United States History

H

Northern Agriculture

Around the middle of the 18th century, a heavily populated and increasingly urbanized Europe lost the capacity to feed itself, providing an important market for North American farmers. The middle colonies, particularly Pennsylvania, became the breadbasket of America. After Pennsylvania farmers provided for their families from their farms and by trading with neighbors, they sent their surplus production of corn and wheat, as much as 40 percent of what they produced, on to the Atlantic market. New England farmers worked soil that was poor and rocky, but used the same system.

Economists call this system safety–first or subsistence–plus agriculture: Farmers provided for household and neighborhood needs before risking their surplus in distant and unpredictable markets. In profitable years, farmers were able to buy finished cloth, dishes and crockery, tea and coffee, and other goods that colonial trade with England provided—goods on which more and more Americans depended by 1770.

I

Religion

British North America in the 18th century was a religiously and ethnically diverse string of settlements. New England’s population was overwhelmingly English, descended from the Great Migration of the 1630s. New England had a reputation for poor land and intolerance of outsiders, and immigrants avoided the region. New Englanders continued to practice congregationalism, although by the 18th century they seldom thought of themselves as the spearhead of the Reformation. A wave of revivals known as the Great Awakening swept New England beginning in the 1720s, dividing churchgoers into New Light (evangelical Calvinists) and Old Light (more moderate) wings. An increasing minority were calling themselves Baptists.

Nearly all Europeans in these colonies were Protestants, but individual denominations were very different. There were Presbyterians, Lutherans, Baptists, Anglicans, Dutch Reformed, Mennonites, and Quakers. While the Church of England was the established church (the official, government–supported church) in the Chesapeake colonies, German and Scottish non-Anglicans were migrating south from the middle colonies, and Baptists were making their first southern converts. Although most Chesapeake slaves were American–born by the late 18th century, they practiced what they remembered of African religions, while some became Christians in 18th-century revivals. See also United States (People): Religion in the Colonies.

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V

Resistance and Revolution

A

The Wars for North America, 1689–1763

Seventeenth–century colonists fought wars with the coastal Native American peoples upon whom they had intruded. Eighteenth-century colonial wars, in contrast, usually began in Europe, and they pitted the English colonies against French and Spanish empires in North America. These empires posed a number of problems for English colonists. Spanish Florida offered refuge to runaway slaves from the southeastern colonies. The French built an interior arc of settlements from Québec to New Orleans; they also made trading agreements with Native Americans. The French trading empire impeded the expansion of English settlements, and the strength of the French and their Native American allies was a constant concern to the British and to American settlers.

The English and French fought frequently: in King William’s War (1689-1697; known in Europe as the War of the League of Augsburg), in Queen Anne’s War (1702-1713; the War of the Spanish Succession), in King George’s War (1744-1748; War of the Austrian Succession), and in the French and Indian War (the Seven Years’ War), which began in America in 1754 and ended in Europe in 1763. In all of these wars, the French had the assistance of most Native Americans of the interior.

During the course of these wars, the English gained strength in relation to their French and Spanish rivals, and in the French and Indian War, with strong help from colonial militias, they expelled the French from mainland North America. In 1763 Britain became the lone European imperial power in North America between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mississippi River. (The Spanish, allies of the French, gave up Florida but took over French claims in New Orleans and in lands west of the Mississippi as compensation.) Within 20 years the British would lose most of what they had gained.

Victory in the French and Indian War gave the British an enlarged mainland empire but also brought new problems. First, the war had been expensive: The interest alone on Britain’s debt required half the government’s revenues, and the overtaxed British people could not be asked to pay more. Second, the acquisition of French and Spanish territory gave the British new administrative tasks. They acquired not only vast tracts of land, but also the French settlers and indigenous peoples who lived there.

The difficulties became clear in early 1763, when an Ottawa chief named Pontiac became worried about losing the French allies who had helped keep British settlers out of the interior. Pontiac led an uprising of a broad Native American coalition that included Seneca, Wyandots, Delawares, Shawnee, Miami, Ottawa, and other nations. They attacked British forts and frontier settlements in Pennsylvania and Virginia. During the summer of 1763 they killed as many as 2,000 settlers, but they could not dislodge the British from their fortified strongholds at Detroit, Niagara, and other places in the interior. Settlers responded by murdering Native Americans, most of whom had done nothing. The British government realized that it needed not only more revenue but also a military presence and a colonial administrative policy to establish British authority and keep the peace in North America.

B

Break with Britain

B

1

Constitutional Understandings: Britain

British officials believed that the British government—and Parliament in particular—had the constitutional power to tax and govern the American colonies. The rulers of Parliament assumed what they called parliamentary sovereignty. Parliament, they insisted, was dominant within the British constitution. Parliament was a brake against arbitrary monarchs; Parliament alone could tax or write legislation, and Parliament could not consent to divide that authority with any other body. As Thomas Hutchinson, the royal governor of Massachusetts, put it, there could be no compromise “between the supreme authority of Parliament and the total independence of the colonies. It is impossible there should be two independent legislatures in one and the same state.”

B

2

Constitutional Understandings: America

The Americans, however, had developed a very different opinion of how they should be governed. By the 1720s all but two colonies had an elected assembly and an appointed governor. Contests between the two were common, with governors generally exercising greater power in the northern colonies and assemblies wielding more power in the south.

Governors technically had great power. Most were appointed by the king and stood for him in colonial government. Governors also had the power to make appointments, and thus to pack the government with their followers.

The assemblies, however, had the “power of the purse”: Only they could pass revenue (tax) bills. Assemblies often used that power to gain control over appointments, and sometimes to coerce the governor himself. This was particularly true during the French and Indian War, when governors often asked assemblies to approve revenue bills and requisitions to fund the fighting. Assemblies used their influence over finances to gain power in relation to governors.

Colonists tended to view their elected assemblies as defenders against the king, against Parliament, and against colonial governors, who were attempting to increase their power at the expense of popular liberty. Thus when the British Parliament asserted its right to tax and govern the colonies (something it had never done before), ideals clashed. The British elite’s idea of the power that its Parliament had gained since 1689 collided with the American elite’s idea of the sovereignty of its own parliaments. The British assumed that their Parliament legislated for the whole empire. The Americans assumed that while the parts of the empire shared British liberties and the British king, the colonies could be taxed and governed only by their own elected representatives. The British attempt to tax the colonies was certain to start a fight.

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