Life in Colonial America

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Farm Life

The overwhelming majority of New England families lived on farms. Within these farm families, and English families in other regions as well, husbands had virtually complete legal power over the property and person of their wives. At marriage English women lost their maiden names and their legal identity; in general, they could not own property, file legal suits, or participate in political life. The prescribed social role of wives was to bear and nurture healthy children and to work as helpmates to their husbands. Most women diligently carried out these duties. In the mid-18th century, New England women usually married in their early 20s and bore six to eight children, most of whom survived to adulthood. Farm women also provided nearly all of the goods used by their families—spinning yarn from wool and knitting it into sweaters and stockings, making candles and soap, and churning milk into butter and cheese.

Most New England parents tried to help their children establish farms of their own. As sons and daughters reached the age of marriage, fathers provided them with gifts of land, livestock, or farm equipment. Parents also selected the marriage partners of their children, so that their children would have hard-working spouses who would maintain or increase the family's farm property. Despite this custom of arranged marriages, parents usually allowed their children to refuse an unacceptable match.

Partly because of the abundance of trees, New England yeoman families usually lived in wooden houses. The typical house was one-and-a-half stories in height and had a strong frame (usually of large, square timbers) that was covered by wooden clapboard siding. A large stone chimney stood in the center of the house, providing cooking facilities and heat during the long winters. One side of the ground floor contained a hall, a general-purpose room where the family worked and ate. On the other side was the parlor, which contained the best furniture and the parents' bed and was used to entertain guests. The children slept in the loft above the main rooms, while the kitchen was either part of the hall or in an attached shed along the rear of the house. Because colonial families were large, there was much activity and little privacy in these small dwellings.

New England families worked on their own farms. The family and its livestock consumed most of the crops that the family farm produced; any surplus was exchanged for needed manufactured goods. The first settlers grew the traditional English crops of wheat and barley (for bread and beer), but over time they adapted their production to the new environment. After 1700 many New England farmers grew mainly corn and raised cattle and hogs. The ears of corn offered food for humans, and corn stalks and leaves furnished feed for cows, bulls, steers, and pigs. The cows, in turn, provided milk products, and steers and pigs were slaughtered and sold in the form of preserved meat.

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By the middle of the 18th century this way of life was facing a crisis. The region's population had nearly doubled each generation—from 100,000 in 1700, to 200,000 in 1725, to 350,000 by 1750—because farm families had many children and most people lived until they were over 60 years old. As colonists in long-settled areas of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island divided and then subdivided their lands, the farms increasingly became too small to support single families, threatening the New England ideal of a society of independent yeoman farmers.

Farm families responded creatively to this challenge to their traditional way of life. To provide land for the next generation, some farmers obtained land grants in undeveloped parts of Massachusetts and Connecticut or bought land from speculators in New Hampshire or in what later became Vermont. Other farmers became agricultural innovators. They planted nutritious English grasses such as red clover and timothy, which provided more forage for their livestock, and they planted potatoes, whose high yield partially offset the disadvantage of smaller farms. Finally, many of these farm families increased their productivity by exchanging goods and labor among themselves. They loaned draft animals and grazing land to one another and worked cooperatively to spin yarn, sew quilts, and shuck corn. These creative measures—migration, agricultural innovation, and economic cooperation—preserved New England's yeoman society until the 19th century.

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Town Life

By 1750 a variety of artisans, shopkeepers, and merchants provided services to the growing agricultural population. Blacksmiths, wheelwrights (wagon makers), and furniture makers set up shops in many rural villages, where they built and repaired the equipment and goods needed by farm families. Traders also established stores that stocked imported English manufactures such as cloth, iron utensils, and window glass, as well as West Indian products such as sugar and molasses. The storekeepers exchanged these imported goods for farm crops and other local products, including shingles, potash (ashes used to make glass), and barrel staves, all of which they shipped to towns and cities along the Atlantic Coast. To service this transportation system, enterprising men set up horse stables and taverns along the wagon roads.

When these local products arrived in major seaport towns such as Boston and Salem in Massachusetts, New Haven in Connecticut, and Newport and Providence in Rhode Island, merchants there exported them to the West Indies, where they exchanged them for sugar, molasses, gold coins, and bills of exchange (credit slips). They carried the West Indian products back to the New England colonial factories, where the raw sugar was refined into loaves of granulated sugar and the molasses was distilled into rum. The merchants sent the gold and credit slips to England and traded them for manufactures, which they carried back to the colonies and sold along with sugar and rum to rural farmers.

Other New England merchants exploited the rich fishing areas along the northeastern coast of North America, financing a large fishing fleet and transporting its catch of mackerel and cod to markets in southern Europe and the West Indies. Still other entrepreneurs took advantage of the abundant supplies of timber along the coasts and rivers of northern New England. They financed sawmills that provided low-cost wood for houses and shipbuilding. Hundreds of New England shipbuilders, sail makers, and blacksmiths built oceangoing ships, which they sold to British and American merchants.

As merchants grew wealthy by providing commercial services to the farm population, they eventually came to dominate the societies of the seaport cities. Unlike the yeoman farming families, these wealthy merchants imitated the upper classes in England by building large two-and-a-half-story houses designed in the popular new Georgian style. A Georgian house had a symmetrical façade, or front face, with equal numbers of windows on each side of the central door. The interior consisted of a passageway down the middle of the house with specialized rooms—library, dining room, formal parlor, and master bedroom—off to the sides. Each of these rooms served a separate purpose, unlike the multipurpose halls and parlors of yeoman houses. In a Georgian house, men primarily used certain rooms, such as the library, while women frequented others, such as the kitchen. Georgian houses also boasted separate bedrooms on the second floor that gave privacy to the parents and children.

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Religion

The Puritans who settled New England were intensely religious men and women. All of these Puritans had experienced a conversion; they had felt God’s grace and were “born again.” Consequently, they tried to make their new society into a holy commonwealth. Following a rule outlined in the Bible, Puritans in Massachusetts divided inheritances among all children, with a double portion going to the oldest son. 'Where there is no law,' the government advised local magistrates, they should rule 'as near the law of God as they can.' Moreover, these devout Christians believed that God intervened constantly in their lives, and they saw signs of God’s (or Satan’s) power in blazing stars, deformed births, and other unusual events. Always on the outlook for wizards or witches, who acted at the command of Satan, civil authorities in Massachusetts and Connecticut accused scores of people of witchcraft during the 17th century and hanged 35 alleged witches.

By the mid-18th century many members of Puritan churches had lost the religious fervor of their ancestors, and their “deadness of soul” worried their ministers. Influenced by resurgences of religious enthusiasm in Germany and Britain, New England ministers led a religious revival known as the Great Awakening. Evangelical ministers traveled through the colonial countryside and made emotional appeals for sinners to repent in order to attain salvation. In the mid-1730s the Puritan minister Jonathan Edwards began a revival in the churches in the Connecticut River valley. Then, in 1739, George Whitefield, a young English preacher, sparked a major revival throughout the British colonies. 'Hearing him preach gave me a heart wound,' confessed one Connecticut farmer, who became convinced that he had sinned and must seek the new light of God's grace.

Support for the new religious message of these evangelists reached its peak during the early 1740s. Thousands of fallen-away Christians returned to their churches, taught moral principles to their children, and vowed to reform their personal lives. The revivalists’ emphasis on “enthusiasm” divided many colonial churches. To some extent, these divisions followed existing lines of occupation and wealth. The revivalists, or New Lights, found many followers among ordinary farmers and artisans, and they supported a more open or democratic approach to religion. Conversely, many wealthy New England merchants became religious traditionalists, or Old Lights, who believed the new movement threatened established religion. In contrast to the New Lights, Old Light ministers preferred church services that were calm and restrained. Like the minister Charles Chauncy of Boston, the Old Lights condemned the 'cryings out, faintings and convulsions' produced by the emotional preaching of the New Lights, especially when these sermons were delivered by traveling evangelists who had no formal education.

The Great Awakening changed religious life throughout the colonies, but its impact in New England was especially profound. New Lights condemned tradition-minded church members as unconverted sinners and challenged the authority of their ministers. In a much-read pamphlet of 1740, The Dangers of an Unconverted Ministry, Presbyterian clergyman and New Light Gilbert Tennent argued that any person who had received the saving grace of God was as qualified to preach as the most-educated minister. Dozens of ordinary men and women heeded Tennent's words, roaming the countryside and preaching to anyone who would listen.

In response, Old Lights in Connecticut won the passage of a law restricting the activities of traveling preachers, and tradition-minded ministers spoke out strongly against enthusiasm. Soon, many churches split in two: New Lights left established churches and founded new churches or joined existing Baptist congregations which, with their emphasis on equality and community and their focus on individual spiritual rebirth, appealed to the revivalists. Equally significant, they refused to pay taxes to support the Congregational Church, which was the official church in Connecticut and Massachusetts. Instead, they argued in favor of the voluntary support of religion and a greater separation between church and state.

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Education and Culture

In New England, unlike other colonial regions, elementary education was widespread. The first Puritan settlers believed that everyone should be able to study the Bible, so they taught their children to read at an early age. They also required every town to pay for a primary school. As a result of this law, most boys in New England had some formal schooling, and about ten percent enjoyed secondary education in publicly financed grammar schools in the larger towns. Most boys learned their skills by helping their fathers at farm tasks or as apprentices to artisans. Only a few girls attended local primary schools, but many more received some education at home or in so-called dame schools, where women taught basic writing and reading skills in their homes. In 1750 nearly 90 percent of New England women (and virtually all men) could read and write, giving this region a higher literacy rate than any other area in Europe or America. Many churches in New England also established colleges to train ministers. For example, Puritans founded both Harvard College (now Harvard University) in Massachusetts in 1636 and Yale College (now Yale University) in Connecticut in 1701. Later, Baptists set up the Rhode Island College (now Brown University) in 1764 and a Congregationalist minister received a royal charter to establish Dartmouth College in New Hampshire in 1769. However, only a few people—no women and a very small percentage of men—attended college.

New England produced more literary works—mostly histories, sermons, and personal journals—than the rest of the colonies combined. Many of these writings were either created by ministers or inspired by religion. For example, the Boston minister Cotton Mather published Magnalia Christi Americana (The Great Works of Christ in America, 1702), an epic account of the Puritans’ experience in America, while the great revivalist Jonathan Edwards wrote an impressive philosophical work, A Careful and Strict Enquiry Into…Notions of…Freedom of Will…(1754). Most music was also religious in nature, primarily taking the form of the singing of Psalms. Because of New England's strong religious character, colonies banned those artistic endeavors that lacked religious content or were too “worldly” in their concerns, such as drama and other forms of theatrical entertainment. See also American Literature: Poetry; American Literature: Prose.

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The Mid-Atlantic Region: Cultural Diversity

By 1750 the combined population of the mid-Atlantic colonies of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania reached nearly 300,000, a significant gain from the 1720 population of only 120,000. Unlike New England, which grew overwhelmingly from natural increase, the mid-Atlantic region expanded primarily from immigration. By 1750 about 60,000 Scots-Irish and 50,000 Germans had arrived in British North America, and most of them settled in small farming communities in the mid-Atlantic region. This influx of non-English immigrants made these colonies the most culturally and religiously diverse of all the settlements.

William Penn, who founded the colony of Pennsylvania in 1682, attracted immigrants from many countries with his policies of religious liberty and freehold ownership, which meant that farmers owned their land free and clear from leases and dues to landlords. The great majority of the settlers who came to Pennsylvania and New Jersey before 1700 were English or Welsh Quakers, and they remained the dominant social and political group until the 1750s.

When the English conquered the Dutch possession of New Netherland in 1664 and renamed it New York, the population of the colony was small and, because of the presence of English and Swedish settlers and African slaves, already culturally diverse. Until the 1720s the population of New York grew slowly. Much of the colony’s land was divided into huge estates—owned by Dutch and English landlords—along the Hudson River. Few immigrants wanted to work as tenant farmers on these estates when they could have their own land somewhere else.

The first major influx of new immigrants to the mid-Atlantic region came from Ireland and consisted primarily of Scots-Irish Presbyterians and smaller numbers of Irish Catholics. The Scots-Irish were descendants of Presbyterian Scots who had settled on lands in Ireland that had been seized from Irish Catholics by England's Protestant rulers during the 1600s (see Ulster Plantation). The English government used the Scots-Irish as a way of controlling the power of Ireland’s Catholic population. However, the English government also discriminated against the Scots-Irish, excluding them from public office and taxing their chief export, textiles. When droughts struck Ireland in the 1720s, thousands of Scots-Irish fled to the American colonies. Most arrived in Philadelphia and then migrated to central Pennsylvania or southward down the Shenandoah Valley into the backcountry of Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas.

Beginning in 1720 a steady stream of German immigrants, escaping from religious conflicts and declining economic opportunities in southwestern Germany and Switzerland, also flowed into the mid-Atlantic region. This immigration swelled to a flood between 1749 and 1756, when 37,000 people arrived in Philadelphia. Some of these Germans came as indentured servants, called redemptioners because they had to work for usually three or four years to redeem the cost of their passage from Europe. Because German immigrants often set up their own communities, both in Pennsylvania and in the Southern backcountry, and encouraged marriage within those communities, the German language remained dominant in many areas. Most of the immigrants also retained other German customs, such as the use of stoves rather than fireplaces for cooking and heating.

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