American History: A Survey
Chapter 3: Society and Culture in Provincial America
APUSH: MR. ROLOFSON
Bacon’s Rebellion is most associated with which early
colony?
A. Virginia
B. Maryland
C. Massachusetts
D. Pennsylvania
APUSH: MR. ROLOFSON
The Colonies as Regions
(differences in resources, immigrant groups, and economic systems, etc)
 Northern colonies (New England): Massachusetts,
Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, (Maine was
part of Massachusetts, Vermont belonged to New York at
the time).
 Middle colonies: New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey
 Chesapeake colonies: Virginia, (Maryland and Delaware
shared traits of both the Middle and Chesapeake colonies)
and North Carolina
 Southern colonies: South Carolina and Georgia (and the
West Indies)
APUSH: MR. ROLOFSON
The Colonies as Regions
(differences in resources, immigrant groups, and economic systems, etc)
APUSH: MR. ROLOFSON
The Early Population
Early New England
Early Chesapeake
 Bulk of the population of
 Bulk of the population of
early New England were
men and women of
modest means who
arranged their own
passage and established
themselves immediately
on their own land
the early Chesapeake (and
a majority of the southern
and mid-Atlantic colonies)
arrived as indentured
servants
APUSH: MR. ROLOFSON
Women and Families
Women in New England
Women in the Chesapeake
 Married young
 Married young
 Stable family structure
 Unstable family structure
 Northern children likely to
 Higher mortality rate
survive
 Usually lived to see their
children grow to maturity
 Status of women defined
in part by religious belief
 More hardships
 But more power and a
greater level of freedom
 (Women lost these as the
sex ratio became more
equal)
APUSH: MR. ROLOFSON
Colonial Economies
Southern Economy
Northern Economy
 Tobacco and rice
 More varied than those of
cultivation (plantation
system)
 This early dependence on
large-scale cash crops
caused Southern colonies
to develop less of a
commercial or industrial
economy than the colonies
of the North
 Few cities developed
the southern colonies
 Other economic activities
emerged because the
topography made farming
difficult
 Lumbering and fishing
 A thriving commercial class
APUSH: MR. ROLOFSON
Environmental Variations Contribute to Regional Differences:
The New England Wilderness Transformed
 White pine for ship masts, oak for barrel staves, hickory for farm
tools (New England forest at the time of colonial settlement was
an open, park-like terrain due to Indians accustomed to burning
the underbrush in the spring and fall to attract deer)
 Corn and beans planted together so that beans twined up the
corn stalks, these shaded the ground where the pumpkins and
squash were planted (limited insect damage and enhanced
yields), used fish as fertilizer
 Cattle, pigs, goats, and oxen roamed the woods, disrupting
Indian-colonial relations
APUSH: MR. ROLOFSON
Environmental Variations Contribute to Regional Differences:
New England: Marketing the Forest
 Colonists and settlements are financed by companies. In return,
colonists are expected to extract natural resources and return
them to the mother country. Mercantilism, or long-distance
trade, was the earliest form of capitalism that developed, and it
began to link the continents together.
 The economic system that developed in New England was part
of an emerging capitalist system that linked nature, labor, and
capital, turning natural resources into commodities to be traded
on the market. The commodification of nature occurred as part
of the so-called triangular trade, involving Europe as a source of
manufacturing and management, Africa as a source of slaves,
and the New World as a source of natural resources.
APUSH: MR. ROLOFSON
Environmental Variations Contribute to Regional Differences:
Cash Crops in the Chesapeake and Southern Colonies
 Tobacco cultivation – though it saved the colonists – was hard on both
soils and the forests that replenished them. After three or four years,
new land had to be cleared. But land was plentiful and the tobacco
market was going strong. The only barrier to wealth was finding
workers for the laborious processes of planting, cultivating, pruning,
harvesting, and curing tobacco.
 Indentured servants wanted to get in on the game but were too poor
to pay for passage across the Atlantic. Opportunities for indentured
servants to graduate into planter-hood soon dried up as population
increased and the more successful planters began locking up vast
tracts of the remaining fresh lands. Also, the rising planter class
discovered a new source of cheaper labor, African slaves.
Southerners depended on slave bodies and slave knowledge for
cultivation of not only tobacco in Virginia, but also of rice in South
Carolina and Georgia, and sugar in Barbados.
APUSH: MR. ROLOFSON
New England: Puritan Belief and Values
 The early history of the region is intimately connected to the
religious movement known as “Puritanism.”
 Puritan New England: A tightly knit society (towns bound
together by the power of the church and the town meeting).
 Puritan beliefs and values: Passion for righteousness, each
Puritan congregation governed itself, desire to establish a
“community,” rather than a colony, through a covenant with
God, Protestant work ethic (idleness is a sin, Patriarchal family
(family played a critical role in the community, women played a
subordinate role)
APUSH: MR. ROLOFSON
Half-Way Covenant
 Once in control of the agencies of authority, puritans used this
power to attempt to impose a culture of discipline on the
societies they governed and to insure that their puritan states
would promote and protect true religion. Settlers in New
England were inclined to accept puritan cultural values during
the early decades of settlement.
 Half-Way Covenant: (1662) this new arrangement modified the
“covenant,” or the agreement between the church and its
adherents, conferring partial membership rights in the onceexclusive Puritan congregations. The Half-Way Covenant
weakened the distinction between the “elect” and others, and
dramatized the difficulty of maintaining at fever pitch the
religious devotion of the founding generation.
APUSH: MR. ROLOFSON
Salem Witch Trials (1690s)
Tensions over gender roles
played a substantial role in
generating the crisis
The Salem witch trials
reflected the widening social
stratification of New England,
as well as the fear of many
religious traditionalists that
the Puritan heritage was
being eclipsed by Yankee
commercialism.
APUSH: MR. ROLOFSON
Legacies of Puritanism
 In the 20th century, historians have attempted to link
Puritanism to broader movements in the shaping of modern
American history, suggesting that the psychological effects of
predestination theology fostered an ethic that fueled economic
growth in England and America, thus linking Puritanism and
capitalism.
 No 19th century writer wrote more about the puritan tradition
than Nathaniel Hawthorne, the descendant of one of the
judges in the Salem witch trials of 1692. The Scarlet Letter
(1850) is arguably the book from which most contemporary
understandings of seventeenth-century New England have
been drawn.
 It is no surprise that when the playwright Arthur Miller wanted
to portray a repressive and persecuting society as a way of
commenting on the McCarthyism of the 1950s, he chose to
place his play, The Crucible, in 1692 Salem.
APUSH: MR. ROLOFSON
Which of the following statements was not true of the
Tidewater in colonial Virginia?
A. It was located on the James and Rappahannock Rivers
B. Many of the wealthiest Virginian plantations were
located in this region
C. Many poorer farmers and former indentured servants
were forced to locate in the Tidewater
D. It was east of the Piedmont region and the Appalachians
APUSH: MR. ROLOFSON
The “Atlantic World”
 As transatlantic commerce expanded, American port cities
grew in size and complexity.
 Membership in the British empire had many advantages for
the colonists. Most Americans did not complain about British
regulation of their trade because commerce enriched the
colonies as well as the mother country and lax enforcement of
the Navigation Acts allowed smuggling to flourish. Also, the
Royal Navy protected American shipping.
APUSH: MR. ROLOFSON
Anglicization
 Anglicization: for much of the 1700s, the American upper class
(or elites) in the British colonies, rather than thinking of
themselves as distinctively American, tried to become more
and more English. Wealthy Americans tried to model their
lives on British etiquette and behavior. They tried to send their
sons to the best schools in England, and retained English
customs.
 In 1750, about 40 merchants controlled more than 50 of
Philadelphia’s trade. Like the Chesapeake gentry, urban
merchants imitated the British upper classes, importing
architectural design books from England and building
Georgian-style mansions to display their wealth.
APUSH: MR. ROLOFSON
Factors Promoting Anglicization
 growth of political communities based on English models
 development of commercial ties and legal structures
 emergence of a trans-Atlantic print culture
 Protestant evangelism and the spread of Enlightenment
ideas
APUSH: MR. ROLOFSON
The Colonial Mind
Old Outlook (1600s)
New Outlook (1700s)
 Traditional outlook on life
 New outlook on life
 Emphasis on a personal
 Emphasis on Enlightenment
God
 Stern moral code
 Intellect is less important
than faith
thinking, stressing the
importance of science and
human reason
 People have control over
their own lives and the world
can be explained along
rational scientific lines
APUSH: MR. ROLOFSON
The Enlightenment
 Enlightenment: Philosophers of the European Enlightenment
used empirical research and scientific reasoning to study all
aspects of life, including social institutions and human behavior.
 English philosopher John Locke advanced the revolutionary
theory that political authority was not given by God to
monarchs. Instead, it derived from social compacts that people
made to preserve their natural rights to life, liberty, and
property. In Locke’s view, the people should have the power to
change government policies – or even their form of
government.
 The Enlightenment foreshadowed the great contributions to
republican political theory by American intellectuals of the
Revolutionary era: John Adams, James Madison, and Thomas
Jefferson.
APUSH: MR. ROLOFSON
Characteristic Ideas of Enlightenment Thinkers
 People are capable of perfecting human society by applying the
rules of reason
 John Locke maintained that natural law ordained a government
resting on the consent of the governed and respecting the
inherent rights of all
 God created the world but left it to function according to the
laws of nature.
 The objective of the Enlightenment was to liberate the natural
laws which would then apply themselves equally and thus
create a new order with harmony and balance
APUSH: MR. ROLOFSON
Benjamin Franklin
Self-educated Benjamin Franklin
exemplified the Enlightenment
spirit and made him the bestknown American in the
eighteenth-century world. He
popularized the practical outlook
of the Enlightenment in Poor
Richard’s Almanack.
He founded the Junto, a club for
weekly discussion of political and
economic debates, which
eventually became the American
Philosophical Society in
Philadelphia.
APUSH: MR. ROLOFSON
Arminianism and Deism
 Arminianism: reason alone was capable of establishing the
essentials of religion.
 Deism: a belief that God essentially withdrew after creating the
world, leaving it to function according to scientific laws without
divine intervention.
 Belief in miracles and the innate sinfulness of mankind were
viewed by Arminians, Deists, and others as outdated
superstitions that should be abandoned in the modern age.
APUSH: MR. ROLOFSON
Reasons for the Decline of Piety
(piety: devotion to religion)
 Rise of denominationalism
 Population shifting westward, causing communities to lose
touch with organized religion
 Colonial culture was growing increasingly secular (not sacred)
and materialistic
 Enlightenment thought allowed some to adopt a more rational
and skeptical view of the world
APUSH: MR. ROLOFSON
The Great Awakening, 1730s-1740s
 Great Awakening: (1730s) also known as the First Great
Awakening, a religious revival ignited by Jonathan Edwards,
who preached the folly of believing in salvation through good
works and affirmed the need for complete dependence on
God’s grace. Sinners needed a “new birth” in which they
became devout Christians.
 George Whitefield, a great orator and evangelical preacher
who helped spark the awakening and soon inspired imitators.
APUSH: MR. ROLOFSON
George Whitefield Preaching
APUSH: MR. ROLOFSON
Old Lights vs. New Lights
 While the Great Awakening began in New England, its
message was spread to the other colonies.
 Congregations split into factions headed by Old Lights
(traditionalists) and New Lights (revivalists), and new
churches proliferated – Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian,
and others.
 Jonathan Edwards: the first and foremost New Light
preacher.
APUSH: MR. ROLOFSON
Significance of the Great Awakening
 The Great Awakening was the first spontaneous mass
movement of the American people, breaking down sectional
boundaries and denominational line. It contributed to the
growing sense that Americans were a single people, united by
shared experiences.
 A few preachers explicitly condemned slavery, and the revivals
brought numerous slaves into the Christian fold. Some blacks
began preaching themselves.
 The Great Awakening broadened the range of religious
alternatives available to Americans and encouraged many
colonists to trust their own views rather than those of
established elites.
APUSH: MR. ROLOFSON
The Zenger case is significant for
A) making sedition illegal.
B) establishing freedom of the press.
C) guaranteeing backcountry residents equal
representation in colonial governments.
D) ensuring taxation through proper representation.
APUSH: MR. ROLOFSON
The chief significance of the Great Awakening was that
it
A. Provided Jonathan Edwards with an opportunity to
preach
B. Was the first genuine unified movement of the
American colonists
C. Revived intolerance
D. Created new interest in the churches
APUSH: MR. ROLOFSON