Life in Colonial America

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Planters

Before 1720 many leading planters were boisterous and poorly educated men who enjoyed the pastimes of common folk. They hunted on foot for deer, got drunk, and gambled on horse races and cockfights. The next generation of planters adopted more refined manners and modeled themselves after the British landed elite. Beginning in the 1720s they built large mansions in the Georgian style and 'rode to the hounds,' donning bright red attire and hunting deer on horseback.

Wealthy women in the Southern colonies shared in the imported culture. They read British magazines, wore clothes of fashionable British design, and imitated British customs such as serving an elaborate afternoon tea.

After women married, they supervised the household slaves and tried to create a refined culture by putting on elaborate dinners and festive balls. These efforts were most successful in South Carolina, where wealthy rice planters maintained townhouses in the busy port city of Charleston. There were also active social seasons in smaller towns like Annapolis, Maryland, and in the tobacco plantations along the James River in Virginia.

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Enslaved Africans

The enslaved Africans who worked the indigo, tobacco, and rice fields in the Southern colonies came from western and central Africa, a vast region that stretches for 4,800 km (3,000 mi) from present-day Senegal to Angola. Slavery had existed in Africa for many centuries, but there most slaves retained some rights and their children were often free.

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Slavery in the American colonies was more oppressive for it was passed on from generation to generation, and slaves had no legal rights. In 1700 there were about 9,600 slaves in the Chesapeake region and a few hundred in the Carolinas. Over the next five decades, about 170,000 more Africans arrived. By 1750 there were more than 250,000 slaves in British North America, and in South Carolina their numbers had jumped to 60 percent of the total population. Most South Carolina slaves had been born in Africa, but half of the slaves in Virginia and Maryland were born in the American colonies.

Slaves in the Chesapeake region expanded their numbers through natural increases in birth rate, while those in South Carolina did not. This difference was primarily because the Chesapeake slaves lived and worked under better conditions. Tobacco was a less demanding crop to grow than rice. Slaves in the Chesapeake area planted tobacco seedlings in the spring, weeded the crop during the summer, and picked and cured the leaves in the fall and winter. In South Carolina, slaves on rice plantations followed a similar seasonal routine, but workdays and living conditions were much harder. Their homes were in swampy lowlands where they regularly endured epidemics of mosquito-borne diseases. Moreover, slaves on rice plantations had to move tons of dirt to construct rice fields and irrigation systems, and many died from overwork. Finally, because tobacco was a less profitable crop than rice, Chesapeake planters lacked the money to buy new African laborers and so encouraged their slaves to live in families and bear offspring.

At first, enslaved Africans in the colonies saw themselves as members of a specific people—Mandinka, Mende, Igbo, Kongo—and tried to associate with slaves who shared their language and culture. Gradually slaves in South Carolina achieved a broader identity, creating a language called Gullah—which merged elements of several West African languages with elements of English—that most slaves could understand. In the Chesapeake region, the majority of slaves learned English, and as a result, they could converse with one another. As these slaves formed families and had children, they created an African American culture by passing on African traditions and beliefs to the next generation. This heritage appeared in African-inspired wood carvings, the use of African drums and musical instruments, and the persistence of traditional religious beliefs.

The restricted nature of slaves’ lives limited their creativity. Masters insisted on a rigorous routine of work and punished those who disobeyed or ran away with whipping and, in some cases, with the amputation of fingers and toes. Slaveowner violence was particularly evident in the South Carolina lowlands, where slaves greatly outnumbered whites. Some Africans resisted slavery by fleeing to the frontier, where they sometimes intermarried with Native American peoples. A number of African Americans who were fluent in English escaped to the towns of the Chesapeake or mid-Atlantic regions and passed as free blacks. The great majority of African workers remained on plantations and bargained with their owners for various privileges or resisted enslavement by working slowly or stealing.

A few of these plantation slaves attacked their owners or plotted rebellion. In 1739, near the Stono River in South Carolina, 75 Africans, including some Portuguese-speaking Christians from the African kingdom of Kongo (see Democratic Republic of the Congo: Kongo Kingdom), killed their owners and stole guns. They then marched toward Spanish Florida, where the governor had promised freedom to escaped slaves. But South Carolina planters put down the rebellion and tightened plantation discipline. Until the American Revolution (1775-1783), most white colonists did not question the morality of slavery or other forms of personal bondage, such as indentured servitude.

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Backcountry Life

By 1750, the Southern backcountry, the area just to the east of the Appalachian Mountains, was peopled by many different European ethnic groups. As early as the 1720s English and Scots-Irish farmers in Pennsylvania had begun to move into western Maryland, down the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, and into the Piedmont regions of the Carolinas and Georgia. They built a better transportation route through the region that became known as the Great Philadelphia Wagon Road. Following their custom in Ireland, the Scots-Irish set up towns that were arranged around an elongated central square, known as the Diamond, where the courthouse and market were located.

By the mid-18th century, Scottish immigrants had arrived in the area as well. Tobacco merchants and artisans from the Lowlands region of Scotland set up stores along the wagon road and the navigable rivers of the region. After 1750 they were joined by shiploads of impoverished farmers from the economically less-advanced Highlands region of northern Scotland. These immigrants came directly from their home country and set up communities in the Cape Fear River valley in North Carolina, the Altamaha River valley in Georgia, and throughout the backcountry. Most of the Highland Scots spoke Gaelic, an early Celtic language (see Celtic Languages: Scottish Gaelic), and they often immigrated and settled in close-knit groups led by ministers and tacksmen, the influential leaseholders for whom they had worked as tenants in Scotland.

This combination of peoples formed a dangerous mix, especially because of the lack of established political institutions to enforce law and order in the backcountry. Different religious groups distrusted one another, and many of their members were armed and organized. A vigilante movement of citizen volunteers who called themselves Regulators tried to restore order and protect the interests of established communities. The Regulators attacked outlaw bands and drove out squatters, who farmed land they did not own, as well as propertyless families who were suspected of stealing livestock.

The Regulators also demanded that the South Carolina government initiate certain political reforms: fairer taxes, lower court fees, and greater representation in the assembly, where the backcountry residents were not represented in proportion to their numbers. The assembly, which was dominated by wealthy rice planters from the coastal region, refused these requests and threw its support to the Moderation, a rival vigilance movement. The breakdown of social authority was so severe that in March 1769 about 600 armed Moderators faced an equal number of armed Regulators near the Saluda River and nearly came to blows. The assembly feared violence in the West and the possibility of slave revolts along the coast, so it agreed to some of the Regulators' demands. However, members refused to reapportion the legislature to give greater representation to backcountry districts and their German and Scots-Irish residents.

In the mid-1760s a new Regulator movement appeared in the backcountry of North Carolina, sparked by falling tobacco prices and a rising number of legal suits for debt. Merchants, who were mostly Lowland Scots, sued bankrupt farmers, many of whom were of German and Scots-Irish descent, asking the courts to seize their property and sell it. To protect their farms, the debtors formed a Regulator movement that closed down the courts. Most Regulators were aspiring property owners, not social revolutionaries; they simply wanted more time to pay their debts. Like the Scots-Irish and Germans in South Carolina, they also wanted the Western areas to have greater representation in the colonial assembly.

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Religion

The Church of England, or Anglican Church, was the legally established religion throughout the Southern colonies. Because Anglicanism was the official state religion, its ministers were paid from public taxes. All residents were required to be members of the Church of England, except in Maryland, which had a significant Catholic population and a legal tradition of toleration. Leading planters controlled most congregations and used their power on the local vestries (boards of elected lay leaders) to control church finances and appoint ministers. Anglican ministers paid the most attention to families of the gentry, who represented a very small percentage of the population, and to yeoman farmers. These ministers largely neglected the spiritual needs of white tenant farmers and of enslaved African Americans, who comprised the majority of the population in South Carolina and over a third of it in the Chesapeake region.

The Great Awakening came to Virginia in the mid-1740s. At that time, Samuel Morris, a bricklayer dissatisfied with the policies of the established Church of England, broke away from the church. Morris and his followers invited New Light Presbyterian ministers to preach to them. As the revival spread, the governor condemned the New Lights as Scots-Irish intruders, and Anglican justices of the peace prohibited Presbyterian meetings. Leading planters feared that New Light doctrines of equality would undermine their authority and their ability to collect religious taxes to support the established church. Their ban on Presbyterian services kept most Virginians within the Church of England.

Beginning in the late 1750s, evangelical Baptists, who believed in individual spiritual rebirth and strict faith in Biblical teachings, began a more successful revival in Virginia and other parts of the South. In Europe and the colonies Baptists used emotional services and rituals to win converts among the poor. For example, they baptized adults by immersing them completely in a lake or river, an emotional rite that represented cleansing and rebirth. Thousands of mostly poor yeomen and tenant farmers in Virginia joined Baptist congregations, attracted by their emphasis on equality and community. Baptist preachers welcomed slaves to their congregations, marking the first major attempt to convert African Americans to Protestant Christianity.

Leading planters again resorted to violence and disrupted Baptist meetings by force. Nonetheless, over the next two decades nearly 20 percent of the white population of Virginia joined Baptist congregations. Hundreds of African Americans also became Baptists, thereby diminishing religious differences between the races and setting the stage for the emergence of African American Christian churches. Despite the success of the Baptist revival, the Anglican planter-elite remained in firm control of the society in Virginia and South Carolina. They exercised direct command over their dependents—wives, children, tenants, and slaves—and political authority over yeoman families.

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Education and Culture

Education in the South was less widespread than in New England and was primarily reserved for the rich. Often wealthy planters would send their sons to London to study law and to acquire the polish of gentlemen. These planters would hire British tutors to educate their daughters in manners and acquaint them with polite literature. In addition, many of the leading tobacco planters and landlords in Maryland, such as Charles Carroll of Carrollton, were Roman Catholics, and a few of them sent their sons to Jesuit schools in France. Although education for the sons and daughters of yeoman and tenant farmers was less common, German settlers in the backcountry were particularly active in establishing an educational system for their children; by the 1750s German Lutheran congregations had built 40 schools in the Southern backcountry.