Chapter 9
In This Chapter
● Understanding how the colonies grew
● Feeling the need to make money and still be religious
● Marching along with colonial wars
● Getting ready for a revolution
● Tying the era to potential essay topics
From shaky settlements clinging to the edge of a wild continent, the 13 colonies grew to become prosperous and increasingly feisty. Surviving colonial wars with the French and their American Indian allies gave colonists confidence. Making a good living by farming, building ships and trading showed the early residents of British North America that they could take care of themselves. Life was good, and as the new country grew, so did the population’s strength in numbers: More than five times as many people lived in the colonies in the 1770s as had made their homes there in the 1690s. People began to feel like acting independent.
Stirring the Melting Pot: Population Expansion
The early colonies of New England included Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Hampshire and were mostly into fishing and small family farming. The early Southern colonies of Virginia, Delaware, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia made their money on large plantations growing rice and tobacco. The Middle colonies of New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey were actually in the middle, with medium-sized farms growing medium-sized crops of grain and raising cattle.
During the years between 1691 and 1775, the American colonies grew like rabbits, thanks mostly to immigration. In 1700, the 13 original colonies had only 250,000 people. Just 50 years later, the population had quintupled to 1.25 million. The colonists had plenty of children, but America also attracted immigrants by the thousands. Irish, Scots, and Germans came to join the party, along with 200,000 slaves from Africa. Canada was the biggest British colony, and Jamaica was the richest, but the 13 colonies were the most popular places to settle because their good land grew rich crops. The colonies were 90 percent farms; the population of New York City in 1700 was all of 5,000 people.
Another 5 percent of the settlers were Europeans, such as Swedes, Dutch, Irish, Welsh, and Scots. None of these non-English people felt any great love for their English rulers. The colonies were the most multicultural country in the world, especially the ethnically rich Middle colonies of Pennsylvania and New York. Beyond the fittingly named New England, half the people of the colonies weren’t from England — about a third of the signers of the Declaration of Independence originated from the world beyond England. In the following sections, I cover the most prominent groups to move to the American colonies during this time.
England, Britain, the United Kingdom . . . how many names can a little-but-mighty island have? Don’t get all confused; here’s what you need to know. England is the biggest part of the island called Britain, which is about the size of California and a few miles off the west coast of Europe. Great Britain evolved politically from the gradual union of England and Scotland, which started in 1603 with the Union of Crowns and slid into the Acts of Union in 1707, when the parliaments of the two nations merged into the Kingdom of Great Britain. Over time, the kingdom added Wales and Northern Ireland, and decided that the name United Kingdom sounded classy. After 1700, the mother country of the colonists can be referred to by either the more inclusive Britain or by its original name, England.
The Scotch-Irish
Perhaps the most aggressive immigrants to search the frontier for farms to settle were the Scotch-Irish. The United States has had 12 presidents with a Scotch-Irish background. These English-speaking people were originally from the Scottish lowlands. (Ay, Scotland isn’t all highlands.) The only thing high about the lowlands was the land rents charged by greedy Scottish lords. Many of the Scotch-Irish moved to Northern Ireland, where their Protestant ancestors still make up the majority of the population. Some kept going to America.
With little money, the Scotch-Irish kept traveling until they found cheap land on the frontiers of Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Maryland. Having been pushed around plenty themselves, they tended to solve potential American Indian problems by shooting first and asking questions later. By 1750, the Scotch-Irish had spread out along the Great Wagon Road, a path for immigration they helped build through mountain passes from Philadelphia to Georgia. By the Revolution, they represented 7 percent of the population of the colonies.
Having moved more than once, the Scotch-Irish didn’t originally build to stay. They threw up rough log cabins, chopped down trees, and planted crops between the stumps. As they gained title to their lands and confidence that no lords would boot them off, the Scotch-Irish built Presbyterian churches.
The rough-and-tumble Scotch-Irish caused heartache for the original Quaker settlers of Pennsylvania (see Chapter 8) when they killed peaceful American Indians and led the Paxton Boys’ (1764) march on Philadelphia to protest lenient treatment of the natives. The Paxton Boys wanted to punish American Indians in general, regardless of whether they’d actually done wrong; luckily, Ben Franklin and the Philadelphia militia stood up to the Paxton Boys and protected the friendly American Indians. The Scotch-Irish also shook things up with the Regulators’ Uprising (1764) against aristocratic domination of their rural settlements in North Carolina. Many of the Regulator hotheads, including a young Andrew Jackson, later joined the move toward revolution.
Germans
Germans were the largest non-English-speaking immigrant group in the colonies. Faced with war and oppression in their homeland, they were delighted to find out about the rich soil of Pennsylvania. They built sturdy homes and barns, some of which still function today. German Americans eventually became one third of the population of the Quaker State (Pennsylvania); some neighborhoods in Philadelphia had German street signs. German Americans brought the Lutheran religion, adding to the Protestant mix of religious toleration. By the time of the Revolution, German Americans were about 6 percent of the population of the colonies.
The Pennsylvania Dutch are so called because English-speaking Americans got confused by Deutsch, the German name for German.
French Canada had about 1 person for every 20 in the 13 colonies, but it helped form what would become the United States. La Salle (1682) was a French explorer who navigated down the Mississippi, establishing French claims to the Louisiana territory that the French government would eventually sell to the young U.S. French courers de bois (runners of the woods), who ranged over North America trading animal pelts with the American Indians. French Acadians resettled by the British from Canada would become the Cajuns of New Orleans.
The French founded Detroit, New Orleans, Pittsburgh, and other towns; if more of them had come, maybe U.S. drive-throughs would serve French cuisine. French settler Crevecoeur observed in his Letters from an American Farmer (1782) that the “strange mixture of blood, which you find in no other country” was an “American, this new man.”
Africans and the ongoing issue of slavery
Africans made up 20 percent of the population by the Revolution, mostly in the South but also with at least a few representatives in all the other early colonies. Slaves worked all their lives with no pay, and their children automatically became slaves too. Slavery grew because slaves made money for their masters, who then had more political and social power.
When they could get together at the end of long workdays, slaves created their own American African culture different from anything in Africa. Africans were brought to America as slaves, but when they could, they fought for their freedom. Slaves revolted in New York in 1712 and 1741; during the Stono Rebellion (1739) in South Carolina, slaves under a flag of freedom fought a pitched battle with white slaveholders. This led slave owners to tighten the rules so that slaves found it hard to get together or even learn to read. Slaves who revolted were tortured and/or killed.
Question: Where was slavery legal in the colonies?
Answer: Slavery was legal in all British North American colonies in the 1700s.
Question: What did slaves do besides hard work?
Answer: Slaves in early America maintained African social customs and even created a hybrid African American culture.
Question: Why did slavery grow in the colonies?
Answer: Slaves made money for their owners, which increased the owners’ social and political power.
Question: How did owners’ power over slaves change in the colonies?
Answer: In the 1700s, slave laws became more repressive and owners expanded their legal power over slaves.
Question: Name some slave rebellions that occurred in the colonies.
Answer: The Stono Rebellion (1739) in South Carolina and the New York slave conflicts (1712 and 1741) are examples of slave rebellions.
Daily Life in the Colonies
Colonial Americans lived in drafty houses heated in the winter by fireplaces in one or two rooms. Bedrooms, churches, and schools had no heat, air conditioning, or even fans. The bathroom was an outhouse 20 feet out the back door, and baths, when they happened, meant boiling a lot of water and pouring it into a tin tub. Garbage disposal meant tossing garbage out the window, where it was taken care of by hogs or buzzards. Light at night may be a flickering whale-oil lamp, and everybody had to ask whether what they were doing instead of going to bed was worth the candle. Going to bed early was easy, because most people were tired from a workday that ran from first light until sundown, when they couldn’t see anymore.
Entertainment meant getting together with a good excuse like a militia muster, when citizen soldiers drilled and partied, or a barn-raising, quilting bee, funeral, or wedding. All these events could be accompanied by a good deal of drinking and flirting. Northerners liked sleigh rides and skating; Southerners went for fox hunts and playing cards. Southerners thought that plays and dancing were just fine; Northerners took a few years to warm up to those ideas.
The Middle states were, as usual, in the middle when it came to entertainment. Not much fox hunting happened, but plays and dancing were okay with most people. Everybody played the lottery. Lotteries were used to fund churches, hospitals, and colleges like Harvard.
Having a Chance at Success and Education
Unless you were one of the growing number of slaves, America in the 1700s was the place to be. Most people were farmers, but more jobs were always available in towns for skilled craftsmen. Even if you were an indentured servant, you could potentially earn your freedom and rise to prominence, which is what two originally indentured signers of the Declaration of Independence did. George Walton was only 26 when he risked hanging by the British to sign the Declaration; he was an orphan who had been indentured to a builder. George Taylor had to indenture himself to earn his ticket from Ireland, but as an old guy of 60, was important enough to sign the Declaration.
Although everyone had a chance for success, the number of rich people (who earned far more than the average farmer) grew with time and opportunity. Between the late 1600s and the Revolution in 1776, the colonies seemed to be dragged into one European war after another.
Wars burn up lots of military supplies, so the merchants in the big cities made big money by supplying the troops. By 1750, the richest 10 percent of the people in Boston and Philadelphia owned more than half of the property. They got reserved seats in the churches and schools.
Poverty: Not as bad as in Britain, but bad enough
A few poor people in the cities were supported by charity and sometimes had to wear a large red P on their clothes. Still, poverty in the colonies was nothing like it was in Britain in the 1700s, where as many as one out of three people lived with next to nothing. The colonies were rife with land that could be farmed and opportunities in trade and skilled jobs. The idea that anybody had a chance to make a good life in America started in the early 1700s. It was true; by the time of the Revolution, the early states had, overall, the most prosperous people in the world.
The government in London tried to drop its problems on the colonies by sending over 50,000 convicts. These convicts included real hard cases as well as plenty of people who received harsh sentences for little more than stealing a loaf of bread. Some of them became upright citizens in the New World, but they had no love for their British persecutors.
The worst poverty was within the growing slave population. White people were afraid of slave violence like the Stono Rebellion in 1739 and made periodic attempts to limit the importation of more slaves, but British leaders vetoed these attempts. Thomas Jefferson tried to put language opposed to slavery in the Declaration of Independence, but he was overridden by Southern slaveholders (see Chapter 10).
Education and Vocations
Most people were farmers, but colonists learned technical skills on the job. This didn’t always mean you had to be an indentured servant to gain a skill; Ben Franklin (the youngest boy of 16 children) learned to be a printer by working for his brother.
In England, education was viewed as being a privilege of the elite, not as a basic right for everyone. Things were different in New England, where public elementary schools supported by towns and counties started in the 1600s. In the Middle colonies, schools were sometimes free and sometimes private for-pay institutions. In the South, where distances between plantations could be large, families tended to rely on private tutors.
Early Puritan religion taught that everyone should be able to read the Bible. Students went to school when they could spare time away from their chores on the family farm. In all schools, whipping was the rule. Students memorized Latin and Greek, and didn’t talk back to their teachers for fear of being whipped.
Christian ministers were the most respected professionals in the colonies. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, and almost all the other original colleges were established to train ministers. Lawyers weren’t universally loved in the pioneer societies; some colonies even passed laws against them. Some early settlers even thought that lawyers made disputes get worse just so they could make money from them. Physicians learned their trade from hanging around other doctors in the early days; the first medical school in the colonies wasn’t founded until 1765. Making patients bleed deliberately was a favorite form of treatment, and epidemics were common.
Smallpox affected one in five people; George Washington was a heavily pockmarked survivor of the disease. The first crude inoculation for smallpox was given in 1721.
An epidemic of diphtheria in the 1730s took thousands of lives and helped scare people into the First Great Awakening, which I cover in “Changing Attitudes toward Religion” later in this chapter.
Establishing American Arts
The 1700s brought more than just independence to the colonies; during this period, American art, architecture, and writing took off. The following sections describe the cultural flourish of this era.
American painters
Fine-arts painters got their start in America during the 1700s. At first, colonial artists focused on portraits — settlers wanted to be remembered, and cameras weren’t an option. Benjamin West was the first American artist to train in Europe; when he saw a statue of Apollo, he realized it was no more handsome than an American Indian warrior. You can check out early American art at www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/American-artists-17th-18th. html and www.nga.gov/collection/gallery/amer.shtm; the following are a few prominent painters of early America:
● John Trumbull (1785) painted pictures of the American Revolution, in which he served briefly.
● Charles Willson Peale (1780) served in the Revolution too, painting all the while. Peale could accurately be described as a Renaissance man, having developed a level of expertise in such diverse fields as carpentry, dentistry, optometry, shoemaking, and taxidermy.
● Benjamin West (1770) painted large-scale historic pictures. He said that when he was young, American Indians showed him how to make paint by mixing clay from the river-bank with bear grease in a pot.
Architecture
Early American architecture styles were imported from Europe; even the log cabin appears to be based on a Swedish model. Nobody lived in log cabins in most of Europe; the idea came from the northern Swedes during their short-lived colony in America.
The popular Georgian architecture (1750) was named after the Georges who were kings of England around that time. Georgian style usually is defined by reddish brick walls that contrast with the white used for window trimming and cornices. A small porch often emphasizes the entrance. Regularity was a term of praise for Georgian architects, who used mathematical formulas to figure the proportion of windows to wall size. Georgian is the architecture of Williamsburg, Harvard, and many colonial buildings.
Literature, libraries, and the birth of American Journalism
Colonial literature was very much in the shadow of the mother country; for years, many Americans assumed that only the English had the sophistication to write. This assumption began to change with the prejudice-shattering poetry of Phillis Wheatley (1772), a slave who had learned to write. Her memorial poem for George Whitefield (see “Changing Attitudes toward Religion” later in this chapter) caused such a stir that John Hancock and others examined her to make sure a black person could actually write such a work.
Benjamin Franklin (1776) would be remembered even if he weren’t a famous Revolutionary War leader. His Poor Richard’s Almanack, which he edited beginning 45 years before the Revolution, contained gems of thought quoted throughout the colonies. Among them is his reaction to the Great Awakening: “Serving God is doing good to man, but praying is thought an easier service, and therefore more generally chosen.” Franklin proved that lightning was electricity and invented bifocal glasses, the efficient Franklin stove, and the lightning rod. He also started the first privately supported library in the country.
By the Revolution, around 40 simple newspapers were published in the colonies. Most of these papers were one-page weeklies, but they begin to reflect and mold public opinion. Peter Zenger (1734) was a New York newspaper printer who attacked the corrupt royal governor.
He was hauled into court and charged with libel. The government didn’t deny the truth of what he said but planned to throw him in prison anyway. In a landmark day for freedom of the press, the jury set Zenger free. Ever since, newspapers have had the right to publish the truth even if it upsets the government.
Changing Attitudes toward Religion
The problem with all the education that ministers received in the American colonies (see “Education and vocations” earlier in this chapter) is that they got so smart that they started to question what their own churches believed. The gloomy predestination doctrine got harder to support; fewer and fewer people went along with the idea that nothing they could do in life would alter God’s prebirth judgment about whether they were going to heaven or hell. The Puritans’ (see Chapter 8) original belief that predestination meant only a small group of people preselected by God for salvation should get to be in their church didn’t leave a lot of room for free will or more church members. They tried the Half-Way Covenant (1662) to let in a few new members who couldn’t swear they’d undergone a conversion experience, but the churches were losing their power over a people busy making a living in the early 1700s.
The Great Awakening was a spiritual revival complete with preaching and conversions all over the colonies. Awakening was so important that it actually happened at least twice. The First Great Awakening (1734) began when the colonies were becoming well established in the 1730s; the Second Great Awakening occurred in the 1820s. First Great Awakening ministers were set up for their success by the toil, loneliness, and heartbreak of life on the frontier. The movement had more power in the country than in the cities, but America was practically all country in the early 1700s. Great Awakening preachers left in their wake a spiritually charged citizenship eager for change. By traveling throughout the colonies, they gave the separate sections a sense of belonging to a whole nation. The Great Awakening set the emotional stage for the American Revolution. Two men in particular were very influential in this movement:
● The First Great Awakening began with Jonathan Edwards (1734), a well-educated theologian and Congregationalist minister from Massachusetts. Edwards came from Puritan roots but spoke with the power of immediate, personal religious experience. His fiery sermons, including “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” attracted a large following.
● Methodist preacher George Whitefield (1738) was even more electric than Edwards. Whitefield traveled across the colonies and spoke in the dramatic, emotional style of a modern revival preacher, often in outdoor camp meetings. He was the first nationwide American star, accepting everyone into his audiences and preaching a simple message of the power of God. He gave more than 18,000 sermons. Whitefield was the most widely recognized public figure in America before George Washington.
Edwards, Whitefield, and others who used a similar style started a new trend in American religion. Previously, so-called Old Light ministers droned on in their sermons, using only rationality and arguments from theology. Modern New Light preachers spoke with emotion and showmanship. Princeton, Brown, Rutgers, and Dartmouth were all New Light schools.
On the more open end of spirituality, the Quakers (see Chapter 8) believed God was so close to love that everyone should be free to worship him in the way that was best for them. Quakers supported women’s rights and freedom of worship. They opposed slavery and war, but they did pay taxes and worked to influence local governments. Although some Quakers were actually put to death in New England for their tolerant beliefs, more worked to build a peaceful society in Pennsylvania, the colony established by Quaker William Penn.
As freedom in the colonies grew, so did tolerance for neighbors who may have a different way of worshiping God. The colonies in the 1750s represented many religious denominations, generally liked the king, opposed aristocrats from England, and were open to settlement by non-English people.
Question: Who were the biggest followers of the First Great Awakening?
Answer: The First Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s appealed more to poor and rural people and less to rich urbanites.
Question: What did the Quakers believe?
Answer: Quakers were against war and slavery; they paid taxes, tried to influence local governments, and supported women’s rights and freedom of worship.
Question: Was Quakerism the official religion of Quaker Pennsylvania?
Answer: Because it was founded by Quakers, who believed in freedom of worship, colonial Pennsylvania had no established official church.
Question: What was the political and social atmosphere of the colonies by the 1750s?
Answer: In general, the colonies in the 1750s represented many religious denominations, disliked aristocrats from England but were okay with the king, and were receptive to settlement by non-English people.
Early Politics
Three colonies had governors appointed by their official proprietors, and two colonies elected their own governors. In the other eight colonies, the king appointed usually competent governors (not counting the dunderhead governor Peter Zenger exposed in New York — see “Literature, libraries, and the birth of American journalism” earlier in this chapter). The colonies had two legislative bodies like the modern U.S. Senate and House of Representatives (see Chapter 10). The Senate-type legislators usually were appointed, and the House-type representatives were elected by all the people who had the right to vote.
Property wasn’t too expensive in a land with miles of open space, so getting the right to vote wasn’t hard. The House, elected by the people, had some major power over the governor; it controlled his salary. The colonies had the most democratic government known in the world up to that time.
Making Money in Colonial America
Due in large part to the plentiful goods they produced and traded, the colonies also provided the highest average standard of living people had ever seen. Here’s a list of the most profitable goods of the period:
The Middle colonies produced enough wheat to make all the bread the colonists could eat and still export thousands of barrels of flour.
Tobacco was a big money-maker for Virginia and Maryland. Taxes on tobacco made up one third of U.S. government revenue until long after the Civil War.
It seemed as though the supply of codfish off the coast of New England would never run out, and boatloads were exported to Europe. Although cod is no longer as plentiful, the fish was so important to the growth of New England that a “Sacred Cod” still hangs in the Massachusetts House of Representatives.
● New England fishing led to shipbuilding and provided training for thousands of Yankee sailors to man American ships. With a plentiful lumber supply, by the time of the Revolution, the colonies were building a third of all the ships in the British trading fleet.
● North America had a lock on beaver pelts, and anyone who was cool in Europe just had to have some beaver fur.
● Making cloth at home, American women outfitted their families for free and often had extra linen to sell.
● Before the Revolution, America had more small iron forges than England did. One famous place — Valley Forge, Pennsylvania — was even named for its iron works.
● The United States was (and is still) the world’s leading wheat exporter.
The triangular trade
From the earliest days, rum and other forms of alcohol had an enthusiastic following in the New World. Early Americans could drink most modern people under the table. The infamous triangular trade was the shipping of New England rum to Africa in exchange for slaves, who were sold in the West Indies for money and molasses, which was taken back to New England to make more rum. This three-legged voyage was hugely profitable but made up only a minority of New England trade. Most Yankee traders exchanged food and lumber for manufactured goods, which they sold in the colonies
Mercantilism
Early Americans couldn’t have been all that drunk from the rum trade, because the colonies managed to make more money per person on average than anyplace else in the world. Long before they knew it, the colonies were on a collision course with the interests of their mother country due to England’s policy of mercantilism. Under this policy, the colonies were supposed to supply England raw materials and buy expensive manufactured stuff only from the mother country. If the colonists wanted to sell anything to another country, the trade was supposed to go through England. England controlled trade, got the markups, and treated the colonists like cows. After the colonists got it together, they weren’t about to let this practice keep happening.
Dealing (or not dealing) with trade tension
America was growing fast; Britain was growing slowly. Pretty soon, the British had all the American food and other stuff they needed, and Americans wanted European finery that Britain didn’t produce. Yankee businessmen wanted to trade with other countries, especially the rich French West Indies. This situation produced the beginning of trade tension between the colonies and their mother country — tension that eventually was one of the precipitating causes of revolt.
Beginning in 1650, the English passed a series of Navigation Acts to support mercantilism. The Navigation Acts (1650) tried to regulate trade with the colonies to make more money for England. As part of the program, Parliament passed the Molasses Act (1733), which imposed a tax of sixpence per gallon on molasses (about $1 in modern money) to make English products cheaper than those from the French West Indies. Colonists largely opposed the tax and rarely paid it; smuggling to avoid it was a huge business. The growing corruption of local officials and disrespect for British law caused by this act and others helped lead to the American Revolution in 1776.
American tobacco filled the pipes of Europe, but the smoking trade was less troublesome; most of the leaf shipped through England, giving British merchants a nice little rake-off.
Fighting All Over North America
Special as the colonies felt they were, they were actually pawns in a world-domination power struggle among the great nations of Europe — mostly England, France, and Spain. Spain got the early lead by finding gold and silver all over South America (except for Brazil, owned by its Portuguese buddies), plus Mexico and other hot parts of what would eventually become the United States. On the East Coast of North America, England started late but was catching up fast, with no gold but plenty of valuable crops in the West Indies and 13 mainland colonies. In Canada and other parts of North America, France went north of everybody else for the furs and the fish.
Everybody was frontier fighting
The English colonists got left alone by Britain for 30 years, during which time they learned to kind of like being on their own. Being left alone also meant that at first, the kings didn’t bother to send any troops over to help the colonists, which would be like getting involved in a war between the squirrels in your backyard.
In both King William’s War (1690) and Queen Anne’s War (1710), French woodsmen and their American Indian buddies raided English settlements. Fighting back, English colonists and their American Indian allies attacked Canada without doing much damage. The French and American Indians managed to kill a lot of settlers in Schenectady, New York, and Deerfield, Massachusetts, but averaging out the rest of the conflicts, the British won. They got frozen northern Canada around Hudson Bay and the island of Nova Scotia, north of Maine, for their troubles.
The prize for the best war name goes to the War of Jenkins’s Ear (1739), fought over British outrage that the Spanish cut off the ear of a British sea captain named Jenkins. During this conflict, great Georgia reformer James Oglethorpe skillfully repelled Spanish raids into the southern Atlantic colonies. (See Chapter 8 for more on Oglethorpe and Georgia.) When the war spread, New Englanders hitched up their pants and, with the help of the Royal Navy, invaded Canada again. This time, they captured a large French fort, but the British gave it back at the end of the war in 1748. The colonists felt betrayed by Britain (and not for the last time).
The French and Indian War
In 1754, the governor of Virginia gave a 21-year-old surveyor named George Washington a mission to scout out French forces who were building forts on land on the Pennsylvania-Ohio border — land that Virginians (including Washington’s family) liked to think they owned. Washington, with 150 Virginian volunteers, spied some Frenchmen resting in the woods and took a shot at them. The Frenchmen called for reinforcements and eventually surrounded Washington. They could have killed him; his men had killed their leader in the sneak attack. Instead, they let Washington and his men go — ironically enough, on July 4.
The French Empire
In Canada, the French were held up by religious and internal political hassles, but Samuel de Champlain (1608) got a town going in the natural fortress of Quebec. Almost right away, Champlain did something that seemed so good but turned out so bad: He helped the local Huron American Indians by kicking some booty on their traditional enemies. Unfortunately, the Hurons' traditional enemies were the megapowerful Iroquois nation. Sure, only a few Iroquois were around when Champlain got involved, but tens of thousands more lived farther south, and after Champlain's little faux pas, they tended to side with the British.
The mostly Catholic French were pretty comfortable back in France, and the French Protestants who would have loved to get out of town to the New World weren't allowed to go. The French who did make it to the New World were more interested in paddling around and partying with the American Indians than settling down and raising a family. This fact made for slow population growth in the French colonies: By 1750, French Canada boasted only 60,000 settlers, as opposed to the 1.25 million in the English North American colonies. Like the British, other French were getting rich on rum and sugar down in the Caribbean, and most of them weren't all that big on going on freezing beaver hunts.
Although farming wasn't their main thing, the French managed to float a surprising amount of grain down the Mississippi to feed their sugar colonies in the West Indies. French fur trappers traveled farther and farther for fur. French trading posts were established all across Canada, up to the British settlements in America and down to the Rio Grande in the south of what's now Texas. They moved around a lot, because when you trap too many beaver, they tend to disappear.
Antoine Cadillac (1701) founded Detroit and fittingly enough got a car named for him. Robert de La Salle (1682) floated down the Mississippi and named Louisiana for his king. The French also established a well-placed fort at New Orleans (1718).
That incident was the beginning of the largest international war the world had yet seen; the U.S. called it the French and Indian War, but it was the Seven Years’ War in the rest of the world. The war raged so hot and heavy in Europe that the French couldn’t do much more in the New World than unleash their American Indian allies. The British, fearing a stab in the back from French people living under British rule in Canada, forced some 4,000 of them to move to New Orleans, where they became the Cajuns.
To unite the colonists and impress the (hopefully) loyal Iroquois, the British called the intercolonial Albany Congress (1754). The American Indians stayed mostly loyal, and Ben Franklin got to present his Albany Plan of Union, an early attempt to form a union of the colonies. It was a nonstarter, but everybody agreed that the idea was interesting.
The British blew it repeatedly in the early French and Indian War. A major British attack against Fort Duquesne (Pittsburgh) was cut to ribbons by a much smaller force of French and American Indians who knew about hiding behind bushes and rocks. In that battle, Washington had two horses shot out from under him, and four bullets tore through his coat. Miraculously unwounded, he rallied his men for an orderly retreat. A later major British attack on outposts all over Canada also failed.
Finally, new Prime Minister William Pitt the Elder directed British forces to make a coordinated assault on the key French fortress at Quebec. In one of the most important battles in British and American history, the British-American force won. The French were thrown completely out of northern America, and William Pitt got Pittsburgh named after him.
During this long war, some 20,000 local troops from all the colonies learned to work and fight together. They saw that the British could lose, and they experienced British arrogance firsthand. British General James Wolfe, for example, called members of the American militia “contemptible, cowardly dogs.” And despite Washington’s heroic war record, the British demoted him to captain. These actions weren’t very good ways to make friends.
With the French and most of the hostile American Indians out of the way, the colonies didn’t need much protection from mother Britain. When the Treaty of Paris (1763) ended the war, the colonies were psychologically on their way to 1776. With the French defeated, the English tried to make peace with the American Indians by prohibiting the colonists from settling west of the Alleghenies in the Proclamation of 1763.
Question: What was the Proclamation of 1763?
Answer: The Proclamation of 1763 was a British royal decree that forbade the American colonists from settling west of the Alleghenies. Its goal was to promote peace with the American Indians and a clear line of defense for the British.
The British halt Western expansion
The Treaty of Paris (see the preceding section) was a tough blow for the American Indians. The warriors who had sided with the French lost an ally, but even American Indians who had been neutral or pro-British had lost the French counterweight to colonial expansion.
In the same year that the French admitted defeat, the great Ottawa American Indian leader Pontiac launched a last-ditch attack against the British advance into the Ohio country. It almost worked. Pontiac’s warriors overran all but three British outposts west of the Appalachians, killing 2,000 soldiers and settlers, and coming close to taking heavily fortified Detroit. Pontiac’s name became another car.
Almost as though they were going into extreme defensive mode right after a victory, the British issued the Proclamation of 1763, flatly forbidding any settlement west of the Appalachians. The British were just trying to be fair to their American Indian allies and to prevent more bloody uprisings like the one Pontiac had led. For the land-hungry Americans, the law was a slap in the face of their long-fought-for dreams. They disobeyed the law and moved West by the thousands. The British were in no mood to put up with insolence. Neither were the Americans. It was head-butting time.
The Colonies Become Fighting Mad
By 1770, the 13 colonies were no longer just a fringe experiment out in the wilderness; together, they were a country of 2.5 million well-fed, educated, and experienced people. The American population was one third as big as that of the mother country, and America had a lot more land. The problem was that the English couldn’t recognize a grown-up nation when they saw one; they insisted on treating America like a spoiled child. Now it was time for the child to make himself useful and do his chores.
These chores had to do with raising 140 million pounds (billions of dollars in modern money) to pay for the debt Britain had run up fighting its wars. Up until this time, the colonies had skated by without paying any dues to the mother country — sort of like buying something tax-free on the Internet. No more. Mother Britain was coming up a little short, and those pesky colonies were certainly big and strong enough to help.
Also, because the American Indians were still kicking up a fuss — and who knew whether the French and the Spanish would stay defeated — it was time for the colonies to pay for the standing army of 10,000 troops that Britain was helpfully sending over.
New thoughts about freedom
Schools in the colonies spent a lot of time teaching students about classical life in Greece and Rome. Athens and Rome were often viewed as democracies where the people helped decide on their own government, and teachers drilled this idea into the heads of the colonists.
Settlers also had a selective idea of their rights as Englishmen — rights that had been slowly expanding since the Magna Carta in 1215. The colonists’ idea of English liberty was selective because they concentrated on their lack of representation in Parliament without proposing an alternative solution to funding the army that Parliament had sent to defend them.
Finally, the colonists were influenced by the left-wing of British politics — the radical Whigs, who distrusted everything the king did as a potential attack on their freedom. The Whigs saw corruption everywhere in the royal government, and they weren’t always wrong. Although the British government hadn’t seen a lot of tax revenue from the colonies, it had enjoyed a fair amount of profit. This profit made the colonies worthwhile based on the theory of mercantilism (discussed earlier in this chapter), which held that the power of a country can be measured by how much money it has.
London was a long way away, and the colonists had no trouble slipping a little trade to other places where they could make a profit. No matter how many Navigation Laws the British passed, they couldn’t control the colonies. As the colonies got richer, their side business of trade around the Navigation Laws got larger. Britain felt as though it had paid to take a date to a dance, but that date was dancing with everybody else.
Stampin' on the Stamp Act
With victory in their pockets and billions of dollars of debt making a hole in their purses, the British decided to tax the colonists directly for the first time. Here are the legal actions that Britain took:
● First, the prime minister ordered the British navy to start strictly enforcing the Navigation Laws to end the colonies’ profitable side trade.
● Second, London enacted the Sugar Act (1764), the first law for raising revenue for Britain in the New World. The Sugar Act taxed the sweet stuff Americans were just as addicted to as everybody else. When the colonists screamed, the government lowered the duties, and the outcry died down.
● Third, the Quartering Act (1765) attempted to give the 10,000 British soldiers in the New World places to stay: with the colonists. Nobody wanted soldiers crowding into the house and eating all the food. Colonial legislatures dragged their feet and refused to cooperate.
● Fourth, Parliament passed the Stamp Act (1765). People in Britain had already been paying stamp taxes for almost 100 years, but to the colonists, shelling out a few cents to the king for every newspaper, playing card, lease, will, and even marriage license seemed to be a major insult.
Colonial legislatures had passed plenty of taxes without trouble, but in those cases, the colonists were taxing themselves. Now a bunch of snooty big shots an ocean away were reaching into their pockets without permission. Chanting “No taxation without representation,” the colonists were fighting mad.
Part III: Early U.S. History: From Dinosaurs to the Civil War
To remember all the legislation in order, consider this scene: You navigate to the store (Navigation Laws) to buy some candy (Sugar Act), but a soldier stops you (Quartering Act) and stamps your hand (Stamp Act). This analogy is silly, but it works.
With years of experience in self-government and the precedent of the Albany Congress setting them up for cooperation, nine colonies quickly assembled the Stamp Act Congress (1765) in New York City. The congress mostly just talked and passed some resolutions, but it did get 9 of the 13 colonies working together.
More to the point of protest were the unofficial nonimportation agreements (1765). Americans agreed among themselves not to buy products from the mother country that was making them so mad. These local agreements were enforced by a gang called the Sons of Liberty, which wasn’t above applying tar and feathers to the bodies of people who tried to break the strike by buying imported goods. The British were hit hard by the boycott; one quarter of their exports had gone to the colonies, and now almost nothing was selling.
The Stamp Act, though, was a nonstarter. Under mob persuasion, all the stamp sellers had been forced to resign before the act took effect. Because the law wasn’t working anyway, Parliament revoked the Stamp Act in 1766. Although this repeal could have been an occasion to make nice, the government instead petulantly enacted a resolution called the Declaratory Act (1766), which declared that although it may be cutting some slack now, Parliament had the power “to bind” the colonies “in all cases whatsoever.” It wasn’t long before Parliament tried a little more binding.
Question: What was the purpose of the Stamp Act?
Answer: The purpose of the Stamp Act of 1765 was to raise money to support British troops in America.
The Boston Massacre
In 1768, the British landed about 1,200 troops in Boston — one soldier for every four residents. The Boston Massacre (1770) occurred when citizens started throwing rocks at ten British troops and the troops fired back, killing or wounding 11 citizens. The Townshend Act that had everybody so upset (see the following section) produced almost no revenue, and the cost to the British of occupying the colonies continued to rise.
The Boston Tea Party
If the colonists wouldn’t pay direct taxes, why not skim a little more off the top before the products got to the New World? The Townshend Act (1767) put a light import tax on glass, lead, paper, paint — and, most importantly, on tea. This tax eventually led to the Boston Tea Party (1773). When the injury of the tax was combined with the insult of granting a monopoly on tea to the British East India Company, citizens responded by dumping a shipload of tea into Boston Harbor.
Gearing up for a revolution
Samuel Adams was a Boston hothead with shaky hands but a firm resolve. While talking revolution in the bars at night, he organized the first Committee of Correspondence (1772). Soon, committees of correspondence were exchanging revolutionary ideas in and among all the colonies. They had lots to talk about.
A couple of years later, the British passed what the colonists called the Intolerable Acts (1774), designed to be a spanking for Massachusetts in general and Boston in particular. The acts closed Boston Harbor until Boston paid Britain back for all the tea lost in the Tea Party. The acts also took away the rights of the legislature and of town meetings, and allowed any English officials who killed an American to be tried back in friendly Britain.
Showing less than zero political sensitivity to the feelings of America, the British also passed the Quebec Act. This act expanded Canada down into Ohio on land the colonies thought they owned. Something had to give.
The Committee of Correspondence set the groundwork for the first Continental Congress (1774). After seven weeks of drinking and deliberation, the first congress passed a Declaration of Rights and sent appeals to the British king and people. The congress also established something called The Association to oversee a boycott of everything British. Americans weren’t going to buy, sell, or even use British goods.
Determined to slap down growing resentment with a surge of strength, in April 1775, British troops marched out of Boston to seize some arms and to arrest protest leaders Samuel Adams and John Hancock. They met colonial militia in the towns of Lexington and Concord. After taking some casualties, the militia fired back, and with American help running in from the hills in all directions, the militia pushed the outnumbered British back to Boston. With 300 total casualties for both sides, the British had a war on their hands.
War wasn’t going to be easy for the Americans. They had one-third of the population of the British army and not one-tenth of the money, and they were facing the most successful fighters in the world. The British had an experienced standing army of 50,000 men, which they made even stronger by hiring 30,000 German mercenaries. The colonies were far from united: The British had as many as 50,000 American loyalists ready to fight their fellow colonists to stay linked to Great Britain.
Contrary to some modern National Rifle Association beliefs, America in 1775 wasn’t a nation of dead-eye marksmen. Only a small minority of households owned firearms. The colonies had no gun factory, and an imported rifle cost the modern equivalent of $5,000. Only 1 out of 12 colonists reported for duty with their own rifles.
The colonists had the advantage of fighting on their own grounds. Eventually, they would get help from the French and other nations. But mostly, the American advantage was that a dedicated minority of the citizens of the New World colonies believed in freedom so much they were willing to die for it.
Working Early Colonial History into Essay Subjects
Social-history themes make great essay fodder for the big AP U.S. History showdown. This section covers a couple of ideas that historians love to chew on, based on the information in this chapter. You may be able to work them into an assigned essay subject.
The Great Awakening seems to be about religion and, thus, about following cosmic rules, but it also really shook things up socially. Public emotion wasn’t something that had been big in Britain, but it was the common experience of religious deliverance in the Awakening. This swept-away feeling helped set the stage for the emotion connected to the Revolution, which would be fought by the grandchildren of the people who attended the Awakening. Awakening preachers often came from congregations outside the religious mainstream. Their very presence outside the church implied that people could be true to God without following all the cues of the established churches. In fact, maybe people had to follow their own hearts to be connected with God’s will. The Awakening led to new schools and the beginning of new light ministers. Could a new country be far behind?
One of the greatest questions in U.S. history is the slavery/freedom paradox. How can one country be the light of freedom in the world and a major exploiter of African slaves? One answer is to see New England as the tower of freedom and abolition and to view the South as the basement of slavery and reaction. But what about Patrick Henry, Washington, Jefferson, Madison, the other architects of freedom, and all those Southern slaveholders? Another answer is that slavery blurred the boundaries between rich and poor in the South and made the idea of equality possible (for everybody but the slaves, of course). This idea gets some support when you consider two other slaveholding beacons of democracy in the ancient world: Greece and Rome.
Historian Edmund Morgan said, “Americans bought their independence with slave labor.” A more balanced statement may be that America got economic power from a large-scale application of the system of slavery that was legal in most of the world and far larger in the West Indies and South America. The North and the Middle states didn’t need large-scale slavery to make money; they were quite capable of winning their freedom without it. Only four generations after the Revolution, while slavery was making more money than it ever had before, the United States fought the bloodiest war in its history — the Civil War — to free the slaves. That war is one of the only times in history when one people (white Northerners with freed black help) fought for the rights of another people (enslaved black Southerners) — not for conquest or glory, but to put an end to slavery in the land of the free.