COLONIAL WAYS OF
LIFE
AMERICA: A Narrative History. Ninth Edition
by TINDALL, George Brown; SHI, David Emory. New
York & London: WW Norton & Company
2013, pp. 106-49
FOCUS QUESTIONS
 What were the social, ethnic, and economic differences among the southern, middle,
and New England colonies?
 What were the prevailing attitudes of English colonists toward women?
 How important was indentured servitude to the development of the colonies, and why
had the system been replaced by slavery in the South by 1700?
 How did the colonies participate in international and imperial trade?
 What were the effects of the Enlightenment in America?
 How did the Great Awakening affect the colonies?
 The process of carving a new civilization out of an abundant “New World” involved
often violent encounters among European, African, and Indian cultures. [But it] was
not simply a story of conflict but also of accommodation, a story of diverse peoples
and cultures engaged in the everyday tasks of building homes, planting crops, trading
goods, raising families, enforcing laws, and worshipping their gods.

Everywhere, it seemed people were moving from farms to villages, from villages to
cities, and from homelands to colonies. […] responding to powerful social and
economic forces as rapid population growth and the rise of commercial agriculture
squeezed people off the land. […] in search of political security or religious freedom.
A tragic exception was the Africans, who were captured and transported to new lands
against their will.
 Those who settled in colonial America were mostly young (over half were under
twenty-five), male, and poor. Almost half were indentured servants or slaves, and
during the eighteenth century England would transport some 50000 convicts to the
North American colonies. […] this extraordinary mosaic of adventurous people
created America’s enduring institutions and values, as well as its distinctive spirit and
energy.
The Shape of Early America






BRITISH FOLKWAYS1. The first wave involved some 20000 Puritans who settled
Massachusetts between 1630 and 1641. A generation later a smaller group of wealthy
Royalist Cavaliers (aristocrats) and their indentured servants migrated from southern
England to Virginia. The third wave brought some 23000 Quakers from the north
Midlands of England to the colonies of West Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware. They
professed a sense of spiritual equality, a suspicion of class distinctions and powerful
elites, and a commitment to plain living and high thinking. The fourth and largest surge
of colonization occurred between 1717 and 1775 and included hundreds of thousands
of Celtic Britons and Scots-Irish from northern Ireland; these were mostly poor, feisty2,
clannish3 folk who settled in the rugged backcountry along the Appalachian
Mountains.
[…] a great “melting pot” […] that stripped immigrants of their native identities and
melded them into homogeneous Americans.
Whereas the Indians tended to be migratory, considering land and animals communal
resources with spiritual significance, to be shared and consumed only as necessary,
most European colonizers viewed natural resources as privately owned commodities
to be exploited for profit. White settlers thus quickly set about4 evicting5 Indians;
British ships brought domesticated animals – cattle, oxen, sheep, goats, horses, and
pigs – that were unknown on the Atlantic seaboard. By 1650, English farm animals
outnumbered the colonists. […]. In 1666, a frustrated Maryland Indian told colonists,
“Your hogs & cattle injure us. You come too near us to live & drive us from place to
place. We can fly no farther. Let us know where to live & how to be secured for the
future from the hogs & cattle.
[…] many settlers died in the first years. […] By 1750 the number of colonists had
passed 1 million; by 1775 it stood at about 2.5 million. […] Benjamin Franklin, […] he
pointed out two facts of life that distinguished the colonies from Europe: land was
plentiful and cheap, and labor was scarce and expensive. The opposite conditions
prevailed in the Old World.
BIRTHRATES AND DEATH RATES. This longevity resulted from several factors. Since
the land was bountiful, famine seldom occurred after the first year, and although the
winters were more severe than those in England, firewood was plentiful. Being
younger on the whole – the average age in the new nation in 1790 was sixteen –
1
Practice, custom and belief shared by the members of a group as part of their common culture.
Full of spirit or determination.
3
As a clan, inclined to cling together as a group.
4
Make sby begin doing sth.
5
Expel; force out.
2
Page 02





Americans were less susceptible to disease than were Europeans. […] That began to
change, of course, as cities grew and trade and travel increased.
SEX RATIOS6 AND THE FAMILY. Whole communities of religious or ethnic groups
migrated more often to the northern colonies than to the southern, bringing more
women with them. Males, however, were most needed in the early years of new
colonies. In fact, as a pamphlet promoting opportunities in America stressed, the new
colonies needed “lusty laboring men… capable of hard labour, and that can bear and
undergo heat and cold”, men adept with the “axe and the hoe”.
A majority of women who arrived in the Chesapeake colonies during the seventeenth
century were unmarried indentured servants, most of whom died before the age of
fifty. while the first generations in New England proved to be long-lived, young people
in the seventeenth-century South were apt never to see their grandparents and in fact
likely to lose one or both parents before reaching maturity. Eventually, however, the
southern colonies reverted to a more even gender ratio, and family sizes approached
those of New England.
WOMEN IN THE COLONIES. Most colonists brought to America deeply rooted
convictions about the inferiority of women. […] “the woman is a weak creature not
endowed7 with like strength and constancy of mind”. Governor John Winthrop insisted
that a “true wife” would find contentment only “in subjection to her husband’s
authority”. […] most women in most colonies could not vote, preach, hold office,
attend public schools or colleges, bring lawsuits, make contracts, or won property.
[But there were exceptions] Elizabeth Lucas Pinckney (1722?-1793), for example,
emerged as one of America’s most enterprising horticulturalists.
WOMEN AND RELIGION. No denomination allowed women to be ordained as
ministers. Only the Quakers let women hold church offices and preach (“exhort”) in
public. Governor John Winthrop demanded that women “not meddle8 in such things
as proper for men” to manage.
Yet by the eighteenth century, as is true today, women made up the overwhelming
majority of church members. […] In 1692 the magisterial Boston minister Cotton
Mather observed that there “are far more Godly Women in the world than there are
Godly Men”. In explaining this phenomenon, Mather put a new twist on the old notion
of women being the weaker sex. He argued that the pain associated with childbirth,
which had long been interpreted as the penalty women paid for Eve’s sinfulness, was
6
Relation in degree or number between two similar things.
Furnish, provide.
8
Interfere, intrude.
7
Page 03





in part what drove women “more frequently, & the more fervently” to commit their
lives to Christ.
In America, black women (and men) were often excluded from church membership
for fear that Christianized slaves might seek to gain their freedom. To clarify the
situation, Virginia in 1667 passed a law specifying that children of slaves would be
slaves even if they had been baptized as Christians.
WOMEN’S WORK. In the eighteenth century, “women’s work” typically involved
activities in the house, garden, and yard. Farm women usually rose at four in the
morning and prepared breakfast by five-thirty. […] Women also combed, spun,
spooled9, wove, and bleached wool for clothing, knit linen and cotton, hemmed
sheets, pieced quilts, made candles and soap, chopped wood, hauled10 water, mopped
floors, and washed clothes.
Despite the laws and traditions that limited the sphere of women, the scarcity of labor
in the colonies created opportunities. In the towns, women commonly served as
tavern hostesses and shopkeepers and occasionally also worked as doctors, printers,
upholsterers11, painters, silversmiths, tanners12, and shipwrights13 – often, but not
always, they were widows carrying on their husband’s trade.
One of the most lucrative trades among colonial women was the oldest: prostitution.
All of the colonial port cities hosted thriving brothels. They catered 14 especially to
sailors and soldiers, but men from all walks of life, married and unmarried, frequented
what were called “bawdy houses” or, in Puritan Boston, “disorderly houses”.
The colonial environment did generate slight improvements in the status of women.
The acute shortage of women in the early years made them more highly valued than
they were in Europe, and the Puritan emphasis on a well-ordered family life led to laws
protecting wives from physical abuse and allowing for divorce. In addition, colonial
laws allowed wives greater control over property that they had contributed to a
marriage or that was left after a husband’s death. But the age-old notion of female
subordination and domesticity remained firmly entrenched in colonial America.
SOCIETY AND ECONOMY IN THE SOUTHERN COLONIES
9
A cylinder of wood, plastic, cardboard, etc., on which wire, thread, or string is wound.
Pull or drag forcibly.
11
Supply (furniture) with stuffing, springs, cushions, and covering fabric, padding, and covering.
12
One who tans skins or hides.
13
Shipbuilders.
14
Provide food or entertainment.
10
Page 04







15
The wealthy increasingly became a class apart, distinguished by their sumptuous living
and their disdain for their social “inferiors”, both white and black.
RELIGION. It has often been said that Americans during the seventeenth century took
religion more seriously than they have at any time since. That may have been true, but
many early Americans – especially in the southern colonies – were not active
communicants. One estimate holds that fewer than one in fifteen residents of the
southern colonies was a church member. After 1642, Virginia governor William
Berkeley decided that his colony was to be officially Anglican, and he sponsored laws
requiring “all nonconformists… to depart the colony”. Puritans and Quakers were
hounded out15.
In the early eighteenth century it became the established (official) church throughout
the South. The tone of religious belief and practice in the eighteenth-century South
was less demanding than that in Puritan New England or Quaker Pennsylvania.
Anglicans stressed collective rituals over personal religious experience. They did not
require members to give a personal, public, and often emotional account of their
conversion. Nor did they expect members to practice self-denial.
CROPS. The southern colonies had one unique economic advantage: the climate. The
warm weather and plentiful rainfall enabled the colonies to grow exotic staples
(profitable market crops such as tobacco and rice) prized by the mother country.
Virginia, as King Charles I put it, was “founded upon smoke”. […] After 1690, rice was
as much the profitable staple crop in South Carolina as tobacco was in Virginia. […]
From their early leadership in the production of pine tar, North Carolinians would earn
the nickname of Tar Heels.
LABOR. Voluntary indentured servitude […]. The name derived from the indenture, or
contract, by which a person promised to work for a fixed number of years in return for
transportation to America. […] After 1717, by act of Parliament, convicts guilty of
certain major crimes could escape the hangman by relocating to the colonies.
As a Pennsylvania judge explained in 1793, indentured servants occupied “a middle
rank between slaves and free men”. They could own property but could not engage in
trade. Marriage required the master’s permission. Runaway servants were hunted
down and punished just as runaway slaves were. Masters could whip servants and
extend their indentures for bad behavior. Many servants died from disease or the
exhaustion […] usually after four to seven years, the indenture ended, and the servant
claimed the “freedom dues” set by custom and law: money, tools, clothing, food, and
Chase sby out of some place; force sby out of something or some place.
Page 05





occasionally small tracts16 of land. [...] Many servants died before completing their
indenture, however, and most of those who served their term remained relatively poor
thereafter.
COLONIAL SLAVERY. Colonial America increasingly became a land of white
opportunity and black slavery. […] Some of the first Africans in America were treated
as indentured servants, with a limited term of servitude. […] Gradually, however, with
racist rationalizations based on color difference, lifelong servitude for black slaves
became the custom – and law – of the land. Slaves cost more buy than servants, but
they served for life. By the 1660s colonial legislative assemblies had legalized lifelong
slavery.
RACIAL PREJUDICE. Slavery was not considered an abomination in the seventeenth
century. Most Europeans viewed race-based slavery as a normal aspect of everyday
life in an imperfect world; few considered it a moral issue. They instead believed that
God determined one’s “station17 in life”. Slavery was thus considered a “personal
misfortune”, but not something to worry about.
Questions about the beginnings of slavery still have a bearing on the present. Did a
deep-rooted color prejudice lead to race-based slavery, for instance, or did the practice
of slavery produce the racial prejudice? Slavery in the American colonies evolved
because of the pervasive demand for more laborers, and the English thereafter joined
a global African slave trade that had been established by the Portuguese and Spanish
more than a century before – the very word negro is Spanish for “black”. English
settlers often enslaved Indian captives, but they did not enslave captured Europeans.
Color was the crucial difference, or at least the crucial rationalization used to justify
the heinous18 institution.
Most of the self-serving qualities that colonial Virginians imputed to blacks to justify
slavery were the same qualities that the English assigned to their own poor to explain
their lowly status: their alleged bent for laziness, treachery19, and stupidity, among
other shortcomings. […] In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, American
colonists readily rationalized enslaving Africans because they were deemed both
“heathens” and “aliens”.
By 1675 the British West Indies had over 100,000 slaves while the colonies in North
America had only about 5,000. But as profitable crops such as tobacco, rice, and indigo
became established in Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas, the demand for mostly
16
A limited area of land.
17
Roman Catholic Church Any of the Stations of the Cross.
18
Wicked; abominable.
Disposition to betray; the act or instance of willful betrayal.
19
Page 06
male Indians or, especially, African slaves grew. During the colonial era, slavery was
recognized in all the colonies but was most prevalent in the southern colonies. Almost
90 percent of the black slaves transported to the American mainland went to the
southern colonies. South Carolina had a black majority through the eighteenth
century. As a visitor observed, “Carolina looks more like a negro community than like
a country settled by white people.
 AFRICAN ROOTS. The transport of Africans across the Atlantic to the Americas was the
largest forced immigration in world history. […] The vast majority of Africans were
taken to Brazil or the West Indian islands. Only 5 percent of them – including twice as
many men as women – were taken to British North America, often in ships built in New
England and owned by merchants in Boston and Newport. Most of the enslaved were
young – between the ages of fifteen and thirty.
 They came from lands as remote from each other as Angola is from Senegal. They
spoke as many as fifty different languages and worshipped many different gods. Some
lived in large kingdoms, and others in dispersed villages. All of them prized their kinship
ties. Trade networks crisscrossed the African continent. […] Like the Indian cultures,
the African societies were often matrilineal: property and social status descended
through the mother rather than the father.
Page 07

[West African life]. Virtually all tribal groups believed in a supreme Creator and an array
of lesser gods tied to specific natural forces, such as rain, fertility, and animal life. West
Africans were pantheistic in that they believed that spirits resided in trees, rocks and
streams.
 Africans preyed upon Africans, however, for centuries, rival tribes had conquered,
kidnapped, enslaved, and sold one another. Slavery in Africa, however, was more
benign than the culture of slavery that developed in North America. In Africa, slaves
were not isolated as a distinct caste; they also lived with their captors, and their
children were not automatically enslaved. The involvement of Europeans in
commercial slavery changed that.
 During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, African middlemen20 brought
captives (debtors, thieves, war prisoners, and those who refused to convert to Islam)
to dozens of “slave forts” along the Atlantic coast, where they were subjected to
humiliating physical inspections before being sold to European slave traders. To
reduce the threat of rebellion, traders split up family and tribal members. Once
purchased, the millions of people destined for slavery in the Americas were branded
on the back or buttocks with a company mark, shackled, and loaded onto horrific slave
ships, where they were packed tightly like animals below deck. “Rammed like herring
in a barrel”, wrote on white, slaves were “chained to each other hand and foot, and
stowed21 so close, that they were not allowed above a foot-and-a-half for each in
breadth”. The Africans then endured a four-week to six-month Atlantic voyage, known
as the Middle Passage. It was so brutal that one in six captives died en route. Almost
one in every ten slave ships experienced a revolt during the crossing. On average,
twenty-five Africans were killed in such uprisings. Far more died of disease. Some
committed suicide by jumping off the ships.
 Race-based slavery entailed the dehumanization of an entire class of human beings
who, in the eyes of white Europeans, were justifiably deprived of their dignity and
honor. Once in America, Africans were treated like property (“chattel”), herded in
chains to public slave auctions, where they were sold to the highest bidder. […] Their
most common role was to dig ditches, drain swamps, build dams, clear, plant, and tend
fields. On large southern plantations, “gangs” of slaves cultivated tobacco and rice.
[…] Colonial laws allowed whites to use brutal means to discipline slaves and enforce
their control over them. They were whipped, branded, shackled, castrated, or sold
20
21
An intermediary; a go-between; a trader who buys from producers and sells to retailers or consumers.
To place or arrange, especially in a neat, compact way.
Page 08





away, often to the Caribbean islands. A 1669 Virginia law declared that accidentally
killing a slave during punishment would not be considered a felony22.
Enslaved Africans, however, found ingenious ways to resist being “mastered”. Some
rebelled against their captors, resisting work orders, sabotaging crops and stealing
tools, feigning23 illness or injury, or running away. Colonial newspapers were sprinkled24
with notices about runaway slaves. […] If caught, the runaways faced certain
punishment – whipping, branding, and even the severing of an Achilles tendon. […]
Where would they run to in a society governed by whites and ruled by racism? […] In
1739 some twenty slaves attacked a store in Stono, South Carolina, south of
Charleston. They killed the owner, seized weapons, and headed toward promised
freedom in Spanish Florida, gathering more recruits along the way. Within a few days,
the insurgent slaves had killed twenty-five whites, whereupon the militia caught up
with them. Most of the rebels were killed, and in the weeks that followed, some sixty
more were captured by enraged planters who “cut off their heads and set them up at
every Mile Post”.
SLAVE CULTURE. In 1700 there were enslaved Africans in every American colony, and
they constituted 11 percent of the total population (it would be more than 20 percent
by 1770). […] Because there were no large plantations in New England and fewer
slaves were owned, “family slavery” prevailed, with masters and slaves usually living
under the same roof. Slaves in the northern colonies performed a variety of tasks,
outside and inside. In the southern colonies, slaves were far more numerous, and most
of them worked on farms and plantations.
For many years before the American Revolution, New York City had more slaves than
any other American city. By 1740, it was second only to Charleston in the percentage
of slaves in its population. […] As the number of slaves increased in the congested city,
racial fears and tensions mounted – and occasionally exploded.
[…] The Conspiracy of 1741 […] Such organized resistance to the abuses and
indignities of slavery was rare – in large part because the likelihood of success was so
small and the punishments so severe. Much more common were subtler forms of
resistance and accommodation adopted by enslaved Africans brought to the
Americans.
[…] including new words that entered the language, such as tabby, tote, cooter,
goober, yam, and banana and the names of the Coosaw, Pee Dee, and Wando Rivers.
22
One of several serious crimes, such as murder, rape, or robbery, punishable by a more stringent sentence than
that given for a misdemeanor.
23
To represent falsely; pretend.
24
To scatter drops or particles on.
Page 09

Most significant are African influences in American music, folklore, and religious
practices. On one level, slaves used such cultural activities to distract themselves from
their servitude; on another level they used songs, stories, and religious preachings to
circulate coded messages expressing their distaste for masters or overseers25.
 Though many families were broken up when members were sold to different owners,
slave culture retained its powerful domestic ties. It also developed gender roles
distinct from those of white society. Most enslaved women were by necessity field
workers as well as wives and mothers responsible for child-rearing and household
affairs. Since they worked in proximity to enslaved men, they were treated more
equally (for better or worse) than were most of their white counterparts.
 SLAVE ECONOMY. As Jedidiah Morse, a prominent Charleston minister, admitted in
the late eighteenth century, “No white man, to speak generally, ever thinks of settling
a farm, and improving it for himself, without negroes”. During the eighteenth century,
the demand for slaves soared in the southern colonies. In 1750 the vast majority of
slaves in British America resided in Virginia and Maryland, about 150,000 compared
with 60,000 in South Carolina and Georgia and only 33,000 in all of the northern
colonies.
 Some slaves had linguistic skills that made them useful interpreters. In a new colonial
society forced to construct itself, slaves became skilled artisans: blacksmiths,
carpenters, coopers26, bricklayers, and the like. Many enslaved women worked as
household servants and midwives27.
SOCIETY AND ECONOMY IN NEW ENGLAND
 […] remarkable diversity among the American colonies […]. The prevalence of
slavery, for example, was much less outside the southern colonies.
 TOWNSHIPS28. New England was born Protestant; […]. Seventeenth-century Puritans
saw themselves as living under the special care of God; they saw no distinction
between church and state in their holy commonwealth29. […] New England towns
shaped environment of a rock-strewn30 land, confined by sea and mountains and unfit
for large-scale commercial agriculture.
25
One who watches over and directs the work of others, especially laborers; supervisor or superintendent.
A person who makes or repairs wooden barrels and tubs.
27
A woman who assists women in childbirth.
28
A subdivision of a county in most northeast and Midwest US states, having the status of a unit of local
government with varying governmental powers.
29
The people of a nation or state; the body politic; a group of persons united by some common interest.
30
Spread here and there.
26
Page 10

A group of settlers, often already gathered into a church, would petition the general
court for a town (what elsewhere was commonly called a township) and then divide
its acres according to a rough principle of equity – those who invested more or had
larger families or greater status might receive more land – retaining some pasture and
woodland in common and holding some for later arrivals.
 DWELLINGS AND DAILY LIFE. The first colonists in New England initially lived in caves,
tents, or “English wigwams31”, but they soon built simple frame houses clad32 with
hand-split clapboards. The roofs were steeply pitched33 to reduce the buildup of snow
and were covered with thatched34 grasses or reeds. By the end of the seventeenth
century, most New England homes were plain but sturdy dwellings centered on a
fireplace. Some had glass windows brought from England.
31
A native American dwelling commonly having an arched or conical framework overlaid with bark, hides
or mats.
32
A long narrow board with one edge thicker than the other, overlapped horizontally to cover the outer
walls of frame structures.
33
Erect, establish, set up.
34
Plant stalks or foliage used for roofing.
Page 11







The father was sometimes referred to as the chair man because he sat in the only chair
(hence the origin of the term chairman of the board). The rest of the family usually
stood to eat or sat on stools or benches. People in colonial times ate with their hands
and wooden spoons. Forks were not introduced until the eighteenth century.
ENTERPRISE. Early New England farmers and their families led hard lives. […] The
growing season was short, and no staple (profitable) crops grew in that harsh climate.
[…] Many New Englanders turned to the sea for their livelihood. Cod, […] had been a
regular element of the European diet for centuries, and the waters off the New
England coast had the heaviest concentrations of cod in the world.
Fisheries encouraged the development of shipbuilding, and experience at seafaring35
spurred transatlantic commerce. A growing trade with Britain and Europe encouraged
wider contacts in the Atlantic world and prompted a self-indulgent materialism and
cosmopolitanism that clashed with the Puritan ideal of plain living and high thinking.
SHIPBUILDING. Nearly a third of all British ships were made in the colonies.
Shipbuilding was one of colonial America’s first big industries, and it in turn nurtured
many related businesses: timbering, sawmills36, iron foundries37, sail lofts38, fisheries,
and taverns.
TRADE. The colonies thus served as an important market for goods from the mother
country. The colonies were blessed with abundant natural resources – land, furs,
deerskins, timber, fish, tobacco, indigo, rice, and sugar, to mention a few – but they
lacked capital (money to invest in new enterprises) and laborers.
The mechanism of trade in New England and the middle colonies differed from that in
the South in two aspects: the lack of staple crops to exchange for English goods was
a relative disadvantage, but the success of the region’s own shipping and commercial
enterprises worked in their favor.
THE UNPURITANICAL PURITANS. New England was settled by religious
fundamentalists; the Puritans looked to the Bible for authority and inspiration. They
read the Bible daily and memorized its passages and stories. […] Yet the conventional
stereotype of the dour39 Puritan, hostile to anything that gave pleasure, is false.
35
Following a life at sea; fit to travel on the sea; seagoing.
Large machine for sawing lumber.
37
Establishment where metal objects are made by melting metal and pouring it into molds.
38
A room where sails are cut out and made.
39
Gloomy; unyielding; silently ill-humored.
36
Page 12







40
41
Puritans wore colorful clothing, enjoyed secular music, and imbibed40 prodigious
quantities of rum. “Drink is in itself a good creature of God”, said the Reverend
Increase Mather, “but the abuse of drink is from Satan”. […] Repeat offenders were
forced to wear the letter D in public.
Seventeenth-century New England court records are filled with cases of adultery and
fornication. A man found guilty of intercourse with an unwed woman could be jailed,
whipped, fined, disfranchised, and forced to marry the woman. Female offenders were
also jailed and whipped, and in some cases adulterers were forced to wear the letter
A in public. The abundance of sex offenses is explained in part by the disproportionate
number of men in the colonies. Many were unable to find a wife and were tempted to
satisfy their sexual desires outside marriage.
CHURCH AND STATE. The Puritans who settled in Massachusetts, unlike the
Separatists of Plymouth, proposed only to form a purified version of the Anglican
Church. They were called Nonseparating Congregationalists.
In the Puritan version of Calvin’s theology, God had voluntarily entered into a covenant,
or contract, with worshippers through which they could secure salvation. By analogy,
therefore, an assembly of true Christians could enter into a congregational covenant,
a voluntary union for the common worship of God. From this idea it was a short step
to the idea of people joining together to form a government.
The Puritans was more of a biblical fundamentalist than a political democrat, dedicated
to seeking the will of God, no the will of the people. The ultimate source of authority
was not majority rule but the Bible.
Religion exercised a pervasive influence over the life of New England towns, but unlike
the Church of England and the British government in New England, church and
government were technically separate. Although Puritan New England has often been
called a theocracy, individual congregations were entirely separate from the state –
except that the residents were taxed to support the churches. And if not all inhabitants
were official church members, all were nonetheless required to attend church services.
DIVERSITY AND SOCIAL STRAINS41. Several communities were founded not as
religious refuges but as secular centers of fishing, trade, or commercial agriculture. The
animating concerns of residents in such commercial towns tended to be more
entrepreneurial than spiritual.
“Love your neighbor”, said Benjamin Franklin, “but don’t pull down your fence”. […]
In New England, as elsewhere, fathers tended to subdivide their land among all the
Drink.
The state of being subjected to such demands or stresses.
Page 13
male children. But by the eighteenth century, with land scarcer, the younger sons were
either getting control of the property early or moving on. […] With the growing
pressure on land in the settled regions, poverty and social tension increased in what
had once seemed a country of unlimited opportunity [as John Smith’s A Description of
New England reported].
 THE DEVIL IN NEW ENGLAND. The strains accompanying Massachusetts’s transition
from Puritan utopia to royal colony reached a tragic climax in the witchcraft hysteria
at Salem Village (now the town of Danvers) in 1692. Belief in witchcraft was
widespread throughout Europe and New England in the seventeenth century. […]
New England was, in the words of Cotton Mather, “a country… extraordinarily
alarum’d by the wrath of the Devil”.
 Still, the Salem episode was unique in its scope and intensity. During the winter of 16911692, several adolescent girls became fascinated with the fortunetelling and voodoo
practiced by Tituba, a West Indian slave owned by a minister. […] Tituba not only
confessed to the charge but also listed others in the community who she claimed were
performing the devil’s work. […] Nineteen people (including some men married to
women who had been convicted) had been hanged, one man – the courageous Giles
Corey – was pressed to death with heavy stones for refusing to sacrifice family and
friends to the demands of the court […]. Nearly everybody responsible for the Salem
executions later recanted42, and nothing quite like it happened in the colonies again.
[…] What explains Salem’s witchcraft hysteria? It may have represented nothing more
than theatrical adolescents trying to enliven the dreary routine of everyday life. […]
More recently, historians have focused on the most salient feature of the accused
witches: most of them were women. Many of the supposed witches, it turns out, had
in some way defied the traditional roles assigned to females. Some had engaged in
business transactions outside the home; other did not attend church; some were
curmudgeons43. Most of them were middle-aged or older and without sons or
brothers. They thus stood to inherit property and live independently. The notion of
autonomous spinsters flew in the face of prevailing social conventions.
SOCIETY AND ECONOMY IN THE MIDDLE COLONIES
42
43
To make a formal retraction or disavowal.
Ill-tempered person, especially one who is habitually stubborn or grouchy.
Page 14
 Both geographically and culturally, the middle colonies stood between New England
and the South, blending their own influences with elements derived from the older
regions on either side.
 AN UNRULY ETHNIC MIX. In the makeup of their population, the middle colonies of
British North America stood apart from both the mostly English Puritan settlements
and the biracial plantation colonies to the south. In New York and New Jersey, for
instance, Dutch culture and language lingered, along with the Dutch Reformed Church.
Along the Delaware River the few Swedes and Finns, the first settlers, were
overwhelmed by the influx of English and Welsh Quakers, followed in turn by Germans,
Irish and Scots-Irish. By the mid-eighteenth century, the middle colonies were the
fastest growing area in North America.
 William Penn’s recruiting brochures encouraging settlement in Pennsylvania circulated
throughout central Europe in German translation, and his promise of religious freedom
appealed to persecuted sects, especially the Mennonites, German Baptists whose
beliefs resembled those of the Quakers. […] “Pennsylvania Dutch” (a corruption of
Deutsch meaning “German”).
 The Scots-Irish and Germans became the largest non-English elements in the colonies.
Other minority ethnic groups enriched the population in New York and the Quaker
colonies: Huguenots (Protestants whose religious freedom had been revoked in
Catholic France in 1685), Irish, Welsh, Swiss, and Jews.
 THE BACKCOUNTRY. Pennsylvania in the eighteenth century became the great
distribution point for the different ethnic groups of European origin, just as the
Chesapeake Bay region and Charleston, South Carolina, became the distribution points
for African peoples. […] Feisty44, determined, and rugged45, the Germans and ScotsIrish settlers confiscated Indian lands, built robustly evangelical churches, and
established contentious rustic communities along the frontier of settlement.
COLONIAL CITIES
 During the seventeenth century the American colonies remained in comparative
isolation from one another, evolving distinctive folkways and unfolding separate
histories. Residents of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston were more
likely to keep in close touch with people in London than with one another. Since
commerce was their chief purpose, colonial cities hugged the coastline or, like
Philadelphia, sprang up on rivers that could be navigated by oceangoing vessels. […]
44
45
Full of spirit and determination; plucky.
Lacking culture or polish; coarse, rude.
Page 15
By the end of the colonial period, Philadelphia with some 30,000 people, was the
largest city in the colonies and second only to London in the British Empire. New York
City, with about 25,000, ranked second; Boston numbered 16,000; Charleston, 12,000;
and Newport, Rhode Island, 11,000.
 THE SOCIAL AND POTICIAL ORDER. The urban social elite was dominated by wealthy
merchants and a middle class or retailers, innkeepers, and artisans. Almost two thirds
of the urban male workers were artisans, people who made their living at handicrafts.
 Class stratification in the cities became more pronounced as time passed. One study of
Boston found that in 1687 the richest 15 percent of the population held 52 percent of
the taxable wealth; by 1771 the top 15 percent held about 67 percent and the top 5
percent contributed some 44 percent of the city’s wealth. In Philadelphia and
Charleston the concentration of wealth was even more pronounced.
 THE URBAN WEB. (During the colonial era it was said that when the Spanish settled an
area, they would first build a church; the Dutch, in their settlements, would first
construct a fort; and the English, in theirs, would first erect a tavern). By the end of the
seventeenth century, there were more taverns in America than any other business.
Indeed, taverns became the most important social institution in the colonies – and the
most democratic. By 1690 there were fifty-four taverns in Boston alone, half of them
operated by women. […] Local ordinances regulated them, setting prices and usually
prohibiting them from serving liquor to African Americans, Indians, servants, or
apprentices. […] By the mid-eighteenth century, they would become the gathering
place for protests against British rule.
THE ENLIGHTENMENT IN AMERICA
 By the middle of the eighteenth century, the thirteen colonies were rapidly growing
and maturing. Schools and colleges were springing up, and the standard of living was
rising as well. More and more colonists had easier access to the latest consumer goods
– and the latest ideas percolating46 in Europe. […] Most significant was a burst of
intellectual activity known as the Enlightenment that originated in Europe and soon
spread to the colonies. Like the Renaissance, the Enlightenment celebrated rational
inquiry, scientific, and individual freedom.
 DISCOVERING THE LAWS OF NATURE. […] earth-centered universe […] heliocentric
(sun-centered) […] Nicolaus Copernicus. His discovery that the earth orbits the sun
was more than controversial; in an age governed by religious orthodoxy, it was
heretical.
46
Spread slowly and gradually.
Page 16
 The climax to the scientific revolution came with Sir Isaac Newton’s theory of
gravitation, which he announced in 1687. Newton challenged biblical notions of the
cosmos by depicting a mechanistic universe moving in accordance with natural laws
that could be grasped by human reason and explained by mathematics.
 Evil in the world, in this view, results not from original sin and innate depravity so much
as from ignorance, an imperfect understanding of the laws of nature. The best way,
therefore, to improve both society and human nature was by the application and
improvement of Reason, which was the highest Virtue (Enlightenment thinkers often
capitalized both words).
 THE AGE OF REASON IN AMERICA. America was therefore especially receptive to the
new science. Benjamin Franklin [1706-1790] epitomized the Enlightenment in the eyes
of both Americans and Europeans.
 Before he retired from business, at the age of forty-two, Franklin, among other
achievements, had founded a library, organized a fire company, helped start the
academy that became the University of Pennsylvania, and organized a debating club
that grew into the American Philosophical Society. […] He developed the Franklin
stove, the lightning rod, and a glass harmonica.
 Franklin’s love of commonsensical reason and his pragmatic skepticism clashed with
prevailing religious beliefs. […] Franklin prized reason over revelation.
 Benjamin Franklin and other like-minded thinkers, such as Thomas Jefferson and James
Madison, derived an outlook of hope and optimism from modern science and
Enlightenment rationalism.
 His “fundamental principle” was that reason, not emotion and “blindfolded fear”,
should inform decision making: “We are saved by our good works, which are within
our power, and not by our faith, which is not in our power”.
 The eighteenth-century Enlightenment thus set in motion intellectual forces in the
colonies that challenged the “truthfulness” of revealed religion and the logic of
Christian faith. Those modern forces, however, would inspire stern resistance among
the defenders of religious orthodoxy.
 EDUCATION IN THE COLONIES. White colonial Americans were among the most
literate people in the world. Almost ninety percent of men (more than in England)
could read. […] The Puritan emphasis on reading Scripture, which all Protestants
shared to some degree, implied an obligation to ensure literacy. And the compact
towns of New England made schools more feasible than they were among the
scattered settlers of the southern colonies. […] In the southern colonies, efforts to
Page 17
establish schools were hampered47 by the more scattered population and, in parts of
the backcountry, by indifference and neglect.




THE GREAT AWAKENING
Religion was put on the defensive by the rational emphases of the Enlightenment and
the growing materialism of eighteenth century life. […] During the early eighteenth
century, the American colonies experienced a widespread revival of religious zeal.
Hundreds of new congregations were founded between 1700 and 1750. Most
Americans (85 percent) lived in colonies with an “established” church, meaning that
the government officially sanctioned – and collected taxes to support – a single official
denomination.
No outside preacher could enter the parish and speak in public without permission.
Then, in the 1740s, the parish system was thrown into turmoil by the arrival of
outspoken traveling (itinerant) evangelists, who claimed that the parish ministers
were incompetent. The evangelists also insisted that Christians must be “reborn” in
their convictions and behavior; […] the so-called Great Awakening ended up
invigorating – and fragmenting – American religious life. Unlike Enlightenment, which
affected primarily the intellectual life, the Great Awakening appealed to the masses
and spawned Protestant evangelicalism. It was the first popular movement before the
American Revolution that spanned all thirteen colonies. As Benjamin Franklin observed
of the Awakening, “Never did the people show so great a willingness to attend
sermons. Religion is become the subject of most conversation”.
FIRST STIRRINGS. Many people seemed to be drifting away from the moorings of piety.
And out along the fringes of settlement, many of the colonists were unchurched. On
the frontier, people had no minister to preach to them or administer sacraments or
perform marriages. According to some ministers, these pioneers had lapsed into a
primitive and sinful life, little different from that of the “heathen” Indians. By the 1730s
the sense of religious decline had provoked the Great Awakening.
In 1734-1735 […] Jonathan Edwards, a Congregationalist minister in Northampton, in
western Massachusetts. […] Edwards claimed that the young people of Northampton
were addicted to sinful pleasures, such as “night walking and frequenting the tavern”;
they indulged in “lewd48 practices” that “exceedingly corrupted others”. […] Religion
47
To prevent from free movement, action, or progress of.
48
obscene
Page 18





had lost its emotional force. Edwards lambasted49 Deists50 for believing that “God has
given mankind no other light to walk by but their own reason”. Edwards resolved to
restore deeply felt spirituality. “Our people”, he said, “do not so much need to have
their heads stored [with new knowledge] as to have their hearts touched”.
The Great Awakening saved souls but split churches. […] William Tennent […] The
Tennents caused great consternation because they and other unauthorized ministers
offered a compelling fire-and-brimstone51 alternative to the settled parish preachers.
They promoted a passionate piety, and they refused to accept the prevailing structure
of denominations and clerical authority. Competition was emerging in colonial
religious life.
The great catalyst of the Great Awakening was a young English minister, George
Whitefield, whose reputation as a spellbinding evangelist preceded him to the
colonies. […] Whitefield urged his listeners to experience a “new birth” – a sudden,
emotional moment of conversion and salvation.
Jonathan Edwards took advantage of the commotion stirred up by Whitefield to
spread his own revival gospel throughout New England. […] Titled “Sinners in the
Hands of an Angry God”, it represented a devout appeal to repentance.
The Great Awakening encompassed a worldwide resurgence of evangelical
Protestantism and “enthusiastic” expressions of faith. […] Whitefield and the other
ecstatic evangelists believed that conversion required a visceral, emotional
experience. Convulsions, shrieks, and spasms were the physical manifestation of the
Holy Spirit at work, and women seemed more willing to let the Spirit move them. […]
Such ecstatic piety was symptomatic of the Awakening’s rekindling of religious
enthusiasm. Yet most ministers who encouraged public expressions of female piety
refused to embrace the more controversial idea of allowing women to participate in
congregational governance. Churches remained male bastions of political authority.
The Revered James Davenport, for instance, a fiery New England Congregationalist,
set about shouting, raging, and stomping on the devil, beseeching his listeners to
renounce the established clergy and become the agents of their own salvation. […]
49
Reprimand, scold; beat or whip severely.
term commonly applied to those thinkers in the 17th and 18th century who held that the course of naturesuffici
ently demonstrates the existence of God. For them formal religion was superfluous, and they scorned as spuriouscl
aims of supernatural revelation. Their tenets stemmed from the rationalism of the period, and though the term is
not nowgenerally used, the tenor of their belief persists. The term freethinkers is almost synonymous. Voltaire and
J. J. Rousseauwere deists, as were Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington.
51
(of a sermon, preacher, etc.) zealous, esp. in threatening eternal damnation; threatening punishment in the
hereafter.
50
Page 19




52
53
54
seized by terror and ecstasy, they groveled52 on the floor or lay unconscious on the
benches, much to the chagrin53 of more traditional churchgoers. Critics of the
Awakening decried the emotionalism generated by the revivalists.
PIETY AND REASON. The Great Awakening undermined many of the established
churches by emphasizing that individuals could receive God’s grace without the
assistance of traditional clergy. It also gave people more religious choices, splitting the
Calvinistic churches. Presbyterians divided into the “Old Side” and the “New Side”,
Congregationalists into “Old Light” and “New Light”. New England religious life would
never be the same. […] Many of the New Lights went over to the Baptists, and others
flocked to Presbyterian or, later, Methodist groups, which in turn divided and
subdivided into new sects.
In reaction to taunts54 that the “born-again” revivalist ministers lacked learning, the
Awakening gave rise to the denominational colleges that became characteristic of
American higher education. The three colleges already in existence had their origins in
religious motives: Harvard College, founded in 1636 because the Puritans dreaded “to
leave an illiterate ministry to the church when our present ministers shall lie in the
dust”; the College of William and Mary, created in 1693 to strengthen the Anglican
ministry; and Yale College, set up in 17o1 to educate the Puritans of Connecticut, who
believed that Harvard was drifting from the strictest orthodoxy. The College of New
Jersey, later Princeton University, was founded by Presbyterians in 1746. In close
succession came King’s College (1754) in New York, later renamed Columbia University,
and Anglican institution; the College of Rhode Island (1764), later called Brown
University, which was Baptist; Queens College (1766), later known as Rutgers, which
was Dutch Reformed; and Dartmouth College (1769), which was Congregationalist and
the outgrowth of a school for Indians. Among the colonial colleges, only the University
of Pennsylvania, founded as the Academy of Philadelphia in 1751, arose from a secular
impulse.
The Awakening, like its counterpart, the Enlightenment, influenced the American
Revolution and set in motion powerful currents that still flow in American life. […] The
movement weakened the status of the old-fashioned clergy and state-supported
churches, encouraged believers to exercise their own judgment, and thereby
weakened habits of deference generally.
But in some respects the counterpoint between the Awakening and the
Enlightenment, between the urgings of the spirit and the logic of reason, led by
Lie or creep in a prostrate position.
Embarrassment and annoyance; a keen feeling of mental unease.
Scornful remarks.
Page 20
different roads to similar ends. Both movements emphasized the power and right of
individual decision making, and both aroused millennial hopes that America would
become the promised land in which people might attain the perfection of piety or
reason, if not both.
Page 21