Life in Colonial America

I

Introduction

Life in Colonial America, the combination of customs, traditions, and social practices that governed the daily lives of the citizens of the British colonies in North America that became the United States. This article provides a portrait of social and cultural life in the American colonies in the middle of the 18th century, when colonial culture was at its most developed and most dynamic. For a treatment of the political history of colonial America, see Colonial America, History of.

II

The Land and Its Peoples

To understand the lives of the colonists, it is necessary to know the surroundings in which they lived. In 1750 North America was still a new world—a world dominated less by human beings than by the natural environment. Even after a century and a half of European and African settlement (and after at least 10,000 years of Native American inhabitancy), towering forests of pine, oak, maple, elm, beech, and chestnut covered most of eastern North America. These forests were home to tens of thousands of deer and other wildlife. An intricate network of streams, rivers, and lakes crisscrossed the landscape, draining the land and providing homes for millions of beaver and freshwater fish. Even larger numbers of saltwater fish inhabited the relatively shallow waters off the northeastern coast of the continent. These fish and animals had long provided food and fur clothing for Native Americans and yielded valuable exports for the European inhabitants.

Many Europeans and Africans lived in the southeastern part of North America, raising crops on the broad coastal plain that extended inland from the ocean up to a distance of 240 km (150 mi). This fertile lowland area of the coastal plain stretched from present-day Florida northward to Delaware Bay. From this plain the terrain rose gently to the west in a rolling upland called the Piedmont Plateau, a region that in 1750 was just being settled. The Piedmont, which means “foot of the mountain,” extended for another 80 km (50 mi) to the ridges of the Appalachian Mountains, which defined the western edge of British settlement. To the north of Delaware Bay, and especially in what is now New England, the coastal plain was much narrower and much less suited to agriculture. Numerous hills and valleys filled the landscape, stretching inland from the ocean to the mountains—a distance at this point of only 80 to 160 km (50 to 100 mi).

III

A Regional Portrait

In 1750 British North America comprised the territory from the Atlantic Coast in the east to the Appalachians in the west, and from what is now Maine in the north to the border of Spanish Florida in the south. Hundreds of villages and towns and tens of thousands of farms were set in this natural landscape. These settlements were home to approximately 900,000 Europeans, 240,000 Africans, and 200,000 Native Americans. Despite their large numbers, by 1750 the inhabitants had changed the land very little. Except for the Native Americans, most of the population had arrived within the previous 50 years—in 1700 there were only 230,000 Europeans and 20,000 Africans. British North America was still a new creation, an undertaking by a diverse mixture of immigrant peoples amid a great expanse of nature.

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Gradually, distinct colonial societies began to emerge in each of the three geographical areas of British North America: New England, the mid-Atlantic region, and the South. This social diversity was not the result of conscious planning but rather of the different origins and cultures of each of these populations and of the different agricultural opportunities offered by the natural environments in which people chose to live. The distinctive economic, religious, and cultural character of the colonial regions meant that their inhabitants lived in different ways. They built different types of houses, grew different crops, worshiped in different churches, and held different values. In 1750 there was not one 'American' colonial society, but three regional social orders united by political bonds of the British Empire and the common English origins of the majority of their inhabitants.

A unique social order developed in New England, an area that included the colonies of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire. English Puritans (see Puritanism), who were members of a radical Protestant sect that followed the teachings of the Swiss theologian John Calvin, settled the region between 1620 and 1640, seeking freedom from religious persecution. A century later the descendants of these first settlers formed the overwhelming majority of the population and made New England the most culturally and religiously homogeneous of the three colonial regions. Because of its cold climate and rocky soils, New England was also the poorest region. Unlike the other regions of North America, its farms could not grow valuable export crops to ship to markets in Europe.

A very different society developed in the so-called mid-Atlantic colonies of Pennsylvania (which at that time also included Delaware), New York, and New Jersey. Immigrants from England and Wales who were members of the religious Society of Friends (more commonly known as Quakers) initially settled in Pennsylvania and parts of New Jersey, while Dutch settlers founded what would become New York and formed a majority of its population until 1700. After 1700 all of the mid-Atlantic colonies received tens of thousands of German and Scots-Irish immigrants and lesser numbers of French Protestants (Huguenots) and Irish Catholics. Thus, by 1750 many of the inhabitants of the mid-Atlantic colonies differed from one another in language and culture. Differences in ethnicity and religion—not homogeneity, as in New England—were the most striking features of the mid-Atlantic colonies.

The English settlers in the South—the colonies of Virginia, Maryland, North and South Carolina, and Georgia—came to North America looking primarily for economic gain. These immigrants took advantage of the region’s mild climate, which permitted the cultivation of many crops, and they established large plantations to produce tobacco and rice for export to markets in Europe. The wealthy planters who dominated the early settlements initially imported English indentured servants, who worked the planters’ lands for a specified period of time in return for their passage from England. After 1670 plantation owners increasingly turned to slave labor from Africa. By 1750 they had brought in so many Africans that the Southern colonies had become slave societies, sharply divided along the lines of race and class.

A

New England: A Society of Yeoman Farmers

As they settled New England, the Puritans created self-governing communities and religious congregations composed of independent landowning farmers, or yeomen, and their families. The Puritan political leadership granted large areas of land to groups of male settlers, known as the proprietors, who then divided the land among themselves. Men of higher social standing usually received larger portions, but every male received enough land to support a family. Equally important, every male had a voice in the town meeting. As the main institution of local government, the town meeting levied taxes, built roads, and elected officials to manage town affairs.

Because of Puritan beliefs that God singled out only a few specific people for salvation, the residents of New England did not automatically become part of the Congregational Church, the church the Puritans founded. Instead, membership was limited to those who could testify convincingly before members of the church that they had experienced religious conversion, or had been saved. Those who had been saved were known as “the elect,” or “Saints,” and they represented less than 40 percent of the New England population. Because of the power wielded by Saints and men of high status, the New England system of landowning and politics was not fully democratic, but it gave ordinary people more autonomy than their ancestors in England had enjoyed.

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1

Ways of Life