United States History

C

The Restoration Colonies

By 1640 England had founded 6 of the 13 colonies that would become the original United States. In 1660, after the end of Puritan rule, Charles II was crowned king of England, an event known as the Restoration. Charles founded or took over six more colonies: New York (taken from the Dutch in 1664), New Jersey, Pennsylvania (including what became Delaware), and North and South Carolina. All were proprietary colonies—huge land grants to individuals or small groups who had been loyal to the king during the civil war.

These colonies shared other similarities as well. None of them was well–funded; they could ill afford to import colonists from overseas. Thus they tried to attract settlers from other colonies as much as from the Old World. These colonies made it easy to own land, and they tended to grant religious toleration to all Christians. The result (even though Pennsylvania began as a Quaker colony under the wealthy proprietor William Penn) was a more ethnically mixed and religiously pluralistic European population than had come to New England or to the Chesapeake. These new colonies were populated not only by the English, but also by the Dutch and eventually by Scots, Scots–Irish, and Germans. Their populations included Quakers and other religious dissenters.

D

Settlers and Native Americans

The French and Spanish came to the New World to trade with the indigenous peoples, to convert them to Christianity, and sometimes to turn them into a labor force for mining and agriculture. In contrast, the English settlers wanted farmland. Thus they posed a far greater threat to the Native Americans. Wars were the result. In New England a Wampanoag chief named Metacomet (the English called him King Philip) became worried about English intrusion on his land and ordered attacks on the settlements in 1675. For the next year Metacomet and his allies destroyed 12 of 90 Puritan towns and attacked 40 others, capturing or killing one in ten adult male English settlers. The Puritans counterattacked in the summer of 1676. They killed Metacomet, sold his wife and chief supporters into slavery in the West Indies, and scattered his coalition. With that, the power of coastal Native Americans in New England was broken.

In the same years (1675 to 1676) in Virginia, land–hungry settlers led by a planter named Nathaniel Bacon picked a fight with the Susquehannock people. The settlers’ goal was simply to end Native American occupation of lands that whites wanted. When Governor William Berkeley objected, the rebellious settlers forced the House of Burgesses to back their war (see Bacon’s Rebellion). Later, they marched on Jamestown and burned the colonial capital. Shortly after that, Bacon died of disease, and his rebellion sputtered out. But a new treaty signed with the Native Americans in 1677 made much of their land available to white settlers.

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E

The English and their Empire

The English had colonies before they had a colonial policy or an empire. The English government had little interest in directly governing its colonies. The government was, however, mercantilist: It wanted colonial economic activity to serve England. The Navigation Act of 1651 stipulated that imports into British harbors and colonies could be carried only in British ships or those of the producing country. A second Navigation Act in 1660 decreed that colonial trade could be carried only in English ships and that crucial commodities such as tobacco and sugar could be sent only to England or another English colony. Further Navigation Acts in 1663 and 1696 regulated the shipment of goods into the colonies and strengthened the customs service. For the most part, the Navigation Acts succeeded in making colonial trade serve England. They also made the colonists accustomed to and dependent upon imported English goods. But the acts did not amount to a colonial administration. Private companies, wealthy proprietors, and the settlers themselves did what they wanted without official English interference.

King James II tried to change that. In 1684 he revoked the charter of the Massachusetts Bay Company. Then in 1686 he created the Dominion of New England from the colonies of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Plymouth, and Connecticut (all colonies that had been derived from the original Massachusetts Bay colony), along with New York and New Jersey. The king sent Sir Edmund Andros to be royal governor of this huge area. However, the king had problems at home. He was a Catholic, and he threatened to leave the throne in the hands of his Catholic son. In 1688 England’s ruling elites deposed James II and replaced him with his daughter Mary and her husband, a militant Dutch Protestant, William of Orange. As part of the agreement that made him king, William issued the English Bill of Rights that ended absolutist royal government in England. The ascension of William and Mary is known in English history as the Glorious Revolution.

American colonists staged smaller versions of the Glorious Revolution. Massachusetts and New York revolted against the Dominion of New England. At the same time, the Protestant majority in Maryland revolted against Charles Calvert, 3rd Baron Baltimore, and his Catholic elite. William could have punished all these rebels and re–established the Dominion of New England. Instead, he reorganized Massachusetts, New York, and Maryland as royal colonies with elected legislative assemblies and royally appointed governors. By 1720 the crown had transformed all the mainland colonies along these lines except for Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware. The Glorious Revolution ended absolutism in England, and it ensured that government in the mainland colonies would be both royal and representative.

F

Colonial Society

The colonies over which the English were beginning to exercise control were growing rapidly. In 1700 approximately 250,000 Europeans and Africans were living in what would become the United States. In 1775 there were approximately 2.5 million. Much of the increase was due to immigration: the forced migration of enslaved Africans, and the willing migration of English, Scots-Irish, and Germans. See also United States (People): European and African Immigration in the Colonies.

The middle colonies were much more diverse than the northern colonies. The English majority contended with a variety of European settlers, with a large Native American presence on the western edges, and with a significant minority of African slaves. In Maryland and Virginia, the early English settlers had been joined, particularly in the western counties, by Scots, Scots–Irish, and Germans. In the eastern counties, African slaves—many of them natives of Africa—often outnumbered whites.

South Carolina and Georgia had white populations as diverse as those in the Chesapeake, and their slave populations were African–born and ethnically diverse. One historian has noted that a slave would have met more different kinds of Africans in one day in South Carolina rice fields than in a lifetime in Africa.

By far the greatest source of population growth, however, was a phenomenal birth rate and a relatively low death rate. Americans in the 18th century had many children, who in turn survived to have children of their own. American population growth in these years may have been unprecedented in human history. See also United States (People): Birthrates in Native America and Colonial America.

The household was the central institution of colonial society. In Puritan society in particular, families were the cornerstone of godly government. As one historian put it, Puritans experienced authority as a hierarchy of strong fathers—beginning with God, descending down through government officials and ministers, and ending with the fathers of families. These families were patriarchal: Fathers ruled households, made family decisions, organized household labor, and were the representatives of God’s authority within the family. Fathers passed that authority on to their sons. Puritan magistrates inspected families to ensure that they were orderly, and it was a capital crime (at least in the law books) to commit adultery or to strike one’s father.

Households in other 18th–century colonies may have been less godly, but they were almost equally dominated by fathers, and most white men had the opportunity to become patriarchs. Land was relatively abundant, and Americans seldom practiced primogeniture and entail, which gave oldest sons their fathers’ full estates and prevented men from dividing their land. Fathers tended to supply all of their sons with land (daughters received personal property as a dowry). Thus most American white men eventually owned their own land and headed their own households.

As populations grew and as colonial economies developed, however, that independence based on property ownership was endangered. Good farmland in the south came to be dominated by a class of planters, while growing numbers of poor whites became tenants. The pressure of a growing population on the supply of farmland made tenancy even more common in New Jersey and Pennsylvania (research puts the proportion at about 25 percent by mid-century), while in New England more and more fathers found themselves unable to provide for their sons. On the eve of the American Revolution (1775-1783), American white men prided themselves on a widespread liberty that was based on economic independence. Meanwhile, the land ownership that upheld that independence was being undermined.

G

18th-Century Slavery

In the first half of the 18th century, the mainland colonies grew dramatically but in very different ways. The Chesapeake and the Carolinas grew plantation staples for world markets—tobacco in the Chesapeake and North Carolina, rice and indigo in the coastal regions of South Carolina and Georgia—and they were committed to African slave labor. Fully 70 percent of South Carolina’s population was black; nearly all Africans were imported directly to the colony in the 18th century. The numbers were so huge and the malarial wetlands they worked on were so unhealthy that masters encouraged slaves to organize their own labor and to work unsupervised. Because so many slaves lived and worked relatively unsupervised in this area, African cultures—language, handicrafts, religious experience and belief, and more—survived most fully among American slaves in South Carolina. Rice planters of South Carolina permitted this cultural independence because it was easier and because the slaves made them lots of money. South Carolina’s lowland planters were the wealthiest group in the mainland colonies.

Further north, the tobacco colonies of Virginia and Maryland were equally committed to slave labor, but slaves led somewhat different lives here than in the deep South. The African population in these colonies began to replace itself through reproduction as early as 1720 (compared with 1770 in South Carolina). Still, Chesapeake planters continued to import new slaves from Africa; about 70,000 went to Virginia in the 18th century and about 25,000 to Maryland. Slaves in these colonies tended to live and work in smaller, more closely supervised groups than slaves farther south, and their cultural memory of Africa, although often strong, was less pervasive than that of Carolina slaves. In addition, white Virginians and Marylanders were turning to wheat as a secondary crop, a development that required mills and towns, and thus slave labor in construction, road building, and some of the skilled crafts.