The American Colonies Through 1700
Source Database: Encyclopedia of American Social History
Table of Contents
Source Citation
Reciprocal Discovery
In the early morning of 12 October 1492 Rodrigo de Triana, a seaman aboard the Pinta, sighted land, an island that Christopher Columbus named San Salvador "in honor of our Blessed Lord." Hauling in all his sails but the mainsail, Columbus lay to until sunrise and then went ashore, where he raised the royal banner and flags that signified his taking possession of these unknown lands in the name of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain; he and his crew then recited a prayer of thanksgiving. While the Spaniards engaged in their ritual of conquest, the naked inhabitants of the island, "young people, none of whom was over 30 years old," gathered and began to intermingle with these strange intruders into their lands who gave them gifts of "red caps and glass beads."
We have Columbus's description of this fateful encounter, taken from his log with his own hidden agenda: he wanted to convince the Spanish monarchs that the people of the Indies desired to convert to Christianity, "for they seem to have no religion," and that they were peaceable people willing to trade their wealth--gold, precious stones, and spun cotton--for European baubles of little worth. Convinced that he was close to Japan, he navigated his small fleet from island to island observing the "Indians," their golden adornments, and the fertile lands that he constantly described in glowing terms that promised enrichment for himself and his monarchs. What the Amerindians thought of these strange persons and their large ships remains in obscurity.
By contrast to the informative log of Columbus's travels, we have little knowledge of John Cabot's voyage to the Newfoundland region aboard the Mathew in 1497 that was the basis for England's claim to North America in the reign of Henry VII (1485-1509). These initial voyages were followed up by the Spanish, English, French, and Portuguese who came to lay claim to the riches of the continent as part of what Samuel Eliot Morison has called "the European discovery of America," but what with greater accuracy Francis Jennings in his The Invasion of America has termed "reciprocal discovery."
By 1504--some ethnohistorians say as early as 1480--French fishermen were working the Grand Bank fisheries and mixing with the indigenous Beothuks. In Giovanni da Verrazano's voyages of 1524-1528, his ships and crew sailed along the coast of North America and came upon the Wampanoags whom they found to be friendly and charitable. In Maine, by contrast, they came upon the Abnaki, who apparently had some earlier dealings with European traders, and whom Verrazano found to be "bad people," being both discourteous and warlike. When mooned by the Abnaki braves the French sailors were upset, but they were more uncomfortable when it became clear that it was the Abnaki who controlled the terms of trading. Verrazano also encountered the Amerindians of the Cape Fear region of North Carolina, and in the New York Narrows. In Mexico and Peru the Spanish invaders had begun the conquest of the Aztecs and Incas, and within that first quarter of the sixteenth century, Spanish armies had invaded North America's southwest as well. And as Europe transformed the American continents, Europe was itself transformed by the transculturation that took place when these conflicting cultures came into contact.
The ethnohistorian Calvin Martin illustrates this process in an interesting essay on the Micmac, an Algonkian-speaking people, who occupied the eastern region of present-day Canada just north and east of Maine. Already decimated by European diseases, the Micmacs were further threatened by the introduction of Christianity, which destroyed their cosmology and brought about "the dispiritualization of the material world" ("European Impact," p. 21). In their well-balanced ecosystem, hunting and fishing for beaver, moose, bear, caribou, and salmon was regulated by a belief in manitou, magical supernatural forces that operated subject to interpretation and control by the shaman.
Various rituals and taboos served as a valuable "control mechanism on Micmac land-use, maintaining the environment within an optimum range of conditions" ("European Impact," p. 13). The European invasion undermined this spiritual edifice, which proved insufficient to protect the people from the diseases that decimated their population while having no effect upon the foreign invaders. The European priestly powers appeared superior to those of the shamans. And, as the shamans became discredited, the Micmac began to overkill the wildlife upon which their ecosystem relied. Drawn into a commercial trading network that exploited their natural resources, they "became dependent on the European marketplace, both spiritually and economically" ("Impact," p. 25). The new weapons of European technology obtained in trade gave them a decided competitive advantage over other Amerindians, enabling the Micmac to push beyond their traditional boundaries. In defense, their neighbors, both Algonquian and Iroquois, were obliged to participate in this trading nexus in order to survive.
This pattern of reciprocity of discovery occurred throughout the Americas. Contact initiated by Europeans created epidemics that decimated the Amerindians and undermined native belief systems that gave coherence and identity to their existence. The invaders then seized Amerindian lands and settled on them, using survival skills adapted from native technologies and justifying their behavior by citing Christian theology and European legal statutes on the rights and sanctity of private property. In return, their technology subverted Amerindians, who increasingly became dependent upon the metal tools and weaponry of the Europeans. In order to survive, the Amerindians were dragged into the competitive marketplace based upon production for exchange in place of their customary production for use and, as the Europeans became increasingly self-sufficient and independent in the New World, the Amerindians lost their own independence and control of their ecosystems.
Thus Spain, advancing into the most heavily populated areas of the Americas, created an empire that extended throughout the Caribbean, Mexico, Central America, Peru, and much of the South American continent. In North America the Spanish invaders established settlements in St. Augustine, Florida, in 1585 and in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1610. Isolated from their major centers in New Spain to the south, these colonies never acquired much importance in the seventeenth century, with Spanish populations of only 1,500 in all of Florida and some 3,000 in New Mexico, and the New Mexico colonies almost succumbed to a Pueblo revolt in 1680 organized by the Indian leader Popé. Throughout their empire the Spaniards annihilated or enslaved the Amerindians with whom they came into contact; wherever they went, they brought their priests to spread Catholicism and royal agents to administer their acquired lands. And in return, the Spanish brought back to the Old World the wealth of the New, as Spain became the most powerful sixteenth-century nation in all of Christendom.
England's First Efforts at Colonization
Spanish success in America had a tremendous impact upon world economies. As the gold and silver from Mexico and Peru filled the coffers of Ferdinand and Isabella, a European price revolution began that continued throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In England wages lagged far behind price increases, and persons with fixed incomes found their living costs growing more rapidly than their incomes. Real wages of agricultural workers in Cambridgeshire, for instance, on the eve of the Puritan migrations to New England, were only 44 percent of their fifteenth-century levels. At the same time, England experienced a population explosion that was in part related to the ending of the pandemic plague period that dated from the fourteenth century. England increased from three million people in 1500 to over five million by the middle of the seventeenth century. Somewhere between a quarter to a half of this population lived below the contemporarily recognized poverty line.
In East Anglia, enclosures for agriculture or the raising of cattle and sheep uprooted many poor persons who depended upon access to open fields and common lands to eke out their marginal existence. And as food prices rose, they frequently resorted to violent protest actions to express what E.P. Thompson terms "the moral economy of the crowd," a generalized belief that traditional rules governing social and economic relations had been violated. When, for instance, agents of Charles I attempted to enclose royal lands in the West Country, large crowds gathered and tore down the offending hedges and fences, eventually forcing the king to return much of the property the people claimed.
Persons forced off the land resorted to begging and thieving to survive. Large numbers of these wandering vagabonds (Hobbes called them "masterless men") clogged the roads, towns, forests, and riverbanks of England in search of some means of existence. Many found their way to London and Bristol and other port cities, helping to account for the phenomenal increase of the urban population and associated social problems that arose during this period.
In addition, England, after its break with the Catholic church in the reign of Henry VIII and the increasing Protestantization of the Anglican church under Elizabeth, wanted to stem the expansion of the "great Anti-christ of Rome." The establishment of English colonies in North America would thus not only be a place of refuge for England's excess population, but would provide a home for missionary activity among the Amerindians as well. Moreover, America was a continent full of natural resources, including naval supplies with tall trees for the building of masts for the Royal Navy, and great harbors for English ships "to spoil Philip's navy, and to deprive him of yearly passage of his treasure to Europe."
It was ideas such as these that captured the imagination of the nation and led to the first English attempts at colonization. Two cousins, both named Richard Hakluyt, became the publicists for settling in America. Every deed of Sir Francis Drake and the other English seadogs appeared in the pages of their edited Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589), along with a wide variety of propaganda promoting the creation of trading companies and colonizing ventures. Their publication of Richard Hakluyt's A Discourse of Western Planting (1584) led directly to Queen Elizabeth's backing of Sir Walter Raleigh's attempt to establish an English colony in North America.
Despite three earlier costly voyages by Martin Frobisher that had ended in failure, Sir Humfry Gilbert managed to find financial support for the creation of a company that would undertake the settlement of a colony in North America. However, Gilbert died before his venture got under way, and Elizabeth granted a new charter to one of her favorites, Walter Raleigh. Although he was not to go on the voyage himself, he planned and outfitted the fleet that in 1585 planted a colony in Roanoke along the outer banks of the present-day Carolina coast.
Needing a quick financial return so as not to discourage his investors, Raleigh wanted a colony that could serve both as a port from which he could attack Spanish treasure ships and a place of permanent settlement. Unfortunately, the persons selected for the hard work of colonizing under the leadership of John White and Ralph Lane proved totally inadequate for the task. Most of the settlers for this venture had been impressed from the sturdy beggars and criminals--the masterless men--who populated the mother country and had none of the necessary skills for planting a colony. An idyllic belief in the existence of "good Indians," who would work for the English in return for protection from the Spanish and bad "cannibal Indians" quickly proved to be a delusion.
The Roanokes, originally quite hospitable, grew weary of supporting the English, who seemed totally incapable of providing for themselves. Instead of working and planting their own crops, the English killed the Roanoke king and attempted to establish a puppet allied to their interests in his place. The Roanokes refused to recognize the renegade's authority and withdrew all support to the settlement, which sent John White scurrying off to England for assistance. The exasperated Ralph Lane also gave up and sailed for home, and when relief ships arrived in 1590, delayed by the great sea battle in England that resulted in the destruction of the Spanish Armada, all that remained of the settlement were the mysterious markings "CRO" found on a tree and the word "Croatoan" on a wooden post. The rest of the colony had vanished, including Governor John White's daughter and her infant baby, Virginia Dare, the first English child born in what would become the United States. English America had lost its settlement, but gained the myth of the Lost Colony.
Jamestown
With the failure of the Roanoke settlement, English investors were unwilling to risk any new attempts at colonization for the remainder of the sixteenth century. Then in the beginning of the new century, a series of events occurred that changed these sentiments: in 1603 James I succeeded Queen Elizabeth to the throne of England, and the following year the war with Spain came to an end just as the 1603 voyages of Samuel de Champlain ignited French interest in New World colonies. Believing that they now had the backing of the nation and the proper financial incentives, nineteen London merchants who had acquired Raleigh's charter and a separate group of West Country merchants both applied for a new charter to settle in lands claimed by the English along the Atlantic seaboard. Forming themselves into two trading companies under the direction of Sir John Popham, the two groups were granted a single charter to plant two colonies. The West Country investors, calling themselves the Plymouth Company, quickly failed in their attempt to settle on the Maine Coast at Sagadahoc.
The second group of English merchants, the London Company, outfitted three ships, the Susan Constant, Godspeed, and Discovery, which sailed from England in the winter of 1606 with 144 colonists on board. Arriving at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay on 26 April 1607, they attempted a landing, but were driven back by Chesapeake Indians. For the next two weeks they navigated the region in search of a place for settlement. Then on 14 May they picked a site at the mouth of a river they called the James, and began the building and fortifying of Jamestown, the seat of the first permanent English settlement in America. Unloading the settlers, Captain Christopher Newport reconnoitered the river to make peace with the neighboring Powhatans, who were secure in the belief of their superiority over the invaders. For this reason the Powhatans were willing to form an alliance with the English, seeing in them potential allies in their struggles with the neighboring Monacans.
Prior contact with Europeans and their diseases, had nearly destroyed the Amerindians of the Chesapeake, killing off 90 percent of their population. If this terrible depopulation had not occurred, it is doubtful whether the English could ever have gained a foothold in the New World. Certainly their technology was far inferior to that of the Amerindians in this alien environment, and without Amerindian help they would certainly have perished as had the colonists at Roanoke.
Even with Amerindian help the Virginia settlement fared badly. Overcome with sickness, the English managed to plant some wheat, cut trees for clapboard and pitch, and gather sassafras roots for shipping to England as a supposed cure for syphilis. By September half of the population had died. As more English arrived their numbers increased to over five hundred at the onset of winter in 1609. By spring only sixty remained.
This account of the tribulations of the original Jamestown settlement is succintly told in Edmund Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom. The English who had come to Virginia found a land where game abounded, the ground was fertile, and fish were plentiful. Yet the settlers refused to work. They did not plant sufficient crops, depending upon the Indians to provide for them instead. From fall 1608 through August 1609, John Smith served the colony as president, and though he asked but four to six hours of work per day from the settlers, he was unable to get even that. In the winter of 1610-1611 some of the colonists reverted to cannibalism to survive. Yet when Thomas Dale arrived as marshal in 1611 he found the people "bowling in the streets," with few gardens planted and the fields barren.
This behavior could partly be explained by the poor organization and direction of the company. The president had little real power under the terms of the charter and the council was never able to act as a body without quarreling among themselves. Additionally, the work force proved ill-suited to the task of settlement. In England the laboring classes spent large amounts of time in idleness, enjoying their "Saint Monday" holidays and even while starving, they would spend, said John Smith, "4 hours each day ... in work, the rest in pastimes and merry exercise" (quoted in Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery). Surprisingly there were very few farmers among the settlers, the company evidently believing that the raising of crops would not be a problem.
To make matters worse, an inordinate number of shareholders in the company were noblemen or wealthy gentry whose only contribution to the settlement was their ability to pay their own way. Of the first 105 settlers, 36 were gentlemen; in the next two ships, 56 out of the 190 men were gentlemen, "about six times as large a proportion of gentlemen as England had" (E. Morgan, American Slavery, p. 84). These were persons with no manual skills and who looked with disdain upon common labor. Many of these gentlemen brought personal attendants with them, and they likewise had none of the requisite survival skills.
Faced with an incredibly high death rate, the irrational behavior of the settlers, and the lack of any significant financial return, the council in England reorganized the company in 1612, sending over new leadership with strict instructions that demanded every colonist work five to eight hours in the summer and three to six in the winter. Despite the high death-rate, new settlers arrived and spread out in cleared areas along the James so that by 1616, with a population still under four hundred, they were scattered over some seven settlements.
In London, the Virginia Company under the direction of Sir Thomas Smith and Sir Edwin Sandys introduced a headright system for the distribution of land to attract new settlers. Each person who came over to the colony at his own expense received a headright of 50 acres (20 hectares) and an additional grant for others, including servants, whom they brought with them. These settlers had to pay a quitrent of a shilling per year for every 50 acres. Persons who had settled in Virginia prior to 1616 were given a minimum of 100 acres (40 hectares) also subject to a quitrent. In addition, the company paid to transport poorer individuals who would work as tenants on Virginia Company lands for seven years, giving half of their earnings to the company. Upon completion of their tenancy, they would be given 50 acres of their own. Although tobacco had become the major money crop, Sandys tried to limit its production, to encourage the growing of other crops for survival, and alternative items for export and manufacture.
When the company sent their new governor, Sir George Yeardley, to the colony in 1619, they instructed him to "create a laudable form of government" consisting of an elected general assembly of two burgesses from each corporation and borough to make the laws for the colony (D. Hawke, Colonial Experience, p. 101). The first assembly met in Jamestown on 30 July 1619, attended by the governor, his council, and twenty-two representatives, as the first popularly elected legislative body to meet in English America. Ironically in the same year, a Dutch merchant vessel unloaded its cargo of twenty African slaves, purchased by the company as servants.
Somehow the company was able to continue repopulating the colony. Between 1619 and 1622, 3,500 new settlers arrived, 75 percent of whom died within three years. Then in 1622 a Powhatan uprising resulted in the death of 347 Englishmen. In a three-year period, more than 3,000 English settlers had perished, and the English settlement in Virginia was still far from secure. Internal struggles within the company led to further difficulties, and finally in 1624 the Crown dissolved the company making Virginia a royal colony.
English Colonization of New England
The settlement of Virginia was part of a momentous movement of English people in the seventeenth century. Over 250,000 English men and women left England between 1603 and 1660, 50,000 going to Virginia and Maryland (founded in 1634), most coming after 1624. Others immigrated to Ireland, a small group went to Bermuda and over 100,000 to the Caribbean islands of Barbados, Saint Kitts-Nevis, Antigua, and Montserrat. After 1620, 20,000 to 25,000 went to New England.
The founding of Plymouth, the first of the New England colonies, originated in the town of Scrooby in southern Yorkshire. Following Henry VIII's break with Catholicism in 1531-1534, the English clergy had evolved an Erastian solution to the church question (one that involved crown control of the church) based on the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion (1563; rev. 1571) that stated the tenets and rituals of the church in a manner broad enough to accommodate the Christian majority. Catholics, of course, were outside the pale, as were the more radical Protestants who insisted that the church must rid itself of all papist remnants. These iconoclasts uprooted railings in English churches, broke the heads off the statues of saints, and got rid of priestly garb and ritual. In Cambridge a group of Puritan divines preached and taught a theology that merely aimed at purifying the Anglican church. The Puritans and Anglicans had few differences with regard to doctrine, but they were at great odds over church polity and the role of the clergy in that polity.
While Puritans believed that Christians must struggle against sin and the unregenerate within their midst, a small group of Separatists believed that the true saints must remove themselves from all communion with evildoers, sinners, and the unregenerate. In Scrooby a congregation of like-minded Separatists gathered in the manor of William Brewster, who had attended Peterhouse, Cambridge, to hear John Robinson, a Puritan minister, a graduate of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, preach to them on the need to break completely from the Church of England. Faced with fines and imprisonment for their recusancy, approximately one hundred twenty-five members of two neighboring congregations uprooted themselves and sailed to Amsterdam, settling there briefly, and then moved to Leyden in order to worship according to their beliefs.
The Netherlands proved to be an unsatisfactory haven for many reasons and the Scrooby group decided to move once again, this time to Virginia. Accordingly, William Brewster opened negotiations with Sir Edwin Sandys and received a patent from the London Company to settle within their grant. About fifty of the Leyden group returned to England. Of these, thirty-five of the original Scrooby church set out for America on the two ships, the Speedwell and the Mayflower. Only the Mayflower proved seaworthy. After many difficulties and a transatlantic crossing of sixty-six days, it arrived off the shores of Cape Cod, hundreds of miles from its intended destination, in November 1620. Deciding upon Plymouth as a place of settlement, the leaders drew up a covenant agreed to and signed by the forty-one free adult males on board, to create "a civil body politic." This Mayflower Compact became the basis for civil government, extending freeman status to all signers in the Plymouth Colony. Throughout most of its existence as an independent colony, a majority of adult males were granted freeman status, given property in the various land divisions, and granted the right to vote.
Under the leadership of William Bradford, who was the governor of the colony from 1621 until his death in 1657, Plymouth survived the illnesses that wiped out almost half of the original settlers. The colonists overcame the problems of never having a charter or even legal rights to their land until 1621 when the Council for New England granted them a patent. And the Pilgrims, as they are known in our history, maintained their settlement despite poor agricultural conditions and economic problems. For a brief period the fur trade provided them with a staple export item, but that soon died out, and the lack of good harbors hindered other enterprises. They were mainly poor people with almost no contacts in the mercantile world of wealthy London merchants. And the colony was as culturally impoverished as it was economically: it lacked both an educated ministry and a public schools system until late in its history. By 1691 when Plymouth was absorbed into Massachusetts, the unassuming colony had grown to twenty-one towns, but its greatest importance was in its contribution to our mythic lore of Plymouth Rock, Samoset and Squanto, Thanksgiving, Miles Standish and Priscilla Mullins. Significantly, according to William Bradford, the Pilgrims were the "instruments to break the ice for others who come after with less difficulty" (quoted in Colonial Experience, p. 129).
As William Bradford personifies the founding of Plymouth Plantation, the name of John Winthrop is synonymous with Massachusetts Bay. A Cambridge student, Winthrop was a devout Puritan and a representative member of the Suffolk gentry class. Married four times, he was the father of seven sons and one daughter by 1630, and it was not an easy time to raise a family, even for the wealthy. The Thirty Years' War that erupted in 1618 adversely affected English markets and helped create a deepening depression in the textile industry, accompanied by increasing unemployment. In these circumstances Winthrop had a hard time making ends meet: while prices and expenses continued to rise, the rents on his lands were largely fixed. As his children neared adulthood, their financial needs also increased, and he thought of migrating to Ireland. In addition, England seemed to be sinking in sin; the court that surrounded James I grew increasingly corrupt--surely a sign of God's displeasure with the country. The resulting social pressures helped Winthrop decide to leave England, "this sinful land," and plant in America.
In 1630, English colonies existed in Virginia, Plymouth, Barbados, and Bermuda, and there were fur trading posts and fishing villages scattered along the New England coast. The granting of a charter in 1620 to the Council for New England, which had replaced the defunct Plymouth Company, served as an impetus for continuing colonization. With no settlement plans of its own, the council offered licenses to investors such as the Dorchester Company, which established trading and fishing villages around Massachusetts Bay. Following the collapse of the Dorchester Company, the council granted a new license in 1628 to a group of Puritan merchants organized as the New England Company, which captured the attention of John Winthrop. Just prior to Charles I's proroguing of Parliament in 1629, they obtained a charter and Winthrop and eleven others, meeting in Cambridge, took an oath to move the charter and entire Massachusetts Bay Company to New England.
In October of 1629 the company appointed Winthrop as their governor and he took charge of organizing the expedition. In early spring 1630 his fleet of eleven ships and some seven hundred passengers steered a course toward the North American continent. It was the beginning of the great migration, in which over twenty thousand persons emigrated to New England in the period from 1630 to 1642. Aboard the flagship Arbella, Winthrop wrote and delivered a lay sermon, "A Model of Christian Charity," in which he explained his goals for the colony they were erecting in the wilderness. "We shall be as a City upon a Hill," he exclaimed, a beacon light for others to follow; by serving God in a model Christian society they would prosper and by their example England would learn and cleanse itself of its sins.
Winthrop's fleet landed in Massachusetts just as another group of settlers arrived and began planting at Dorchester, several miles south of the Boston Harbor. After a brief stay at Salem, Winthrop explored the region north of Dorchester, and came upon the peninsula that the Amerindians called Shawmut, where he settled along the Charles River while others of his group encamped along the Mystic. Assisted by a small number of English inhabitants already dwelling in the region, the new colony quickly located a good source for water and sites for settlement.
Here on what the English saw as "widowed lands," left by the Pawtucket and Massachusetts Amerindians, who had been nearly destroyed by European diseases (only about two hundred remained in the area), the Puritans began building their colony. Within a year they had erected seven towns, and Winthrop had moved across the Charles to Boston, where in October the first general court met, extending freeman status to all the male settlers who took an oath binding them to the laws of the colony, while restricting future membership to church members only.
The New England Town
Boston's growth from town to city evolved quite differently than did the inland farming communities. Its soil was poor, land was limited, and even firewood was scarce. Its initial success in the fur trade soon passed. But with its natural harbor, Boston developed as a commercial center, open to outside worldly influences that undermined early Puritan concerns for community. The effect was that capital accumulation and material gain became more important than godly behavior. From the very beginning property distribution was unequal--over half of its land was given originally to just thirty families--and this inequality between rich and poor increased over time. As Darrett Rutman shows, individualism and materialism thwarted Winthrop's "concern for community," as his "ideal of the medieval community was transformed into the reality of modern society" (Winthrop's Boston, p. 275). By the last decade of the seventeenth century, Boston, with a population of over seven thousand, was no longer a village. It had become the largest port city and commercial trading center in English North America, open to the worldly influences and sins its Puritan founders had hoped to leave behind in England.
As these first settlers arrived in New England, they had no definite plans of church polity or town government to guide them. They had the charter that defined their powers and a governor, deputy governor, and a body of assistants who had been selected in England to serve as a governing body along with the freemen. Beyond that, they had to adapt to the circumstances they found in the New World while relying upon familiar traditions, institutions, and forms of government brought with them from England, where there existed a tremendous diversity in agricultural structures, land systems, and patterns of leadership. No town in New England could be said to be typical, each had its own particular characteristics largely related to the English background of its founders.
In his study of the processes by which English culture, law, and customs were transported to New England, David Grayson Allen found that the settlers attempted to recreate societies and structures with which they were familiar. In Hingham, England, town government was based upon parish organization; in Hingham, Massachusetts, the people "set up a network of relationships in law, government, economy, and society that duplicated their English background." Where there was a "stable, static agrarian society, characterized by a population steady in size, a traditional open-field system of farming, specializing in grain and cattle, and tightly defined social structure," such as in the East Riding of York, these became the characteristics of the "new society created at Rowley, Massachusetts" (English Ways, pp. 55, 21). In the chalk regions of Wiltshire and Hampshire, where large-scale capitalistic agriculture was the rule, the "villages were nucleated, surrounded by common fields and open pastures, and meadow" (p. 83). Settlers from this region replicated such a society, complete with its highly stratified class structure and contentiousness, to Newbury in New England.
The resulting diversity in the five towns he studied reflected the regional differences that existed in the mother country. Similarly the people who came and their reasons for emigrating were quite different. For instance, emigrants from English towns in the north and west tended to be younger and from prominent families. Those from the south and east were usually older and from more obscure backgrounds.
Away from the coast, these almost mythic agricultural New England towns developed. Studies of such towns as Andover, Dedham, Sudbury, and Plymouth describe traditional life in colonial America that has been taken incorrectly to be typical of New England life in general. Here, in well laid-out settlements with their centrally located meetinghouses, Englishmen established Puritan communities based on close-knit nuclear patriarchal family structures with strong, supportive, kinship networks. The people who founded Andover in 1646, for instance, came mainly from Lincolnshire, Wiltshire, and Hampshire in England, and attempted to re-create in rural Massachusetts the traditional open-field village with which they were familiar. They laid out their town along two parallel streets, presided over by the meetinghouse, and assigned house lots to inhabitants accepted as townsmen, recognizing "a hierarchy of rank and wealth," yet with a "relative narrowness of the range of landholdings" (Christine A. Young, From "Good Order" to "Glorious Revolution" [1980] p. 1). It was to a large extent a one-class society.
The distribution of farmlands followed a similar pattern. Andover, as Philip J. Greven has demonstrated, was a subsistence agricultural village, inhabited by a homogeneous population, sharing communal values and an abiding faith in Puritan piety. Kinship factors played heavily in populating the town and as long as land was plentiful, large patriarchal families lived long, harmonious lives together in healthy environs. Second-generation women married at an average age of 22.3 years, men at 26.7 and with surprisingly infrequent childbirth deaths raised their five-plus children. Other studies, such as Kenneth Lockridge's A New England Town (on Dedham), describe similar "homogeneous, closed, corporate, and cohesive," settlements that were based on subsistence farming. Frequently utopian in their origins, the town's inhabitants covenanted together and erected their churches, established a school system that made for "nearly universal male literacy," and supplied the students for Harvard College (founded in 1636), which in turn provided the learned clergy, teachers, and educated men who led the colony into the evolving capitalist world of the eighteenth century.
The commercialized agricultural towns such as Springfield in the Connecticut Valley, however, were quite different and, until recently, unstudied. Stephen Innes's Labor in a New Land traces the growth of Springfield from its beginnings in 1636 as a fur-trading post through its development of a diversified economy encompassing gristmills, sawmills, lead mines, turpentine manufactories, ironworks, and house construction largely dominated by William Pynchon, the town's founder, and his son John. It quickly became the commercial center for trade in the upper valley, with about one-third of the town's male population working as wage laborers, and some forty men employed full time by the Pynchons. The indentured servants and low-paid free laborers who worked for Pynchon had to buy their goods in his general store. Innes says in his Labor in a New Land that about half of the town depended "in some fashion--rental of land or animals, employment, or debt--on the resources and good graces of Pynchon" (p. xix).
Unlike Dedham or Andover, land tenancy was commonplace in Springfield. As the Pynchons owned most of the agriculturally productive alluvial and bottomlands, and as the poorer town-dwellers could not support themselves on their meager holdings, about one-third of the adult males were forced to rent land or livestock from the Pynchons. This often meant that the tenants, in addition to paying rent, had to perform feudal-like duties on the leasehold. Laborers even had to rent their tools from the Pynchons. The resulting town structure was far from a harmonious community. Springfield was replete with antisocial behavior: "physical assault, family feuds, slander, witchcraft accusations, and drunkenness" (Labor in a New Land, p. xviii).
While the majority of the town dwellers lived in poverty, in humble dwellings, working as wage laborers, William Pynchon lived in an ornate mansion from whence he dominated every aspect of town life: he served the town as magistrate, judge of the county court, permanent moderator of the town meeting, and captain of the militia. In addition and of equal importance, the family was Springfield's mediator to the outside world.
Pynchon came to Springfield as a merchant, not as a Puritan; the townspeople readily accepted his entrepreneurship because they shared a common weltanschauung. The triumph of the market economy in Springfield was the victory of nascent capitalism; it was an acquisitive, materialistic society, competitive, individualistic, and non-egalitarian that accepted the ideal of possessive individualism.
As the English of the great migration settled the towns of New England and the Chesapeake, their Puritan brethren in the mother country became embroiled in a revolution and civil war. On 23 October 1642 the forces of the king and Parliament clashed at Edgehill, the opening battle of the Civil War; seven years later, on 30 January 1649 Charles I was beheaded and parliamentary rule established. In New England, news of these events came in infrequent letters: the people were for the most part supporters of Parliament, and some even felt it necessary to return to England. As governor, John Winthrop subjected the colony to Parliament's protection, he argued from the beginning that governments were based on the consent of the governed and that the Puritans, by migrating to America, and covenanting together, had given their consent to be governed by the Massachusetts Bay Charter. Playing it as cautiously as he could, he was clearly a supporter of Parliament in the Revolution. But the Puritan revolution also turned "the eyes of all people" away from his model of Christian charity, and after 1642 immigration slowed considerably, the great migration was over. Parliament in the interregnum moved toward a Presbyterian solution to the religious question, and on 26 March 1649 John Winthrop died, his dream of a Puritan utopia unfulfilled.
With the coeval development of commercialism and Puritanism in Massachusetts, the increasingly unequal distribution of wealth became disruptive to the original settlers' aspirations, resulting in a turbulent period of social unrest. In its zeal for orthodoxy, Massachusetts drove religious dissenters such as Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson and their followers from their midst. In the 1650s a small number of English Quakers entered the colony with an even greater impact. The Puritans perceived them as a threat, demanding harsh treatment including imprisonment, whippings, exile, and hangings. Only the direct intervention by Charles II could halt this violence against the Quakers. Significantly, the crown continued its attack upon the colony's privileges for the next quarter century, finally revoking its charter in 1684. Following the Glorious Revolution, William and Mary granted a new charter in 1691, making Massachusetts a royal colony.
This assault upon the old social and political structure had severe repercussions in the colony, including the appearance of witches in Salem--a tragic event rooted, as Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum wrote, "in the prosaic, everyday lives of obscure and inarticulate men and women." Salem, like Boston and Springfield, was a mercantile center with taverns and other disruptive influences, a place where merchants charged usurious prices, and where backcountry farmers warred against commercial capitalism and its insidious individualism. Salem residents fought over land divisions, families split apart because third-generation sons found their access to town lots blocked by their parents, and churches strained the bounds of the covenant as saints and ministers locked in unseemly battles. The tension and repression, sexual and otherwise, created in this environment was vented in accusations of witchcraft brought by neighbor against neighbor--resulting in the hanging of nineteen convicted witches and the crushing to death of Giles Cory. When the fury finally subsided, over one hundred fifty others were in jail faced with death.
Thus despite its success in establishing its towns, the Puritan commonwealth failed in its mission, its errand into the wilderness. The "beacon light of the City upon a Hill" was dimmed by the English Revolution; communal society broke apart on the reef of New World individualism; outward behavior, and display of wealth became more important than inward godliness; and extended family and kinship relations split apart in internal migrations caused by a combination of large family size and longevity. Puritans became Yankees, the counting house surpassed the meetinghouse in importance, and the one-class society gave way to a new hierarchical order of rich and poor.
Colonization in the Seventeenth Century
By mid century the first phase of colonization was completed; the English settlements in North America had a population of approximately fifty-five thousand, two thousand of whom were of African heritage. In the Chesapeake region there were two colonies. Virginia was the largest English colony in North America with a population of almost nineteen thousand. Bordering Virginia to the north, Maryland, founded as a proprietary government, competed with its larger neighbor in the production of tobacco and by 1650 had a population of just under five thousand. The Maryland charter granted Cecil Calvert and his heirs 6.5 million acres (2.6 million hectares) in return for the annual payment of two Indian arrowheads, and was intended both as an economic investment and a haven for Catholics in the New World. No English colonies were yet organized along the Atlantic coast between the Chesapeake and the Spanish settlements in Florida. The Carolinas were not settled until after the Restoration when Charles II granted a proprietary charter to a group of eight influential supporters in 1663. To the north of Maryland lay only the Dutch colony in New Netherland, the New England colonies, and the French in Canada.
The Dutch claim in the region stemmed from Henry Hudson's voyages between 1607 and 1609 for the Dutch East India Company. Other explorers followed, and in 1624 the Dutch West India Company established its first settlement at New Amsterdam, purchasing the land from the Manhattan Amerindians of the region. Originally intended as a trading post and commercial center, New Netherland grew very slowly, and a series of disastrous Indian wars between 1641 and 1645 devastated the colony. In spring 1647 Peter Stuyvesant arrived in New Amsterdam as the director of the company. Under his leadership the population doubled to almost four thousand by 1650. As the colony grew and prospered, the Dutch maritime fleet, which dominated the world carrying trade, came into conflict with the English. In the resulting wars, England conquered New Netherland in 1664 and Charles II granted it as a proprietary grant to his brother, the duke of York, renaming the colony New York.
Pennsylvania, like Maryland, the Carolinas, and New York, came into existence as a proprietary colony. Pennsylvania's founder, William Penn, who was an influential member of the gentry class and a close friend to the duke of York, had joined the Society of Friends in the 1660s. In return for a debt owed his father by Charles II, and most likely because of the king's desire to rid the land of the obstreperous Quakers, Penn received a liberal charter in 1681 to a huge landmass over which he had wide yet limited powers. Here, reminiscent of John Winthrop's model Christian community, he intended to plant a colony "that an example may be set up to the nations: that there may be room there ... for ... an holy experiment." But he also wanted to raise a substantial income for himself and his children as well--or as he wrote, "though I desire to extend religious freedom, yet I want some recompense for my trouble."
Penn sold about five hundred thousand acres (two hundred thousand hectares) of Pennsylvania property to merchants in order to raise funds for settling the colony. At the same time he traded large tracts to the Free Society of Traders, a group of London Quakers organized as a joint-stock company to promote settlement in Pennsylvania. They in turn sold individual plots outright, while developing their own estate with two hundred servants transported to the colony for that purpose. As part of his deal with the Free Society of Traders, Penn exempted them from paying the normal quitrents and granted them three seats on the provincial council, which they used to contend against his government. To end the internecine squabbling, Penn separated the three lower counties from Pennsylvania and formed it into a new colony, Delaware, with its own assembly. Then in 1701 Penn wrote a new and more liberal frame of government, the Charter of Privileges. By this date, the rapid pace of immigration had pushed the population of Pennsylvania to twenty-one thousand, and propelled Philadelphia past New York as the second largest city in English North America.
Thus by the end of the seventeenth century, all the original thirteen colonies with the exception of Georgia had been founded. The New England colonies of Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Hampshire had their beginnings as outgrowths of Massachusetts Bay. Dissenters from Puritan orthodoxy such as Anne Hutchinson, Roger Williams, John Wheelwright, and their followers found refuge in lands removed from but claimed by Massachusetts and built their own colonies. In 1691 Massachusetts, which included the remote Maine district until the nineteenth century, absorbed Plymouth. By that date the English contiguous settlement of the Atlantic seaboard from Maine to South Carolina was completed, the business of clearing the land and populating the colonies well under way. As the colonies grew, five colonial cities developed as centers of trade and commerce: Boston in 1700 was the largest with 6,700, followed by Philadelphia and New York, each with 5,000, Newport, Rhode Island, with 2,600, and Charles Town, South Carolina, with 2,000. Protected by the English navy, operating comfortably within the nation's mercantile system, growing in wealth and population, and providing new markets, the twelve colonies had survived the early stages of colonization and emerged as harbingers of a New World far different than that envisioned by the original settlers.
Work and Labor in Early America
Richard Hakluyt's sixteenth-century promotional literature argued that "the wandering beggars of England, that grow up idly and hurtful and burdenous to this realm," would find employment and new life in America. As he prepared to sail for New England in 1630, John Winthrop worried that England "grows weary of her inhabitants," and echoed the idea that in the colonies jobs were plentiful. Even as late as 1681, William Penn was promoting his colony as a place where the idle would find work and the industrious find means to uplift themselves. The masterless men who wandered aimlessly in seventeenth-century England were part of what Stephen Innes has called the "worst employment crisis ever experienced by the British Isles." They migrated to the cities in large numbers, seeking employment--London's population grew from about 200,000 in 1600 to 575,000 in 1700. One-quarter of England's population lived on the edge of starvation, and real wages declined dramatically, affecting almost the entire unskilled and semi-skilled working classes. And it was the extent of full employment that economists of the time believed to be the measure of economic well-being for the country. Accordingly, "unemployment," Innes writes, "served as one of the principle rationales for the colonial effort."
Unable to find any means of support in London or Bristol, the working poor readily accepted offers to migrate to the colonies. They were typically nonhouseholders with little property of any kind, persons of small means, representing a wide variety of trades and agricultural work. For the most part, they came as servants; some 80 to 90 percent of the immigrants to the Chesapeake were indentured; very few were of the gentry or professional classes. Those who came to the Chesapeake were overwhelmingly male, with a ratio of about three males to each female. With family life uncertain, only sustained immigration enabled Virginia and Maryland to survive in the seventeenth century. Initially work in the Chesapeake consisted of three related activities: clearing the land, growing tobacco for export, and providing food and livestock for subsistence and sale. There was little specialization or diversity. But with the decline in tobacco prices in the last quarter of the century, the Chesapeake region responded by diversifying its output to wheat and corn. At the same time, the demand for craftsmen of all kinds increased, with greater and greater degrees of specialization becoming the rule. Women's work, too, bolstered the local economy and altered the patterns of their labor.
Another cause for the increased diversity in servant labor and the changing patterns of work was the growing importance of and dependence on slavery in the Chesapeake. Virginia and Maryland were becoming what Philip D. Morgan has distinguished as slave-owning societies, but not yet slave societies where slavery "becomes central to the economic functioning of that society" (Strangers, p. 163). Initially, following their arrival in 1619, blacks in the Chesapeake found race relations to be somewhat flexible. The passage from slave to freedman remained open, with the legal status of the slave not yet spelled out. Most blacks worked alongside whites in the tobacco fields, others cared for livestock, some were artisans. Interracial sex may have been frowned upon, but it did take place; and the records show that in some instances free black men married white women and there were a number of cases where white servant women gave birth to mulatto children.
While the status of blacks in the period from 1619 to 1661 remains obscure--some blacks lived as freedmen, some owned property, some were servants, and some, probably the majority, were slaves--after 1661, when Virginia enacted its first slave codes, their condition became quite clear and defined. Coincidentally, their numbers grew: 950 in Virginia and 758 in Maryland in 1660 to more than 16,000 and 3,000, respectively, by 1700. And as slaves began to arrive in significant numbers after 1680, there was a corresponding decrease in the number of new white servants. Darrett and Anita Rutman found in their study of Middlesex County, Virginia, that in the last decade of the sixteenth century, slaves exceeded white servants in the work force, and by the end of the century constituted 22 percent of the total population. A fifth of the male heads of households in Middlesex owned at least one slave.
The reasons for this transformation to slave labor, as expressed by Virginia's governor, were clear: "Blacks can make [tobacco] cheaper than Whites" (A Place in Time, p. 165). While most slaves toiled at onerous jobs like clearing the fields and plowing, others worked as skilled laborers with artisanal skills. Women slaves got the more monotonous tasks such as hoeing tobacco. And as black men and women replaced whites in the work force, the white servants and poor farmers viewed the very labor they once performed as debased. Virginia gentlemen built their fortunes upon the backs of this degraded white work force and the rapidly increasing slave class.
In the Carolinas, slavery took hold almost from the beginning. In fact a small population of Africans existed in the region prior to the 1619 date that traditionally marks the entrance of blacks into the English colonies. And from the period of South Carolina's earliest settlement, Africans "seasoned" in the Caribbean arrived in large numbers. Between one-fourth and one-third of the colony's newcomers were blacks, with men outnumbering women by a ratio of three to one, and by the first decade of the eighteenth century blacks outnumbered whites in the overall population. Slave labor was by no means merely unskilled: blacks worked as carpenters, cattle herders, and boatmen. Even more significantly, they brought with them from Africa the experience and technology for the cultivation of rice and indigo that in the eighteenth century became South Carolina's major export commodities.
Additionally, Africans could be maintained more cheaply and worked harder and, after the initial investment, made to produce greater profits. Those who suffered from sickle-cell anemia, ironically, had a genetic resistance to malaria that enabled them to survive in the mosquito-infested low country where rice and indigo were grown. Thus there were few inducements for white servants to migrate to South Carolina, and as they had a choice, they were not a major component of the seventeenth-century Carolina low-country work force. So despite the high original purchase price, and fear that Africans would run away--the Spanish town of Saint Augustine was a place of refuge--Carolinians made a conscious choice to build their society based upon slave labor and, beginning in 1690, enacted stringent slave codes to protect their human chattel.
Pennsylvanians pursued a different path, depending upon white indentured servants instead of slaves to supply their labor. By the end of the seventeenth century there were probably fewer than five hundred slaves out of a population of approximately eighteen thousand. While definite figures are hard to calculate, historians estimate that approximately one-third of early settlers were indentured servants. Originally they were offered liberal headrights as part of their freedom dues, but by the end of the century these seem to have been reduced and in most cases removed altogether. Most of the early servants were male. Having served their terms of indenture, they tended to settle in rural areas as nonlandholding laborers. In comparison to Maryland, where 90 percent of former servants became landowners and where social mobility was a reality, Pennsylvania offered little opportunity to its indentured work force.
What indentured servants were to Pennsylvania, free families were to New England. While servants, tenants, and hired labor were common in commercial centers such as Springfield, Massachusetts, and Bristol, Rhode Island, they did not exceed 4 percent of the population in the agricultural towns, where four-fifths of "the farmers kept no male servants at all" (Stephen Innes, Work and Labor, p. 56). Likewise, slaves did not provide an alternative to free labor: in all of New England, slaves accounted for about 1 percent of the population, numbering slightly more than one thousand, and as in England, they were mostly house servants. Day laborers hired in time of necessity were another component of the work force, but they were hard to find and the high wages they could command placed them beyond the means of most farmers.
Women and the Family
By the end of the seventeenth century, colonial dwellings, even for the poorest, had come a long way from the sod houses and shacks that once existed in Virginia, New Netherland, and New England. Except for the wealthy, English settlers typically dwelt in small single-room houses, twenty-by-twenty feet (six-by-six meters), which provided little light, air, or privacy. These physical limitations work against the popular image of large extended families dwelling together under one roof. Rather, the typical colonial family tended to be neither extended nor nuclear, but rather a "mixed affair of parents, stepparents, guardians, natural children, stepchildren, and wards," living in a small community in which neighbors were also related (Hawke, Everyday Life, p. 62). Families in the Chesapeake differed radically from those in the north, owing in part to the higher mortality rates and imbalanced sex ratio in the South. Infant mortality and childbirth deaths were common. As Darrett and Anita Rutman's study of Middlesex County, Virginia, illustrates, of those children born prior to 1689 who managed to survive beyond infancy, almost half had lost one or both parents by the age of nine, and almost two-thirds were orphaned by their thirteenth birthday. Women, always in short supply, married at an early age and when widowed could and did remarry quickly. In such unstable conditions, the makeup of the family was constantly shifting, and patriarchal control was difficult to sustain.
In New England, where there was a more balanced sex ratio and the ravages of disease were less life-threatening, women tended to marry in their early twenties, men in their middle to late twenties. While there are instances of truly large families--Benjamin Franklin, for instance, was one of seventeen--the more typical number of children was somewhere between five and seven. Death in childbirth was much less frequent than in the southern colonies and longevity not uncommon. As women were therefore less likely to be widowed until late in life, the rate of frequent remarriage was small. This translated into family relationships in which the hierarchical structure subordinated the interests of the wife to those of her husband. In such a family the parents could expect to see their children grow, arrange the marriages of their daughters, and exploit their sons' labor until they should reach adulthood and establish their own families--and sometimes beyond.
While women in the South, because of their scarcity, had the ability to select their husbands from a wider field and to obtain a degree of economic independence through widowhood and profitable marriages, women in the North had the advantage of greater marital stability, longer life spans, and more favorable domestic situations in general. But in both North and South, women lived in rigorous patriarchal societies that supported legal restrictions upon women's rights. In some colonies husbands could sell off their wives' property without their consent, and when husbands died intestate--and more than half of all men did so--their wives could expect only dower rights, usually a third of the estate, meant to maintain them and keep them off the relief roles. Even here the widow's property rights were limited and might revert back to the husband's estate if she remarried. The result of these property laws favored the rights of the eldest son over those of the mother, although in some instances widows successfully challenged unfavorable wills and other property settlements. Again, in some colonies women had feme sole rights to operate their own businesses and own property in their own name, but this too was a limited right intended to keep women off of public relief.
Women were expected to be the educators of their children, teaching them how to read--but not to write, for it was not seen as necessary for women to write and they therefore frequently lacked this skill. In the early stages of colonization, women worked alongside their husbands in the fields, but they also raised the families and cared for the household. As summed up by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, "a married women in early New England was simultaneously a housewife, a deputy husband, a consort, a mother, a mistress, a neighbor, and a Christian." On the war-torn frontier she might also become a heroine" (Good Wives, p. 9). Alternatively, she might also be the deviant daughter of Eve, guilty of harlotry, infanticide, witchcraft, and adultery. There is thus little evidence for those who seek to find a golden age for women's rights in the colonial past.
The demographic differences from colony to colony with regard to age of marriage, number of children, and longevity, narrowed by the end of the century as the domestic lives of white women became more similar and, at the same time, more restricted. The major exception to this increasingly narrow sphere for women's freedom was Rhode Island, where their roles were conceived more liberally.
Social Structure and Conflict at the End of the Century
By the end of the seventeenth century, the English inhabitants along the Atlantic seaboard had established twelve colonies bordered on the south by the Spanish in Florida, and on the north by the French in Canada. Their founding, as Karl Marx noted in his Communist Manifesto, signaled the opening of a world-market system. No longer weak dependent settlements, they had developed within the mercantile system into important markets and providers of raw materials for English merchants. In the American colonies it was the staple-producing economies in the Carolinas and the Chesapeake based on slave labor, and the commercial colonies in the North that utilized wage labor, not the subsistence-farming communities of New England, that were to be the major forces shaping eighteenth-century society.
As these colonies grew in economic power and size, social conflict became more and more frequent. The Amerindians fought back against the English conquest of their lands: local and limited raids and counter-raids produced large-scale wars. In 1622 the Powhatans launched an attack against Jamestown, killing 347 Virginians. The survivors saw this as a blessing, for it enabled them to kill off the Chesapeake peoples without constraint, and, as one noted, "now their cleared ground in all their villages shall be inhabited by us." At one treaty-signing ceremony, the English offered poisoned wine to the Indians, killing over two hundred outright, and an additional fifty in the fighting that followed. In 1644 the Chesapeake nations tried once more to oust the invaders from their lands, but again they were defeated in battle and forced to sign a humiliating treaty.
In New England the Pequots offered the greatest resistance to English conquest. In 1637 the English, aided by the Narragansetts, almost exterminated the Pequots completely. In just one battle at Mystic, the Puritans, invoking God's name, killed five hundred Pequots, and then placed their captives on ships which they sank "to feed the fishes with 'em." Then the English turned on the Algonquians, already weakened by epidemic diseases, and converted them into "praying Indians," forced to live in fourteen villages where they adopted English clothes, customs, and Christianity. As the ethnohistorian James Merrell has shown, where the English lacked power they met with the Amerindians on the latter's terms, adapting to their rituals and customs. Once the white men gained the upper hand, however, they dispensed with the traditional courtesies, and forced the Native Americans to conform to English ways.
In the most serious of these Indian struggles, King Philip's War of 1675, the Wampanoag leader Metacom organized a league of Indian resistance against the colonists, driving them almost into the sea. But disease and shortages of arms and food brought a halt to Metacom's victories, and by the summer of 1676 the war was over, the Wampanoags defeated. A similar fate befell the Tuscaroras, Yamasees, Saraws, Catawbas, Congarees, Santees, and other lesser tribes in the south. The fate of the Iroquois, Creeks, and Cherokees was bound up in the French and English wars for empire that lasted from 1689 to 1783. Forced to take sides in order to survive, they too were ultimately destroyed. By the time of the American Revolution a mere 100,000 Amerindians remained in English North America. While Europeans had fought for empire, the Amerindians had battled for survival, and lost.
There were few opportunities for blacks to fight their oppressors in the seventeenth century. Their numbers were too few; if they ran away--their most effective form of resistance--they were easily identifiable and had but limited knowledge of their local geography. The first large-scale slave revolt did not occur until 1739 in Stono, South Carolina.
Serious rebellions and conflicts occurred within the white population as well. The most threatening to any established government was Bacon's Rebellion in Virginia (1675-1676). What began as a frontier uprising for Indian lands, led by Nathaniel Bacon, a wealthy member of the Virginia council, against the governor, William Berkeley, became a struggle over unequal tax rates, representation, and governmental favoritism. The 1681 uprisings led by John Coode and Josias Fendall in Maryland, and the even more radical 1688-1691 rebellion led by Jacob Leisler in New York, both involved religious struggles that pitted Protestants against Catholics, but there were even more important underlying issues of class discontent that help explain the ferocity of the conflicts in each colony.
Indeed, by the end of the century increasing social and class stratification created major problems. In the colonial cities where the dwellings and clothes of the rich appeared close to the hovels and rags of the poor, these disparities were most obvious. As early as mid century, taxes had to be raised to care for the numerous poor and unemployed who in times of crisis flocked to the cities where riots were always a threat. In Boston in 1689, a crowd gathered and attacked the newly opened Anglican church, breaking its windows and smearing its walls with dung. Seamen, dockhands, laborers, artisans, thieves, and pirates walked the urban streets, and in their wake came the taverns, brothels, jails, and other social indicators of modernity.
In the same towns and on the same streets one could also find schools and colleges, bookshops and printing presses, open-air markets filled with the products of the hinterlands, carted overland on roads extending into the backcountry. The city harbors bustled with activity, town streets echoed with the sounds of a growing economy. These too were social indicators of modernity ushered in by the social, economic, and political changes of the seventeenth century. As the English inhabitants of North America faced the new century, they were no longer dependent and fragile, they were instead the vibrant harbingers of the commercial and industrial might that would change the entire world.
General Studies
Bailyn, Bernard, and Philip D. Morgan, eds. Strangers Within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire (1991).
Bridenbaugh, Carl. Cities in the Wilderness: The First Century of Urban Life in America, 1625-1742 (1955; 2d ed. 1960).
Greene, Jack P. Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (1988).
Grevin, Philip J., Jr. Four Generations: Population, Land, and Family in Colonial Andover, Massachusetts (1970).
Hawke, David Freeman. The Colonial Experience (1966).
Hawke, David Freeman. Everyday Life in Early America (1988).
McCusker, John J., and Russell R. Menard. The Economy of British America, 1607-1789 (1985).
Morgan, Edmund S. Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (1988).
Nash, Gary B. Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early America (1974; 2d ed. 1982).
Smith, James Morton, ed. Seventeenth-Century America: Essays in Colonial History (1959).
European Background and Reciprocal Discovery
Cressy, David. Coming Over: Migration and Communication Between England and New England in the Seventeenth Century (1987).
Fischer, David Hackett. Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (1989).
Jennings, Francis. The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (1975; 2d ed. 1976).
Martin, Calvin. "The European Impact on the Culture of a Northeastern Algonquian Tribe: An Ecological Interpretation." William and Mary Quarterly 3d ser., 31 (1974): 3-26.
Weber, David J. The Spanish Frontier in North America (1992).
New England Colonies
Allen, David Grayson. In English Ways: The Movement of Societies and the Transferral of English Local Law and Custom to Massachusetts Bay in the Seventeenth Century (1981).
Archer, Richard. "New England Mosaic: A Demographic Analysis for the Seventeenth Century." William and Mary Quarterly 3d ser., 47 (1990): 477-502.
Boyer, Paul, and Stephen Nissenbaum. Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft (1974).
Breen, Timothy H., and Stephen Foster. "Moving to the New World: The Character of Early Massachusetts Immigration." William and Mary Quarterly 3d ser., 30 (1973): 189-222.
Erikson, Kai T. Wayward Puritans: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance (1966).
Innes, Stephen. Labor in a New Land: Economy and Society in Seventeenth-Century Springfield (1983).
Lockridge, Kenneth A. A New England Town, the First Hundred Years: Dedham, Massachusetts, 1636-1736 (1970).
Lockridge, Kenneth A. "Assessing the Little Communities of Early America." William and Mary Quarterly 3d ser., 43 (1986): 163-178.
Rutman, Darrett B. Winthrop's Boston: Portrait of a Puritan Town, 1630-1649 (1965).
Southern Colonies
Morgan, Edmund S. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (1975).
Rutman, Darrett B., and Anita H. Rutman. A Place in Time: Middlesex County, Virginia, 1650-1750 (1984).
Wood, Peter H. Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 Through the Stono Rebellion (1974).
Middle Colonies
Ritchie, Robert C. The Duke's Province: A Study of New York Politics and Society, 1664-1691 (1977).
Salinger, Sharon V. "To Serve Well and Faithfully": Labor and Indentured Servants in Pennsylvania, 1682-1800 (1987).
Schwartz, Sally. "A Mixed Multitude". The Struggle for Toleration in Colonial Pennsylvania (1987).
Work, Women, and the Family
Breen, Timothy H. "A Changing Labor Force and Race Relations in Virginia, 1660-1710." Journal of Social History 7 (1973): 3-25.
Brown, Kathleen M. Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs (1996).
Henretta, James A. "Families and Farms: Mentalité in Pre-Industrial America." William and Mary Quarterly 3d ser., 35 (1978): 3-32.
Hoffer, Peter C., and N. E. Hull. Murdering Mothers: Infanticide in England and New England, 1558-1803 (1981).
Innes, Stephen C., ed. Work and Labor in Early America (1988).
Koehler, Lyle. A Search for Power: The "Weaker Sex" in Seventeenth-Century New England (1980).
Lockridge, Kenneth A. Literacy in Colonial New England: An Enquiry into the Social Context of Literacy in the Early Modern West (1974).
Norton, Mary Beth. "The Evolution of White Women's Experience in Early America." American Historical Review 89 (1984): 593-619.
Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher. Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650-1750 (1982).
-- Norman S. Cohen
Source Citation: "The American Colonies Through 1700." Encyclopedia of American Social History. 3 vols. Charles Scribner's Sons, 1993. Reproduced in History Resource Center. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale. http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/HistRC/
Document Number: BT2313026898
