven times by their 40s. Fear of death during childbirth and the importance of baptism for the new baby were believed to be a reason many Puritan women clung to the church even when fewer men were attending.
4. Restrictions – no equality within the church, most women accepted such restrictions as social norms.
Farm Property: Inheritance
1. Family Authority – emigrants wanted farms to provide for them and their grown children, landless children could be placed as indentured servants until age 18 or 21, landless men hoped to climb from laborer to tenant to freeholder.
2. Children of Wealthy Parents – marriage portion between 23 and 25, consisted of land, livestock, or farm equipment; enabled parents to choose their children’s spouses because economic concerns outweighed love in the long-term interests of the extended family.
3. Marriage – bride gave her husband legal ownership of her property; she received a dower right to use but not sell one-third of the property if her husband died; this portion went to her children if she died or remarried.
4. Father’s Duty – provide an inheritance for children or lose status in the community; some men moved their families to the frontier where land was cheap and abundant; on the frontier these men created communities of independent property owners.

55. New England’s Communities

56. Puritan New England Puritanism and Witchcraft Supernatural Forces
Salem Witchcraft 1692 (view)
Puritan New England
Puritanism and Witchcraft
By the late seventeenth century, growth and diversity had begun to undermine the cohesiveness of many New England communities. At times, such tensions could produce bizarre and disastrous events. One example was the widespread hysteria in the 1680s and 1690s over supposed witchcraft in New England.
The most famous outbreak (although by no means the only one) was in Salem, Massachusetts, where adolescent girls began to exhibit strange behavior and leveled accusations of witchcraft against several West Indian servants steeped in voodoo lore. The hysteria they produced spread throughout the town, and before it was over, hundreds of people (most of them women) were accused of witchcraft. As the crisis in Salem grew, accusations shifted from marginal women like the West Indians to more prominent and substantial people. Nineteen residents of Salem were put to death before the trials ended in 1692; the girls who had been the original accusers later recanted and admitted that they had made up the story.
The Salem experience was only one of many. Accusations of witchcraft spread through many New England towns in the early 1690s (and indeed had emerged periodically in Puritan society for many years before). Research into the background of accused witches reveals that most were middle-aged women, often widowed, with few or no children. Many accused witches were of low social position, were often involved in domestic conflicts, had frequently been accused of other crimes, and were considered abrasive by their neighbors. Others were women who, through inheritance or enterprise, had come into possession of substantial land and property on their own and hence also challenged the gender norms of the community. Puritan society had little tolerance for “independent” women. That so many “witches” were women who were not securely lodged within a male-dominated family structure (and that many seemed openly to defy the passive, submissive norms society had created for them) suggests that tensions over gender roles played a substantial role in generating the crisis.
Above all, however, the witchcraft controversies were a reflection of the highly religious character of these societies. New Englanders believed in the power of Satan and his ability to assert his power in the world. Belief in witchcraft was not a marginal superstition, rejected by the mainstream. It was a common feature of Puritan religious conviction.
1. Supernatural Forces – Puritans saw signs of God and Satan in the physical world (birth defects, storms, unusual events, etc.); many Christians incorporated some pagan practices into their daily lives; condemned those who claimed powers as healers or prophets; New Englanders were hanged for witchcraft.
2. Salem 1692 – after young girls claimed to experience seizures and accused neighbors of bewitching them, accusations spun out of control; Massachusetts Bay tried 175 people for witchcraft, executed 19; debate among historians as to whether the witchcraft hysteria was the result of class differences or efforts to control/limit the activities of women in the colonies; charges of witchcraft were significantly reduced as colonists began to adopt the philosophies of the Enlightenment, including rational and scientific thought.

57. 18th Century Philadelphia
A Philadelphian called 18th century America the best poor man's country in the world. It was, provided you were white and male. In 1723, Benjamin Franklin left his brother's printing business in Boston, at age seventeen, and arrived in Philadelphia, broke and with his pockets stuffed with dirty laundry. Franklin's rags-to-riches story is a study in tenacity.
But luck sure had a part in it. He had landed in Philadelphia, a city of exploding opportunity. The place and the person were ideally matched. Blessed with a splendid harbor and ringed by fertile land, Philadelphia had recently become the commercial capital of British America.
Almost on his own, Franklin would soon make it the cultural capital, as well. Philadelphia was built on land that had been given by the crown to William Penn, the son of a British admiral and a devout Quaker. Penn launched Pennsylvania as a holy experiment, a refuge for persecuted people everywhere.
Pennsylvania's tolerant policies, its abundant land, and its amazingly fair and peaceful relations with the Indians made it the immigrant center of early America, a place of tremendous ethnic and religious diversity.
This diversity was seen, even then, as distinctly American. Traveling through Philadelphia in 1744, a Swedish botanist encountered, in a tavern, what he described as a "very mixed company of different nations and religions." In addition to "Scots, English, Dutch, Germans, and Irish," he reported "there were Roman Catholics, Presbyterians, Quakers, Methodists, Seventh-Day men, Moravians, Anabaptists, and one Jew. " From Philadelphia, these immigrants spread out over the land and set up prosperous farms, raising wheat, corn, hemp and flax, but mostly wheat. Pennsylvania became the breadbasket of the American colonies.

58. Provincial Cities Only about 5% of population
Five largest cities: Boston, Newport, New York, Philadelphia, and Charles Town
Economies were geared to commerce, not manufacturing
Inhabitants emulated English culture, fashion, and architecture
Cities were becoming more elegant
High white literacy rates
Colonial cities served as trading centers for the farmers of their regions and as marts for international trade. Their leaders were generally merchants who had acquired substantial estates. Disparities of wealth were features of almost all communities in America, but in cities they seemed particularly glaring. Moving beside the wealthy merchants were numerous minor tradesmen, workers, and indigents who lived in crowded and often filthy conditions. More than in any other area of colonial life, social distinctions were real and visible in urban areas.
Yet despite the limited urban population, cities profoundly influenced colonial culture. It was in the cities that Americans were exposed to and welcomed the latest English ideas. Wealthy colonists—merchants and lawyers—tried to emulate the culture of the mother country. It was in the cities, also, that wealthy merchants transformed commercial profits into architectural splendor, for, in their desire to outdo one another, they built grand homes of enduring beauty. These homes were provincial copies of grand country houses of Great Britain. Their owners filled the houses with fine furniture. Each city patronized certain skilled craftsmen, but the artisans of Philadelphia were known for producing magnificent copies of the works of Thomas Chippendale, Great Britain’s most famous furniture designer. These developments gave American cities an elegance they had not possessed in the previous century. One foreign visitor noted of Philadelphia in 1748 that “its natural advantages, trade, riches and power, are by no means inferior to any, even of the most ancient towns of Europe.” As this traveler understood, the cultural impact of the cities went far beyond the number of people who actually lived there.
Of particular importance for the political future of the colonies, cities became places where new ideas could circulate and be discussed. Because there were printers, it was possible to have regular newspapers. Books and other publications from abroad introduced new intellectual influences. And the taverns and coffeehouses of cities provided forums in which people could gather and debate the issues of the day. It was not surprising that when the revolutionary crisis began to build in the 1760s and 1770s, it was first visible in the cities.

59. Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827). The Peale Family.
Inequality. New England, for all its belief in community and liberty, was far from an egalitarian society. “Some must be rich and some poor,” John Winthrop wrote early in the seventeenth century, and his prediction perhaps exceeded his expectations. Wealthy families and socially distinguished ones (which were usually the same people) had privileges and rights that were not available to poor citizens. Elites were called “ladies” and “gentleman,” while people in the lower levels of society were known as “goodman” or “goodwife.” Elites were given the best seats in their churches and had the most influence over the parish. Men had more power than women. Servants had few rights. The church itself taught that inequality reflected God's intention.
In cities, such economic stratification was significant—although, unlike in later eras, the ranks of the richest were the largest group in the population and, in Boston in the eighteenth century, the majority. That was partly because wealthy people were more likely to move to cities and participate in commerce. In the agricultural countryside, many fewer people accumulated significant wealth.

60. Henry Benbridge (1743-1812). Gordon Family

61. Henry Benbridge (1743-1812). Gordon Family

62. John Singleton Copley (1738-1815). The Copley Family

63. Henry Benbridge (1743-1812). The Hartley Family.

64. Henry Benbridge (1743-1812). The Archibald Bulloch Family.

65. Charles Willson Peale (1827). Robert Goldsborough & Family.

66. Edward Savage (1761-1817). The George Washington Family.

67. American Enlightenment
Intellectual movement that swept Europe with new, radical ideas
Age of Reason
The Enlightenment’s basic assumptions:
Optimistic view of human nature
God set up the universe and human society to operate by mechanistic, natural laws
Those laws can be found through reason
Two powerful forces were competing in American intellectual life in the eighteenth century. One was the traditional outlook of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with its emphasis on a personal God, intimately involved with the world, keeping watch over individual lives. The other was the new spirit of the Enlightenment, a movement sweeping both Europe and America, which stressed the importance of science and human reason. The old views supported such phenomena as the belief in witchcraft, and they placed great value on a stern moral code in which intellect was less important than faith. The Enlightenment, by contrast, suggested that people had substantial control over their own lives and the course of their societies, that the world could be explained and therefore could be structured along rational scientific lines.

68. Benjamin Franklin
Franklin (1706–1790) regarded as Enlightenment thinker by Europeans
Started as printer, then satirist in Boston. Moved to Philadelphia
Achieved wealth through printing business
Made important scientific discoveries and inventions
Symbol of material progress through human ingenuity
Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790)
When Franklin was born in Boston in 1706, the son of a candle and soap -maker who had immigrated from England, the colonies were overwhelmingly English. By 1776, half of the colonial population south of New England was of non-English origin.
Franklin himself was the embodiment of this freer, more expansive society that was becoming America. A lowborn apprentice printer, he went on to become an American luminary. To admiring Europeans, he was the quintessential American, the most famous American of the eighteenth century and a great cultural hero in Europe as well as in his own country. In 1718, he became a printer’s apprentice under his brother James. At age seventeen, he moved to Philadelphia, which became his permanent home.
Once Franklin had made a substantial fortune from Poor Richard’s Almanack and other publishing business ventures, he concentrated on science, philosophy, and politics. Although largely self-taught (he learned five languages on his own), he was immensely knowledgeable in many areas. Besides electricity, he studied meteorology, hydrology (water), geology, and demographics (population).
While serving as a colonial agent in England in the 1760s, he considered permanently moving to that country, and in America, he was suspected of favoring the Stamp Act until he testified against it in Parliament. When he served as minister to France during the Revolution, his portrait was put in shop windows and on medals, rings, watches, snuffboxes, and bracelets. His charm and simple democratic manners endeared him to everyone, especially aristocratic French ladies. Practical, skeptical, cool-minded, insatiably curious, sexually passionate, uninhibited, plainspoken, and above all humorous, Franklin was at ease with all kinds and levels of people, from kings to tavern maids.

69. Table 5-3 p90

70. Religious Revivals in Provincial Societies
The Great Awakening
Spontaneous, evangelical revivals
People began to rethink basic assumptions about church and state, institutions and society
Movement occurred among many denominations in different places at different times
New England in the 1730s; Virginia in the 1750s and 1760s
By the beginning of the eighteenth century, some Americans were growing troubled by the apparent decline in religious piety in their society. The movement of the population westward and the wide scattering of settlements had caused many communities to lose touch with organized religion. The rise of commercial prosperity created a secular outlook in urban areas. The progress of science and free thought in Europe—and the importation of Enlightenment ideas to America—caused at least some colonists to doubt traditional religious beliefs.
Whatever their origins, the seeds of revival were generally sown on fertile ground. In the early decades of the century, many Americans—but especially New Englanders—complained that organized religion had lost vitality. They looked back at Winthrops generation with nostalgia, assuming that common people at that time must have possessed greater piety than did later, more worldly colonists. Congregational ministers seemed obsessed with dull, scholastic matters; they no longer touched the heart. And in the Southern Colonies, there were simply not enough ordained ministers to tend to the religious needs of the population.

71. The Great Awakening Jonathan Edwards sparked the movement - 1734
Reminded people of omnipotent God and predestination
Reaction to ministers going “soft” on population
The Great Awakening arrived unexpectedly in Northampton, a small farm community in western Massachusetts, sparked by Jonathan Edwards, the local Congregational minister. Edwards accepted the traditional teachings of Calvinism (see Chapter 1), reminding his parishioners that their eternal fate had been determined by an omnipotent God, there was nothing they could do to save themselves, and they were totally dependent on the Lord s will. He thought his fellow ministers had grown soft. They left men and women with the mistaken impression that sinners might somehow avoid eternal damnation simply by performing good works. “How dismal will it be,” Edwards told his complacent congregation, “when you are under these racking torments, to know assuredly that you never, never shall be delivered from them.”
Young people began flocking to the church. They experienced a searing conversion, a sense of “new birth” and dependence on God. “Surely,” Edwards pronounced, “this is the Lord’s doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes.” The excitement spread, and evangelical ministers concluded that God must be preparing Americans, his chosen people, for the millennium. “What is now seen in America and especially in New England,” Edwards explained, “may prove the dawn of that glorious day.”
Edwards was the great preacher, revivalist, theologian, and philosopher of eighteenth-century New England. Even as a child he showed personal piety and intellectual brilliance: at age seven he began leading other children into the woods for prayer, and by age fourteen, he was reading John Locke and Isaac Newton.
Despite his later learned writings on subjects like the nature of the mind and its relation to the natural world, he remained a parish pastor in Northampton, Massachusetts. In 1734, his intense preaching, first considered old-fashioned, began producing emotional conversions that soon numbered thirty a week. His fame spread throughout the colonies. By 1741, he became concerned about the excesses of the Great Awakening, especially as conducted by uneducated revivalists, but he still defended it strongly.
Tall, slender, with piercing eyes and a soft but perfectly modulated voice, Edwards rose daily at 4:00 A.M. and devoted thirteen hours to study. His later years were absorbed by controversies with parishioners who objected to his strong moral demands on them. In 1757, he was appointed president of Princeton University but died of a smallpox inoculation before taking office.

72. The Voice of Evangelical Religion
George Whitefield a dynamic personality and speaker who sustained the revivals
Preached outdoor sermons to thousands of people in nearly every colony
Skilled entrepreneur and promoter
Itinerant ministers followed Whitefield’s example
Split established churches into “new lights” and “old lights”
While Jonathan Edwards may have ignited a new religious passion, it was George Whitefield, a dynamic personality and speaker who sustain the revivals.
Whitefield was a brilliant entrepreneur. Like Franklin, with whom he published many popular volumes, the itinerant minister possessed an almost intuitive sense of how this burgeoning consumer society could be turned to his own advantage, and he embraced the latest merchandising techniques. He appreciated, for example, the power of the press in selling the revival, and he regularly promoted his own work in advertisements placed in British and American newspapers. The crowds flocked to hear Whitefield. Other preachers, most notably Gilbert Tennent also traveled from town to town to deliver the word of God. Men and women who thronged to hear the itinerants were called “New Lights,” and during the 1740s and 1750s, many congregations split between defenders of the new emotional preaching and those who regarded the entire movement as dangerous nonsense. These traditionalists were known as “Old Lights”.
Despite occasional anti-intellectual outbursts, the New Lights founded several important centers of higher learning. They wanted to train young men who would carry on the good works of Edwards, Whitefield, and Tennent. In 1746, New Light Presbyterians established the College of New Jersey, which later became Princeton University. Just before his death, Edwards was appointed its president. The evangelical minister Eleazar Wheelock launched Dartmouth (1769); other revivalists founded Brown (1764) and Rutgers (1766).

73. The College of New Jersey at Princeton, 1764
Later known as Princeton University,
it was chartered in 1746 by the Presbyterian church though open to students of all
religious persuasions. The fourth college to be founded in British North America, it met
in Elizabeth and Newark, New Jersey, until a gift of ten acres of land precipitated a move
to Princeton in All classes were held in the large building, Nassau Hall. Here the
Continental Congress met for three months during the summer of 1783, making
Princeton for a short time the capital of the nation. This copper engraving, based on a
drawing by one of Princeton’s earliest students, was part of a series of college views that
reflected colonial Americans’ growing pride in institutions of higher learning.
p89

74. George Whitefield Preaching Americans of both genders and all
races and regions were spellbound by
Whitefield’s emotive oratory.
p88

75. The Voice of Evangelical Religion
Gave voice to those traditionally silenced
The Awakening promoted a democratic, evangelical union of national scope
Fostered sense of American unity
The Great Awakening also encouraged men and women who had been taught to remain silent before traditional figures of authority to speak up, to take an active role in their salvation. They could no longer rely on ministers or institutions. The individual alone stood before God.

76. The Voice of Evangelical Religion
Despite outbursts of anti-intellectualism, “new lights” formed colleges
Princeton, Dartmouth, Brown, and Rutgers

77. Table 5-2 p86

78. Colonial Governments
Because Britain was far away, colonists “created” their self government
Politics are locally controlled. Local communities ran their own affairs, formed local assemblies that functioned like mini English Parliament.
Provincial governors appointed by the crown, but limited in power in reality
Quasi self government did not become a problem until 1763 when Britain began to tighten its imperial policy.
Even more significant for the future of the relationship between the colonies and England were important differences between the American and British political systems. Because the royal government was so far away, Americans created a group of institutions of their own that gave them—in reality, if not in theory—a large measure of self-government. In most colonies, local communities grew accustomed to running their own affairs with minimal interference from higher authorities. Communities also expected to maintain strict control over their delegates to the colonial assemblies, and those assemblies came to exercise many of the powers that Parliament exercised in England (even though in theory Parliament remained the ultimate authority in America). Provincial governors appointed by the crown had broad powers on paper, but in fact their influence was sharply limited. They lacked control over appointments and contracts; such influence resided largely in England or with local colonial leaders. They could never be certain of their tenure in office; because governorships were patronage appointments, a governor could be removed any time his patron in England lost favor. And in many cases, governors were not even familiar with the colonies they were meant to govern. Some governors were native-born Americans, but most were Englishmen who came to the colonies for the first time to assume their offices. The result of all this was that the focus of politics in the colonies became a local one. The provincial governments became accustomed to acting more or less independently of Parliament, and a set of assumptions and expectations about the rights of the colonists began to take hold in America that policymakers in England did not share. These differences caused few problems before the 1760s, because the British did little to exert the authority they believed they possessed. But when, beginning in 1763, the English government began attempting to tighten its control over the American colonies, a great imperial crisis developed.

79. Sermon Activity
In your groups, write a short SERMON (1-2 paragraphs) that attacks a SPECIFIC SIN.
Be creative
Use imagery and fiery language
Elect one person to PREACH your sermon to the congregation