Life in Colonial America

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Ways of Life

The architecture of the mid-Atlantic region reflected the diversity of its peoples. Many buildings in New York City and Albany, New York, were built in the Dutch style, with brick exteriors and high gables at each end. Many Dutch churches were distinctively designed in the shape of an octagon. In Pennsylvania, German and Welsh settlers ignored the ample supplies of timber and, following the custom of their homelands, used cut stone to build their houses and barns. As an example, more than 80 percent of the buildings in Germantown, Pennsylvania, were made of stone. The Scots-Irish, on the other hand, took advantage of the American forests to fell large trees and construct sturdy log cabins.

Ethnic customs also influenced furniture styles. Rural Quakers preferred simple designs in tables, chairs, and chests and shunned elaborate decorations; however, some urban Quakers favored more intricate patterns. The city of Philadelphia emerged as a center of furniture making because of the wealth of its Quaker and Anglican merchants. Philadelphia cabinetmakers crafted elegant desks and highboys, graceful cabinets with many drawers. German artisans in Pennsylvania preserved the folk traditions of their native land, decorating chests with intricate carved designs and painted scenes of flowers and birds. Similarly, German potters turned out an array of ceramic jugs, pots, and plates with traditional shapes and decorations.

Ethnic differences appeared again with respect to women's lives. Among English Puritan settlers in New England, few wives worked alongside their husbands in the fields. In German communities in Pennsylvania, however, a visitor noted that women were 'always in the fields, meadows, stables, etc. and do not dislike any work whatsoever.' In addition, German and Dutch settlers followed the laws and customs of their homelands, which gave wives more control over property than was permitted by English common law. Unlike English colonial women, German and Dutch colonial wives owned their clothes and other personal goods and could write wills disposing of the property they brought to the marriage.

Finally, ethnicity played some role in determining agricultural practice. For example, German farmers generally preferred using oxen rather than horses to pull their plows, and more than other ethnic groups, the Scots-Irish embraced a farming economy based on corn and hogs. But these groups also adapted their traditions to the new environment. In Ireland, the Scots-Irish had engaged primarily in intensive farming, aggressively working small pieces of land to get the largest possible yield from their crops of wheat and potatoes. In the American colonies they turned to mixed farming, raising crops of corn for human consumption and as food for hogs and other farm animals; this type of production was well suited to the hilly, upland regions where many of them settled. In addition, improvement-minded farmers of all ethnic backgrounds used new agricultural practices to raise their output. During the 1750s these innovators discarded the traditional hand sickles and scythes used to harvest hay, wheat, and barley; instead, they used the cradle scythe, a tool with wooden fingers that arranged the stalks of grain for easy collection and binding. This implement doubled or tripled the amount a worker could cut in a day. Farmers also increased their commercial production by fertilizing their fields with dung and lime and by rotating their crops to maintain the fertility of the soil.

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Before 1720 colonists in the mid-Atlantic region generally engaged in small-scale farming and paid for imported manufactures by shipping corn and flour to the West Indies. In New York a flourishing fur pelt export trade to Europe provided additional wealth. After 1720 an international demand for wheat stimulated mid-Atlantic agriculture. A population explosion in Europe drove up wheat prices (a bushel of wheat cost twice as much in 1770 as it had in 1720), prompting farmers to increase their output. Farmers also expanded their production of flaxseed, which was in great demand in the Irish linen industry. In addition, farmers boosted their production of corn, which they sold in the West Indies. These booming export markets ushered in an era of agricultural prosperity, especially for established farmers.

Some newly arrived immigrants purchased farms and shared in the export boom, but many German redemptioners and poor Scots-Irish immigrants had to work as agricultural wage laborers. Merchants and artisans also employed these propertyless workers in a so-called putting-out or domestic system for the manufacture of cloth and other goods. In this type of production, the merchants bought wool and flax from farmers and hired new arrivals, many of whom had been textile workers in Ireland and Germany, to work at home spinning these materials into yarn and weaving cloth. As textile production and farm output increased, export-minded farmers and enterprise-minded merchants grew wealthy, while many small farmers and artisans earned only enough for subsistence. Consequently, by 1750 mid-Atlantic society was divided by wealth as well as by ethnicity.

Social distinctions were most apparent in the seaport cities, which expanded as a result of the wheat trade. By 1750 Philadelphia had 25,000 residents, New York had 15,000, and the new port of Baltimore (also a wheat-shipping center) had nearly 7,000 inhabitants. A small group of merchants dominated the societies of these seaports: For example, about 40 merchants controlled over half of Philadelphia's trade. Like their counterparts in New England, some wealthy Philadelphia and New York merchants marked their achievements by building elaborate Georgian-style mansions.

Shopkeepers and artisans—shipwrights, butchers, coopers (barrelmakers), seamstresses, shoemakers, bakers, carpenters, masons, and many other specialized producers—constituted the middle ranks of seaport society. Wives and husbands often worked as a team and passed on their craft to their children. Most of these artisans and traders earned enough income to maintain a modest but dignified existence.

Laboring men and women stood at the bottom of urban society. They worked on the docks, unloading manufactured goods from inbound vessels and stocking outbound ships with barrels of wheat, corn, and flaxseed. Many of these workers were African Americans; some were free, but others were still enslaved under the system of slave labor that existed in the colonies at the time. In 1750 blacks comprised more than 10 percent of the population of Philadelphia and New York. Hundreds of seamen, some of them African American as well, also lived in the port cities and sought work as sailors on merchant vessels.

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Religion

Like the Puritans who settled New England, the Quakers were a radical sect of English Protestants. Unlike the Puritans, who believed that only a few specific men and women were predestined to achieve salvation, Quakers believed that all people had the potential to hear the voice of God in their souls (what they called the 'inner light”) and to be saved. Quakers also believed that women as well as men should be active in religious life, and many Quaker women assumed influential roles as elders and leaders.

Quakers had a distinct set of moral ethics. To emphasize that all people were equal in God's eyes, they wore plain clothes and refused to remove their hats to wealthier or more powerful individuals. As early as 1688 some Quakers expanded their belief in equality to include African Americans, and during the 1750s, in response to the urgings of Quaker evangelist John Woolman, some Pennsylvania Quakers began to free their slaves. The Quakers were also pacifists; as a result, until the 1750s Pennsylvania avoided warfare with the Native Americans.

The other major Protestant religious groups in the mid-Atlantic—Scots-Irish Presbyterians, German Lutherans, German Reformed, and Dutch Reformed—were basically similar. They all had a well-educated clergy and expected lay members to have detailed knowledge of the Bible. The Dutch Reformed Church was the most authoritarian, with church leaders in Holland exerting control over congregations in America; the Presbyterians were the most democratic, providing each congregation with representation in the synod (assembly), which decided church doctrine and practice.

Revivalist beliefs from Germany inspired ministers such as Theodore Frelinghuysen, William Tennent, and Gilbert Tennent, who led revivals among German and Scots-Irish immigrants in the 1730s. In addition, members of a number of radical Protestant sects in Germany, such as the Mennonites and the Moravian Church, settled in the mid-Atlantic region.

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Education and Culture

Education and culture in the mid-Atlantic colonies were heavily influenced by the Age of Enlightenment, an intellectual movement that had its roots in Europe in the 17th century and emphasized the power of human reason to understand and change the world. The English philosopher John Locke was a major contributor to the political thought of the Enlightenment. Locke argued that the supreme authority of the state was not given by God to kings and queens, but stemmed from the social contracts made among ordinary individuals to preserve their “natural” rights to life, liberty, and property.

Philadelphia became the center of the Enlightenment in America partly because of the presence of Benjamin Franklin, who championed many Enlightenment ideas. Franklin popularized the Enlightenment in annual editions of Poor Richard's Almanack, a collection of practical and humorous information first published in 1732. Thousands of people read the book. In 1743 Franklin was among the founders of the American Philosophical Society of Philadelphia, which sought to promote useful knowledge in the sciences and humanities through scholarly research and community service.

Franklin’s Enlightenment ideals were well received in Philadelphia because the city was home to a merchant class that was both well educated and wealthy. Quaker and Anglican merchants and their wives read Enlightenment tracts that discussed social reforms, and they used their financial resources to put them into practice. They built a hospital to care for the sick, poor, and the insane. It was chartered in 1751 and later was called Pennsylvania Hospital. In 1769 they built a Bettering House, which sheltered the aged and offered jobs to the poor. The city's elite also subsidized the first American medical school in 1765 and created a circulating library filled with Enlightenment literature. Although these ideas appealed to educated men and women in other seaport cities, only in Philadelphia did Enlightenment principles find a significant public expression in the establishment of institutions dedicated to its cause.

Before the Enlightenment, most American intellectuals were ministers. By the 1750s a non-religious culture had developed in Philadelphia and other colonial cities, stimulated in part by easy access to European books and magazines and the appearance of locally published newspapers. Men and women from the families of merchants and lawyers were prominent participants in this new culture, but many skilled artisans also became familiar with the scientific discoveries and radical political philosophies of Enlightenment thinkers.

Enlightenment culture, in combination with merchant wealth, gave a major boost to the production of high art as opposed to popular or folk art. Serious artistic work had previously found little support in the colonies. Merchants began to hire skilled artisans to decorate their houses with elaborate plaster ceilings. Their wives ordered fine furniture and expensive silverware. To dignify their newfound status, merchants commissioned artists to paint their portraits. This patronage subsidized the early careers of the first important American painters, Benjamin West and John Singleton Copley, both born in 1738. Although these two artists were born and did their early work in America, they only attained real fame after moving to London, a city that had a much richer artistic culture than anyplace in the American colonies.

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The South: Slavery and Aristocracy

British culture and values, especially those of the landowning aristocracy and gentry, were greatly prized by wealthy slave-owning planters in Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina. By 1720 the leading families in those colonies stood at the top of a European-like social hierarchy. They presided over large estates that were worked by enslaved African American laborers. Of the 650,000 inhabitants of the Southern colonies in 1750, about 250,000 (or nearly 40 percent) were slaves. The planters used their wealth and social status to dominate the white yeoman and tenant farmers, who formed the great majority of the white population. To control the colonial legislatures, the planters solicited the votes of yeoman farmers at election time by treating them to rum and gifts and promising to lower their taxes.

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Ways of Life

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Yeomen and Tenants

In Virginia and Maryland, most yeoman and tenant farm families grew tobacco for export to Europe. Each year a typical family produced about 800 kg (1,800 lbs) of good-quality tobacco and used about ten percent of it to pay taxes and another 40 to 50 percent to buy imported cloth and shoes. With the remainder of the tobacco the family paid the rent (if they were tenants) and bought tools and various food items such as salt, sugar, and tea. Until tobacco prices rose in the 1760s, many yeomen barely scraped by and most tenants could not save enough money to buy land of their own. In South Carolina most yeoman farm families lived a considerable distance inland from the rice-growing plantations nearer the coast. These farmers grew a variety of crops, which they exchanged with one another and sold locally.

Most Southern yeomen lived in humble, one-story frame dwellings sided with unpainted clapboard and roofed with wooden shingles. There were often two rooms on the ground floor and usually the windows had no glass, only wooden shutters. At one or both gable ends of the house stood a chimney, which was usually made of wood and coated on the inside with clay to make it fire-resistant. Yeoman families often planted apple orchards on hilly ground and used the apples to make cider. They protected their planted fields of tobacco or corn from wandering livestock with split-rail fences. The cattle, hogs, and horses foraged for their own food in the surrounding woods.

By the 1750s yeoman farmers in Virginia and North Carolina were setting up new tobacco plantations in the Piedmont Plateau, a region of rolling hills at the foot of the Appalachian Mountains. Scottish merchants financed these settlements in order to increase the production of tobacco for export to new markets in central Europe. These merchants granted credit to farmers for the purchase of land, slaves, and equipment and took their tobacco crops in payment. As a result of this expansion into the Piedmont, tobacco exports reached 34 million kg (75 million lb) per year by 1765, up from 24 million kg (52 million lb) in 1740. Planters in Virginia and Maryland also increased their exports by growing wheat as well as tobacco, while planters in South Carolina began to cultivate indigo, a dark blue dyestuff that was in great demand in British textile factories.

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