American Colonial History, 1607-1775

 

Colonial Farm Kitchen. Notice clock in the corner.

American Colonial History, 1607-1775

 

Preliminary Comments

 

Between 1607 and 1775 about 550,000 – 600,000 Europeans migrated to the American colonies. Most American families were immigrants (or refugees) or had recent immigrant pasts. They were risk-takers. They left long-settled communities and societies to get on small, crowded sailing ships to make the dangerous 3,000 voyage to a new land that was mostly wilderness. Many died. They had to adapt to a new, frontier environment. They had to “tame the howling wilderness.” A high percent of the European immigrants in this period were from England, Scotland, and Scots from Northern Ireland. Almost all were Protestants.

 

Emigrants from England and Scotland came over in four “waves.” They were four distinctly different groups of people from different areas of the English isles.

 

To understand why these four groups left England and Scotland, at different times, it is necessary to know a little bit of English history during this period.

 

THE 1600s

 

The Failure of the First Settlements

 

The earliest settlements of Pilgrims coming to Plymouth (1620) and immigrants coming to Jamestown (1607) were failures. About half of the Pilgrims died on the voyage or in the first year. Very few new immigrants came to Plymouth. 

 

The company that settled Jamestown continued to send over thousands of new immigrants and many supply ships. But in the first 15 years, about 75% of the settlers died. There were many reasons, including that Jamestown was built on a malarial swamp. Neither group was prepared to deal with the harsh “wilderness” of America.

 

But there was one success. Some of the Jamestown settlers began growing tobacco.

 

The First Wave – Puritans coming to the Boston area. (1629-1642)

 

English background. In the early 1600s, there was political tension and conflict in England. The English kings thought they could rule without consulting Parliament. But many people in England thought the King and Parliament should rule together. They opposed the kings right to rule without Parliament. 

 

At the same time, there was a bitter conflict over who would control the Church of England. The Church of England was the official, government-supported church. It was Protestant (it was illegal to be a Catholic in England at this time). Most English were members. But some members wanted a church controlled by its bishops, who were appointed by the king. Top-down, hierarchical control. Others wanted to “reform” or “purify” the Church, move it further away from traditional practices and beliefs. Some even thought individual congregations should be able to appoint their ministers without interference from the bishops. These people were called Puritans.

 

The fights over who should control the government and who should control the Church of England were connected. Supporters of the king also supported a Church controlled by its leaders, the bishops. Many supporters of Parliament were also Puritans.

 

By the late 1620s, it was obvious that the king and the bishops had won the fight over power and control. Many Puritans recognized they had lost and wanted to leave England. They came to the American colonies.

 

From 1629 to 1642, about 20,000 Puritans came to the Boston area and started to spread out. This area was known as the Massachusetts Bay Colony. They were highly organized and well-prepared to set up towns and farms. They came in families, brought farm equipment and supplies, and their own Puritan ministers. They quickly set up a seminary to train new Puritan ministers; we now call this school Harvard. They prospered and their numbers increased rapidly. They spread out into much of New England and beyond.

 

They wanted to set up a Puritan society that they controlled. They discouraged anyone who wasn’t a Puritan from settling in New England.

 

The Second Wave – Royalists coming to Virginia (1649-1660)

 

In 1642, civil war broke out in England – the Puritans and Parliament supporters against the king and his supporters. Supporters of the king were called royalists (also called cavaliers). Many were members of landowning aristocratic and gentry families.

 

The king and his supporters lost. Many royalists didn’t want to live under a government and church controlled by Parliament and Puritans. So many came to Virginia, where a pro-royalist governor created a society dominated by royalists. He gave them large tracts of land, the basis of the spread of tobacco plantations. 

 

They tried to recreate the kind of society and government they ruled before the civil war. Fortunately, there was hundreds of miles of wilderness between Virginia and Massachusetts.

 

The Third Wave – Quakers coming to Pennsylvania (late 1600s and early 1700s)

 

Not everyone in England belonged to the official Church of England. They were called “dissenting sects.” One of the most prominent was the Quakers.

 

The Quakers were persecuted by government and church officials. In the 1680s, William Penn worked out a deal with the king, who granted Penn, who had converted to Quakerism, ownership and control over a large area in America. Pennsylvania. It became a haven for Quakers. Many of the Quakers in England, over 20,000, emigrated to Pennsylvania and nearby areas. 

 

About 100,000 Europeans emigrated to the American colonies in the 1600s. By the end of the 1600s, there were about 200,000 European immigrants and their descendants along the Atlantic coast. A very high percent, maybe 90% or more, were from England and Wales. Their numbers increased rapidly because of this immigration and high birth rates.

 

FROM 1700 TO 1775 (THE FIRST YEAR OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION)

 

Immigration was different in the 1700s than in the 1600s. There were four main groups:

 

English – about 100,000

Scots and Scot-Irish – also about 100,00

German speaking – somewhat less than 100,000

African slaves – about 300,000

Small numbers of other groups, including French Huguenots (Protestants) and Irish Catholics

 

Total immigration was around 600,000. English immigrants were a minority of the European immigrants and a small minority of total immigrants. By 1775, the American colonies were made up of a diverse population; English immigrants and their descendants may have been a minority of the total population.

 

Over half of the European immigrants were poor people who couldn’t afford the ship passage to America. To get to America, they became “indentured servants.” When the ships landed in America, the immigrants were auctioned off to pay the shipowners. Typically, an indentured servant “agreed” to work for their owners for four to seven years. They had almost no rights. After their indenture was complete, they were free; some received some compensation. They were often offered free or cheap land, so they had little reason to continue working on plantations. But since most of the good land along the Atlantic Ocean was owned by earlier immigrants and their descendants, the new immigrants had to move west to the unsettled frontier, much of which were the foothills and valleys of the Appalachian Mountains. 

 

English Immigrants

 

The composition of English immigrants in the 1700s were somewhat different than that of English immigrants in the 1600s. They were not part of distinct religious or political groups. They were generally poor. They came from different parts of England, including the borderlands. Many, maybe 20,000 or 20%, were criminals or convicts (in England, you could be sent to prison for not paying a debt). England emptied its jails and sent the inmates to America. They were indentured for seven years and did not get any land or compensation. Many became part of the landless poor.

 

People from the borderlands between northern England and Scotland (1700s)

The Scots and Scot-Irish

 

Fighting between northern English and lowland Scots, and among the Scots, had been going on for hundreds of years. This was a frontier, lawless area – little organized government or military control. There was much violence, including raids to cause destruction, pillage, and steal cattle. In addition, there was family and clan feuds on the Scottish side of the border.

 

In the 1600s and 1700s, England completed its campaign of clearing out Irish Catholics from Northern Ireland. Favored English were given large land grants. Many of the farm workers came from Scotland. They were Protestant. They were called Scot-Irish.

 

In the 1700s, a stronger English government successfully established control over northern England. Through battles and brutal military campaigns, England subdued the lowland (borderland) Scots. Many didn’t like the new order. At the same time, highland Scot landowners began clearing out their Scottish tenant farmers. Many Scots went to Northern Ireland to work. But conditions were not much better than in Scotland. In the 1700s, about 100,000 Scots and Scot-Irish emigrated to the American colonies.

 

Many of the settled colonies weren’t happy about the less “civilized” new immigrants. But the expanding plantation colonies of Virginia (tobacco) and South Carolina (rice) needed their labor.

 

Many of the borderland people settled into a similar frontier environment of little formal control in the foothills, valleys, and mountains of the Appalachian Mountains (the western geographical border of the colonies). For a long time, there was little government or legal presence. Few churches and little organized religion. Disputes were often settled by violence. Many raised cattle as in the borderlands. In America, they were called the “backcountry” people.

 

German-Speaking Immigrants

 

Many of the German-speaking immigrants came to America to avoid religious persecution. They held similar religious beliefs as the Quakers. They also were persecuted by German governments and their official (state-supported) religions. When the Quakers established Pennsylvania, it was a safe haven for the German sects, including the German-speaking Amish, Mennonites, Moravians and Schwenkfelders.

 

The German sects, like the Puritans and the Quakers, tended to come over as families and often with their ministers. They moved to the new lands west of the Quaker-dominated region around Philadelphia. Even today, part of their settlement is called the “Pennsylvania Dutch” country. The word “Dutch” is derived from the German word for Germans.

 

African Slaves

 

The largest colonial immigrant group was African slaves. About 300,000 African slaves were brought to the American colonies up to 1775. The number started to go up in the late 1600s and then accelerated after 1725. The total black population of colonial North America in 1775 was probably over 350,000, mostly slave but some free. Most of the slaves in the South worked on plantations, especially in Virginia, Maryland, and South Carolina.

 

Why was there African slavery in colonial America? There are demand side and supply reasons. 

 

The short answer is: the rapid expansion of the production of plantation crops. The limiting growth factor, as always in colonial America, was labor. Expansion originally depended on indentured servants. But many immigrants, including indentured servants, didn’t want to work on plantations. German-speaking immigrants went to Pennsylvania, not Virginia, Maryland, or South Carolina. Many Scottish immigrants avoided indenture. Then there were the long-run costs. Indentured servants only worked for four to seven years. Plantation owners had to buy new servants to replace leaving servants. For complicated reasons, the cost of indenture servants rose in the late 1600s. African slaves cost more but they were slaves for life. Children of slaves belonged to the slaveowner, a cheap source of future labor.

 

South Carolina was a special case. Plantation agriculture started when a few slaveowners and their slaves migrated from Barbados. Rice, not sugar, was the most profitable crop. Rice was exported to Europe and to Caribbean islands. By the late 1700s the rice growers in South Carolina were some of the richest families in America.

 

Slaves were available. The American continent was importing large number of slaves in the 1700s, mostly for the sugar-producing Caribbean islands and Brazil. Much of the trade to the Caribbean was controlled by English slavers. It was a short step to expand to the North American colonies.

 

Native Americans

 

I have not mentioned Native Americans. I assume there is currently much writing and discussion about Native Americans. It is a complicated topic.

 

In the end, unlike Spanish or Portuguese America, the rapid increase in the European population, combined with the pressure to expand farming into Native American lands with relatively small Native American populations, doomed Native American independence in parts of colonial and early Federalist America. Some tribes adapted. Some moved west. The Iroquois Confederation avoided most of the pressure and remained independent for some time. But the long, tragic history of land-hungry white Americans taking Native American land had begun.

 

Consequences

 

Many of the European immigrants came to America to avoid religious and political persecution. Equally important was the lure of unlimited new farmland. Rather than being tenant farmers (paying rent to a landowner) or landless farm laborers in Europe, immigrants had a chance to own large farms (by European standards) and be independent. For many, religious freedom and economic independence went together. For Africans, the exact opposite happened.

 

All groups had different ideas about how government, religion, and society should be organized. Or not organized. After the American Revolution, as the separate colonies became the United States, the clash of their different ideas would be the basis of many of America’s political conflicts.

 

The rapid increase in the population of these groups and their westward expansion looking for new farmland would have a profound influence on American history. The first consequence was that the western movement to new lands was a contributing factor in causing the American Revolution.

 

America in 1775

 

America in 1775 was a much different colony than the America of 100 years earlier. Population in the middle 1600s of around 100,000 – almost all of English descent and few slaves – had become a society of about 2 million people – about 1.5 million European immigrants and their descendants and about 350,000 African slaves. With high birth rates, plentiful and diverse food, and open immigration, Americans could expect their population to double by 1800.

 

Why the change? 

 

·      Access to “unlimited” free and cheap land for farming. 

·      Geographic mobility – individuals, families and groups leaving settled communities to move west. 

·      Fortunes to be made producing plantation crops and exporting into protected English markets (similar to the sugar islands in the Caribbean). 

·      Expanding merchant and shipping class to handle rapidly expanding domestic and foreign trade.

·      Development of craft production to fill rapidly rising standards of living. 

·      Overall opportunity – fewer obstacles to personal and family advancement. Individual and political freedom and democratic government compared to Europe and even England.

 

The Economy

 

Most Americans, like people everywhere, engaged in agriculture. But agriculture by 1775 was very different than the subsistence (producing food just for the farm family) agriculture in most of the rest of the world. Americans with large family-owned farms and plantations, produced enough food to make Americans well-fed, plus a surplus of grain and commercial crops for sale to local markets, towns, and for export.

 

Americans produced a surprisingly variety of food and crops. For example, many farms and plantations had apple orchards. The apples were mostly used to produce cider. I was also astonished to learn that bananas were grown in South Carolina. 

 

Americans had begun to experiment with growing mulberry trees throughout the colonies. Mulberry trees were the food for silkworms. Americans were trying to develop a silk industry. This venture would eventually fail. But many towns and rural areas even today have a Mulberry Street. Including Boston.  

 

America’s largest exports in colonial times were the plantation crops of tobacco and rice, followed by indigo (a blue dye from the indigo plant for England’s growing textile industry). The colonies also exported grain and other products like lumber and horses to the sugar-producing islands in the Caribbean. 

 

The American colonists imported most of their manufactured products from England. Everything from cloth, clothes, shoes, guns, swords, clocks, furniture, dinnerware, china (including Wedgwood), silverware and silver products, and all sorts of manufactured metal products including pots and shoe buckles. And tea.

 

The American colonies were England’s largest trading partner by 1775.

 

In the 1600s, almost all this trade was carried on English ships and controlled by English merchants. But by 1775, the American colonies had become major ship builders; more of the trade was carried in American ships. And more of the trade was organized by a growing merchant class in American ports. 

 

And by 1775, Americans were producing some of their own manufactured goods. Most farm families made cloth. American craftsmen were producing furniture, dinnerware, and silver products. The most famous silversmith was Paul Revere.

 

A colonial image shows a farm family with metal pots and other metal goods, a gun over the mantel, metal buckles on man’s shoes, a butter churn (kept cows?), and a spinning wheel to make yarn. They also owned a grandfather clock. These products were of a simple style; some of them were probably made in America.

 

With unlimited land and a rapidly-growing population, rising exports, and new types of economic activity, the American economy was also rapidly growing and developing. On average, white Americans enjoyed a high standard of living by 1775. 

 

Politics and Government

 

America was more democratic than England. No king, no aristocracy who dominated land-holding and political power. No state-supported church. Much higher literacy rates. A much higher percent of white males voted and were active in government than in England. 

 

From the very beginning, the American colonies were self-governing. At both the local and provincial (colony) level, most of the government officials were democratically elected. The exception was that some of the provincial governors were appointed by London. But their salaries had to be approved by provincial assemblies, which gave them some control over the governors.

 

One example of America’s political independence from English control was that Americans found it easy to evade the Navigation Acts. The Navigation Acts basically said that all American exports and imports had to be with England or English colonies. But Americans routinely ignored the Navigation Acts by trading with other countries and their colonies. Although illegal, Americans and American ships imported goods from other countries. England had too few officials and ships in America to stop this smuggling (sneaking in illegal imports). Probably the best-known smuggler was John Hancock. 

 

By 1775, over 50% of free adult males were qualified to vote. And Americans were very active voters, with high turn-outs at election times. In England, by contrast, fewer then 5% of adult males were qualified to vote. In over half of parliamentary elections, there was only one candidate. 

 

Americans were highly literate; about 70% of white males and 50% of white females could read and write. The percents in England were much lower.

The American colonies had more newspapers than England, which had a larger population. Foreign observers often remarked that Americans seemed to love to read and talk about politics (often in taverns).

 

OVERVIEW

 

By 1775, the American colonies had become a rather unique society. It was very different than most of the rest of the world, even England. Large, family-owned farms. New land on the frontier. Commercially active. Literate. Democratic and politically engaged. Economic opportunity – few barriers to start new businesses or develop new skills (no guilds). Physical (move west) and economic mobility. King far away and no aristocratic landowning class. No long-settled rural class society. No official (state-supported) religion. (But in a few colonies, the dominant religion was supported by local taxes.) No large standing army. Low taxes.

 

By 1775, Europeans had become or were becoming Americans. England’s North American colony was less “English” and more diverse than a century earlier. Puritans were becoming Yankees; many were challenging their Puritan roots and moving away from the Boston area.  By the early 1700s, many New Englanders thought Harvard (established to train Puritan ministers and teachers), had become too “liberal.” Virginia royalists had become plantation owners, with African slaves replacing European indentured servants. Many had gone from being Tories (supporters of king and aristocrats) to becoming Whigs (critics of king and his royal governors of Virginia) as they engaged in bitter political battles with appointed English governors. Many big South Carolina plantation and slave owners were also becoming Whigs.

 

These three groups would contribute many of the leaders and military officers of the coming American Revolution, including George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson.

 

Quakers came to America as a small persecuted religious group and had become the dominant merchant and political group in the greater Philadelphia regions. Maybe the Scots and Scot-Irish, relatively late arrivers, probably changed the least by 1775, but many hated the English and already had a strong sense of personal independence.

 

There was individual mobility. The most famous example was Benjamin Franklin, who went from being a penniless “immigrant” from Boston to the richest man in Philadelphia. He was an urban entrepreneur and a major investor in urban real estate. An anglophile (lover of the English), he also went from a man who retired to England and expected to die there to be one of the leaders of American independence from England.

 

The Manigault family went from penniless religious refugees (French Huguenots) to the richest family in South Carolina in three generations. (They would be followed after the Revolution by the du Pont family, French political refugees)

 

This was not a settled or stagnant society. By the standards of the time, colonial America was a “modern” society. The only threat to dynamic change and growth was that America was still an English colony. That would change.

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See the next post in this series, Revolution and the New Country: American History, 1755-1790