Growth, Diversity, and Conflict

4
C H A P T E R
1720–1763

I
NEW ENGLAND’S n 1736, Alexander MacAllister left the IDENTIFY THE BIG IDEA
FREEHOLD SOCIETY Highlands of Scotland for the back- In what ways were Britain’s Ameri-
Farm Families: Women in the country of North Carolina, where his can colonies affected by events
Household Economy wife and three sisters soon joined him. across the Atlantic, and how were
Farm Property: Inheritance MacAllister prospered as a landowner and their societies taking on a life of
Freehold Society in Crisis mill proprietor and had only praise for his their own?
new home. Carolina was “the best poor
DIVERSITY IN THE
MIDDLE COLONIES man’s country,” he wrote to his brother Hector, urging him to “advise all poor
people . . . to take courage and come.” In North Carolina, there were no landlords
Economic Growth, Opportunity,
and Conflict to keep “the face of the poor . . . to the grinding stone,” and so many Highlanders
Cultural Diversity were arriving that “it will soon be a new Scotland.” Here, on the far margins of the
British Empire, people could “breathe the air of liberty, and not want the necessarys of
Religion and Politics
life.” Some 300,000 European migrants — primarily Highland Scots, Scots-Irish, and
COMMERCE, CULTURE, Germans — heeded MacAllister’s advice and helped swell the population of Britain’s
AND IDENTITY North American settlements from 400,000 in 1720 to almost 2 million by 1765.
Transportation and the Print MacAllister’s “air of liberty” did not last forever, as the rapid increase in white set-
Revolution tlers and the arrival of nearly 300,000 enslaved Africans transformed life throughout
The Enlightenment in America mainland British North America. Long-settled towns in New England became over-
American Pietism and the Great crowded, and antagonistic ethnic and religious communities jostled uneasily with one
Awakening another in the Middle Atlantic colonies; in 1748, there were more than a hundred Ger-
Religious Upheaval in the North man Lutheran and Reformed congregations in Quaker-led Pennsylvania. By then, the
Social and Religious Conflict in MacAllisters and thousands of other Celtic and German migrants had altered the social
the South landscape and introduced religious conflict into the southern backcountry.
THE MIDCENTURY Everywhere, two European cultural movements, the Enlightenment and Pietism,
CHALLENGE: WAR, changed the tone of intellectual and spiritual life. Advocates of “rational thought”
TRADE, AND SOCIAL viewed human beings as agents of moral self-determination and urged Americans to
CONFLICT, 1750–1765 fashion a better social order. Religious Pietists outnumbered them and had more influ-
The French and Indian War ence. Convinced of the weakness of human nature, evangelical ministers told their fol-
The Great War for Empire lowers to seek regeneration through divine grace. Amidst this intellectual and religious
British Industrial Growth and the ferment, migrants and the landless children of long-settled families moved inland and
Consumer Revolution sparked wars with the native peoples and with France and Spain. A generation of
The Struggle for Land in the East dynamic growth produced a decade of deadly warfare that would set the stage for a
Western Rebels and Regulators new era in American history.

114
John Collet, George Whitefield Preaching No painting could capture English minister George
Whitefield’s charismatic appeal, although this image conveys his open demeanor and religious intensity.
When Whitefield spoke to a crowd near Philadelphia, an observer noted that his words were “sharper
than a two-edged sword. . . . Some of the people were pale as death; others were wringing their
hands . . . and most lifting their eyes to heaven and crying to God for mercy.” An astute businessman as
well as a charismatic preacher, Whitefield tirelessly promoted the sale of his sermons and books. © Private
Collection/The Bridgeman Art Library.

115
 116 PART 2 BRITISH NORTH AMERICA AND THE ATLANTIC WORLD, 1660–1763

their brothers. Thus Ebenezer Chittendon of Guilford,

New England’s Connecticut, left his land to his sons, decreeing that
“Each Daughter [shall] have half so much as Each Son,
Freehold Society one half in money and the other half in Cattle.”
In the 1630s, the Puritans had fled England, where a Throughout the colonies, women assumed the role
small elite of nobles and gentry owned 75 percent of of dutiful helpmeets (helpmates) to their husbands.
the arable land, while tenants (renters) and property- In addition to tending gardens, farmwives spun thread
less workers farmed it. In New England, the Puritans and yarn from flax and wool and then wove it into
created a yeoman society of relatively equal landown- cloth for shirts and gowns. They knitted sweaters and
ing farm families. But by 1750, the migrants’ numerous stockings, made candles and soap, churned milk into
descendants had parceled out the best farmland, threat- butter, fermented malt for beer, preserved meats, and
ening the future of the freehold ideal. mastered dozens of other household tasks. “Notable
women” — those who excelled at domestic arts —
Farm Families: Women in the won praise and high status (Thinking Like a Historian,
p. 118).
Household Economy Bearing and rearing children were equally impor-
The Puritans’ vision of social equality did not extend to tant tasks. Most women in New England married in
women, and their ideology placed the husband firmly their early twenties and by their early forties had given
at the head of the household. In The Well-Ordered birth to six or seven children, delivered with the help of
Family (1712), the Reverend Benjamin Wadsworth of a female neighbor or a midwife. One Massachusetts
Boston advised women, “Since he is thy Husband, God mother confessed that she had little time for religious
has made him the head and set him above thee.” It was activities because “the care of my Babes takes up so
a wife’s duty “to love and reverence” her husband. large a portion of my time and attention.” Yet most
Women learned this subordi- Puritan congregations were filled with women: “In a
UNDERSTAND nate role throughout their lives. Church of between Three and Four Hundred Commun-
POINTS OF VIEW Small girls watched their mothers icants,” the eminent minister Cotton Mather noted,
What ideas, institu- defer to their fathers, and as “there are but few more than One Hundred Men; all the
tions, and responsibilities young women, they were told to Rest are Women.”
shaped New England farm be “silent in company.” They saw Women’s lives remained tightly bound by a web
women’s lives? the courts prosecute more women of legal and cultural restrictions. Ministers praised
than men for the crime of fornica- women for their piety but excluded them from an
tion (sex outside of marriage), and they found that equal role in the church. When Hannah Heaton, a
their marriage portions would be inferior to those of Connecticut farmwife, grew dissatisfied with her

Prudence Punderson (1758–1784), The First,

Second and Last Scenes of Mortality
This powerful image reveals both the artistic skills
of colonial women in the traditional medium of
needlework and the Puritans’ continuing cultural
concern with the inevitability of death. Prudence
Punderson, the Connecticut woman who embroi-
dered this scene, rejected a marriage proposal and
followed her Loyalist father into exile on Long Island
in 1778. Sometime later, she married a cousin,
Timothy Rossiter, and bore a daughter, Sophia, who
may well be the baby in the cradle being rocked by
“Jenny,” a slave owned by Prudence’s father. Long
worried by “my ill state of health” and perhaps now
anticipating her own death, Prudence has inscribed
her initials on the coffin — and, in creating this
embroidery, transformed her personal experience
into a broader meditation on the progression from
birth, to motherhood, to death. Connecticut Historical
Society.
 CHAPTER 4 Growth, Diversity, and Conflict, 1720–1763 117

Congregationalist minister, thinking him unconverted A father’s duty was to provide inheritances for his
and a “blind guide,” she sought out equality-minded children so that one day they could “be for themselves.”
Quaker and evangelist Baptist churches that welcomed Men who failed to do so lost status in the community.
questioning women such as herself and treated “saved” Some fathers willed the family farm to a single son and
women equally with men. However, by the 1760s, provided other children with money, an apprentice-
many evangelical congregations had reinstituted men’s ship, or uncleared frontier tracts. Other yeomen moved
dominance over women. “The government of Church their families to the frontier, where life was hard but
and State must be . . . family government” controlled land was cheap and abundant. “The Squire’s House
by its “king,” declared the Danbury (Connecticut) stands on the Bank of the Susquehannah,” traveler
Baptist Association. Philip Fithian reported from the Pennsylvania back-
country in the early 1760s. “He tells me that he will be
able to settle all his sons and his fair Daughter Betsy on
Farm Property: Inheritance the Fat of the Earth.”
By contrast, European men who migrated to the colo-
nies escaped many traditional constraints, including
the curse of landlessness. “The hope of having land of Freehold Society in Crisis
their own & becoming independent of Landlords is Because of rapid natural increase, New England’s
what chiefly induces people into America,” an official population doubled each generation, from 100,000 in
noted in the 1730s. Owning property gave formerly 1700, to nearly 200,000 in 1725, to almost 400,000 in
dependent peasants a new social identity. 1750. Farms had been divided and then subdivided,
Unlike the adventurers seeking riches in other parts making them so small — 50 acres or less — that parents
of the Americas, most New England migrants wanted could provide only one child with an adequate inheri-
farms that would provide a living for themselves and tance. In the 1740s, the Reverend Samuel Chandler
ample land for their children. In this way, they hoped of Andover, Massachusetts, was “much distressed for
to secure a competency for their families: the ability to land for his children,” seven of them young boys. A
keep their households solvent and independent and decade later, in nearby Concord, about 60 percent of
to pass that ability on to the next generation. Parents the farmers owned less land than their fathers had.
who could not give their offspring land placed these Because parents had less to give their sons and
children as indentured servants in more prosperous daughters, they had less control over their children’s
households. When the indentures ended at age eigh- lives. The traditional system of arranged marriages
teen or twenty-one, propertyless sons faced a decades- broke down, as young people engaged in premarital
long climb up the agricultural ladder, from laborer to sex and then used the urgency of pregnancy to win
tenant and finally to freeholder. permission to marry. Throughout New England, pre-
Sons and daughters in well-to-do farm families were marital conceptions rose dramatically, from about 10
luckier: they received a marriage portion when they percent of firstborn children in the 1710s to more than
were in their early twenties. That portion — land, live- 30 percent in the 1740s. Given another chance, young
stock, or farm equipment — repaid them for their past people “would do the same again,” an Anglican minis-
labor and allowed parents to choose their marriage ter observed, “because otherwise they could not obtain
partners. Parents’ security during old age depended on their parents’ consent to marry.”
a wise choice of son- or daughter-in-law. Although the Even as New England families changed, they main-
young people could refuse an unacceptable match, tained the freeholder ideal. Some parents chose to
they did not have the luxury of falling in love with and have smaller families and used
marrying whomever they pleased. birth control to do so: abstention, IDENTIFY CAUSES
Marriage under eighteenth-century English com- coitus interruptus, or primitive What factors threatened
mon law was not a contract between equals. A bride condoms. Other families peti- the freeholder ideal in
relinquished to her husband the legal ownership of all tioned the provincial government midcentury New England,
her property. After his death, she received a dower for frontier land grants and hacked and what strategies did
right, the right to use (though not sell) one-third of new farms out of the forests of farming families use to
the family’s property. On the widow’s death or remar- central Massachusetts, western preserve this ideal?
riage, her portion was divided among the children. Connecticut, and eventually New
Thus the widow’s property rights were subordinate to Hampshire and Vermont. Still others improved their
those of the family line, which stretched across the farms’ productivity by replacing the traditional English
generations. crops of wheat and barley with high-yielding potatoes
THINKING LIKE
A HISTORIAN

As these documents show, women bore the responsibility for a wide variety of
Women’s Labor work, from keeping up households to supporting themselves independently.

1. Thomas Tusser, Five Hundred Pointes of Good Hus- father gives me the land or not; and therefore I design
bandrie, 1557. Advice manuals like Tusser’s circulated many years hence when oaks are more valueable than
for generations and offered guidance on household they are now — which you know they will be when we
management. In this couplet, Tusser stresses the vir- come to build fleets.”
tues of a wife’s economy and hard work. [c. June 1742]
Wife, make thine own candle, “I am engaged with the rudiments of the law to which
Spare penny to handle. I am yet but a stranger. . . . If You will not laugh too
Provide for thy tallow ere frost cometh in, immoderately at me I’ll Trust you with a secrett. I have
And make thine own candle ere winter begin. made two wills already.”

2. Eliza Lucas, letters, 1740–1742. George Lucas 3. Mary Vial Holyoke, diary excerpts, 1761. Mary Vial
owned three South Carolina plantations, but, as Holyoke, wife of a prominent physician in Salem,
lieutenant governor of Antigua, he was frequently Massachusetts, kept a diary that offers a glimpse
absent. When his daughter was sixteen, he gave of the range of household tasks women faced.
her responsibility for managing them. She intro- [1761]
duced indigo cultivation in South Carolina, and it Jan. 16: Began upon the firkin of butter of 40 lb. . . .
soon became the colony’s second-leading cash 22: Bo’t hog, weighed 182 pounds, at 2/5. Salted hog with
crop. These letters were written when she was half Lisbon & half saltertudas [Tortugas] salt. . . .
between the ages of eighteen and twenty. Mar. 4: Ironing. . . .
May 2, 1740 7: Scower’d pewter. . . .
“I have the business of 3 plantations to transact, which 17: Made the Dr. six Cravats marked H. . . .
requires much writing and more business and fatigue of Apr. 17: Made soap. . . .
other sorts than you can imagine. But least you should 23: Dressed a Calves Head turtle fashion. . . .
imagine it too burthensom to a girl at my early time of life, May 20: Began to whitewash. . . .
give me leave to answer you: I assure you I think myself 28: Ironed. . . .
happy that I can be useful to so good a father, and by rising 30: Scower’d pewter. . . .
very early I find I can go through much business.” July 7: Scowered rooms. . . .
July 1740
4. Colonial house interiors in Germantown, Pennsyl-
“Wrote my Father a very long letter on his plantation
vania, and Augusta, Maine. These images show
affairs and on . . . the pains I had taken to bring the
the dining room of Benjamin Chew, a wealthy
Indigo, Ginger, Cotton and Lucerne and Casada to per-
Philadelphia lawyer (below), and the kitchen of
fection, and had greater hopes from the Indigo . . . than
the Howards, an extended family of soldiers and
any of the rest of the things I tried.”
merchants on the Maine frontier (opposite).
February 6, 1741
“. . . I have a Sister to instruct and a parcel of little
Negroes whom I have undertaken to teach to read.”
April 23, 1741
“Wrote to my Father informing him of the loss of a
Negro man — also the boat being overset in Santilina
[Saint Helena] Sound and 20 barrels of Rice lost.”
[1742]
“Wont you laugh at me if I tell you I am so busey in
providing for Posterity I hardly allow my self time to Eat
or sleep. . . . I am making a large plantation of Oaks
which I look upon as my own property, whether my
Source: Photo by Ron Blunt, Courtesy of Cliveden, a
118 National Trust Historic Site, Philadelphia, PA.
 MOLL PLACKET-HOLE was born in a Bawdy House in
a Lane in the City of Brotherly Love. . . . [A]t the Age of
twelve (Shocking to consider!) . . . [her] Mother sold her
Virginity — sold it for the Trifling Consideration of Ten
Pounds. Her Purchaser was soon cloyed and abandoned
her. Virtue lost and good Reputation (if ever she had it)
gone, she commenced open Prostitute and dealt out her
Favours to the highest Bidder. . . . [S]he understood the
Trade and set up a Bawdy-House. . . . It was necessary,
however, that a Man should live with her, that they might
appear to the Publick, as honest Housekeepers. . . . The
Trade became at last so publick, that it gave Offence to her
sober Neighbours. . . . [T]he Town tired out with her Inso-
lence, and her Escape from Justice in a regular Manner,
set a Mob (many of whom had been her Beneficiaries)
Source: Old Fort Western, Augusta, Maine.
upon her. They pulled down her House, and destroyed
her Furniture &c. She stormed and raged and swore if her
5. Business advertisement in the Pennsylvania
Customers would not build her a better House, she would
Gazette, 1758. Not all women’s work was done
expose them. . . . They opened a Subscription, and a hun-
in the home. Hannah Breintnall, a Philadelphia
dred Pounds were subscribed in one Day.
widow, ran a tavern before opening a shop Sources: (1) Alice Morse Earle, Home Life in the Colonial Days (New York: The
specializing in eyeglasses. Macmillan Company, 1898), 35; (2) From The Letterbook of Eliza Lucas Pinckney,
1739–1762, edited by Elise Pinckney, University of North Carolina Press, 1972. Based
on original documents from the South Carolina Historical Society. Courtesy of the
South Carolina Historical Society; (3) George Francis Dow, ed., The Holyoke Diaries,
1709–1856 (Salem, MA: The Essex Institute, 1911), 49–51; (6) Hilliad Magna: Being the
Life and Adventures of Moll Placket-Hole ([Philadelphia]: Printed [by Anthony
Armbruster], 1765).

ANALYZING THE EVIDENCE

1. Compare the advice manual (source 1) with Eliza Lucas’s
letters and Mary Vial Holyoke’s diary. What themes do
they share in common, and how do these women’s expe-
riences deviate from the expectations of the advice book
authors?
2. Eliza Lucas supervised slave labor, and Mary Vial Holyoke
very likely employed servants. How do these facts affect
the way you interpret sources 2 and 3?
3. Compare the two house interiors (source 4). What work
would women have done in these spaces? The Chews
were a slaveholding family, and the Howards probably
employed servants. With that in mind, consider the rela-
tionship between supervisory and manual labor.
4. Hannah Breintnall was a well-to-do widow, while Moll
Placket-Hole was a fictional stereotype. What does
Breintnall’s experience tell us about the prospects of a
woman living without a male protector? How does Moll
Placket-Hole shed light on popular attitudes toward such
Source: Library Company of Philadelphia. women?

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

6. Hilliad Magna: Being the Life and Adventures of With all these sources in mind, write a short essay that
considers the role of hierarchy and social power in women’s
Moll Placket-Hole, 1765. Moll Placket-Hole was a work. How did economic and social status affect the work
satirical, seven-page pamphlet that purported to that was expected of women? How did the women whose
describe the life of a Philadelphia prostitute. Moll lives are documented here navigate the challenges and
was an eighteenth-century term for a loose woman opportunities they faced? And how does the satire of Moll
Placket-Hole illuminate popular attitudes toward women’s
or prostitute, while placket-hole referred to a slit work and its place in colonial society?
that might be found in a woman’s skirt.
119
120 PART 2 BRITISH NORTH AMERICA AND THE ATLANTIC WORLD, 1660–1763

and maize (Indian corn). Corn was an especially wise Tenancy in New York In New York’s fertile Hudson
choice: good for human consumption, as well as for River Valley, wealthy Dutch and English families pre-
feeding cattle and pigs, which provided milk and meat. sided over the huge manors created by the Dutch West
Gradually, New England changed from a grain to a live- India Company and English governors (Map 4.1). Like
stock economy, becoming a major exporter of salted Chesapeake planters, the New York landlords aspired
meat to the plantations of the West Indies. to live in the manner of the European gentry but found
As the population swelled, New England farmers that few migrants wanted to labor as peasants. To
developed the full potential of what one historian has
called the “household mode of production,” in which
families swapped labor and goods. Women and chil- 0 10 20 miles

dren worked in groups to spin yarn, sew quilts, and 0 10 20 kilometers

M VERMONT
oh a (claimed by New York,
shuck corn. Men loaned neighbors tools, draft animals, wk Massachusetts, and

R.
New Hampshire)
and grazing land. Farmers plowed fields owned by arti- ⓦ
Schenectady
sans and shopkeepers, who repaid them with shoes,
ⓦ Troy
furniture, or store credit. Partly because currency was
Albany ⓦ

S
IN
in short supply, no cash changed hands. Instead, farm- N

TA
Rensselaerswyck
ers, artisans, and shopkeepers recorded debits and Manor

UN
W E

MO
credits and “balanced” the books every few years. This S
system helped New Englanders to maximize agricul-

IRE
tural output and preserve the freehold ideal. MASSACHUSETTS

KSH
ⓦ Hudson

BER
NEW YORK

Livingston
Manor
Little Nine
Partners

Diversity in the Kingstonⓦ

Middle Colonies
Hudson R.

Great Nine
Partners

t R.
The Middle colonies — New York, New Jersey, and

c t icu
Poughkeepsie ⓦ
Beekman
Ho
Pennsylvania — became home to peoples of differing

e
Patent CONNECTICUT

Conn
us a
origins, languages, and religions. Scots-Irish Presby- ton
Newburgh ⓦ ic R
terians, English and Welsh Quakers, German Lutherans
.
Philipse
Oblong
and Moravians, Dutch Reformed Protestants, and Patent
Patent
others all sought to preserve their cultural and reli- Cortlandt
Manor
gious identities as they pursued economic opportunity.
At the same time, rapid population growth throughout
the region strained public institutions, pressured Indian Philipsburg
Manor White Plains Long Island Sound
ⓦ
lands, and created a dynamic but unstable society. NEW JERSEY

Economic Growth, Opportunity, Saint George Manor

and Conflict New York Cityⓦ

Morissania
Manor
Long Island

Previously home to New Netherland and New Sweden,

the Mid-Atlantic region was already ethnically diverse Manor boundary
Disputed colonial boundary
before England gained control of it. The founding of
Pennsylvania and New Jersey amplified this pattern.
Fertile land seemed abundant, and grain exports to MAP 4.1
The Hudson River Manors
Europe and the West Indies financed the colonies’
Dutch and English manorial lords owned much of the
rapid settlement (America Compared, p. 121). Between fertile east bank of the Hudson River, where they leased
1720 and 1770, a growing demand for wheat, corn, and farms on perpetual contracts to German tenants and
flour doubled their prices and brought people and refused to sell land to freehold-seeking migrants from
prosperity to the region. Yet that very growth led to overcrowded New England. This powerful landed elite
produced aristocratic-minded Patriot leaders such as
conflict, both within the Middle colonies and in their Gouverneur Morris and Robert Livingston, as well as
relations with Native American neighbors. prominent American families such as the Roosevelts.
AMERICA
C O M PA R E D

The following graph compares the number of European and African migrants
who arrived in the American colonies of Spain, Portugal, Britain, France, and the
Transatlantic Migration, Netherlands. It also charts change over time: while immigrants in the sixteenth
and early seventeenth centuries went predominantly to the colonies of Spain
1500–1760 and Portugal, Britain’s colonies became the principal destination for both Euro-
peans and Africans between 1640 and 1760.

2,000,000
FIGURE 4.1
1,910,000 Transatlantic Migration
Source of data: Stanley L. Engerman and Kenneth L. Sokoloff, “Factor
Endowments, Institutions, and Differential Paths of Growth Among New
World Economies: A View from Economic Historians of the United States,”
1,500,000
in How Latin America Fell Behind: Economic Histories of Brazil and Mexico,
1,313,000 1800–1914, ed. Stephen Haber (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press,
1997), 264.

1,000,000
QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS
763,000
661,000 1. What relationship do you see between the number of
547,000 European emigrants and the importation of African
500,000 slaves? Which nation’s colonies had the highest percent-
397,000
age of Africans relative to Europeans? Which had the
190,000
lowest? Which time periods had the highest and lowest
130,000 percentages of Africans?
0
3,000 10,000 2. Compare France and the Netherlands to Spain, Portu-
Spain Portugal Britain France Netherlands gal, and Britain. Why do you suppose that the ratio of
Africans to Europeans is so much higher in French and
Dutch colonies than in the other nations? Which type of
1500–1640 Africans colony — tribute, plantation, or neo-European — was likely
1641–1760 Europeans
to have been most important to the French and Dutch?

attract tenants, the manorial lords granted long leases, but the proprietors of each colony, like the manor
with the right to sell improvements such as houses and lords of New York, had enormous land claims. The
barns to the next tenant. They nevertheless struggled to first migrants lived simply in small, one- or two-room
populate their estates. houses with a sleeping loft, a few benches or stools, and
Most tenant families hoped that with hard work some wooden platters and cups. Economic growth
and ample sales they could eventually buy their own brought greater prosperity, along with conflicts between
farmsteads. But preindustrial technology limited out- ordinary settlers and the proprietors who tried to con-
put. A worker with a hand sickle could reap only half trol their access to land, resources, and political power.
an acre of wheat, rye, or oats a day. The cradle scythe, a William Penn’s early appeals to British Quakers and
tool introduced during the 1750s, doubled or tripled continental Protestants led to a boom in immigrants.
the amount of grain one worker could cut. Even so, a When these first arrivals reported that Pennsylvania
family with two adult workers could reap only about and New Jersey were “the best poor man’s country in
12 acres of grain, or roughly 150 to 180 bushels of the world,” thousands more followed. Soon the propri-
wheat. After saving enough grain for food and seed, the etors of both colonies were overwhelmed by the demand
surplus might be worth £15 — enough to buy salt and for land. By the 1720s, many new migrants were forced
sugar, tools, and cloth, but little else. The road to land- to become squatters, settling illegally on land they
ownership was not an easy one. hoped eventually to be able to acquire on legal terms.
Frustration over the lack of land led the Penn family
Conflict in the Quaker Colonies In Quaker- to perpetrate one of the most infamous land frauds of
dominated Pennsylvania and New Jersey, wealth was the eighteenth century, the so-called Walking Purchase
initially distributed more evenly than in New York, of 1737, in which they exploited an old (and probably 121
 122 PART 2 BRITISH NORTH AMERICA AND THE ATLANTIC WORLD, 1660–1763

fraudulent) Indian deed to claim more than a million manufactured goods or ran mills. These large-scale
acres of prime farmland north of Philadelphia. This farmers, rural landlords, speculators, storekeepers, and
purchase, while opening new lands to settlement, poi- gristmill operators formed a distinct class of agricul-
soned Indian relations in the colony. Delaware and tural capitalists. They built large stone houses for their
Shawnee migration to western Pennsylvania and the families, furnishing them with four-poster beds and
Ohio Valley, which was already under way, accelerated expensive mahogany tables, on which they laid elegant
rapidly in response. linen and imported Dutch dinnerware.
Immigrants flooded into Philadelphia, which grew By contrast, one-half of the Middle colonies’ white
from 2,000 people in 1700 to 25,000 by 1760. Many men owned no land and little personal property. Some
families came in search of land; were the sons of smallholding farmers and would even-
EXPLAIN for them, Philadelphia was only tually inherit some land. But many were Scots-Irish or
CONSEQUENCES a temporary way station. Other German “inmates” — single men or families, explained
How did rapid immigration migrants came as laborers, includ- a tax assessor, “such as live in small cottages and have
and economic growth trig- ing a large number of indentured no taxable property, except a cow.” In the predomi-
ger conflict in the Middle servants. Some were young, nantly German township of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, a
colonies? unskilled men, but the colony’s merchant noted an “abundance of Poor people” who
explosive growth also created a “maintain their Families with great difficulty by day
strong demand for all kinds of skilled laborers, espe- Labour.” Although these workers hoped eventually to
cially in the construction trades. become landowners, rising land prices prevented many
Pennsylvania and New Jersey grew prosperous but from realizing their dreams.
contentious. New Jersey was plagued by contested land
titles, and ordinary settlers rioted against the propri-
etors in the 1740s and the 1760s. By the 1760s, eastern Cultural Diversity
Pennsylvania landowners with large farms were using The Middle Atlantic colonies were not a melting pot.
slaves and poor Scots-Irish migrants to grow wheat. Most European migrants held tightly to their traditions,
Other ambitious men were buying up land and divid- creating a patchwork of ethnically and religiously diverse
ing it into small tenancies, which they lent out on prof- communities (Figure 4.2). In 1748, a Swedish traveler
itable leases. Still others sold farming equipment and counted no fewer than twelve religious denominations

FIGURE 4.2
Estimated European Migration to the
British Mainland Colonies, 1700–1780
After 1720, European migration to British
North America increased dramatically,
peaking between 1740 and 1780, when
more than 264,000 settlers arrived in the
mainland colonies. Emigration from
Germany peaked in the 1740s, but the
number of migrants from Ireland, Scotland,
England, and Wales continued to increase
during the 1760s and early 1770s. Most
1700– 1720– 1740– 1760– Total
migrants, including those from Ireland,
1719 1739 1759 1779 (1700–1780) were Protestants.
Germany 4,000 17,900 52,700 23,700 98,300
N. Ireland 2,000 6,900 25,400 36,200 70,500
S. Ireland 2,500 10,400 18,200 13,400 44,500
England 1,700 7,100 16,300 19,000 44,100
Scotland 700 2,800 6,800 25,000 35,300
Wales 1,200 4,700 10,700 12,400 29,000
Other 300 1,000 2,300 2,300 5,900

All 12,400 50,800 132,400 132,000 327,600

1700–1719 1720–1739 1740–1759 1760–1779

 CHAPTER 4 Growth, Diversity, and Conflict, 1720–1763 123

in Philadelphia, including Anglicans, Baptists, Quakers, traditions of local village governance, popular partici-
Swedish and German Lutherans, Mennonites, Scots- pation in politics, and social equality. But after 1720,
Irish Presbyterians, and Roman Catholics. the growth of German and Scots-Irish populations
Migrants preserved their cultural identity by mar- challenged their dominance.
rying within their ethnic groups. A major exception
was the Huguenots, Calvinists who had been expelled The German Influx The Quaker vision of a “peace-
from Catholic France in the 1680s and resettled in able kingdom” attracted 100,000 German migrants
Holland, England, and the British colonies. Huguenots who had fled their homelands because of military con-
in American port cities such as Boston, New York, and scription, religious persecution, and high taxes. First
Charleston quickly lost their French identities by inter- to arrive, in 1683, were the Mennonites, religious
marrying with other Protestants. More typical were the dissenters drawn by the promise of freedom of wor-
Welsh Quakers in Chester County, Pennsylvania: 70 ship. In the 1720s, a larger wave of German migrants
percent of the children of the original Welsh migrants arrived from the overcrowded villages of southwestern
married other Welsh Quakers, as did 60 percent of the Germany and Switzerland. “Wages were far better” in
third generation. Pennsylvania, Heinrich Schneebeli reported to his
In Pennsylvania and western New Jersey, Quakers friends in Zurich, and “one also enjoyed there a free
shaped the culture because of their numbers, wealth, unhindered exercise of religion.” A third wave of
and social cohesion. Most Quakers came from English Germans and Swiss — nearly 40,000 strong — landed
counties with few landlords and brought with them in Philadelphia between 1749 and 1756. To help pay

A Quaker Meeting for Worship

Quakers dressed plainly and met for worship in unadorned buildings, sitting in silence until inspired by
an “inner light.” Women spoke during meetings on terms of near-equality to men, a tradition that
prepared Quaker women to take a leading part in the nineteenth-century women’s rights movement.
In this English work, titled Quaker Meeting, an elder (his hat on a peg above his head) conveys his
thoughts to the congregation. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. M. and M. Karolik Collection.
 124 PART 2 BRITISH NORTH AMERICA AND THE ATLANTIC WORLD, 1660–1763

The Demory House, c. 1780

The Demory House lies near the Shenandoah
Valley in northwestern Virginia and was probably
built by a migrant from Pennsylvania according
to a German design used by both German and
Scots-Irish settlers. The house is small but sturdy.
It measures 20 feet by 14 feet deep and has
one and a half stories. The two first-floor rooms,
a kitchen and a parlor, are separated by an
18 × 18–inch square chimney set in the center
of the house, as well as the stairs leading up to
the sleeping chamber. Clay and small stones fill
the gaps in the exterior walls, which consist of
timber planking about 12 inches tall and 6 to
8 inches wide. © 2003 Copyright and All Rights
Reserved by Christopher C. Fennell.

the costs of the expensive trip from the Rhine Valley, seventeenth century to solidify English rule there.
German immigrants pioneered the redemptioner sys- Once in Ireland, the Scots faced hostility from both
tem, a flexible form of indentured servitude that Irish Catholics and English officials and landlords. The
allowed families to negotiate their own terms upon Irish Test Act of 1704 restricted voting and office hold-
arrival. Families often indentured one or more children ing to members of the Church of England, English
while their parents set up a household of their own. mercantilist regulations placed heavy import duties on
Germans soon dominated many districts in eastern linens made by Scots-Irish weavers, and farmers paid
Pennsylvania, and thousands more moved down the heavy taxes. This persecution made America seem
fertile Shenandoah Valley into the western backcoun- desirable. “Read this letter, Rev. Baptist Boyd,” a
try of Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas (Map 4.2). migrant to New York wrote back to his minister, “and
Many migrants preserved their tell all the poor folk of ye place that God has opened a
IDENTIFY CAUSES cultural identity by settling in door for their deliverance . . . all that a man works for
What attracted German German-speaking Lutheran and is his own; there are no revenue hounds to take it from
and Scots-Irish migrants to Reformed communities that us here.”
Pennsylvania in such large endured well beyond 1800. A Lured by such reports, thousands of Scots-Irish
numbers? minister in North Carolina families sailed for the colonies. By 1720, most migrated
admonished young people “not to to Philadelphia, attracted by the religious tolerance
contract any marriages with the English or Irish,” argu- there. Seeking cheap land, they moved to central
ing that “we owe it to our native country to do our part Pennsylvania and to the fertile Shenandoah Valley to
that German blood and the German language be pre- the south. Governor William Gooch of Virginia wel-
served in America.” comed the Scots-Irish presence to secure “the Country
These settlers were willing colonial subjects of against the Indians.” An Anglican planter, however,
Britain’s German-born and German-speaking Protes- thought them as dangerous as “the Goths and Vandals
tant monarchs, George I (r. 1714–1727) and George II of old” had been to the Roman Empire. Like the
(r. 1727–1760). They generally avoided politics except Germans, the Scots-Irish retained their culture, living
to protect their cultural practices; for example, they in ethnic communities and holding firm to the
insisted that married women have the legal right to Presbyterian Church.
hold property and write wills, as they did in Germany.

Scots-Irish Settlers Migrants from Ireland, who Religion and Politics

numbered about 115,000, were the most numerous of In Western Europe, the leaders of church and state
the incoming Europeans. Some were Irish and Catholic, condemned religious diversity. “To tolerate all [reli-
but most were Scots and Presbyterian, the descendants gions] without controul is the way to have none at all,”
of the Calvinist Protestants sent to Ireland during the declared an Anglican clergyman. Orthodox church
 CHAPTER 4 Growth, Diversity, and Conflict, 1720–1763 125

MAP 4.2
QUEBEC
Ethnic and Racial Diversity in the ALGONQUIN ME.
VT. (MASS.)
British Colonies, 1775 (part of
Scots and Scots Irish made up
N.Y.) N.H.
In 1700, most colonists in British 15 percent of the population.
N.Y.
North America were of English origin;

L. H
ABENAKI
by 1775, settlers of English descent

L. Michigan
o
L. Ontari

uron
constituted only about 50 percent IROQUOIS MASS.
of the total population. African R.I.
CONN.
Americans now accounted for one- OTTAWA
r ie
third of the residents of the South, L. E PENN.

S
N
while tens of thousands of German

IN
and Scots-Irish migrants added ethnic DELAWARE

TA
E
MIAMI W
and religious diversity in the Middle

N
N.J.

U
S
colonies, the southern backcountry, Those of German ancestry

O
MD.
made up about 7 percent of

M
and northern New England (see the population. DEL. ATLANTIC OCEAN
Figure 4.2).

N
IA
VA.

CH
People of African origin

LA
accounted for 20 percent of the

PA
SHAWNEE
total population and were

AP
particularly numerous in the South.

CHEROKEE N.C.

CATAWBA
S.C.
CHICKASAW

GA.

Predominant Ethnic Group

CREEK African Scots-Irish
CHOCTAW 0 100 200 miles
Dutch Scots
0 100 200 kilometers English Swedish
FLORIDA
German Welsh

officials carried such sentiments to Pennsylvania. “The children of well-to-do Friends usually married within
preachers do not have the power to punish anyone, or the sect, while poor Quakers remained unmarried,
to force anyone to go to church,” complained Gottlieb wed later in life, or married without permission — in
Mittelberger, an influential German minister. As a which case they were often ousted from the meeting.
result, “Sunday is very badly kept. Many people plough, These marriage rules helped the Quakers build a self-
reap, thresh, hew or split wood and the like.” He con- contained and prosperous community.
cluded: “Liberty in Pennsylvania does more harm than In the 1740s, the flood of new migrants reduced
good to many people, both in soul and body.” Quakers to a minority — a mere 30 percent of Penn-
Mittelberger was mistaken. Although ministers in sylvanians. Moreover, Scots-Irish settlers in central
Pennsylvania could not invoke government authority Pennsylvania demanded an aggressive Indian policy,
to uphold religious values, the result was not social challenging the pacifism of the
anarchy. Instead, religious sects enforced moral behav- assembly. To retain power, UNDERSTAND
ior through communal self-discipline. Quaker families Quaker politicians sought an alli- POINTS OF VIEW
attended a weekly meeting for worship and a monthly ance with those German religious What issues divided the
meeting for business; every three months, a committee groups that also embraced paci- various ethnic and reli-
reminded parents to provide proper religious instruc- fism and voluntary (not compul- gious groups of the Middle
tion. The committee also supervised adult behavior; a sory) militia service. In response, colonies? What core values
Chester County meeting, for example, disciplined a German leaders demanded more did they agree upon?
member “to reclaim him from drinking to excess and seats in the assembly and laws
keeping vain company.” Significantly, Quaker meetings that respected their inheritance customs. Other
allowed couples to marry only if they had land and Germans — Lutherans and Baptists — tried to gain con-
livestock sufficient to support a family. As a result, the trol of the assembly by forming a “general confederacy”
126 PART 2 BRITISH NORTH AMERICA AND THE ATLANTIC WORLD, 1660–1763

with Scots-Irish Presbyterians. An observer predicted

that the scheme was doomed to failure because of Commerce, Culture,
“mutual jealousy” (Map 4.3).
By the 1750s, politics throughout the Middle colo- and Identity
nies roiled with conflict. In New York, a Dutchman After 1720, transatlantic shipping grew more frequent
declared that he “Valued English Law no more than a and Britain and its colonies more closely connected,
Turd,” while in Pennsylvania, Benjamin Franklin dis- while a burgeoning print culture flooded the colonies
paraged the “boorish” character and “swarthy com- with information and ideas. Two great European cul-
plexion” of German migrants. Yet there was broad tural movements — the Enlightenment, which empha-
agreement on the importance of economic opportu- sized the power of human reason to understand and
nity and liberty of conscience. The unstable balance shape the world; and Pietism, an evangelical Christian
between shared values and mutual mistrust prefigured movement that stressed the individual’s personal rela-
tensions that would pervade an increasingly diverse tionship with God — reached America as a result. At
American society in the centuries to come. the same time, an abundance of imported goods began
to reshape material culture, bringing new comforts
into the lives of the middling sort while allowing pros-
perous merchants and landowners to set themselves
ME.
VT. (MASS.) apart from their neighbors in new ways.
(N.Y.) N.H.

L. Ontario

Transportation and the
NEW YORK

  MASS.
 

Print Revolution
 
ie  CONN.   
L.
Er      In the eighteenth century, improved transportation
 R.I.

 

networks opened Britain’s colonies in new ways, and

    British shipping came to dominate the north Atlantic.

PENNSYLVANIA    
    N
In 1700, Britain had 40,000 sailors; by 1750, the num-
   
   N.J.

    
 W
E ber had grown to 60,000, while many more hailed from
   S the colonies. An enormous number of vessels plied
  MD.
 DEL. Atlantic waters: in the late 1730s, more than 550 ships


 ATLANTIC OCEAN
arrived in Boston annually. About a tenth came directly
from Britain or Ireland; the rest came mostly from
VIRGINIA
other British colonies, either on the mainland or in the
West Indies.
 Anglican A road network slowly took shape as well, though

Congregational roadbuilding was expensive and difficult. In 1704,
NORTH Lutheran
CAROLINA  Presbyterian
Sarah Kemble Knight traveled from Boston to New
 Baptist York on horseback. The road was “smooth and even” in
 Roman Catholic some places, treacherous in others; it took eight days of
SOUTH  Jewish
CAROLINA hard riding to cover 200 miles. Forty years later, a phy-
 Reformed Churches
  Dutch
sician from Annapolis, Maryland, traveled along much
  German better roads to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and
 0 100 200 miles  French back — more than 1,600 miles in all. He spent four
GA.  Quaker
 0 100 200 kilometers months on the road, stopping frequently to meet the
locals and satisfy his curiosity. By the mid-eighteenth
MAP 4.3
century, the “Great Wagon Road” carried migrating
Religious Diversity in 1750
families down the Shenandoah Valley as far as the
By 1750, religious diversity was on the rise, not only
in the multiethnic Middle colonies but also in all of Carolina backcountry.
British North America. Baptists had increased their All of these water and land routes carried people,
numbers in New England, long the stronghold of produce, and finished merchandise. They also carried
Congregationalists, and would soon become important
information, as letters, newspapers, pamphlets, and
in Virginia. Already there were considerable numbers of
Presbyterians, Lutherans, and German Reformed in the crates of books began to circulate widely. The trip across
South, where Anglicanism was the established religion. the Atlantic took seven to eight weeks on average, so
 CHAPTER 4 Growth, Diversity, and Conflict, 1720–1763 127

the news arriving in colonial ports was not fresh by our undermined the traditional Christian understanding
standard, but compared to earlier years, the colonies of the cosmos.
were awash in information. In the century between the Principia Mathematica
Until 1695, the British government had the power and the French Revolution of 1789, the philosophers of
to censor all printed materials. In that year, Parliament the European Enlightenment used empirical research
let the Licensing Act lapse, and the floodgates opened. and scientific reasoning to study all aspects of life,
Dozens of new printshops opened in London and including social institutions and human behavior.
Britain’s provincial cities. They printed newspapers and Enlightenment thinkers advanced four fundamental
pamphlets; poetry, ballads, and sermons; and hand- principles: the lawlike order of the natural world, the
bills, tradesman’s cards, and advertisements. Larger power of human reason, the “natural rights” of individ-
booksellers also printed scientific treatises, histories, uals (including the right to self-government), and the
travelers’ accounts, and novels. The result was a print progressive improvement of society.
revolution. In Britain and throughout Europe, print English philosopher John Locke was a major
was essential to the transmission of new ideas, and contributor to the Enlightenment. In his Essay Con-
both the Enlightenment and Pietism took shape in part cerning Human Understanding (1690), Locke stressed
through its growing influence. the impact of environment and experience on human
All this material crossed the Atlantic and filled the behavior and beliefs, arguing
shops of colonial booksellers. The colonies also began that the character of individuals PLACE EVENTS
printing their own newspapers. In 1704, the Boston and societies was not fixed but IN CONTEXT
Newsletter was founded; by 1720, Boston had five print- could be changed through edu- What conditions and ideas
ing presses and three newspapers; and by 1776, the cation, rational thought, and lay behind the emergence
thirteen colonies that united in declaring indepen- purposeful action. Locke’s Two of the Enlightenment in
dence had thirty-seven newspapers among them. This Treatises of Government (1690) America?
world of print was essential to their ability to share advanced the revolutionary the-
grievances and join in common cause. ory that political authority was not given by God to
monarchs, as James II had insisted (see Chapter 3).
Instead, it derived from social compacts that people
The Enlightenment in America made to preserve their natural rights to life, liberty,
To explain the workings of the natural world, some col- and property. In Locke’s view, the people should have
onists relied on folk wisdom. Swedish migrants in the power to change government policies — or even
Pennsylvania attributed magical powers to the great their form of government.
white mullein, a common wildflower, and treated Some clergymen responded to these developments
fevers by tying the plant’s leaves around their feet and by devising a rational form of Christianity. Rejecting
arms. Traditionally, Christians believed that the earth supernatural interventions and a vengeful Calvinist
stood at the center of the universe, and God (and Satan) God, Congregationalist minister Andrew Eliot main-
intervened directly and continuously in human affairs. tained that “there is nothing in Christianity that is
The scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seven- contrary to reason.” The Reverend John Wise of
teenth centuries challenged these ideas, and educated Ipswich, Massachusetts, used Locke’s philosophy to
people — most of them Christians — began to modify defend giving power to ordinary church members. Just
their views accordingly. as the social compact formed the basis of political soci-
ety, Wise argued, so the religious covenant among the
The European Enlightenment In 1543, the Polish lay members of a congregation made them — not the
astronomer Copernicus published his observation bishops of the Church of England or even ministers
that the earth traveled around the sun, not vice like himself — the proper interpreters of religious
versa. Copernicus’s discovery suggested that humans truth. The Enlightenment influenced Puritan minister
occupied a more modest place in the universe than Cotton Mather as well. When a measles epidemic
Christian theology assumed. In the next century, Isaac ravaged Boston in the 1710s, Mather thought that
Newton, in his Principia Mathematica (1687), used only God could end it; but when smallpox struck a
the sciences of mathematics and physics to explain decade later, he used his newly acquired knowledge of
the movement of the planets around the sun (and inoculation — gained in part from a slave, who told
invented calculus in the process). Though Newton was him of the practice’s success in Africa — to advocate
himself profoundly religious, in the long run his work this scientific preventive for the disease.
128 PART 2 BRITISH NORTH AMERICA AND THE ATLANTIC WORLD, 1660–1763

Enlightenment Philanthropy: Pennsylvania Hospital, Philadelphia

Using public funds and private donations, Philadelphia reformers built this imposing structure in
1753. The new hospital embodied two principles of the Enlightenment: that purposeful actions
could improve society, and that the products of these actions should express reason and order,
exhibited here in the building’s symmetrical facade. Etchings like this one from the 1760s (A
Perspective View of the Pennsylvania Hospital, by John Streeper and Henry Dawkins) circulated
widely and bolstered Philadelphia’s reputation as the center of the American Enlightenment.
Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

Franklin’s Contributions Benjamin Franklin was myself,” added Thomas Jefferson. Influenced by Enlight-
the exemplar of the American Enlightenment. Born in enment science, deists such as Jefferson believed that a
Boston in 1706 to devout Calvinists, he grew to man- Supreme Being (or Grand Architect) created the world
hood during the print revolution. Apprenticed to his and then allowed it to operate by natural laws but did
brother, a Boston printer, Franklin educated himself not intervene in people’s lives. Rejecting the divinity of
through voracious reading. At seventeen, he fled to Christ and the authority of the Bible, deists relied on
Philadelphia, where he became a prominent printer, “natural reason,” their innate moral sense, to define
and in 1729 he founded the Pennsylvania Gazette, right and wrong. Thus Franklin, a onetime slave owner,
which became one of the colonies’ most influential came to question the morality of slavery, repudiating it
newspapers. Franklin also formed a “club of mutual once he recognized the parallels between racial bond-
improvement” that met weekly to discuss “Morals, age and the colonies’ political bondage to Britain.
Politics, or Natural Philosophy.” These discussions, as Franklin popularized the practical outlook of the
well as Enlightenment literature, shaped his thinking. Enlightenment in Poor Richard’s Almanack (1732–
As Franklin explained in his Autobiography (1771), 1757), an annual publication that was read by thou-
“From the different books I read, I began to doubt of sands. He also founded the American Philosophical
Revelation [God-revealed truth].” Society (1743–present) to promote “useful knowledge.”
Like a small number of urban artisans, wealthy Adopting this goal in his own life, Franklin invented
Virginia planters, and affluent seaport merchants, bifocal lenses for eyeglasses, the Franklin stove, and the
Franklin became a deist. Deism was a way of thinking, lightning rod. His book on electricity, published in
not an established religion. “My own mind is my own England in 1751, won praise as the greatest contribu-
church,” said deist Thomas Paine. “I am of a sect by tion to science since Newton’s discoveries. Inspired by
 CHAPTER 4 Growth, Diversity, and Conflict, 1720–1763 129

with God, Pietism appealed to believers’ hearts rather

than their minds (American Voices, p. 130). In the
1720s, German migrants carried Pietism to Amer-
ica, sparking a religious revival (or renewal of reli-
gious enthusiasm) in Pennsylvania and New Jersey,
where Dutch minister Theodore Jacob Frelinghuysen
preached passionate sermons to German settlers and
encouraged church members to spread the message of
spiritual urgency. A decade later, William Tennent and
his son Gilbert copied Frelinghuysen’s approach and
led revivals among Scots-Irish Presbyterians through-
out the Middle Atlantic region.

New England Revivalism Simultaneously, an

American-born Pietist movement appeared in New
England. Revivals of Christian zeal were built into the
logic of Puritanism. In the 1730s, Jonathan Edwards, a
minister in Northampton, Massachusetts, encouraged
a revival there that spread to towns throughout the
Connecticut River Valley. Edwards guided and
observed the process and then published an account
entitled A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of
God, printed first in London (1737), then in Boston
Benjamin Franklin’s Rise (1738), and then in German and Dutch translations. Its
This portrait of Benjamin Franklin, attributed to Robert Feke publication history highlights the transatlantic net-
and executed around 1746, portrays Franklin as a successful work of correspondents that gave Pietism much of its
businessman. His ruffled collar and cuffs, his fashionably
curly wig, and his sober but expensive suit reveal his social vitality.
ambitions. In later portraits, after he gained fame as an
Enlightenment sage, he dispensed with the wig and chose Whitefield’s Great Awakening English minister
more unaffected poses; but in 1746, he was still establishing
his credentials as a young Philadelphia gentleman on the rise.
George Whitefield transformed the local revivals of
Harvard University Art Museum, Fogg Art Museum, Bequest of Dr. John Edwards and the Tennents into a Great Awakening.
Collins Warren, 1856, H47 Photo: Imaging Department © President After Whitefield had his personal awakening upon
and Fellows of Harvard College. reading the German Pietists, he became a follower of
John Wesley, the founder of English Methodism. In
1739, Whitefield carried Wesley’s fervent message to
Franklin, ambitious printers in America’s seaport cities America, where he attracted huge crowds from Georgia
published newspapers and gentlemen’s magazines, the to Massachusetts.
first significant nonreligious periodicals to appear in Whitefield had a compelling presence. “He looked
the colonies. The European Enlightenment, then, almost angelical; a young, slim, slender youth . . .
added a secular dimension to colonial cultural life, cloathed with authority from the Great God,” wrote a
foreshadowing the great contributions to republican Connecticut farmer. Like most evangelical preachers,
political theory by American intellectuals of the Whitefield did not read his sermons but spoke from
Revolutionary era: John Adams, James Madison, and memory. More like an actor than a theologian, he ges-
Thomas Jefferson. tured eloquently, raised his voice for dramatic effect,
and at times assumed a female persona — as a woman
American Pietism and the in labor struggling to deliver the word of God. When
the young preacher told his spellbound listeners that
Great Awakening they had sinned and must seek salvation, some suddenly
As some colonists turned to deism, thousands of others felt a “new light” within them. As “the power of god
embraced Pietism, a Christian movement originating come down,” Hannah Heaton recalled, “my knees smote
in Germany around 1700 and emphasizing pious together . . . [and] it seemed to me I was a sinking
behavior (hence the name). In its emotional worship down into hell . . . but then I resigned my distress and
services and individual striving for a mystical union was perfectly easy quiet and calm . . . [and] it seemed as
AMERICAN
VOICES

Two great historical movements, Enlightenment thought and Pietistic religion,

swept across British North America in the eighteenth century and offered radi-
Evangelical Religion cally different — indeed, almost completely contradictory — worldviews. Pietism
sparked religious revivals based on passion and emotion, while Enlightenment
and Enlightenment rationalism encouraged personal restraint and intellectual logic. Both move-
ments shaped American cultural development: Pietism transformed American
Rationalism religious life, and Enlightenment thinking influenced the principles of the
American government.

Sarah Lippet Poor Me — Miserable me. . . . I was loaded with the guilt
Death as a Passage to Life of Sin. . . .
Hell fire was most always in my mind; and I have
Sarah Lippet was a longtime member of the Baptist church hundreds of times put my fingers into my pipe when I
of Middletown in eastern New Jersey. She died in October have been smoaking to feel how fire felt: And to see how
1767 at the age of sixty-one; fellow parishioners reported my Body could bear to lye in Hell fire for ever and
her sentiments as she lay, for four days, on her deathbed. ever. . . . And while these thoughts were in my mind
All my lifetime I have been in fears and doubts, but now God appeared unto me and made me Skringe: before
am delivered. He hath delivered them who through fear whose face the heavens and the earth fled away; and I
of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage. For was Shrinked into nothing; I knew not whether I was in
the love I have for Christ I am willing to part with all the body or out, I seemed to hang in open Air before
my friends to be with Him, for I love Him above all; yet God, and he seemed to Speak to me in an angry and
it is nothing in me, for I know if I had my desert I should Sovereign way[:] What? Won’t you trust your Soul with
be in Hell. I believe in Christ, and I know that I put my God?; My heart answered O yes, yes, yes. . . .
whole trust in Him, and he that believeth in Him shall When God disappeared or in some measure with-
not be ashamed nor be confounded. . . . drew, every thing was in its place again and I was on my
Why do you mourn when I rejoice? You should not; it Bed. . . . I was set free, my distress was gone, and I was
is no more for me to die and leave my friends for the great filled with a pineing desire to see Christs own words in
love I have for Christ than for me to go to sleep. I have no the bible; . . . I got the bible up under my Chin and
fears of death in my mind. Christ has the keys of death hugged it; it was sweet and lovely; the word was nigh
and hell, and blessed are the dead that die in the Lord. [near] me in my hand, then I began to pray and to
I can’t bear to see a tear shed. You should not mourn. praise God.

Source: “The Triumphant Christian,” in Historical and Genealogical Miscellany, ed. Source: “The Spiritual Travels of Nathan Cole, 1741” in The Great Awakening:
John E. Stillwell (New York, 1964), 3: 465–466. Documents on the Revival of Religion, 1740–1745, ed. Richard L. Bushman (New York:
Atheneum, 1970), 68–70.

Nathan Cole
The Struggle for Salvation Benjamin Franklin
The Importance of a Virtuous Life
Connecticut farmer Nathan Cole found God after listening
to a sermon by George Whitefield, the great English evan- Franklin stood at the center of the American Enlighten-
gelist. But Cole’s spiritual quest was not easy. He struggled ment. In his Autobiography, he outlined his religious views
for two years before coming to believe that he was saved. and his human-centered moral principles.

[After hearing Whitefield] I began to think I was not My Parents had early given me religious Impressions,
Elected, and that God made some for heaven and me for and brought me through my Childhood piously in the
hell. And I thought God was not Just in so doing. . . . My Dissenting Way. But I was scarce 15 when, after doubting
heart then rose against God exceedingly, for his making by turns of several Points as I found them disputed in
me for hell; Now this distress lasted Almost two years — the different Books I read, I began to doubt of Revelation

130
itself. Some Books against Deism fell into my Hands. . . . and Government. . . . I shall consider Man in a state of
It happened that they wrought an Effect on me quite con- Natural Being, as a Free-Born Subject under the Crown
trary to what was intended by them: For the Arguments of Heaven, and owing Homage to none but God himself.
of the Deists [that were quoted in those books] appeared It is certain Civil Government in General, is a very
to me much Stronger than the Refutations. In short I soon Admirable Result of Providence, and an Incomparable
became a thorough Deist. . . . Benefit to Mankind, yet must needs be acknowledged
I grew convinc’d that Truth, Sincerity & Integrity to be the Effect of Humane Free-Compacts and not
in Dealings between Man & Man, were of the utmost of Divine Institution; it is the Produce of Mans Reason,
Importance to the Felicity of Life, and I form’d written of Humane and Rational Combinations, and not from
Resolutions, (which still remain in my Journal Book) to any direct Orders of Infinite Wisdom. . . .
practice them ever while I lived. . . . The Prime Immunity in Mans State, is that he is
About the Year 1734. There arrived among us from most properly the Subject of the Law of Nature. He is
Ireland, a young Presbyterian Preacher named Hemphill, the Favourite Animal on Earth; in that this Part of Gods
who delivered with a good Voice, & apparently extem- Image, viz. Reason is Congenate with his Nature, wherein
pore, most excellent Discourses, which drew together by a Law Immutable, Instampt upon his Frame, God has
considerable Numbers of different Persuasions, who provided a Rule for Men in all their Actions; obliging
join’d in admiring them. Among the rest I became one each one to the performance of that which is Right,
of his constant Hearers, his Sermons pleasing me as they not only as to Justice, but likewise as to all other Moral
had little of the dogmatical kind, but inculcated strongly Vertues, which is nothing but the Dictate of Right Reason
the Practice of Virtue, or what in the religious Stile are founded in the Soul of Man. . . .
called Good Works. Those however, of our Congregation, The Second Great Immunity of Man is an Original
who considered themselves as orthodox Presbyterians, Liberty Instampt upon his Rational Nature. He that
disapprov’d his Doctrine, and were join’d by most of the intrudes upon this Liberty, Violates the Law of Nature. . . .
old Clergy, who arraign’d him of Heterodoxy before the The Third Capital Immunity belonging to Mans
Synod, in order to have him silenc’d. I became his zealous Nature, is an equality amongst Men; Which is not to be
Partisan. . . . denyed by the Law of Nature, till Man has Resigned him-
I never was without some religious Principles; I never self with all his Rights for the sake of a Civil State; and
doubted, for instance, the Existance of the Deity, that he then his Personal Liberty and Equality is to be cherished,
made the World, & govern’d it by his Providence; that the and preserved to the highest degree.
most acceptable Service of God was the doing Good to
Man; that our Souls are immortal; and that all Crime will Source: John Wise, A Vindication of the Government of New England Churches (Boston:
J. Allen, for N. Boone, 1717), 32–40.
be punished & Virtue rewarded either here or hereafter;
these I esteem’d the Essentials of every Religion.

Source: Louis P. Masur, ed., The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, with Related
Documents, 2nd ed. (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003), 73–74, 93–94, 108.
QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS
John Wise 1. All of these writers declare a belief in God. How do their
beliefs and outlooks differ?
The Primacy of Human Reason 2. These writers were variously influenced by the Great
and Natural Laws Awakening, the Enlightenment, and rational Christian-
ity. How are these movements reflected in the passages
Reverend John Wise (1652–1725) served for many years as above?
a pastor in Ipswich, Massachusetts. A graduate of Harvard 3. What roles do fear and anxiety play in the experiences
College, Wise used the Enlightenment doctrines of John of Sarah Lippet and Nathan Cole? What difference does
Locke and Samuel von Pufendorf to justify the democratic it make that neither Franklin nor Wise expresses fear,
either of God or of his own sinfulness?
structure of New England Congregational churches.
4. Benjamin Franklin and John Wise stress the importance
I Shall disclose several Principles of Natural Knowledge; of reason and virtue as guides to human conduct. How
would Nathan Cole and Sarah Lippet react to that
plainly discovering the Law of Nature; or the true senti- emphasis?
ments of Natural Reason, with Respect to Mans Being
131
 132 PART 2 BRITISH NORTH AMERICA AND THE ATLANTIC WORLD, 1660–1763

The Print Revolution and the Great

Awakening
George Whitefield made his first trip to
North America in 1738, when he traveled
to Savannah, Georgia. Benjamin Franklin
published the first edition of this journal of
his voyage in Philadelphia in 1739; the copy
pictured here was printed a year later. Texts
like this one highlight the importance of
the print revolution to eighteenth-century
culture: Whitefield was utterly unknown in
North America until he began publicizing his
ministry and his travels through such works.
Enlightenment ideas, too, were conveyed
to large and far-flung audiences in books,
magazines, and newspapers. Library Company
of Philadelphia.

if I had a new soul & body both.” Strengthened and for allowing women to speak in public: it was “a plain
self-confident, these converts, the so-called New breach of that commandment of the lord, where it is
Lights, were eager to spread Whitefield’s message. said, Let your women keep silence in the churches.” In
The rise of print intersected with this enthusiasm. Connecticut, Old Lights persuaded the legislature to
“Religion is become the Subject of most Conversations,” prohibit evangelists from speaking to a congregation
the Pennsylvania Gazette reported. “No books are in without the minister’s permission. But the New Lights
Request but those of Piety and Devotion.” Whitefield refused to be silenced. Dozens of farmers, women, and
and his circle did their best to answer the demand for artisans roamed the countryside, condemning the Old
devotional reading. As he traveled, Whitefield regu- Lights as “unconverted” and willingly accepting impris-
larly sent excerpts of his journal to be printed in news- onment: “I shall bring glory to God in my bonds,” a dis-
papers. Franklin printed Whitefield’s sermons and sident preacher wrote from jail.
journals by subscription and found them to be among The Great Awakening undermined legally estab-
his best-selling titles. Printed accounts of Whitefield’s lished churches and their tax-supported ministers. In
travels, conversion narratives, sermons, and other New England, New Lights left the Congregational
devotional literature helped to confirm Pietists in their Church and founded 125 “separatist” churches that
faith and strengthen the communication networks that supported their ministers through voluntary contribu-
sustained them. tions (Figure 4.3). Other religious dissidents joined
Baptist congregations, which also condemned govern-
ment support of churches: “God never allowed any
Religious Upheaval in the North civil state upon earth to impose religious taxes,”
Like all cultural explosions, the Great Awakening declared Baptist preacher Isaac Backus. In New York
was controversial. Conservative ministers — passionless and New Jersey, the Dutch Reformed Church split in
Old Lights, according to the evan- two as New Lights refused to accept doctrines imposed
COMPARE AND gelists — condemned the “cryings by conservative church authorities in Holland.
CONTRAST out, faintings and convulsions” The Great Awakening also appealed to Christians
In what ways was the in revivalist meetings and the New whose established churches could not serve their
spread of ideas during the Lights’ claims of “working Miracles needs. By 1740, Pennsylvania’s German Reformed and
Enlightenment and the Lutheran congregations suffered from a severe lack of
or speaking with Tongues.” Bos-
Great Awakening similar,
ton minister Charles Chauncy university-trained pastors. In the colony’s Dutch
and how did it differ?
attacked the Pietist New Lights Reformed, Dutch and Swedish Lutheran, and even its
 CHAPTER 4 Growth, Diversity, and Conflict, 1720–1763 133

FIGURE 4.3
Church Growth by Denomination, 1700–1780
In 1700, and again in 1740, the Congregationalist and Anglican churches had the most members. By
1780, however, largely because of their enthusiastic evangelical message, Presbyterian and Baptist
congregations outnumbered those of the Anglicans. The growth of immigrant denominations, such
as the German Reformed and Lutheran, was equally impressive.

Anglican congregations, half the pulpits were empty. In advance his opinion, in religious as well as political
this circumstance, itinerant preachers who stressed the matters, with as much freedom as the gentleman.”
power of “heart religion” and downplayed the impor-
tance of formal ministerial training found a ready
Social and Religious Conflict
audience.
The Great Awakening challenged the authority of in the South
all ministers, whose status rested on respect for their In the southern colonies, where the Church of England
education and knowledge of the Bible. In an influential was legally established, religious enthusiasm triggered
pamphlet, The Dangers of an Unconverted Ministry social conflict. Anglican ministers generally ignored
(1740), Gilbert Tennent asserted that ministers’ author- the spiritual needs of African Americans and landless
ity should come not from theological knowledge but whites, who numbered 40 percent and 20 percent of
from the conversion experience. Reaffirming Martin the population, respectively. Middling white freehold-
Luther’s belief in the priesthood of all Christians, ers (35 percent of the residents) formed the core of
Tennent suggested that anyone who had felt God’s most Church of England congregations. But promi-
redeeming grace could speak with ministerial author- nent planters (just 5 percent) held the real power, using
ity. Sarah Harrah Osborn, a New Light “exhorter” in their control of parish finances to discipline ministers.
Rhode Island, refused “to shut up my mouth . . . and One clergyman complained that dismissal awaited any
creep into obscurity” when silenced by her minister. minister who “had the courage to preach against any
As religious enthusiasm spread, churches founded Vices taken into favor by the leading Men of his Parish.”
new colleges to educate their young men and to train
ministers. New Light Presbyterians established the The Presbyterian Revival Soon, a democratization
College of New Jersey (Princeton) in 1746, and New of religion challenged the dominance of both the
York Anglicans founded King’s College (Columbia) Anglican Church and the planter elite. In 1743, brick-
in 1754. Baptists set up the College of Rhode Island layer Samuel Morris, inspired by reading George
(Brown) in 1764; two years later, the Dutch Reformed Whitefield’s sermons, led a group of Virginia Anglicans
Church subsidized Queen’s College (Rutgers) in New out of their congregation. Seeking a deeper religious
Jersey. However, the main intellectual legacy of the experience, Morris invited New Light Presbyterian
Great Awakening was not education for the privileged Samuel Davies to lead their prayer meetings. Davies’s
few but a new sense of authority among the many. A sermons, filled with erotic devotional imagery and
European visitor to Philadelphia remarked in surprise, urging Christians to feel “ardent Passion,” sparked
“The poorest day-laborer . . . holds it his right to Presbyterian revivals across the Tidewater region,
134 PART 2 BRITISH NORTH AMERICA AND THE ATLANTIC WORLD, 1660–1763

threatening the social authority of the Virginia gentry. to bring their slaves into the Christian fold, but white
Traditionally, planters and their well-dressed families opposition and the Africans’ commitment to their
arrived at Anglican services in fancy carriages drawn ancestral religions kept the number of converts low.
by well-bred horses and flaunted their power by sitting However, in the 1760s, native-born African Americans
in the front pews. Such ritual displays of the gentry’s in Virginia welcomed the Baptists’ message that all
superiority were meaningless if freeholders attended people were equal in God’s eyes. Sensing a threat to
other churches. Moreover, religious pluralism threat- the system of racial slavery, the House of Burgesses
ened the tax-supported status of the Anglican Church. imposed heavy fines on Baptists who preached to slaves
To halt the spread of New Light ideas, Virginia without their owners’ permission.
governor William Gooch denounced them as “false Baptists threatened gentry authority because they
teachings,” and Anglican justices of the peace closed repudiated social distinctions and urged followers to
Presbyterian churches. This harassment kept most call one another “brother” and “sister.” They also con-
white yeomen and poor tenant families in the Church demned the planters’ decadent lifestyle. As planter
of England. Landon Carter complained, the Baptists were “destroy-
ing pleasure in the Country; for they encourage ardent
The Baptist Insurgency During the 1760s, the vig- Prayer . . . & an intire Banishment of Gaming, Dancing,
orous preaching and democratic message of New Light & Sabbath-Day Diversions.” The gentry responded
Baptist ministers converted thousands of white farm with violence. In Caroline County, an Anglican posse
families. The Baptists were radical Protestants whose attacked Brother John Waller at a prayer meeting.
central ritual was adult (rather than infant) baptism. Waller “was violently jerked off the stage; they caught
Once men and women had experienced the infusion of him by the back part of his neck, beat his head against
grace — had been “born again” — they were baptized in the ground, and a gentleman gave him twenty lashes
an emotional public ceremony, often involving com- with his horsewhip.”
plete immersion in water. Despite these attacks, Baptist congregations multi-
Slaves were welcome at Baptist revivals. During the plied. By 1775, about 15 percent of Virginia’s whites
1740s, George Whitefield had urged Carolina planters and hundreds of enslaved blacks had joined Baptist

Baptism in the Schuylkill River

The Baptist movement, which made adult baptism central to its religious practice, gained enormous influence
during the Great Awakening. Baptists presented a challenge to the social order in New England, where Isaac
Backus and other leaders vigorously opposed the power of established Congregationalist churches. They
presented an even graver threat to established authority in Virginia, where they ministered to African
American slaves and ridiculed the pretensions of the gentry. This woodcut, from an eighteenth-century
history of the Baptist movement, shows a congregation gathered on the banks of the Schuylkill River in
Pennsylvania to witness the baptism of a new convert. Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
 CHAPTER 4 Growth, Diversity, and Conflict, 1720–1763 135

churches. To signify their state of grace, some Baptist River. They traded with Delawares and Shawnees in the
men “cut off their hair, like Cromwell’s round-headed upper valley and began to draw French-allied Indians
chaplains.” Others forged a new evangelical masculin- into their orbit and away from French posts. Then, in
ity, “crying, weeping, lifting up the eyes, groaning” 1748, the Ohio Company of Virginia, a partnership of
when touched by the Holy Spirit. prominent colonial planters and London merchants,
The Baptist revival in the Chesapeake challenged received a 200,000-acre grant from the crown to estab-
customary authority in families and society but did not lish a new settlement on the upper Ohio, threatening
overturn it. Rejecting the pleas of evangelical women, French claims to the region.
Baptist men kept church authority in the hands of “free
born male members”; and Anglican slaveholders re- Conflict in the Ohio Valley By midcentury, Britain
tained control of the political system. Still, the Baptist relied on the Iroquois Confederacy as its partner in
insurgency infused the lives of poor tenant families Indian relations throughout the Northeast. By extend-
with spiritual meaning and empowered yeomen to ing the Covenant Chain, the Iroquois had become a
defend their economic interests. Moreover, as Baptist kind of Indian empire in their own right, claiming to
ministers spread Christianity among slaves, the cul- speak for other groups throughout the region based on
tural gulf between blacks and whites shrank, under- their seventeenth-century conquests. The Delawares,
mining one justification for slavery and giving some Shawnees, and other groups who repopulated the Ohio
blacks a new religious identity. Within a generation, Valley did so in part to escape the Iroquois yoke. To
African Americans would develop distinctive versions maintain influence on the Ohio, the Iroquois sent two
of Protestant Christianity. “half-kings,” Tanaghrisson (an adopted Seneca) and
Scarouady (an Oneida), to the native settlement of
Logstown, a trading town on the upper Ohio, where
Britain recognized them as leaders.
The Midcentury Challenge: French authorities, alarmed by British inroads,
War, Trade, and Social built a string of forts from Lake Erie to the headwaters
of the Ohio, culminating with Fort Duquesne on the
Conflict, 1750–1763 site of present-day Pittsburgh. To reassert British
Between 1750 and 1763, three significant events trans- claims, Governor Dinwiddie dispatched an expedition
formed colonial life. First, Britain went to war against led by Colonel George Washington, a twenty-two-
the French in America, sparking a worldwide conflict: year-old Virginian whose half-brothers were Ohio
the Great War for Empire. Second, a surge in trade Company stockholders. Washington discovered that
boosted colonial consumption but caused Americans most of the Ohio Indians had decided to side with the
to become deeply indebted to British creditors. Third, French; only the Iroquois half-kings and a few of their
westward migration sparked warfare with Indian followers supported his efforts. After Washington’s
peoples, violent disputes between settlers and land party fired on a French detachment, Tanaghrisson
speculators, and backcountry rebellions against eastern- rushed in and killed a French officer to ensure war — a
controlled governments. prospect that would force British arms to support
Iroquois interests in the valley.
Washington’s party was soon defeated by a larger
The French and Indian War French force. The result was an international incident
In 1754, overlapping French and British claims in that prompted Virginian and British expansionists to
North America came to a head (Map 4.4). The French demand war. But war in North America was a worri-
maintained their vast claims through a network of forts some prospect: the colonies were notoriously incapable
and trading posts that sustained alliances with neigh- of cooperating in their own defense, and the Covenant
boring Indians. The soft underbelly of this sprawling Chain was badly in need of repair.
empire was the Ohio Valley, where French claims were
tenuous. Native peoples were driven out of the valley by The Albany Congress The Iroquois Confederacy
Iroquois attacks in the seventeenth century, but after was unhappy with its British alliance and believed that
1720 displaced Indian populations — especially Dela- the British were neglecting the Iroquois while settlers
wares and Shawnees from Pennsylvania — resettled from New York pressed onto their lands. Moreover, the
there in large numbers. In the 1740s, British traders Ohio Indians, France, and Britain were all acting in
from Pennsylvania began traveling down the Ohio the Ohio Valley without consulting them. To mend
 Labrador
Hudson Sea
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MAP 4.4
European Spheres of Influence in North America, 1754
In the mid-eighteenth century, France, Spain, and the British-owned Hudson Bay Company laid
claim to the vast areas of North America still inhabited primarily by Indian peoples. British settlers
had already occupied much of the land east of the Appalachian Mountains. To safeguard their
lands west of the mountains, Native Americans played off one European power against another.
As a British official remarked: “To preserve the Ballance between us and the French is the great
ruling Principle of Modern Indian Politics.” When Britain expelled France from North America in
1763, Indians had to face encroaching Anglo-American settlers on their own.
136
 CHAPTER 4 Growth, Diversity, and Conflict, 1720–1763 137

continental assembly to manage trade, Indian policy,

and the colonies’ defense. Though it was attractive to a
few reform-minded colonists and administrators, the
plan would have compromised the independence of
colonial assemblies and the authority of Parliament. It
never received serious consideration, but that did not
stop the push toward war.

To see a longer excerpt of the Albany Plan of

Union, along with other primary sources from
this period, see Sources for America’s History.

The War Hawks Win In Parliament, the fight for the

Ohio prompted a debate over war with France. Henry
Pelham, the British prime minister, urged calm: “There
is such a load of debt, and such heavy taxes already laid
upon the people, that nothing but an absolute neces-
sity can justifie our engaging in a new War.” But two
expansionist-minded war hawks — rising British states-
man William Pitt and Lord Halifax, the new head of
the Board of Trade — persuaded Pelham to launch an
American war. In June 1755, British and New England
troops captured Fort Beauséjour in the disputed
territory of Nova Scotia (which the French called
Acadia). Soldiers from Puritan Massachusetts then
forced nearly 10,000 French settlers from their lands,
Hendrick Peters Theyanoguin, Chief of the arguing they were “rebels” without property rights,
Mohawks
and deported them to France, the West Indies,
Great Britain’s alliance with the Iroquois Confederacy — and Louisiana (where “Acadians” became “Cajuns”).
the Covenant Chain — was central to its Indian policy in
the mid-eighteenth century, and the Mohawk warrior and English and Scottish Protestants took over the farms
sachem Hendrick Peters Theyanoguin emerged as its most the French Catholics left behind.
powerful spokesman. His speech at the Albany Congress This Anglo-American triumph was quickly offset
of 1754, in which he urged Great Britain toward war, was
reported in newspapers in Britain and the colonies and made
by a stunning defeat. In July 1755, General Edward
him a transatlantic celebrity. This print was advertised for sale Braddock advanced on Fort Duquesne with a force of
in London bookstalls just as his death at the Battle of Lake 1,500 British regulars and Virginia militiamen.
George (1755) was being reported in newspapers there. Braddock alienated potential allies by treating Indians
Hendrick wears a rich silk waistcoat, an overcoat trimmed
with gold lace, a ruffled shirt, and a tricorn hat — gifts from (including Tanaghrisson) dismissively and denying the
his British allies — while he holds a wampum belt in one privilege of rank to colonial officers like George
hand and a tomahawk in the other. Courtesy of the John Carter Washington. Persuaded that British arms could easily
Brown Library at Brown University.
triumph in the American backcountry, he was instead
routed by a French and Indian force. Braddock was
killed, and more than half his troops were killed or
relations with the Iroquois, the British Board of Trade wounded. “We have been beaten, most shamefully
called a meeting at Albany in June 1754. There, a prom- beaten, by a handfull of Men,” George Washington
inent Mohawk leader named Hendrick Peters complained bitterly as he led the survivors back to
Theyanoguin challenged Britain to defend its interests Virginia.
more vigorously, while Benjamin Franklin proposed a
“Plan of Union” among the colonies to counter French
expansion. The Great War for Empire
The Albany Plan of Union proposed that “one By 1756, the American conflict had spread to Europe,
general government . . . be formed in America, includ- where it was known as the Seven Years’ War, and pitted
ing all the said colonies.” It would have created a Britain and Prussia against France, Spain, and Austria.
138 PART 2 BRITISH NORTH AMERICA AND THE ATLANTIC WORLD, 1660–1763

Braddock’s Defeat and Death, July 1755

In May 1755 General Edward Braddock led a force of 1,500 British regulars and Virginia militiamen out of
Fort Cumberland in western Maryland, intending to oust the French from Fort Duquesne, 50 miles to the
west. As Braddock neared the fort, the French garrison of 200 troops and about 600 Indian allies — mostly
Potawatomis, Ottawas, Shawnees, and Delawares — set out to ambush his force. Instead, they unexpectedly
met the British along a narrow roadway. As the French and Indians fanned out to attack from the woods, the
British troops (George Washington reported) “were struck with such a panic that they behaved with more
cowardice than it is possible to conceive. The officers behaved gallantly, in order to encourage their men, for
which they suffered greatly.” The British casualties — 450 killed, 500 wounded — included General Braddock,
pictured above, who later died from his wounds. © Chicago History Museum, USA/The Bridgeman Art Library.

When Britain mounted major offensives in India, West Beginning in 1758, the powerful Anglo-American
Africa, and the West Indies as well as in North America, forces moved from one triumph to the next, in part
the conflict became the Great War for Empire. because they brought Indian allies back into the fold.
William Pitt emerged as the architect of the British They forced the French to abandon Fort Duquesne
war effort. Pitt was a committed expansionist with a (renamed Fort Pitt) and then captured Fort Louisbourg,
touch of arrogance. “I know that I can save this country a stronghold at the mouth of the St. Lawrence. In 1759,
and that I alone can,” he boasted. A master strategist, an armada led by British general James Wolfe sailed
he planned to cripple France by seizing its colonies. In down the St. Lawrence and took Quebec, the heart of
North America, he enjoyed a decisive demographic France’s American empire. The Royal Navy prevented
advantage, since George II’s 2 million subjects out- French reinforcements from crossing the Atlantic,
numbered the French 14 to 1. To mobilize the colo- allowing British forces to complete the conquest of
nists, Pitt paid half the cost of their troops and supplied Canada in 1760 by capturing Montreal (Map 4.5).
them with arms and equipment, at a cost of £1 million Elsewhere, the British likewise had great success.
a year. He also committed a fleet of British ships and From Spain, the British won Cuba and the Philippine
30,000 British soldiers to the conflict in America. Islands. Fulfilling Pitt’s dream, the East India Company
 CHAPTER 4 Growth, Diversity, and Conflict, 1720–1763 139

758
e, 1
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Sept. 13, 1759 Island
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.
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MAP 4.5
The Anglo-American Conquest of New France
After full-scale war with France began in 1756, it took almost three years for the British ministry to
equip colonial forces and dispatch a sizable army to far-off America. In 1758, British and colonial
troops attacked the heartland of New France, capturing Quebec in 1759 and Montreal in 1760.
This conquest both united and divided the allies. Colonists celebrated the great victory: “The
Illuminations and Fireworks exceeded any that had been exhibited before,” reported the South
Carolina Gazette. However, British officers had little respect for colonial soldiers. Said one, “[They
are] the dirtiest, most contemptible, cowardly dogs you can conceive.”

ousted French traders from India, and British forces preferred the presence of a few French traders to an
seized French Senegal in West Africa. They also cap- influx of thousands of Anglo-American settlers. To
tured the rich sugar islands of Martinique and encourage the French to return, the Ottawa chief
Guadeloupe in the French West Indies, but at the insis- Pontiac declared, “I am French, and I want to die
tence of the West Indian sugar lobby (which wanted to French.” Neolin, a Delaware
protect its monopoly), the ministry returned the prophet, went further, calling for EXPLAIN
islands to France in the Treaty of Paris of 1763. Despite the expulsion of all white-skinned CONSEQUENCES
that controversial decision, the treaty confirmed invaders: “If you suffer the English How did the Seven Years’
Britain’s triumph. It granted Britain sovereignty over among you, you are dead men. War reshape Britain’s
half of North America, including French Canada, all Sickness, smallpox, and their empire in North America
French territory east of the Mississippi River, Spanish poison [rum] will destroy you and affect native peoples?
Florida, and the recent conquests in Africa and India. entirely.” In 1763, inspired by
Britain had forged a commercial and colonial empire Neolin’s nativist vision, Pontiac led a major uprising at
that was nearly worldwide. Detroit. Following his example, Indians throughout
Though Britain had won cautious support from the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley seized nearly every
some Native American groups in the late stages of British military garrison west of Fort Niagara, besieged
the war, its territorial acquisitions alarmed many Fort Pitt, and killed or captured more than 2,000
native peoples from New York to the Mississippi, who settlers.
 140 PART 2 BRITISH NORTH AMERICA AND THE ATLANTIC WORLD, 1660–1763

British military expeditions defeated the Delawares

near Fort Pitt and broke the siege of Detroit, but it took
the army nearly two years to reclaim all the posts it had
lost. In the peace settlement, Pontiac and his allies
accepted the British as their new political “fathers.” The
British ministry, having learned how expensive it was
to control the trans-Appalachian west, issued the Royal
Proclamation of 1763, which confirmed Indian control
of the region and declared it off-limits to colonial settle-
ment. It was an edict that many colonists would ignore.

British Industrial Growth

and the Consumer Revolution
Britain owed its military and diplomatic success to its
unprecedented economic resources. Since 1700, when
it had wrested control of many oceanic trade routes
from the Dutch, Britain had become the dominant
commercial power in the Atlantic and Indian oceans.
By 1750, it was also becoming the first country to use
new manufacturing technology and work discipline to
expand output. This combination of commerce and
industry would soon make Britain the most powerful
nation in the world. Nicholas Boylston, c. 1769
Mechanical power was key to Britain’s Industrial Merchants in the coastal and transatlantic trades gained
enormous wealth in the mid-eighteenth century and
Revolution. British artisans designed and built water displayed it in new ways. Among the most flamboyant was
mills and steam engines that efficiently powered a wide Nicholas Boylston. Of Boylston’s home John Adams wrote, “A
array of machines: lathes for shaping wood, jennies Seat it is for a noble Man, a Prince.” In this portrait, painted
by John Singleton Copley in 1769, Boylston flaunts his exotic
and looms for spinning and weaving textiles, and ham- possessions. In place of the wig he would have worn outside
mers for forging iron. Compared with traditional man- his home, Boylston wears a red velvet turban to keep his
ufacturing methods, the new power-driven machinery shaved head warm. His morning gown of heavy silk damask
produced woolen and linen textiles, iron tools, furni- covers a rich waistcoat, casually unbuttoned in the middle to
reveal his elegant ruffled shirt. Boylston rests his left elbow on
ture, and chinaware in greater quantities — and at two thick account books, an unmistakable reminder of the
lower cost. Moreover, the entrepreneurs running the source of his wealth. Photograph © 2014 Museum of Fine Arts,
new workshops drove their employees hard, forcing Boston. Bequest of David P. Kimball, 23.504.

them to keep pace with the machines and work long

hours. To market the abundant factory-produced Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia became the
goods, English and Scottish merchants extended credit breadbasket of the Atlantic World, supplying Europe’s
to colonial shopkeepers for a full year instead of the exploding population with wheat.
traditional six months. Americans soon were purchas- Americans used their profits and the generous
ing 30 percent of all British exports. credit extended from overseas to buy English manufac-
To pay for British manufactures, mainland colo- tures. When he was practicing law in Boston, John
nists increased their exports of tobacco, rice, indigo, Adams visited the home of Nicholas Boylston, one of
and wheat. Using credit advanced by Scottish mer- the city’s wealthiest merchants, “to view the Furniture,
chants, planters in Virginia bought land, slaves, and which alone cost a thousand Pounds sterling,” he wrote.
equipment to grow tobacco, “[T]he Marble Tables, the rich Beds with Crimson
EXPLAIN which they exported to expand- Damask Curtains and Counterpins, the Beautiful
CONSEQUENCES ing markets in France and central Chimny Clock, the Spacious Garden, are the most
How did the prosperity of Europe. In South Carolina, rice magnificent of any Thing I have ever seen.” Through
the British Empire improve planters used British government their possessions, well-to-do colonists set themselves
and endanger the lives and
subsidies to develop indigo and apart from their humbler — or, as they might have said,
interests of colonists?
rice plantations. New York, more vulgar — neighbors.
 CHAPTER 4 Growth, Diversity, and Conflict, 1720–1763 141

Although Britain’s consumer revolution raised basis of Connecticut’s “sea-to-sea” royal charter of
living standards, it landed many consumers — and 1662. However, Charles II had also granted the
the colonies as a whole — in debt (Figure 4.4). Even Wyoming Valley to William Penn, and the Penn family
during the wartime boom of the 1750s, exports paid had sold farms there to Pennsylvania residents. By the
for only 80 percent of British imports. Britain financed late 1750s, settlers from Connecticut and Pennsylvania
the remaining 20 percent — the Americans’ trade were at war, burning down their rivals’ houses and
deficit — through the extension of credit and Pitt’s barns. Delawares with their own claim to the valley
military expenditures. When the military subsidies were caught in the crossfire. In April 1763, the Delaware
ended in 1763, the colonies fell into an economic reces- headman Teedyuscung was burned to death in his
sion. Merchants looked anxiously at their overstocked cabin; in retaliation, Teedyuscung’s son Captain Bull
warehouses and feared bankruptcy. “I think we have a led a war party that destroyed a community of
gloomy prospect before us,” a Philadelphia trader Connecticut settlers.
noted in 1765. The increase in transatlantic trade had Simultaneously, three distinct but related land dis-
made Americans more dependent on overseas credit putes broke out in the Hudson River Valley (Map 4.6).
and markets. Dutch tenant farmers, Wappinger Indians, and migrants
from Massachusetts asserted ownership rights to lands
long claimed by manorial families such as the Van
The Struggle for Land in the East Rensselaers and the Livingstons. When the manor
In good times and bad, the population continued to lords turned to the legal system to uphold their claims,
grow, intensifying the demand for arable land. Consider Dutch and English farmers in Westchester, Dutchess,
the experience of Kent, Connecticut. Like earlier gen- and Albany counties rioted to close the courts. In
erations, Kent’s residents had moved inland to establish response, New York’s royal governor ordered British
new farms, but Kent stood at the colony’s western troops to assist local sheriffs and manorial bailiffs: they
boundary. To provide for the next generation, many suppressed the tenant uprisings, intimidated the
Kent families joined the Susquehanna Company Wappingers, and evicted the Massachusetts squatters.
(1749), which speculated in lands in the Wyoming Other land disputes erupted in New Jersey and the
Valley in present-day northeastern Pennsylvania. As southern colonies, where landlords and English aris-
settlers took up farmsteads there, the company urged tocrats had successfully revived legal claims based
the Connecticut legislature to claim the region on the on long-dormant seventeenth-century charters. One

Population British imports (in £) Average yearly balance of payments, 1768–1772

4.5 million
Earnings Payments (£ sterling, millions)
4.0
Commodities: Exports 2,870,000
3.5 Foreign earnings: Ship sales 140,000
Foreign earnings: Shipping 820,000
3.0 British military expenditures 365,000

2.5 Commodities: Imports 3,920,000

Debt-fueled consumption Purchases of slaves & servants 280,000
2.0 Imperial government: Taxes 40,000
1.5 Total 4,195,000
4,240,000
1.0

0.5 Avg. annual Colonial deficit 45,000

Deficit over 5 years 225,000
0
1720 1730 1740 1750 1760 1770 1780

FIGURE 4.4
Mainland Population and British Imports
Around 1750, British imports were growing at a faster rate than the American population, indicat-
ing that the colonists were consuming more per capita. But Americans went into debt to pay for
these goods, running an annual trade deficit with their British suppliers that by 1772 had created a
cumulative debt of £2 million.
142 PART 2 BRITISH NORTH AMERICA AND THE ATLANTIC WORLD, 1660–1763

MAINE
(MASS.)
Western Rebels and Regulators
ALGONQUIN Massachusetts settlers
in New York VT. ABENAKI N As would-be landowners moved west, they sparked
(N.Y.) conflicts over Indian policy, political representation,
NEW E
HAMP. W
OIS and debts. During the war with France, Delaware and
L. H

ario QU S
L. Ont O
IR NEW YORK MASS.
Shawnee warriors had exacted revenge for Thomas
uron

New England migrants vs. Penn’s land swindle of 1737 by destroying frontier farms
Hudson Valley manor lords CONN.
RHODE
ISLAND in Pennsylvania and killing hundreds of residents.
ie
Er Scots-Irish settlers demanded the expulsion of all
L. PENNSYLVANIA
S
Connecticut settlers
I N in Wyoming Valley Indians, but Quaker leaders refused. So in 1763, a
DELAWARE NEW
A

JERSEY New Jersey group of Scots-Irish frontiersmen called the Paxton

T

land riots
LLE U N

Paxton Boys
MARYLAND
DEL.
Boys massacred twenty Conestoga Indians, an assimi-
Y

lated community that had lived alongside their colonist

AH M O

SHAWNEE
VA

Virginia speculators: VIRGINIA Revival of charter neighbors peacefully for many years. When Governor
Ohio Company claims in Virginia
DO

John Penn tried to bring the murderers to justice,

SH A N

and North Carolina

AN
EN

250 armed Scots-Irishmen advanced on Philadelphia.

I
H

AT L AN TIC Benjamin Franklin intercepted the angry mob at

C

EE
A

K OC E AN Lancaster and arranged a truce, averting a battle with

L

ERO NORTH
A

CH CAROLINA
the militia. Prosecution of the Paxton Boys failed for
P
P

North Carolina
lack of witnesses, and the episode gave their defenders
A

CATAWBA Regulators
SOUTH the opportunity to excoriate Pennsylvania’s govern-
CAROLINA Area of Settlement
CREEK Up to 1700
ment for protecting Indians while it neglected the
South Carolina Up to 1750 interests of backcountry colonists.
GEORGIA Regulators Up to 1775

0 150 300 miles

The South Carolina Regulators Violence also broke
0 150 300 kilometers
out in the backcountry of South Carolina, where land-
hungry Scottish and Anglo-American settlers clashed
MAP 4.6
repeatedly with Cherokees during the war with France.
Westward Expansion and Land Conflicts, 1750–1775
After the fighting ended in 1763, a group of landown-
Between 1750 and 1775, the mainland colonial
population more than doubled — from 1.2 million ing vigilantes known as the Regulators demanded that
to 2.5 million — triggering westward migrations and the eastern-controlled government provide western dis-
legal battles over land, which had become increasingly tricts with more courts, fairer taxation, and greater rep-
valuable. Violence broke out in eastern areas, where
tenant farmers and smallholders contested landlords’
resentation in the assembly. “We are Free-Men — British
property claims based on ancient titles; and in the Subjects — Not Born Slaves,” declared a Regulator mani-
backcountry, where migrating settlers fought with festo. Fearing slave revolts, the lowland rice planters who
Indians, rival claimants, and the officials of eastern- ran the South Carolina assembly compromised. In 1767,
dominated governments.
the assembly created western courts and reduced the
fees for legal documents; but it refused to reapportion
the legislature or lower western taxes. Like the Paxton
court decision allowed Lord Granville, the heir of an Boys in Pennsylvania, the South Carolina Regulators
original Carolina proprietor, to collect an annual tax won attention to backcountry needs but failed to wrest
on land in North Carolina; another decision awarded power from the eastern elite.
ownership of the entire northern neck of Virginia
(along the Potomac River) to Lord Fairfax. Civil Strife in North Carolina In 1766, a more rad-
The revival of these proprietary claims by manorial ical Regulator movement arose in North Carolina.
lords and English nobles testified to the rising value of When the economic recession of the early 1760s
land along the Atlantic coastal plain. It also underscored brought a sharp fall in tobacco prices, many farmers
the increasing similarities between rural societies in could not pay their debts. When creditors sued these
Europe and America. To avoid the status of European farmers for payment, judges directed sheriffs to seize
peasants, native-born yeomen and tenant families the debtors’ property. Many backcountry farmers lost
joined the stream of European migrants searching for their property or ended up in jail for resisting court
cheap land near the Appalachian Mountains. orders.
 CHAPTER 4 CHAPTER REVIEW 143

To save their farms, North Carolina’s debtors play a crucial role in determining the direction the
defied the government’s authority. Disciplined mobs maturing colonies would take.
intimidated judges, closed courts, and freed their
comrades from jail. The Regulators proposed a series
of reforms, including lower legal fees and tax pay-
ments in the “produce of the country” rather than in
SUMMARY
cash. They also demanded greater representation in In this chapter, we observed dramatic changes in Brit-
the assembly and a just revenue system that would ish North America between 1720 and 1765. An aston-
tax each person “in proportion to the profits arising ishing surge in population — from 400,000 to almost
from his estate.” All to no avail. In May 1771, Royal 2 million — was the combined result of natural increase,
Governor William Tryon mobilized British troops European migration, and the African slave trade. The
and the eastern militia, which defeated a large print revolution and the rise of the British Atlantic
Regulator force at the Alamance River. When the brought important new influences: the European
fighting ended, thirty men lay dead, and Tryon sum- Enlightenment and European Pietism transformed the
marily executed seven insurgent leaders. Not since world of ideas, while a flood of British consumer goods
Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia in 1675 and the colonial and the genteel aspirations of wealthy colonists
uprisings during the Glorious Revolution of 1688 (see reshaped the colonies’ material culture.
Chapter 2) had a colonial dispute caused so much Colonists confronted three major regional
political agitation. challenges. In New England, crowded towns and ever-
In 1771, as in 1675 and 1688, colonial conflicts smaller farms threatened the yeoman ideal of indepen-
became linked with imperial politics. In Connecticut, dent farming, prompting families to limit births, move
the Reverend Ezra Stiles defended the North Carolina to the frontier, or participate in an “exchange” econ-
Regulators. “What shall an injured & oppressed omy. In the Middle Atlantic colonies, Dutch, English,
people do,” he asked, “[when faced with] Oppression German, and Scots-Irish residents maintained their
and tyranny?” Stiles’s remarks reflected growing resis- religious and cultural identities while they competed
tance to recently imposed British policies of taxation for access to land and political power. Across the back-
and control. The American colonies still depended country, new interest in western lands triggered con-
primarily on Britain for their trade and military flicts with Indian peoples, civil unrest among whites,
defense. However, by the 1760s, the mainland settle- and, ultimately, the Great War for Empire. In the after-
ments had evolved into complex societies with the math of the fighting, Britain stood triumphant in
potential to exist independently. British policies would Europe and America.

C H A P T E R R E V I E W
M A K E I T S T I C K Go to LearningCurve to retain what you’ve read.

TERMS TO KNOW Identify and explain the significance of each term below.

Key Concepts and Events Key People

tenancy (p. 116) natural rights (p. 127) Isaac Newton (p. 127)
competency (p. 117) deism (p. 128) John Locke (p. 127)
household mode of production revival (p. 129) Benjamin Franklin (p. 128)
(p. 120) Old Lights (p. 132) Jonathan Edwards (p. 129)
squatters (p. 121) New Lights (p. 132) George Whitefield (p. 129)
redemptioner (p. 124) consumer revolution (p. 141) Tanaghrisson (p. 135)
Enlightenment (p. 126) Regulators (p. 142) William Pitt (p. 138)
Pietism (p. 126) Pontiac (p. 139)