UNFINISHED NATION

THE UNFINISHED NATION, Chapters 1-5 (fwd)

A CONCISE HISTORY

OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE

Alan Brinkley

Columbia University

OVERTURE

BOOKS

McGraw-Hill, Inc.

New York St. Louis San Francisco Auckland Bogota Caracas

Lisbon London Madrid Mexico Milan Montreal New Delhi

Paris San Juan Singapore Sydney Tokyo Toronto

Adapted from American History: A Survey, by Brinkley, Current,

Freidel, and

Williams

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Brinkley, Alan.

The unfinished nation: a concise history of the American people /

Alan Brinkley.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-07-015033-8

1. United States=D1History. I. rltle.

E178.1.B827 1993

973=D1dc20=0992-2666

Preface

The story of the American past, which is the subject of this book,

is as contested today as it has been at any moment in its history.

As the population of the United States becomes ever more diverse

and as groups that once stood outside the view of scholarship

thrust themselves into its center, historians are revealing the

immense and, until recently, inadequately understood complexity of

their country's past. The result has been the slow emergence of a

richer and fuller history of the United States, but also a more

fragmented and contentious one. That history offers a picture of a

highly diverse people. It also provides a picture of a great nation.

Threading one's way through the many, conflicting demands of

contemporary scholars and contemporary readers is no easy task. But

I have tried in this book to find an acceptable middle ground between

the claims of diversity and the claims of unity. The United States is,

indeed, a nation of many cultures. We cannot understand its history

without understanding the experiences of all the different groups that

have shaped American society, without understanding the particular

worlds that have developed within it based on race, gender, ethnicity,

religion, class, or region.

But the United States is more than just a collection of different

cultures. It is also a nation. And as important as understanding its

diversity is understanding the forces that have drawn it together and allowed it

to survive and flourish despite division. The United States has

constructed a remarkably stable and enduring political system that

touches the lives of all Americans. It has developed an immense,

highly productive national economy that affects the working and

consuming lives of virtually everyone. It has created a mass popular

culture that colors the experiences and assumptions of almost all

the American people, and the people of much of the rest of the world

as well. One can admire these unifying forces for their contributions

to America's considerable success as a nation, or condemn them for

the ways they have contributed to inequality, injustice, and failure.

But no one proposing to understand the history of the United States

can afford to ignore them.

In the great historical narratives of the nineteenth and early

twentieth Centuries~ the story of America moved smoothly and

triumphantly from one clearly defined era to another, focusing on great events and great men

and tracing the rise of national institutions. The late twentieth

century has produced a different narrative, with frequent, sometimes

jarring, changes of focus and direction. It devotes attention to private

as well as public events, to failure as well as success, to difference

as well as to unity. And yet it remains, in the end, a narrative, a

story, newly complicated, perhaps, by our understanding of the many

worlds of historical experience that once eluded us -- but no less --

remarkable and compelling for those complications.

This book is an effort to tell this newer story of America for

students of history and for general readers in a single, reasonably

concise volume. It has its origins in a considerably larger book by

Alan Brinkley, Richard N. Current, Frank Freidel, and T. Harry

Williams, American History: A Survey, now in its eighth edition. But it

is not simply an abridgment of that longer work. I have tried here to

craft a new, more thematic, and more selective narrative that

preserves the central elements of the larger text but presents a

clearer and more readily accessible story. In addition to the central

narrative (and the maps and illustrations that accompany it), readers

will also find a collection of essays examining major interpretive

debates among scholars; and they will find a series of excerpts from

important or emblematic American autobiographies, journals,

memoirs, and other works. Together, I hope, these elements will serve

to introduce readers to enough different approaches to and areas of

American history to make them aware of its extraordinary richness

and diversity. I hope they will also give readers some sense of the

shared experiences of Americans.

The title of this book, Tbe Unfinished Nation, is meant to suggest

several things. It is a reminder of America's exceptional diversity: of

the degree to which, despite all the many efforts to build a single,

uniform definition of the meaning of American nationhood, that

meaning remains contested and diverse. It is a reference to the

centrality of change in American history: to the way in which the

nation has continually transformed itself and to how it continues to

do so in our own time. And it is a description of the writing of

American history itself, of the way historians are engaged in a

continuing, ever unfinished, process of asking new questions of the

past.

Many people contributed to this book: Chris Rogers, David Follmer,

Niels Aaboe, Larry Goldberg, Roth Wilkofsky, and Peter Labella at

McGraw-Hill; Ashbel Green at Knopf; Yanek Mieczkowski, my research

assistant at Columbia; and several anonymous scholars who read and

commented on the manuscript and saved me from many errors and

inelegancies. I am grateful to them all. I will also be grateful to any

readers who wish to offer comments, criticisms, and corrections as I prepare future

editions. Suggestions can be sent to me in care of the Department of

History, Columbia University, New York, NY I002 7; I will respond to

them as fully and constructively as I can.

ALAN BRINKLEY

CHAPTER ONE The Meeting of Cultures

America Before Columbus ~ Europe Looks Westward

The Arrival of the English

THE DISCOVERY OF America did not begin with Christopher Colum-

bus. It started many thousands of years earlier when human

beings first crossed an ancient land bridge over the Bering Strait into

what is now Alaska and=D1almost certainly without realizing it=D1began

to people a new continent.

AMERICA BEFORE COLUMBUS

No one is certain when these migrations began; recent estimates

suggest that they started between I4~000 and I 6,ooo years ago. They

were probably a result of the development of new stone-tipped spears

and other hunting implements that made it possible for humans to

pursue the large animals that regularly crossed between Asia and

North America. Year after year, a few at a time, these nomadic

peoples=D1apparently drawn from a Mongolian stock similar to that of

modern-day eastern Siberia=D1entered the new continent and moved

deeper into its heart. Perhaps as early as 8000 B.C.~ the migrations

reached the southern tip of South America. By the end of the fifteenth

century A.D.~ when the first important contact with Europeans

occurred, America was the home of many millions of men and women.

Scholars estimate that well over IO million people lived in South

America by I 500 and that perhaps 4 million lived in the territory that

now constitutes the United States.

The Civilizations of tbe South

The most elaborate of these societies emerged in South and Central

America and in Mexico. In Peru, the Incas created a powerful empire

of perhaps 6 million people. They developed a complex political

system and a large network of paved roads that welded together the

populations of many tribes under a single government. In Central

America and on the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico, the Mayas built a

sophisticated culture with a written language, a numerical system

similar to the Arabic, an accurate calendar, and an advanced

agricultural system. They were succeeded by the Aztecs, a once-

nomadic warrior tribe from the north. In the late thirteenth century,

the Aztecs established a precarious rule over much of central and

southern Mexico and built elaborate administrative, educational, and

medical systems comparable to the most advanced in Europe at the

time. The Aztecs also developed a harsh religion that required human

sacrifice. Their Spanish conquerors discovered the skulls of IOO~OOO

victims in one location when they arrived in ISI9.

The economies of these societies were based primarily on

agriculture, but there were also substantial cities. Tenochtitl=87n, the

Aztec capital built on the site of present-day Mexico City, had a

population of over IOO~OOO in ISOO~ which was comparable to some

of the largest European cities of the time. The Mayas (at Mayapan and

elsewhere) and the Incas (in such cities as Cuzco and Machu Picchu)

produced elaborate settlements with striking religious and

ceremonial structures. These civilizations accomplished all this

without some of the important technologies that Asian and European

civilizations possessed. As late as the sixteenth century, no American

society had yet developed wheeled vehicles.

The Civilizations of the North

The peoples north of Mexico=D1in the lands that became the United

States and Canada=D1developed less elaborate but still substantial

civilizations and political systems. Inhabitants of the northern

regions of the continent subsisted on hunting, gathering, fishing, or

some combination of the three. They included the Eskimos of the

Arctic Circle, who fished and hunted seals and whose civilization

spanned thousands of miles of largely frozen land; the big-game

hunters of the northern forests, who led nomadic lives based on

pursuit of moose and caribou; the tribes of the Pacific Northwest,

whose principal occupation was salmon fishing and who created

substantial permanent settlements along the coast; and a group of

tribes spread through

relatively arid regions of the Far West who developed successful

communities, many of them quite wealthy and densely populated,

based on fishing, hunting small game, and gathering edible seeds,

roots, and other plant materials.

Other societies in North America were primarily agricultural.

Among 3- the most developed were those in the Southwest. The people

of that arid region built large irrigation systems, and they

constructed substantial towns of stone and adobe structures. In the

Great Plains region, too, most tribes were engaged in sedentary

farming (corn and other grains) and lived in large permanent

settlements, although there were some small nomadic tribes that

subsisted by hunting buffalo.

The Eastern third of what is now the United States=D1much of it

covered with forests and inhabited by the Woodland Indians=D1had the

greatest food resources of any area of the continent. The many tribes

of the region engaged E~ in farming, hunting, gathering, and fishing

simultaneously. In the South ~- there were substantial permanent

settlements and large trading networks based on the corn and other

grains grown in the rich lands of the Mississippi River valley. The city

of Cahokia (near present-day St. Louis), was a large trading center. At

its peak in A.D. I 200 it had a population of 4o,ooo.

The agricultural societies of the Northeast were less stationary.

Farming techniques there were designed to exploit the land quickly

rather than to develop permanent settlements. Many of the tribes

living east of the Mississippi River were linked together loosely by

common linguistic roots. The largest of these language groups

consisted of the Algonquin tribes, which lived along the Atlantic

seaboard from Canada to ~Irginia; the Iroquois Confederation, which

was centered in what is now upstate New York; and the Muskogean,

which consisted of the tribes in the southernmost region of the

Eastern seaboard. Alliances among the various Indian societies (even

among thos

as it was to most other cultures and was usually closely bound up

with the natural world on which the tribes depended. Native

Americans worshiped many gods, whom they associated variously

with crops, game, forests, rivers, and other elements of nature.

All tribes assigned women the jobs of caring for children,

preparing meals, and gathering certain foods. But the allocation of

other tasks varied from one societv to another. Some tribal ~roups

(notably the Pueblos of the Southwest) reserved farming tasks almost

entirely for men. Among others (including the Algonquins, the

Iroquois, and the Muskogean), women tended the fields, while men

engaged in hunting, warfare, or clearing land. Iroquois women and

children were often left alone for extended periods while men were

away hunting or fighting battles. As a result, women tended to control

the social and economic organization of the settlements and played

powerful roles within families.

EUROPE LOOKS WESTWARD

Europeans were almost entirely unaware of the existence of the

Americas before the fifteenth century. A few early wanderers Leif

Ericson, an eleventh-century Norse seaman, and perhaps others had

glimpsed parts of the New World on their voyages. But even if their

discoveries had become common knowledge (and they did not), there

would have been little incentive for others to follow, for Europe in

the Middle Ages (roughly A.D. 500-I 500) was so divided and

decentralized, so limited in its commerce, and

o ~ rHE UNFINISHED NATION=09~=09THE MEETING OF CULTURES=097

so lacking in powerful political leaders that interest in great

ventures remained limited. By the end of the fifteenth century,

however, conditions in Europe had changed, and the incentive for

overseas exploration had grown.

Commerce and Nationalism

Two changes in particular helped produce incentives for Europeans to

look toward new lands. One was a result of the significant growth in

Europe's population in the fifteenth century. The Black Death, a

catastrophic epidemic of the bubonic plague that began in

Constantinople in I347, had killed (according to some estimates) as

many as half the people of the Continent. But a century and a half

later, the population had rebounded. With that growth came a

reawakening of commerce and a general increase in prosperity. A new

merchant class was emerging to meet the rising demand for goods

from abroad. As trade increased, and as advances in navigation and

shipbuilding made long-distance sea travel more feasible, interest in

expanding trade even further grew quickly.

At the same time, new governments were emerging that were

more united and powerful than the feeble political entities of the

feudal past. In the western areas of Europe in particular, strong new

monarchs were emerging, creating centralized nation-states, and

growing eager to enhance the commercial growth of their nations.

Ever since the early fourteenth century, when Marco Polo and other

adventurers had returned from the Orient bearing exotic goods

(spices, cloths, dyes) and even more exotic tales, Europeans who

craved commercial glory had dreamed above all of trade with the East.

For two centuries, that trade had been limited by the difficulties of

the long overland iourney to the Asian courts. But in the fourteenth

century, as the maritime talents of several western European

societies increased, there began to be talk of finding a faster, safer

route to the Orient by sea. In the late fifteenth century, some of the

new monarchs were ready to finance daring voyages of exploration.

The first to do so were the Portuguese. Their maritime preeminence

in the fifteenth century was in large part the work of Prince Henry

the Navigator, who devoted much of his life to the promotion of

exploration. Some of Henry's mariners went as far south as Cape

Verde, on Africa's west coast. After his death in I460, Portuguese

explorers advanced farther still. In I486, Bartholomeu D=92az rounded

the southern tip of Africa (the Cape of Good Hope); and in I497-I498

Vasco da Gama proceeded all the way around the cape to India. In I

500, the next Portuguese fleet bound for India, under the command of

Pedro Cabral, was blown off course and happened =A3r upon the coast of

Brazil. But by then, another man, in the service of another country,

had already encountered the "New World".

Christopber Columbus

Christopher Columbus was born and reared in Genoa, Italy, and spent

his early seafaring years in the service of the Portuguese. As a young

man, he became interested in trying to reach the Orient by going west,

across the Atlantic, rather than east, around Africa. Columbus's

optimism rested on several basic misconceptions. He thought the

world was far smaller than it actually is. He also believed that the

Asian continent extended farther eastward than it actually does. Most

important, he did not realize that anything lay to the west between

Europe and the lands of Asia.

Columbus failed to convince the leaders of Portugal of the value

of his plan, so he turned instead to Spain. Although the Spaniards

were not yet as advanced a maritime people as the Portuguese, they

were just as energetic and ambitious. And in the fifteenth century

they were establishing a strong nation-state. The marriage of Spain's

two most powerful regional rulers, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella

of Castile, had produced the strongest monarchy in Europe, one that

was eager to demonstrate its strength by sponsoring new commercial

ventures.

Columbus appealed to Queen Isabella for support for his proposed

westward voyage, and in I492, after consolidating her position at

home, she agreed. Commanding ninety men and three ships=D1the Nina,

the Pinta, and the Santa Maria=D1Columbus left Spain in August I492

and sailed west into the Atlantic. Ten weeks later, he sighted land

and assumed he had reached an island off Asia. In fact, he had landed

on an island in the Bahamas. When he pushed on and encountered Cuba,

he assumed he had reached China. He returned to Spain, bringing with

him several captured natives as evidence of his achievement. (He

called the natives "Indians" because he believed they were from the

East Indies in the Pacific.)

Columbus did not, however, bring back news of the great khan's court

in China or any samples of the fabled wealth of the Indies. And so a

year later, he tried again, this time with a much larger expedition. As

before, he headed into the Caribbean, discovering several other

islands and leaving a small and short-lived colony on Hispaniola. On a

third voyage, in I498, he finally reached the mainland and cruised

along the northern coast of South America. He then realized, for the

first time, that he had encountered not

a part of Asia but a separate continent. Still, he remained convinced

that Asia was only a short distance away.

1 IIE lVlEETlNG OE ( ULIURES ~ 9

Columbus's celebrated accomplishments made him a popular hero

for a time, but he ended his life in obscurity. Ultimately he was even

unable to give his name to the land he had revealed to the Europeans.

That distinction went instead to a Florentine merchant, Amerigo

Vespucci, a passenger on a later Portuguese expedition to the New

World, who wrote a series of vivid (if largely fictitious) descriptions

of the lands he visited.

Partly as a result of Columbus's initiative, Spain began to devote

greater resources and energy to maritime exploration and gradually

replaced Portugal as the foremost seafaring nation. In I 5 I 3 the

Spaniard Vasco de Balboa fought his way across the Isthmus of

Panama and became the first European to gaze westward upon the

great ocean that separated America from China. Seeking access to

that ocean, Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese in Spanish employ, found

the strait that now bears his name at the southern end of South

America, struggled through the stormy narrows and into the ocean (so

calm by contrast that he christened it the Pacific), and then

proceeded to the Philippines. There Magellan died in a conflict with

the natives, but his expedition went on to complete the first known

circumnavigation of the globe (ISI9-I522). By I550~ Spaniards had

explored the coasts of North America as far north as Oregon in the

west and Labrador in the east.

Tbe Spanisb Empire

In time, Spanish explorers in the New World stopped thinking of

America simply as an obstacle to their search for a route to the East

and began instead to consider it a possible source of wealth in itself.

The Spanish claimed for themselves the whole of the New World,

except for a piece of it (today's Brazil) that was reserved by a papal

decree for the Portuguese; and by the mid-sixteenth century, they

were establishing a substantial American em-

pire.

The early Spanish colonists, beginning with those Columbus

brought on his second voyage, settled on the islands of the Caribbean.

But then, in I 5 I 8, Hernando Cort=8Es, who had been an unsuccessful

Spanish government official in Cuba for fourteen years, decided to

lead a small military expedition (about 600 men) against the Aztecs

in Mexico and their powerful emperor, Montezuma, after hearing

stories of great treasures there. His first assault on Tenochtitl=87n, the

=20

Aztec capital, failed. But Cort=8Es and his army had, unknOwingly~

unleashed an assault on the Aztecs far more devastating than military

attack: they had exposed the natives to smallpox. An epidemic of that

disease decimated the Aztec population and made it possible for the

Spanish to triumph in their second attempt at conquest. Through his

ruthless

IO - THE UNFINISHED NATION

=09THE MEETING OF

CULTURES=09I I

suppression of the surviving natives, established himself as

the most brutal of the Spanish conquistadores (conquerors). Twenty

years later, Francisco PizarTo conquered Peru, revealed to the world

the wealth of the Incas, and opened the way for other advances into

South America.

The story of the Spanish warriors is one of great military daring

and achievement. It is also a story of remarkable brutality and greed.

The conquistadores subjugated and, in some areas, virtually

exterminated the native populations. In this horrible way, they made

possible the creation of a vast Spanish Empire in the New World.

Although the conquistadores had cleared the way for Spanish

colonization of America, the task of creating settlements remained

difficult. Spaniards who wished to launch expeditions to the New

World had to get licenses

CORT=83S IN THE NEW WORLD An Aztec artist created this image of

Hernando

Cort=8Es in Mexico. Cort=8Es is visible at upper left, on horseback,

wielding a

sword. Other images suggest the destruction his arrival produced

among the

Aztecs. One of the most brutal and successful of the Spanish

conquistadores,

Cort=8Es burned his ships upon landing at Vera Cruz (where he founded a

city)

in I 5 I 9 to prevent his men from turning back. In I 5 2 I, he captured

the Az-

tec capital, Tenochtitl=87n, after a long siege.

from the crown and pay the monarch a fifth of any wealth gathered in

the new colonies. Colonizers then had to equip and finance their

expeditions without help from the government and assume the full

risk of loss or ruin. They might succeed and make a fortune; they

might fail and lose everything, including their lives.

The first Spanish settlers in America were interested only in

exploiting the American stores of gold and silver, and they were

fabulously successful. For 300 years, beginning in the sixteenth

century, the mines in Spanish America yielded more than ten times as

much gold and silver as the rest of the world's mines together. These

riches made Spain for a time the wealthiest and most powerful nation

on earth.

After the first wave of conquest, however, most Spanish settlers in

America traveled to the New World for other reasons. Many went in

hopes of creating a profitable agricultural economy in America, and

they helped establish elements of European civilization permanently

in America. Other Spaniards went to America to spread the Christian

religion; after the I 840S priests or friars accompanied all colonizing

ventures. Through the work of zealous missionaries, the influence of

the Catholic church ultimately extended throughout South and Central

America and Mexico.

By the end of the sixteenth century, the Spanish Empire had become

one of the largest in the history of the world. It included the

Caribbean islands, Mexico, and southern North America, where a

second wave of European colonizers had established outposts. The

Spanish fort established in I565 at St. Augustine, Florida, became the

first permanent European settlement in the present-day United

States. The Spanish Empire also spread into South America and

included what is now Chile, Argentina, and Peru. In I580, when the

Spanish and Portuguese monarchies temporarily united, Brazil came

under Spanish jurisdiction as well.

It was, however, a colonial empire very different from the one the

English would later establish in North America. The earliest Spanish

ventures in the New World had operated largely independently of the

throne, but by the end of the sixteenth century the monarchy had

extended its authority directly into the governance of local

communities, leaving colonists few opportunities to establish

political institutions independent of the crown. The Spanish were far

more successful than the British would be in extracting great surface

wealth=D1gold and silver=D1from their American colonies. But they

concentrated relatively less energy on making agriculture and

commerce profitable in their colonies. The strict and inflexible

commerCial policies of the Spanish government made the problem

worse. The

THE MEETING OF CULTURES ~ I 3

Spanish emphasis on surface riches ultimately had a stifling impact

on Spain itself too. The supply of easy wealth from America weakened

the incentive to promote domestic economic growth. That was one

reason why Spain remained less developed than its northern European

rivals and why its power declined so quickly in the seventeenth

century.

But the biggest difference between the Spanish Empire and the

later European colonization of North America was in the characters of

the populations. The societies of English, French, and Dutch America

were centered on farming and permanent settlement and emphasized

family life. Hence, the Europeans in North America reproduced

themselves rapidly after their first difficult years and in time came

to outnumber the natives. The Spanish, by contrast, ruled their empire

but did not people it. The number of European settlers in Spanish

America always remained relatively small, and despite disease and

war, the vast majority of the population continued to consist of

natives. The Spanish Empire, therefore, was the product of a collision

between and then a commingling of two cultures that had been

developing for centuries along completely different lines.

Cultural Excbanges

European and native cultures never entirely merged in the Spanish

Empire. Indeed, significant differences remain today between=20

European and Indian cultures throughout South and Central America.

Nevertheless, the arrival of whites launched a process of interaction

between different peoples that left no one unchanged.

That Europeans were exploring the Americas at all was a result

of their early contacts with the natives, from whom they had learned

of the rich deposits of gold and silver. From then on, the history of

the Americas became one of increasing levels of exchanges=D1some

beneficial, some catastrophic=D1 among different peoples and cultures.

The first and perhaps most profound result of this exchange was the

importation of European diseases to the New World. It would be

difficult to exaggerate the consequences of the exposure of native

Americans to such illnesses as influenza, measles, typhus, and above

all smallpox=D1diseases to which Europeans had over time developed at

least a partial immunity but to which Americans were tragically

vulnerable. \~illionS died. In some areas, native populations were

virtually wiped out within a few decades of their first contact with

whites. On Hispaniola=D1 where the Dominican Republic and Haiti are

today and where Columbus landed and established a small, short-lived

colony in the I490S=D1the native

I4 ~ THE UNFINISHED NATION

HE MEETING OF CULTURES

5

population quickly declined from approximately I million to about

500. In the Mayan areas of Mexico, as much as 95 percent of the

population perished within a few years of the natives' first contact

with the Spanish. Some groups fared better than others; many

(although not all) of the tribes north of Mexico, whose contact with

European settlers came later and was often less intimate, were

spared the worst of the epidemics. But for other areas of the New

World, this was a catastrophe at least as grave as, and in some places

far worse than, the Black Death that had killed as much as half the

population of Europe two centuries before.

The decimation of native populations in the southern regions of

the Americas was not, however, purely a result of exposure to

infection. It was also a result of the conquistadores' quite deliberate

policy of subjugation and extermination. Their brutality was in part a

reflection of the ruthlessness with which Europeans waged war in all

parts of the world. It was also a result of their conviction that the

natives were "savages"=D1uncivilized peoples who could be treated as

somehow not fully human. Ironically, it was also a consequence of the

high level of development of some native societies. Had the natives

truly been as primitive and disorganized as Europeans wanted to

believe, there would have been little need to destroy them. But

organized into substantial empires, they posed a serious threat to the

conquistadores' ambitions. That, more than anything else, accounts

for the thoroughness with which the Spanish set about obliterating

native cultures. They razed cities and dismantled temples and

monuments. They destroyed records and documents. They

systematically killed Indian warriors, leaders, priests, and organized

elites. By the I 540s, the combined effects of European diseases and

European military brutality had all but destroyed the empires of

Mexico and South America and allowed the Spanish to exert their

authority with few organized challenges from the natives.

Not all aspects of the exchange were so disastrous to the Indians. The

Europeans introduced to America important new crops (among them

sugar and bananas), domestic livestock (cattle, pigs, and sheep), and

perhaps most significantly the horse. Indians soon learned to

cultivate the new crops, and European livestock spread widely among

tribes that in the past had possessed virtually no domesticated

animals other than dogs. The horse, in particular, became central to

the lives of many natives and transformed their societies.

The exchange was at least as important (and more beneficial) to the

Europeans. In both North and South America, the arriving white

peoples learned from the natives new agricultural techniques

appropriate to the demands of the new land. They discovered new

crops, above all maize

(corn), which Columbus took back to Europe from his first trip to

America and which became an important staple in Europe itself as

well as among European settlers in the New World. Such foods as

squash, pumpkins, beans, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, and

potatoes all found their way into European diets by way of native

Americans. These and other American crops revolutionized European

agriculture, enabling farmers to feed more

- people with more nutritious foods. That, in turn, facilitated the

growth of the European population and the transformation of the

European economy. Agricultural discoveries ultimately proved more

important to Europe than

-4~ the gold and silver the conquistadores valued so highly.

In South America, Central America, and Mexico, a society

emerged in which Europeans and natives lived in intimate, if unequal,

contact with one another. As a result, Indians adopted many features

of European civilization,

. although seldom did those features survive the transfer to America

unchanged. Many natives gradually came to speak Spanish or

Portuguese, but they created a range of dialects fusing the

European languages with elements of their own. Gradually, European

missionaries=D1through a combination of persuasion and coercion

spread Catholicism through most areas of the Spanish Empire. But

native Christians combined the new religion with features of their

old ones.

Colonial officials were expected to take their wives with them

to America, but among the ordinary settlers=D1the majority=D1European

men outnumbered European women by at least ten to one. As a result,

male Spanish immigrants had substantial sexual contact with native

women. Intermarriage=D1sometimes forcible, sometimes with the

agreement of native women responding to the shortage of native men

became frequent. Before long, the population of the colonies came to

be dominated (numerically, at least) by people of mixed race, or

mestizos.

~Irtually all the enterprises of the Spanish and Portuguese colonists

depended on an Indian work force. In some places, Indians were sold

into slavery. More often, colonists used a coercive wage system by

which Indians worked in the mines and on the plantations under

duress for fixed periods, unable to leave without the consent of their

employers. These indentured work forces survived in some areas of

the South American mainland for many centuries. Yet even that was

not, in the end, enough to meet the labor needs of the colonists

particularly since the native population had declined (and in some

places virtually vanished) because of disease and war. As early as

I502~ therefore, European settlers began importing slaves from

Africa.

6 ~ THE UNFINISHED NATION

A]Crica and America

Over half of all the immigrants to the New World between I 500 and I

80o were Africans, virtually all of them sent to America against

their will. Most came from a large region in west Africa below the

Sahara Desert, known as Guinea.

Europeans and white Americans came to portray African society

as primitive and uncivilized (in part to justify the enslavement of

Africa's people). But most Africans were, in fact, civilized peoples

with well-developed economies and political systems. The residents

of upper Guinea had substantial commercial contact with

Mediterranean world=D1trading ivory, gold, and slaves for finished

goods=D1and, largely as a result, became early converts to Islam. After

the collapse of the ancient kingdom of Ghana around A.D. IIOO, they

created the even larger empire of Mali, which survived into the

fifteenth century and whose trading center at Timbuktu became

fabled as a meeting place of the peoples of many lands and a center of

education.

Farther south, Africans were more isolated from Europe and the

Mediterranean and were more politically fragmented. The central

social unit was the village, which usually consisted of members of an

extended family group. Some groups of villages united in small

kingdoms. But no large empires emerged in the south comparable to

the Ghana and Mali kingdoms farther north. Nevertheless, these

southern societies developed extensive trade=D1in woven fabrics,

ceramics, wooden and iron goods, as well as crops and livestock=D1both

among themselves and, to a lesser degree, with the outside world.

African civilizations naturally developed economies that reflected

the climates and resources of their lands. In upper Guinea, fishing and

rice cultivation, supplemented by the extensive trade with

Mediterranean lands, were the foundation of the economy. Farther

south, Africans grew wheat and other food crops, raised livestock,

and fished. There were some more nomadic tribes in the interior, who

subsisted largely on hunting and gathering and developed less

elaborate social systems. But most Africans were sedentary, farming

people.

As in many Indian societies in America, but in contrast to the

European tradition, African families tended to be matrilineal. That

means that people traced their heredity through and inherited

property from their mothers. Women played a major role, often the

dominant role, in trade; in many areas, they were the principal

farmers (while the men hunted, fished, and raised

THE MEETING OF CULTURES=09I 7

livestock); and everywhere, they managed child care and food

preparation. Most tribes also divided political power by gender, with

men choosing leaders and systems for managing male affairs and

women choosing parallel leaders to handle female matters.

In those areas of west Africa where indigenous religions had

survived the spread of Islam (which included most of the lands south

of the empire of Mali), people worshiped many gods, whom they

associated with various aspects of the natural world and whose

spirits they believed lived in trees, rocks, forests, and streams. Most

Africans also developed forms of ancestor worship and took great

care in tracing family lineage; the most revered priests were

generally the oldest people.

Small elites of priests and nobles stood at the top of African

societies. Most people belonged to a large middle group of farmers,

traders, crafts workers, and others. At the bottom of society were

slaves=D1men and women who were put into bondage after being

captured in wars, because of criminal behavior, or as a result of

unpaid debts. Slavery was not usually permanent; people were

generally in bondage for a fixed term, and in the meantime retained

certain legal protections (including the right to marry). Children did

not inherit their parents' condition of bondage. The slavery that

Africans would experience at the hands of the Europeans was to be

very different.

The African slave trade long preceded European settlement in the New

World. As early as the eighth century, west Africans began selling

slaves to traders from the Mediterranean. When Portuguese sailors

began exploring the coast of Africa in the fifteenth century, they too

bought slaves and took them back to Portugal, where there was a

small but steady demand. In the sixteenth century, however, the

market for slaves grew dramatically as a result of the growing

European demand for sugar cane. The small areas of sugar cultivation

in the Mediterranean were proving inadequate, and production soon

moved to new areas: to the island of Madeira off the African coast,

which became a Portuguese colony, and not long thereafter (still in

the sixteenth century) to the Caribbean islands and Brazil. Sugar was

a labor-intensive crop, and the demand for African workers in these

new areas of cultivation was high. At first the slave traders were

overwhelmingly Portuguese and, to a lesser extent, Spanish. By the

seventeenth century, the Dutch had won control of most of the market.

In the eighteenth century, the English dominated it; by then, slavery

had spread well beyond its original locations in the Caribbean and

South America and into the English colonies to the north.

I 8 ~ THE UNFINISHED NATION

THE MEETING OF

CULTURES

THE ARRIVAL OF THE EN~LISH

England's first documented contact with the New World came only

five years after Spain's. In 1497,John Cabot (like Columbus, a native

of Genoa) sailed to the northeastern coast of North America on an

expedition sponsored by King Henry VII. Other English navigators,

continuing Cabot's unsuccessful search for a northwest passage

through the New World to the Orient, explored other areas of North

America during the sixteenth century. But nearly a century passed

before the English made any serious efforts to establish colonies

there. Like other European nations, England had to experience an

internal transformation before it could begin settling new lands.

Incentives for Colonization

Interest in colonization grew in part as a response to the social and

economic problems of sixteenth-century England. The English people

suffered from frequent and costly European wars, and they suffered

from almost constant religious strife within their own land. They

suffered too from a harsh economic transformation of the

countryside. Because the worldwide demand for wool was growing

rapidly, many landowners were converting their land from fields for

crops to pastures for sheep. The result was a significant growth in

the wool trade=D1and a reduction in the amount of land available for

growing food. Many of the displaced farmers became beggars or

criminals. And England's food supply declined at the same time that

the English population was growing=D1from 3 million in I485 to 4

million in I603. To some of the English, the New World began to seem

attractive because it offered something that was growing scarce in

England: land.

At the same time, new merchant capitalists were prospering

from the expansion of foreign trade, particularly once merchants

helped create a domestic cloth industry that allowed them to begin=

marketing finished goods. At first, most exporters did business

almost entirely as individuals. In time, however, merchants developed

more collective enterprises and formed enterprises that operated on

the basis of charters from the monarch giving companies monopolies

for trading in particular regions. Some were joint-stock companies,

similar in some respects to modern corporations, with stockholders

sharing risk and profit either on single ventures or, increasingly, on a

permanent basis. These investors often made fantastic profits, and

they were eager to continue the expansion of their profitable trade.

Central to this drive was the emergence of a new concept of economic

life known as mercantilism. Mercantilism rested on the belief that

the world's wealth was finite, that one person or nation could grow

rich only at the expense of another, and that a nation's economic

health depended, therefore, on extracting as much wealth as possible

from foreign lands and exporting as little wealth as possible from

home. The principles of mercantilism guided the economic policies of

virtually all the great nation-states that were emerging in Europe in

the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and increased the

competition among nations. Every European state was trying to find

markets for its exports while trying to limit its imports. One result

was the increased attractiveness of acquiring colonies, which could

become the source of goods that a country might otherwise have to

buy from other nations and could become a market for goods produced

by the colonizing power.

- In England, the mercantilistic program thrived at first on the basis

of the flourishing wool trade with the European continent, and

particularly with the great cloth market in Antwerp. In the I 5 50s,

however, that glutted market began to collapse, and English=20

merchants had to look elsewhere for overseas trade. The=20

establishment of colonies seemed to be an answer to their problems.

Some English also believed colonies would help alleviate poverty and

unemployment by siphoning off the surplus population. Perhaps most

important, colonial commerce would allow England to acquire

products for which the nation had previously been dependent on

foreigners=D1products such as lumber, naval stores, and silver and gold.

There were also religious motives for colonization. The

Protestant Reformation began in Germany in I 5 I 7, when Martin

Luther challenged some of the basic practices and beliefs of the

Roman Catholic church=D1until then, the supreme religious authority

Luther quickly won a wide following among ordinary men and women

in northern Europe. When the pope excommunicated him in I 5 20,

Luther began leading his followers out of the Catholic church entirely.

As the spirit of the Reformation spread rapidly throughout Europe,

other dissidents began offering other alternatives to Catholicism. The

Swiss theologian John Calvin went even further than Luther had in

rejecting the Catholic belief that human behavior or the church itself

could affect an individual's prospects for salvation. Calvin introduced

the doctrine of predestination. God "elected" some people to be saved

and condemned others to damnation; each person's destiny was

determined before birth, and no one could change that predetermined

fate. But those who accepted Calvin's teachings came to believe that

the way they led their lives might reveal to

20 ~ THE UNFINISHED NATION

THE MEETING OF

CULTURES

them their chances of salvation. A wicked or useless existence would

be a sign of damnation; saintliness, diligence, and success could be

signs of grace. Calvinism created anxieties among its followers, but

it also produced a strong incentive to lead virtuous, productive lives.

The new creed spread rapidly throughout northern Europe and produced

(among other groups) the Huguenots in France and the Puritans in

England.

At first, however, the English Reformation was less a result of

these doctrinal revolts than of a political dispute between the king

and the pope. In I 529 King Henry VIII, angered by the refusal of the

pope to grant him a divorce from his Spanish wife (who had failed to

bear him the son he desperately wanted), broke England's ties with

the Catholic church and established himself as the head of the

Christian faith in his country. After Henry's death, his Catholic

daughter, Queen Mary, restored England's allegiance to Rome and

persecuted those who resisted. But when Mary died in I558~ her hal

sister, Elizabeth I, became England's sovereign and once again severed

the nation's connection with the Catholic church, this time for good.

To many English people, however, the new Church of England=D1which

differed little at first from the Catholic church=D1was not reformed

enough. Some had been affected by the teachings of the European

Reformation, and they complained that theirs was a church that had

abandoned Rome without abandoning Rome's offensive beliefs and

practices. They clamored for reforms that would "purify" the church,

and thus they became known as "Puritans."

The most radical Puritans, known as Separatists, were determined to

worship as they pleased in their own independent congregations,

despite English laws that required all subjects to attend regular

Anglican services. But most Puritans did not wish to leave the Church

of England. They wanted, rather, to simplify Anglican forms of

worship; reduce the power of the crown-appointed bishops, who were

sometimes corrupt and extravagant; and reform the clergy, many of

whom were uneducated men with little interest in or knowledge of

theology. Like the Separatists, they grew increasingly frustrated by

the refusal of either political or ecclesiastical authorities to respond

to their demands.

Puritan discontent grew rapidly after the death of Elizabeth, the last

of the Tudors, and the accession of James I, the first of the Stuarts,

in I603. Convinced that kings ruled by divine right, James quickly

antagonized the Puritans, a group that included most of the rising

businessmen, by resorting to illegal and arbitrary taxation, by

favoring English Catholics in the granting of charters and other

favors, and by supporting "high-church" forms of ceremony. By the

early seventeenth century, some religious nonconformists were

beginning to look for places of refuge outside the kingdom.

Many factors, therefore, combined to increase the interest of the

English in peopling distant lands=D1social and economic instability,

religious discontent, personal ambition, commercial greed. England's

first experience with colonization, however, came not in the New

World but in neighboring Ireland. The English had long laid claim to

the island, but only in the late sixteenth century did serious efforts

at colonization begin. The long, brutal process by which the English

attempted (never entirely successfully) to subdue the Irish led to an

important assumption about colonization that the English would take

with them to America: the belief that settlements in foreign lands

must retain a rigid separation from the native populations. Unlike the

Spanish in America, the English in Ireland tried to build a separate

society of their own, peopled with emigrants from England itself.

They would take that concept with them to the New World.

The French and the Dutch in ~merica

English settlers in North America were to encounter not only natives

but also other Europeans who were, like them, driven by mercantilist

ideas. There were scattered North American outposts of the Spanish

Empire, whose residents looked on the English as intruders. More

important, there were French and Dutch settlers.

France founded its first permanent settlement in America at

Quebec in I608~ less than a year after the English started their first

atJamestown. The colony's population grew very slowly, but the

French exercised an influence in the New World disproportionate to

their numbers, because of their relationships with native Americans.

Unlike the early English settlers, who hugged the coastline and traded

with the Indians of the interior through intermediaries, the French

forged close ties with natives deep inside the continent. French

Jesuit missionaries established some of the first contacts between

the two peoples. More important were the coureu~s de bois

adventurous fur traders and trappers=D1who also penetrated far into

the wilderness and developed an extensive trade that became one of

the underpinnings of the French colonial economy. The French traders

formed partnerships with the Indians and often became virtually a

part of native society, living among the natives and at times marrying

Indian women. The fur trade helped open the way for French

agricultural estates (or seigneu~ies) along the St. Lawrence River and

for the development of trade and military centers at Quebec and

Montreal.

2 2 ~ THE UNFINISHED NATION

The English also faced competition from the Dutch in North

America. Holland in the early seventeenth century was one of the

leading trading nations of the world. In I609 an English explorer in the

employ of the Dutch, Henry Hudson, sailed up the river that was to be

named for him in what is now New York State; and his explorations

led to a Dutch claim on that territory and to the establishment of a

permanent Dutch presence in the New World. In I624~ not long after

the first two permanent English colonies took root in Jamestown and

Plymouth, the Dutch created a wedge between them when the Dutch

West India Company established a series of permanent trading posts

on the Hudson, Delaware, and Connecticut rivers. The company

actively encouraged settlement of the region, and the result was the

colony of New Netherl?nd and its principal town, New Amsterdam, on

Manhattan Island. But the Dutch population remained relatively small.

The First Eng=C0ish Settlements

The first permanent English settlement in the New World was

established at Jamestown, in ~lrginia, in I 607 . But for nearly thirty

years before that, English merchants and adventurers had been

engaged in a series of failed efforts to create colonies in America.

Through much of the sixteenth century, the English had harbored

mixed feelings about the New World. They were intrigued by its

possibilities, but they were also leery of Spain, which remained the

dominant force in America and the dominant naval power in Europe. In

I588~ however, King Philip II of Spain sent one of the largest military=

fleets in the history of warfare=D1the Spanish Armada=D1across the

English Channel to attack England itself. The invasion failed. The

smaller English fleet, taking advantage of its greater

maneuverability, dispersed the Armada and, in a single stroke, ended

Spain's domination of the Atlantic. The most important inhibition the

English had retained about establishing themselves in the New World

was now removed.

The pioneers of English colonization were Sir Humphrey Gilbert and

his half-brother Sir Walter Raleigh=D1both friends of Queen Elizabeth,

and both veterans of earlier colonial efforts in Ireland. In I 5 78

Gilbert obtained from Elizabeth a six-year patent granting him the

exclusive right "to inhabit and possess any remote and heathen lands

not already in the possession of any Christian prince." Five years

later, after several setbacks, he led an expedition to Newfoundland

and proceeded south looking for a good place to build a profitable

colony. But a storm sank his ship, and he was lost at sea.

Sir Walter Raleigh was undeterred. The next year, he secured his own

Six-year grant from the queen and sent a small group of men on an

expedition to explore the North American coast. When they returned,

Raleigh named the region they had explored ~lrginia, in honor of

Elizabeth, who was unmarried and was known as the "~lrgin Queen."

In I585 Raleigh recruited his cousin, Sir Richard Grenville, to lead a

group of men to the island of Roanoke, off the coast of what is now

North Carolina, to establish a colony. Grenville deposited the settlers

on the island, antagonized the natives by destroying an Indian village

as retaliation for a minor theft, and returned to England. The

following spring, with expected supplies and reinforcements from

England long overdue, Sir Francis Drake unexpectedly arrived in

Roanoke. The colonists boarded his ships and left.

Raleigh tried again in I 587, sending an expedition to Roanoke carrying

ninety-one men, seventeen women (two of them pregnant), and nine

24 ~ THE UNFINISHED NATION

children. The settlers attempted to take up where the first group of

colonists had left off. (Shortly after arriving, one of the women=D1the

daughter of the commander of the expedition,John White=D1gave birth to

a daughter,

rginia Dare, the first American-born child of English parents.)

White returned to England after several weeks, leaving his daughter

and granddaughter behind, in search of supplies and additional

settlers. Because of a war with Spain, he was unable to return to

Roanoke for three years. When he did, in I 590, he found the island

utterly deserted, with no clue to the fate of the settlers other than

the cryptic inscription "Croatoan" carved on a post. No solution to the

mystery of the "Lost Colony" has ever been found. The Roanoke

disaster marked the end of Sir Walter Raleigh's involvement in

English colonization of the New World, and no later colonizer would

receive grants of land in the New World as vast or undefined as those

Raleigh and Gilbert had acquired. But despite the discouraging

example of these first experiences, the colonizing impulse remained

very much alive. In the early years of the seventeenth century, a group

of London merchants to whom Raleigh had assigned his charter rights

decided to renew the attempt at colonization in ~lrginia. A rival group

of merchants, from the area around Plymouth, was also interested in

American ventures and was sponsoring voyages of exploration farther

north. In I606James I issued a new charter, which divided America

between the two groups. The London group got the exclusive right to

colonize in the south, and the Plymouth merchants received the same

right in the north. Through the efforts of these and other companies,

the first enduring English colonies would be established in America.

CHAPTER TWO

The English ~~Transplantati

The Early Chesapeake ~ The Gro~th of Ne~v England

The Restoration Colonies ~ The Development of Empire

~ HE ROANOKE FIASCO dampened enthusiasm for colonization in

England for a time. But the lures of the New World=D1the

presumably vast riches, the abundant land, the promise of religious

freedom, the chance to begin anew=D1were too strong to be suppressed

for very long. By the early seventeenth century, the effort to

establish permanent English colonies in the New World resumed.

The new efforts were much like the earlier, failed ones: private

ventures, with little planning or direction from the English

government; small, fragile enterprises led by people unprepared for

the hardships they were to face. Unlike the Roanoke experiment, they

survived, but not before experiencing a series of disastrous setbacks.

Three conditions in particular shaped the character of these English

settlements. First, the colonies were business enterprises, and one of

their principal concerns was to produce a profit for their corporate

sponsors. Second, the English colonies, unlike the Spanish, were

designed to be "transplantations" of societies from the Old World to

the New. As in Ireland, there were few efforts to blend English

society with the society of the natives . And third, because the

colonies were tied only indirectly to the crown, they began from the

start to develop their own political and social institutions.

THE EARLY CHESAPEAKE

Once James I had issued his I606 charters to the London and Plymouth

Companies~ the Plymouth group floundered and largely abandoned its

efforts at settling the northern regions of British America. But the=

London

26 ~ THE UNFINISHED NATION

Company moved quickly and decisively to launch a colonizing expedi-

tion headed for ~Irginia=D1a party of I44 men aboard three ships, the

Godspeed, the Discovery, and the Susan Constant, which set sail for

America

earlyin I607.

The Founding of ~amestown

Only I04 men survived the journey. They reached the American coast

in the spring of I607, sailed into Chesapeake Bay and up a river they

named the James, and established their colony on a peninsula. They

called it Jamestown.

They chose an inland setting that they believed would offer them

security from the natives. But they chose poorly. The site was low and

swampy and subject to outbreaks of malaria. It was surrounded by

thick woods, which were diffficult to clear for cultivation. And it

bordered the territories of powerful local Indians. The result could

hardly have been more disastrous. For seventeen years, one wave of

settlers after another attempted to make Jamestown a habitable and

profitable colony. Every effort failed. The town became instead a

place of misery and death, and the London Company found itself

saddled with endless losses. All that could be said of Jamestown at

the end of this first period of its existence was that it had

survived.

The initial colonists ran into serious difficulties from the

moment they landed. They had no prior exposure to the infections of

the new land and were highly vulnerable to local diseases,

particularly malaria . The promoters in London demanded a quick

return on their investment and diverted the colonists' energies into

futile searches for gold and only slightly more successful efforts to

pile up lumber, tar, pitch, and iron for export. These energies would

have been better spent on growing food. The promoters also had little

interest in creating a family-centered community, and they sent

virtually no women to Jamestown. Hence settlers could not establish

real households and had diffficulty feeling any sense of a permanent

stake in the community.

ByJanuary I608~ when ships appeared with additional men and

supplies, all but 3 8 of the first I04 colonists were dead. Jamestown,

now facing extinction, survived largely as a result of the efforts of

CaptainJohn Smith, who at age twenty-seven was already a famous

world traveler. Leadership in the colony had been bitterly divided

until the fall of I 608, when Smith took control. He imposed work and

order on the community. He also organized raids on neighboring Indian

villages to steal food and kidnap natives. During the colony's second

winter, fewer than a dozen (in a population of about 200) died. By the

summer of I609, when Smith returned to England, the colony was

showing promise of survival. ButJamestown's ordeal was not over yet.

Reorganization and Expansion

As Jamestown struggled to survive, the London Company (now

renamed the Virginia Company) was already dreaming of bigger things.

In I609~ it obtained a new charter from the king, which increased its

power and enlarged its territory. It raised money by selling additional

stock. It offered stock in the company to planters who were willing to

migrate at their own

28 ~ THE UNFINISHED NATION

expense. And it provided free passage to ~lrginia for poorer people

who would agree to serve the company for seven years. In the spring

of I609~ confident that it was now poised to transform Jamestown

into a successful venture, the company dispatched a fleet of nine

vessels with about 600 people (including some women and children)

to ~lrginia.

Disaster followed. One of the ~Irginia-bound ships was lost at

sea in a hurricane. Another ran aground off Bermuda and was unable to

free itself for months. Many of those who reached Jamestown, still

weak from their long and stormy voyage, succumbed to fevers before

winter came. The winter of I609-I6IO became known as the "starving

time," a period worse than anything before. The local Indians,

antagonized by the hostile actions of the early English settlers, killed

off the livestock in the woods and kept the colonists barricaded

within their palisade. The Europeans lived on what they could find:

"dogs, cats, rats, snakes, toadstools, horsehides," and even the

"corpses of dead men," as one survivor recalled. When the migrants

who had run aground on Bermuda finally arrived in Jamestown the

following May, they found about 60 emaciated people (out of 500

residents the previous summer) still alive. The new arrivals took the

survivors onto their ship, abandoned the settlement, and set sail

downriver for home. But as the refugees proceeded down the James,

they met an English ship coming up the river=D1part of a fleet bringing

supplies and the colony's first governor, Lord De La Warr. The

departing settlers agreed to return to Jamestown. New relief

expeditions with hundreds of colonists soon began to arrive, and the

effort to turn a profit in Jamestown resumed.

Under the leadership of the first governors, ~lrginia survived and even

expanded. New settlements began lining the river above and below

Jamestown. That was partly because of the order and discipline the

governors at times managed to impose and partly because of military

assaults by the English on local Indian tribes to protect the new

settlements. But it was also because the colonists had at last

discovered a marketable crop=D1tobacco.

Europeans had become aware of tobacco soon after Columbus first

returned from the West Indies, where he had seen the Cuban natives

smoking small cigars (tabacos), which they inserted in the nostril. By=

the early seventeenth century, tobacco from the Spanish colonies was

already in wide use in Europe. Then, in I6I2~ theJamestown

planterJohn Rolfe, noting that local Indians were growing a strain of

tobacco, began trying to cultivate the crop in ~lrginia with seeds

obtained from the Spanish colonies. Tobacco planting quickly spread

up and down the James.

Almost immediately, tobacco cultivation created great pressure for

territorial expansion. Tobacco growers needed large tracts of land to

grow profitable crops; and because tobacco exhausted the soil very

quickly, the demand for land increased even more. As a result, English

farmers began establishing plantations deeper and deeper in the

interior, isolating themselves from the center of European settlement

atJamestown and penetrating farther into the territory of the native

tribes.

The tobacco economy also created a heavy demand for labor. To entice

new workers to the colony, the ~lrginia Company established what it

called the "headright" system. Headrights were fifty-acre grants of

land. Those who already lived in the colony received two headrights

(IOO acres) apiece. Each new settler received a single headright for

himself or herself. This System encouraged family groups to migrate

together, since the more family members traveled to America, the

more land the family would receive. In addition~ anyone who paid for

the passage of immigrants to ~lrginia would receive an extra

headright for each arrival, an encouragement to the pros-

perous to import new laborers. As a result, some colonists were able

to assemble large plantations.

The company also transported ironworkers and other skilled

craftsmen to ~Irginia to diversify the economy. In I6I9, it sent IOO

Englishwomen to the colony (which was still overwhelmingly male) to

become the wives of male colonists. It promised the male colonists

the full rights of Englishmen (as provided in the original charter of

I606), an end to strict and arbitrary rule, and even a share in self-

government. OnJuly 30, I6I9~ delegates from the various communities

met as the House of Burgesses. It was the first meeting of an elected

legislature within what was to become the United States.

A month later, ~Irginia established another important precedent. As

John Rolfe recorded, "about the latter end of August" a Dutch ship

brought in "20 and odd Negroes." There is some reason to believe that

the colonists did not consider these first Africans in ~lrginia slaves,

that they thought of them rather as servants to be held for a term of

years and then freed, like the white servants with whom the planters

were already familiar. For a time, moreover, the use of black labor

remained limited. Although AfTicans continued to trickle steadily

into the colony, planters continued to prefer European indentured

servants until at least the I670S, when white servants began to

become scarce and expensive. But the small group of blacks who

arrived in I6I9 marked the first step toward the enslavement of

Africans within what was to be the American republic.

The European settlers in ~lrginia built their society not only on the

coerced labor of imported Africans but also on the effective

suppression of the local Indians. For two years, Sir Thomas Dale led

unrelenting assaults against the Powhatan Indians and in the process

kidnapped the great chief Powhatan's daughter Pocahontas. When

Powhatan refused to ransom her, she converted to Christianity and in

I6I4 marriedJohn Rolfe. At that point, Powhatan ceased his attacks on

the English in the face of overwhelming odds. But after his death

several years later, his brother, Opechancanough, revived the effort to

defend tribal lands and began secretly to plan the elimination of the

English intruders. On a March morning in I622~ tribesmen called on

the white settlements as if to offer goods for sale, and then suddenly

attacked. Not until 347 whites of both sexes and all ages (including

John Rolfe) lay dead were the Indian warriors finally forced to

retreat. And not until over twenty years later were the Powhatans

finally defeated.

By then, however, the ~lrginia Company in London was defunct. The

company had poured virtually all its funds into its profitless

Jamestown venture and in the aftermath of the I622 Indian uprising

faced imminent

~

bankruptcy. In I624,James I revoked the company's charter, and the

colony at last came under the control of the crown. So it would

remain until I776.

Wlth the stabilization of ~lrginia's English sponsorship, the

suppression of the Indian threat, and the development of a profitable

cash crop, the colony finally seemed secure. But this success had

come at a terrible cost. In ~lrginia's first seventeen years, more than

8,500 white settlers had arrived in the colony. In I624, the white

population stood at I,300. More than 80 percent had abandoned the

colony or died.

Ma~yland and the Calverts

The Maryland colony ultimately came to look much like ~lrginia, but

its origins were very different from those of its southern neighbor.

George Calvert, the first Lord Baltimore, was a recent convert to

Catholicism and a shrewd businessman, and he envisioned

establishing a colony in America both as a great speculative venture

in real estate and as a retreat for English Catholics oppressed by the

Anglican establishment at home. Calvert died while still negotiating

with the king for a charter to establish a colony in the Chesapeake

region. But in I632 his son Cecilius, the second Lord Baltimore, finally

received the charter.

The Maryland charter was remarkable not only for the extent of

the territory it granted to Calvert=D1an area that encompassed parts of

what is now Pennsylvania, Delaware, and ~lrginia, in addition to

present-day Maryland=D1but for the powers it bestowed on him. He and

his heirs were to hold their province as "true and absolute lords and

proprietaries." Their only obligation to the king was paying an annual

fee to the crown.

Lord Baltimore named his brother, Leonard Calvert, as governor of the

colony. In March I634~ two ships=D1the ~Irk and the Dove=D1bearing

Calvert along with 200 or 300 other colonists, entered the Potomac

River, turned into one of its eastern tributaries, and established the

village of St. Mary's on a high, dry bluff. Neighboring Indians

befriended the settlers and provided them with temporary shelter and

with stocks of corn. The early Marylanders experienced no Indian

assaults, no plagues, no starving time.

The Calverts needed to attract thousands of settlers to Maryland if

their expensive colonial venture was to pay. As a result, they had to

encourage the immigration of Protestants as well as their fellow

English Catholics. The Calverts soon realized that Catholics would

always be a minority in the colony, and so they adopted a policy of

religious toleration, embodied in the I649 "Act Concerning Religion,"

which assured freedom of worship to all Christians. Nevertheless,

politics in Maryland remained plagued for years

3 2 I HE UNFINISHED NATION

by tensions, and at times violence, between the Catholic minority and

the Protestant majority.

The government in Maryland gradually came to resemble that of

other English colonies in America in many ways. At the insistence of

the first settlers, the Calverts agreed in I635 to the calling of a

representative assembly=D1the House of Delegates=D1whose proceedings

were based on the rules of Parliament. But the proprietor retained

absolute authority to distribute land as he wished; and since Lord

Baltimore granted large estates to his relatives and to other English

aristocrats, a distinct upper class soon established itself. By I640~ a

severe labor shortage forced a modification of the land-grant

procedure; and Maryland, like ~lrginia, adopted a headright system=D1a

grant of IOO acres to each male settler, another IOO for his wife and

each servant, and 50 for each of his children. But the great landlords

of the colony's earliest years remained powerful even as the

population grew larger and more diverse. Like ~lrginia, Maryland

became a center of tobacco cultivation; and as in ~lrginia, planters

worked their land with the aid, first, of indentured servants imported

from England and then, beginning late in the seventeenth century, of

slaves imported from Africa.

Turbulent Virginia

By the mid-seventeenth century, the ~lrginia colony had survived its

early disasters. Its population was growing, and its economy was

becoming more complex and profitable. Soon, factions began to

emerge within the colony to compete for influence within the

government, and particularly for influence over policies toward the

natives.

For more than thirty years, one man=D1Sir ~flliam Berkeley, the

royal governor of ~lrginia=D1dominated the politics of the colony. He

took office in I642 at the age of thirty-six and with but one

interruption remained in control of the government until the I 670S.

In his first years as governor, he helped open up the interior of

~lrginia by sending explorers across the Blue Ridge Mountains and

crushing a I 644 Indian uprising. The defeated Indians agreed to a

treaty ceding to England most of the territory east of the mountains

and establishing a boundary west of which white settlement would be

prohibited. But the rapid growth of the ~lrginia population made this

agreement difficult to sustain. By I650~ ~lrginia's population of

I6~000 was twice what it had been ten years before; by I660~ it had

more than doubled again, to 40,000. By I652, English settlers had

established three counties in the territory set aside by the treaty for

the Indians. Unsurprisingly, there were frequent clashes between

natives and whites.

1 HE ~N~LISH 1 RANSPLANTArlONS ~ 3 3

In the meantime, Berkeley was expanding his powers and making

himself virtually an autocrat. By I670~ the vote for delegates to the

House of Burgesses, once open to all white men, was restricted to

landowners. Elections were rare, and the same burgesses,

representing the established planters of the Eastern (or tidewater)

region of the colony and subservient

r to the governor, remained in office year after year. The more recent

settlers on the frontier were underrepresented in the assembly or

not represented at all.

~~=09Resentment of the power of the governor and the tidewater

aristocrats

;~ grew steadily in the newly settled lands of the west (often known

as the "back

. country"). In I676~ this resentment helped create a major conflict,

led by Nathaniel Bacon, a young, handsome aristocrat who had

arrived in Virginia in I673. Bacon had a good farm in the west and a

seat on the governor's council. But like other members of the new

back-country gentry, he was at odds in crucial ways with the

governor and his tidewater allies, particularly over Indian policy.

The frontier elite was in constant danger of attack from the tribes

on whose lands they were encroaching, and they chafed at the

governor's attempts to hold the line of settlement steady so as to

avoid antagonizing the Indians. Bacon's rift with Berkeley was also

a result of resentment that he was not part of the inner circle of

the governor's council and that Berkeley refused to allow him a

piece of the Indian fur trade, which the governor himself

controlled.

Bloody events thrust Bacon into the role of leader of an anti-

Berkeley faction. In I675~ a major conflict erupted in the west

between whites and natives. As the fighting escalated, Bacon and

other concerned landholders demanded that the governor send the

militia. Berkeley, however, simply ordered the construction of several

new forts along the western border. Bacon responded by offering to

organize a volunteer army of back-country men who would do their

own fighting. Berkeley, who saw Bacon as a potential rival and feared

a needless slaughter of the natives, rejected the offer. Bacon ignored

him and launched a series of vicious but unsuccessful pursuits of the

Indian challengers.

When Berkeley heard of the unauthorized military effort, he dismissed

Bacon from the governor's council and proclaimed him and his men to

be rebels. Bacon now turned his army against the governor and, in

what became known as Bacon's Rebellion, twice led his troops east to

Jamestown. The first time he won a temporary pardon from the

governor; the second time, after the governor reneged on the

agreement, Bacon burned the city and drove the governor into exile.

But then Bacon died suddenly of dysentery; and Berkeley, his position

bolstered by the arrival of British troops, soon

regained control. In I677~ the Indians (aware of their inability to

defeat the white forces militarily) reluctantly signed a new treaty

that opened new lands to white settlement.

Bacon's Rebellion was significant for several reasons. It was

evidence of the continuing struggle to define the Indian and white

spheres of influence in ~lrginia. It revealed the bitterness of the

competition among rival elites and between easterners and

westerners in particular. But it also demonstrated the potential for

instability in the colony's large population of free, landless men.

These men=D1most of them former indentured servants without

property or prospects=D1had formed the bulk of Bacon's constituency

during the rebellion. Their hatred of Indians drew them to Bacon, but

they also harbored a deep animosity toward the landed gentry (of

which Bacon himself was a part). One result was that landed elites in

both eastern and western ~lrginia began to recognize a common

interest in quelling social unrest from below. That was one of several

reasons for their turning increasingly to the African slave trade to

fulfill their need for labor. African slaves, unlike white indentured

servants, did not need to be released after a fixed term and hence did

not threaten to become an unstable, landless class.

THE GROWTH OF NEW ENGLAND

The northern regions of British North America were slower to attract

settlers, in part because the Plymouth Company was never able to

mount a successful colonizing expedition after receiving its charter

in I606. It did, however, sponsor exploration of the region. Captain

John Smith, after his return from Jamestown, made an exploratory

journey for the Plymouth merchants, wrote an enthusiastic pamphlet

about the lands he had seen, and called them New England.

Plymoutb Plantation

A discontented congregation of Puritan Separatists in England, not the

Plymouth Company, established the first enduring European

settlement in New England. In I 608~ after years of persecution for

attempting to practice their own religion, a congregation of

Separatists from the hamlet of Scrooby began emigrating quietly (and

illegally), a few at a time, to Leyden, Holland, where they could enjoy=

freedom of worship. But as foreigners in Holland, they could not join

the Dutch guilds of craftsmen, and so they had to work at unskilled

and poorly paid jobs. They also watched with alarm

50 Kilometers

as their children began to speak Dutch, marry into Dutch families, and

drift away from their church. Finally some of the Separatists decided

to move again, across the Atlantic, where they hoped to create a

stable, protected community and where they could spread "the gospel

of the Kingdom of Chnst m those remote parts of the world."

In I620, leaders of the Scrooby group obtained permission from the

rginia Company to settle in ~lrginia and received informal assurances

from the king that he would "not molest them, provided they carried

themselves peaceably." Several English merchants advanced the

necessary funds for the venture on the condition that the merchants

share in the profits at the end of seven years. The "Pilgrims," as they

saw themselves, sailed from Plymouth, England, in September I620

aboard the Mayflowe7~; with thirty-five "saints" (Puritan

Separatists) and sixty-seven "strangers" (people who were not part of

the congregation) aboard. In November, after a long and diffficult

voyage, they sighted land=D1the shore of what is now Cape Cod. l'hat had

not been their destination, but it was too late in the year to sail

36 ~ THE UNFINISHED NATION

farther. So the Pilgrims chose a site for their settlement in the area

just north of the cape, a place John Smith had labeled "Plymouth" on a

map he had drawn during an earlier exploration of New England.

Because Plymouth lay outside the London Company's territory, the

settlers were not bound by the company's rules. So while still aboard

ship, the "saints" in the group drew up an agreement, the Mayflower

Compact, which established a civil govemment. Then, on December 2

I~ I620~ they stepped ashore at Plymouth Rock.

The Pilgrims' first winter was a difficult one. Half the colonists

perished from malnutrition, disease, and exposure. But the colony

survived, in large part because of crucial assistance from local

Indians, who showed them how to gather seafood and cultivate corn.

After the first autumn harvest, the settlers invited the natives to

join them in a festival, the original Thanksgiving. The Pilgrims could

not create rich farms on the sandy and marshy soil around Plymouth,

but they developed a profitable trade in fish and furs. New colonists

arrived from England, and in a decade the population reached the

modest total of 3oo.

The people of Plymouth Plantation chose as their governor the

remarkable ~llliam Bradford, who in I62I won them title to their land

from the Council for New England (the successor to the old Plymouth

Company, which had charter rights to the territory). He never

succeeded in his efforts to obtain a royal charter giving the Pilgrims

clear rights of self-government, but Bradford governed successfully

for many years without any real interference from London.

The Pilgrims were always a poor community. As late as the I640S~

they had only one plow among them. But they were, on the whole,

content to be left alone to live their lives in what they considered

godly ways. At times, they spoke of serving as a model for other

Christians. But the Pilgrims were less concerned about how they were

viewed by others than were the Puritans who settled the larger and

more ambitious English colonies to their north.

The Massachusetts Bay Expetiment

Turbulent events in England in the I620S generated a strong interest

in colonization among other groups of Puritans. James I had been

creating tensions for years by his effort to assert the divine right of

kings and by his harsh, repressive policies toward Puritans. The

situation grew worse when he was succeeded in I625 by his son,

Charles I, who was even more aggressively autocratic than his father.

The new king tried to restore Roman Catholicism to England and to

destroy religious nonconformity. The Puritans were particular targets

of Charles's policies; many of them were impris-

Safe ~4wival of the Pilgrims at Cape Cod

BEING THUS ARRIVED in a good harbor, and brought safe to land, they

fell upon their knees and blessed the God of Heaven who had brought

them over the vast and furious ocean, and delivered them from all the

perils and miseries thereof, again to set their feet on the firm and

stable earth, their proper element....

But here I cannot but stay and make a pause, and

stand half amazed at this poor people's present

condition; . . . they had now no friends to welcome them nor inns to

entertain or refresh their weatherbeaten bodies; no houses or much

less towns to repair to, to seek for succour. It is recorded in

Scripture as a mercy to the Apostle and his shipwrecked company,

that the barbarians showed them no small kindness in refreshing

them, but these savage barbarians, when they met with them . . . were

readier to fill their sides full of arrows than otherwise.... Besides,

what could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of

wild beasts and wild men=D1and what multitudes there might be of

them they knew not. . . . Which way soever they turned their eyes (save

upward to the heavens) they could have little solace or content in

respect of any outward objects. For summer being done, all things

stand upon them with a weatherbeaten face, and the whole country,

full of woods and thickets, represented a wild and savage hue.

SoURcE William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation: 1620-I647, ed.

Samuel Eliot Morison, pp. 6I-62. Copyright I952 Samuel Eliot Morison.

Reprinted by permisSion of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

oned for their beliefs. The king dissolved Parliament in I629 (it was

not to be recalled until I640)~ ensuring that there would be no

political redress.

In the midst of this turrnoil, a group of Puritan merchants began

organizing a new enterprise to take advantage of opportunities in

America. At first, their interest was largely an economic one. They

obtained a grant of land in New England for most of the area now

comprising Massachusetts and New Hampshire; and they acquired a

charter from the king (who was evidently unaware of their religious

inclinations) allowing them to create the Massachusetts Bay Company

and to establish a colony in the New World. In I629, they were ready

to dispatch a substantial group of settlers to New England.

Some members of the Massachusetts Bay Company, however, saw the

enterprise as something more than a business venture. They decided

to emigrate themselves and try to create in New England a refuge for

Puritans. After buying out the interests of the company members who

preferred to stay in England, the new owners elected a governor, John

Winthrop, who commanded the expedition that sailed for New England

in I 630: seventeen ships and I~OOO people, mostly family groups. It

was the largest single migration of its kind in the seventeenth

century. Winthrop carried with him the charter of the Massachusetts

Bay Company, which meant that the colonists would be responsible to

no company officials in England.

The Massachusetts migration quickly produced several settlements.

The port of Boston, at the mouth of the Charles River, became the

capital, but in the course of the next decade colonists established

several other towns in eastern Massachusetts: Charlestown, Newtown

(later renamed Cambridge), Roxbury, Dorchester, Watertown, Ipswich

Concord, Sudbury, and others. The Massachusetts Bay Company soon

transformed itself into the Massachusetts colonial government.

According to the terms of the original company charter, the "freemen"

(the eight stockholders) formed the governing body (or "general

court") of the colony. But the colonists redefined "freemen" to include

all male citizens. John Winthrop continued to dominate the politics of

Massachusetts Bay, but after I634 he and most other officers of the

colony had to face election each year.

Unlike the Separatist founders of Plymouth, the Puritan founders of

Massachusetts had come to America with no intention of breaking

away from the Church of England. Yet if they continued to feel any

real attachment to the Anglican establishment, they gave little sign

of it in their behavior. In every town, the community church had (in

the words of the prominent ministerJohn Cotton) "complete liberty to

stand alone," without connection to Anglican hierarchy or ritual. Each

congregation chose its own minister and regulated its own affairs.

The result was what became the Congregational church, a church

controlled by its own congregation.

The Massachusetts Puritans were not grim or joyless, as many critics

would later come to believe, but they were serious and pious. They

strove to lead useful, conscientious lives of thrift and hard work, and

they honored material success as evidence of God's favor. Winthrop

and the other founders of Massachusetts believed they were founding

a holy commonwealth, a model=D1a "city upon a hill"=D1for the corrupt

world to see and emulate. But if Massachusetts was to become a

beacon to others, it had first to maintain its own purity and

"holiness." And to that end, the ministers and the officers of the

government worked dosely together. Massachusetts dissidents had no

more freedom of worship than the Puritans themselves had had in

Englan

Like other new settlements, the Massachusetts Bay colony had early

difficulties. During the first winter (I629-I630), nearly 200 died and

many others decided to leave. But more rapidly thanJamestown, the

colony grew and prospered. The nearby Pilgrims and neighboring

Indians helped with food and advice. Incoming settlers, many of them

affluent, brought needed tools and other goods. The dominance of

families in the colony (a sharp contrast to the early years

atJamestown) helped ensure a feeling of commitment to the

community and a sense of order among the settlers, and it also

ensured that the population would reproduce itself.

Sp rea din g S ettle m ent

It did not take long for English settlement to begin moving outward

from Massachusetts Bay to other parts of New England and beyond.

Some people migrated in search of more productive soil than the

stony land around Boston provided. Others left because of the

oppressiveness of the church-dominated government of

Massachusetts. Tolerance for those who were not practicing Puritans

was limited, and most had little choice but to conform or leave.

The Connecticut River valley, about IOO miles west of Boston,

began attracting English families as early as the I630S~ despite the

presence of powerful native tribes and despite claims to those lands

by the Dutch. The Connecticut settlers were attracted by the valley's

fertile lands and by its isolation from the religious character of

Massachusetts Bay. In I635~ Thomas Hooker, a minister of Newtown

(Cambridge), defied the Massachusetts government, led his

congregation west, and established the town of Hartford. Four years

later, the people of Hartford and of two other newly founded towns

nearby established a colonial government of their own and

40 THE UNFINISHED NATION

adopted a constitution known as the Fundamental Orders of

Connecticut. This created a government similar to that of

Massachusetts Bay but gave a larger proportion of the men the right

to vote and hold office. (Women were barred from voting virtually

everywhere.) Another CoQnecticut colony grew up around New Haven

on the Connecticut coast. Unlike Hartford, it reflected unhappiness

with what its founders considered the increasing religious laxity in

Boston. The Fundamental Articles of New Haven (I639) established a

Bible-based government even stricter than that of Massachusetts Bay.

New Haven remained independent until I662~ when a royal charter

officially gave the Hartford colony jurisdiction over the New Haven

settlements.

European settlement in what is now Rhode Island was a result of

the religious and political dissent of R~ger ~Nllliams, an engaging but

controversial young minister who lived for a time in Salem,

Massachusetts.

lliams was a confirmed Separatist who argued that the

Massachusetts church should abandon even its nominal allegiance to

the Church of England. He was also friendly with the neighboring

Indians and proclaimed that the land the colonists were occupying

belonged to the natives and not to the king or to the Massachusetts

Bay Company. The colonial government considered W~llliams

dangerous and voted to deport him, but he escaped before they could

do so. During the bitter winter of I635-I636~ he took refuge with

Narragansett tribesmen; and the following spring he bought a tract of

land from them, and with a few followers, created the town of

Providence on it. U7l11iams considered himself the proprietor of the

region and he called for complete freedom of worship. In I644~ after

obtaining a charter from Parliament, he established a government for

Providence and the surrounding settlements=D1a government that was

based on the Massachusetts pattern but that did not restrict the vote

to church members or tax the people for church support. For a time,

Rhode Island was the only colony in which all faiths

(includingJudaism) could worship without interference.

Another challenge to the established religious order in

Massachusetts Bay came from Anne Hutchinson, an intelligent and

charismatic woman from a substantial Boston family. Hutchinson

argued that the faithful could communicate directly with God (as she

claimed she herself had done) and gain from Him assurance of grace

and salvation. Such teachings (known as the Antinomian heresy) were

a serious threat to the spiritual authority of the established clergy.

The belief that an individual could receive a revelation directly from

God carried with it an implication that ministers were not essential

to the task of discovering one's chance of salvation. Hutchinson also

affronted prevailing assumptions about the proper role of women in

THE ENGLISH TRANSPLANTATIONS 4I

Puritan society. She was not a retiring, deferential wife and mother,

but a powerful religious figure in her own right.

As Hutchinson's influence grew, and as she began to deliver open

attacks on members of the clergy, the Massachusetts hierarchy

mobilized to stop her. In I638~ she was convicted of heresy and

sedition and banished. ~Ith her family and some of her followers, she

moved to a point on Narragansett Bay not far from Providence. Later

she moved south into New York, where in I643 she and her family died

during an Indian uprising.

42 ~ THE UNFINISHED NATION THE

ENGLISH TRANspLANTATloNs

The Hutchinson affair had an important impact on the settlement

of the areas north of Massachusetts Bay. New Hampshire and Maine

were established in I629 by two English proprietors. But despite

lavish promotional efforts, few settlers moved into these northern

regions until the religious disruptions in Massachusetts Bay. In I639~

John Wheelwright, a disciple of Anne Hutchinson, led some of his

fellow dissenters to Exeter, New Hampshire. Other groups=D1of both

dissenting and orthodox Puritans=D1soon followed. The Massachusetts

Bay Company tried to extend its authority over this entire northern

territory, with partial success. New Hampshire became a separate

colony in I679~ but Maine remained a part

ofMassachusettsuntil I820.

Settlers and Natives

The first white settlers in New England generally maintained

amicable relations with the natives and learned much from them.

Indians taught whites how to grow vital food crops such as corn,

beans, pumpkins, and potatoes; they also taught them crucial

agricultural techniques, such as annual burning for fertilization and

planting beans to replenish exhausted soil. European farmers also

benefited from the extensive lands Indians had already cleared (and

either abandoned or sold). White traders used Indians as partners in

some of their most important trading activities (and particularly in

the creation of the thriving North American fur trade). Indeed,

commerce with the Indians was responsible for the creation of some

of the first great fortunes in British North America. Other white

settlers attempted to educate the Indians in European religion and

culture. Protestant missionaries converted some natives to

Christianity, and a few Indians became at least partially assimilated

into white society.

But as in other areas of white settlement, tensions soon

developed in New England between Europeans and natives=D1primarily

as a result of the white colonists' insatiable appetite for land and

their steady encroachments into Indian territory. The particular

character of those conflicts=D1and the brutality with which whites

assaulted their Indian foes=D1emerged as well out of Puritan attitudes

toward the natives. The religious leaders of New England came to

consider the tribes a threat to their hopes of creating a godly

community in the New World, particularly once dissenters such as

Roger Williams began forming close relationships with the tribes.

Gradually, the image of Indians as helpful neighbors came to be

replaced by the image of Indians as "heathens" and barbarians.

In I637~ hostilities broke out between English settlers in the

Connecticut Valley and the Pequot Indians of the region, a conflict

(known as the Pequot War) that ended disastrously for the natives.

The Pequot tribe was almost wiped out. But the bloodiest and most

prolonged encounter between

- whites and Indians in the seventeenth century began in I 675~ a

conflict that whites called King Philip's War. As in the Pequot War,

an Indian tribe=D1the Wampanoags, under the leadership of a

chieftain known to the white settlers as King Philip and among his

own people as Metacomet=D1rose up to resist English encroachment

on its lands and the efforts of the colonial govern-

t ment to impose English law on the natives. (A court in Plymouth had

recently tried and hanged several Wampanoags for murdering a

member of their own tribe.)

For three years, the natives inflicted terror on a string of

Massachusetts towns, killing over a thousand people (including at

least one-sixteenth of the white males in the colony). But the white

settlers gradually prevailed, beginning in I676. Massachusetts leaders

recruited guides and spies from rival tribes, including a group of

Mohawks who ambushed Metacomet, shot and killed him, and then bore

his severed head to Boston to present to the

',"~r colonial leaders. Without Metacomet, the fragile alliance among

the tribes collapsed, and the white settlers were soon able to

crush the uprising.

.;j=09Yet these victories by the white colonists did not end the

danger to their

-' settlements. This was in part because other Indians in other tribes

were still capable of launching wars. It was also because the

New England settlers faced competition not only from the

natives but also from the Dutch and the French, who claimed

the territory on which some of the outlying settlements were

established. The French, in particular, would pose a constant

threat to the English through their alliance with the

Algonquins. In later years, they would support hostile Indians

in their attacks on the New England frontier.

THE RESTORATION COLONIES

By the end of the I630S, then, English settlers had established the

beginningS of what would eventually become six of the thirteen

original states of the American republic: Vlrginia, Massachusetts,

Maryland, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire. But for

nearly thirty years after Lord Baltimore received the charter for

Maryland in I632, no new English colonies were established in

America. England was preoccupied with troubles of its own at home.

44 ~ THE UNFINISHED NATION

The English Civil War

The unpopular James I had attracted widespread opposition in England

before he died in I625, but he never came into open conflict with

Parliament. His son, Charles I, was not so fortunate. After he

dissolved Parliament in I629 and began ruling as an absolute monach,

he steadily alienated a growing number of his subjects=D1and the

members of the powerful Puritan community above all. Finally,

desperately in need of money, Charles called Parliament back into

session in I640 and asked it to levy new taxes. But he antagonized the

members by dismissing them twice in two years; and in I642, they

organized a military force, thus beginning the English Civil War.

The conflict between the Cavaliers (the supporters of the king)

and the Roundheads (the forces of Parliament, who were largely

Puritans) lasted seven years. In I649, the Roundheads defeated the

king's forces, captured Charles himself, and beheaded the monarch.

The stern Roundhead leader Oliver Cromwell replaced the king and

assumed the position of "protector." Butwhen Cromwell died in I658,

his son and heir proved unable to maintain his authority, and two

years later, King Charles II, son of the beheaded monarch, returned

from exile and seized the throne, thus completing what became known

as the Stuart Restoration.

Arnong the results of the Restoration was the resumption of

colonization in America. Charles II rewarded faithful courtiers with

grants of land in the New World and in the twenty-five years of his

reign issued charters for four additional colonies: Carolina, New York,

NewJersey, and Pennsylvania. The new colonies were all proprietary

ventures (modeled on Maryland rather than on Virginia and=

Massachusetts), in large part because private companies were no

longer taking an interest in launching colonies, having finally realized

that there were no quick profits to be had in the New World. The new

colonies had different aims: not so much quick commercial success as

permanent settlements that would provide proprietors with land and

power.

The Carolinas

Carolina (a name derived from the Latin word for "Charles") was, like

Maryland, carved in part from the original ~lrginia grant. In

successive charters issued in I663 and I665, Charles II awarded eight

proprietors joint title to a vast territory stretching south to the

Florida peninsula and west to the Pacific Ocean. Like Lord Baltimore,

they received almost kingly powers over their grant. They reserved

tremendous estates for themselves and distributed the rest through a

headright system similar to those in Virginia

THE ENGLISH TFANSPLANTATIONS 45

and Maryland, after which they collected annual payments from the

settlers. Although committed Anglicans themselves, they welcomed

settlers of all Christian faiths and guaranteed them religious

fTeedom in the colonial charter. The proprietors also allowed a

measure of political freedom, creating a representative assembly to

make laws. They hoped to attract settlers fTom the existing American

colonies and to avoid the expense of financing expeditions from

England.

But their initial efforts to profit from settlement in Carolina

failed dismally. A few early colonizing ventures were quickly

abandoned, and most of the original proprietors soon concluded that

the Carolina venture could not succeed. One man, however, persisted

Anthony Ashley Cooper. Cooper convinced the other proprietors to give

up on attracting settlers from other colonies and to finance

expeditions to Carolina fTom England, the first of which set sail with

300 people in the spring of I670. Only IOO people survived the

diffficult voyage; those who did established a settlement at Port=

Royal on the Carolina coast. Ten years later they founded a city at the

junction of the Ashley and Cooper rivers, which in I 690 became the

colonial capital. They called it Charles Town (it was later renamed

Charleston).

With the aid of the English philosopherJohn Locke, Cooper (now the

Earl of Shaftesbury) drew up the Fundamental Constitution for

Carolina in I669 in an attempt to create a highly ordered society. It

divided the colony into counties of equal size and divided each county

into equal parcels. The largest number of parcels would be distributed

among the proprietors themselves (who were to be known as

"seigneurs"); a local aristocracy (consisting of lesser nobles known as

"landgraves" or "caciques") would receive fewer parcels; and ordinary

settlers ("leet-men") would receive less land still. At the bottom of

this stratified society would be poor whites, who had no political

rights, and African slaves, whose subjection would be complete.

Proprietors, nobles, and other landholders would have a voice in the

colonial parliament in proportion to the size of their landholdings.

In fact, however, Carolina developed along lines quite different from

the carefully ordered vision of Shaftesbury and Locke. For one thing,

the colony was never really united in anything more than name. The

northern and southern regions of settlement were widely separated

and socially and economically distinct from one another. The northern

settlers were mainly backwoods farmers, scratching out a meager

existence at subsistence agriculture. They developed no important

aristocracy and for many years imported virtually no black slaves. In

the south, fertile lands and the good harbor at Charles Town promoted

a far more prosperous economy and a far more stratified, aristocratic

society. Settlements ~rew up rapidly alon~ the

46 ~ THE UNFINISHED NATION

Ashley and Cooper rivers, and colonists established a flourishing

trade, particularly (beginning in the I660S) in rice=D1which was to

become the colony's principal commercial crop.

Southern Carolina very early developed close commercial ties to

the large (and overpopulated) European colony on the Caribbean island

of Barbados. During the first ten years of settlement, most of the new

residents in Carolina were Barbadians, some of whom arrived with

large groups of black workers and established themselves as

substantial landlords. African slavery had taken root on Barbados

earlier than in any of the mainland colonies; and the white Caribbean

migrants=D1tough, uncomprornising profit seekers=D1established a

similar slave-based plantation society in Carolina.

For several decades, Carolina remained one of the most factious of all

the English colonies in America. There were tensions between the

small farmers of the Albemarle region in the north and the wealthy

planters in the south. And there were conflicts between the rich

Barbadians in southern Carolina and the smaller landowners around

them. After Lord Shaftesbury's death, the proprietors proved unable to

establish order. In I7I9, the colonists seized control of the colony

from them. Ten years later, the king divided the region into two royal

colonies, North and South Carolina.

Nezv Netherland and Ne7v York

In I664~ Charles II granted his brother James, the Duke of York, all

the territory lying between the Connecticut and Delaware rivers. But

the grant faced major challenges. The Massachusetts Bay Company

claimed some of the territory, and, more importantly, the Dutch

claimed the entire area and controlled settlements at New

Amsterdam and other strategic points.

England and the Netherlands were already commercial rivals in

Europe, and that rivalry now extended to America, where the Dutch

served as a wedge between the northern and southern English

colonies. In I664~ vessels of the English navy, under the command of

Richard Nicolls, put in at New Amsterdam and extracted a surrender

from the arbitrary and unpopular Dutch governor, Peter Stuyvesant.

Several years later, in I673, the Dutch reconquered and briefly held

their old provincial capital. But they lost it again, this time for good,

in I674.

The Duke of York, now firmly in possession of his territory, renamed

it New York and set out to govern the diverse region. New York

contained not only Dutch and English but Scandinavians, Germans,

French, a large number of Africans (imported as slaves by the Dutch

West India Company),

THE ENGLISH TRANSPLANTATIONS ~ 47

as well as members of several different Indian tribes. James wisely

made no effort to impose his own Roman Catholicism on the colony. He

delegated powers to a governor and a council but made no provision

for representative assemblies.

Property holding and political power remained highly divided and

highly unequal in New York. In addition to confirming the great Dutch

apatroonships" already in existence, James granted large estates to

some of his own political supporters in order to create a class of

influential landowners loyal to him. Power in the colony thus

remained widely dispersed=D1 among wealthy English landlords, Dutch

patroons, fur traders, and the duke's political appointees. By I685~

when the Duke of York ascended the English throne as James II, New

York contained about four times as many people (around 30~000) as

when he had taken power over it twenty years before, and it was one

of the most factious colonies in America.

- Shortly afterJames received his charter, he gave a large part of

the land south of New York to a pair of political allies, both Carolina

proprietors, Sir John Berkeley and Sir George Carteret. Carteret

named the territory New Jersey, after the island in the English

Channel on which he had been born. But the venture in NewJersey

generated few profits, and in I674~ Berkeley sold his half interest.

The colony was divided into two jurisdictions, East and West Jersey,

which squabbled with one another until I702, when the two halves of

the colony were again joined and became a single royal colony.

New Jersey, like New York (fTom which much of the population

had come), was a colony of enormous ethnic and religious diversity,

and the weak colonial government made few efforts to impose strict

control over the fTagrnented society. But unlike New York, NewJersey

developed no important class of large landowners; most of its

residents remained small farmers. Nor did New Jersey (which, unlike

New York, had no natural harbor) produce any single important city.

The Quaker Colonies

Pennsylvania was born out of the efforts of a dissenting English

Protestant sect, the Society of Friends, to find a home for their own

distinctive social order. The society began in the mid-seventeenth

century under the leadership of George Fox, a Nottingham shoemaker,

and Margaret Fell. Their followers came to be known as Quakers (from

Fox's instruction to them to "tremble at the name of the Lord"). Unlike

the Puritans, Quakers rejected

48 THE UNFINISHED NATION

the concept of predestination and original sin. All people, they

believed, had divinity within themselves and need only learn to

cultivate it; all could attain salvation. Also unlike the Puritans,

Quakers granted women a position within the church generally equal

to that of men.

The Quakers had no formal church government and no traditional

church buildings, only meetinghouses. They had no paid clergy, and in

their worship they spoke up one by one as the spirit moved them.

Disregarding distinctions of gender and class, they addressed one

another with the terms "thee" and "thou," words commonly used in

other parts of English society only in speaking to servants and social

inferiors. As confirmed pacifists, they would not take part in wars.

Unpopular in England both with the government and with members of

other religious orders (whose services Quakers occasiona~ly

disrupted), the Quakers began looking to America for asylum. A few

migrated to New England or Carolina, but most Quakers wanted a

colony of their own. As members of a despised sect, however, they

could not get the necessary royal grant without the aid of someone

influential at the court.

Fortunately for the Quaker cause, a number of wealthy and prominent

men had converted to the faith. One of them was William Penn, whose

father, Sir William Penn, was an admiral in the Royal Navy and a

landlord of valuable Irish estates. Over his father's objections, the

younger Penn converted to Quakerism, took up evangelism, and was

sent repeatedly to prison. He soon began working with George Fox to

create a Quaker colony in America.

Penn looked first to NewJersey, half of which (after I674) belonged to

two fellow Quakers. But in I68I~ after the death of his father, he

received fTom the king an even more valuable grant of lands. Penn had

inherited his father's claim to a large debt from the king. Charles II

paid the debt with an enormous grant of territory between New York

and Maryland, which Penn was to control as both landlord and ruler. At

the king's insistence, the territory was to be named Pennsylvania,

after Penn's late father.

Through his informative and honest advertising, Penn soon made

Pennsylvania the best-known and most cosmopolitan of all the English

colonies in America, a place to which settlers flocked from England

and the Continent. More than any other English colony, Pennsylvania

prospered fTom the outset, because of Penn's successful recruiting,

his thoughtful planning, and the region's mild climate and fertile soil.

But the colony never became a great source of profit for Penn or his

descendants. Indeed, Penn himself, near the end of his life, was

imprisoned in England for debt and died in l~overty in I 7 I 8 .

rHE ENGLISH I RANSPLANTATIONS 49

But Penn was much more than a mere real-estate promoter, and

he undertook in Pennsylvania what he called a "holy experiment." He

personally sailed to Pennsylvania in I682 to oversee the laying out,

between the Delaware and the Schuylkill rivers, of the city he named

Philadelphia ("Brotherly Love"), which with its rectangular streets

helped set the pattern for most later cities in America. Penn

recognized Indian claims to the land in the province, and he was

scrupulous about reimbursing them for it. The Indians respected Penn,

and during his lifetime the colony had no major battles with the

natives.

But the colony was not vithout conflict. By the late I690S~ some

residents of Pennsylvania were beginning to chafe at the nearly

absolute power of the proprietor. Residents of the southern areas of

the colony, in particular, complained that the government in

Philadelphia was unresponsive to their needs. Pressure from these

groups grew to the point that in I 70I ~ shortly before he departed for

England for the last time, Penn agreed to a Charter of Liberties for

the colony. The charter established a representative assembly

(consisting, alone among the English colonies, of only one house),

which greatly limited the authority of the proprietor. The charter also

permitted "the lower counties" of the colony to establish their own

representative assembly. The three counties did so in I703 and as a

result became, in effect, a separate colony=D1Delaware=D1although until

the Revolution it continued to have the same governor as

Pennsylvania.

The Founding of Georgia

Not until I 73 3, decades after the founding of the Restoration

colonies, did another new English settlement emerge in America:

Georgia, the last English colony to be established in what would

become the United States. Georgia was unlike any other colony. It was

founded neither by a corporation nor by a wealthy proprietor. Its

guiding purpose was neither the pursuit of profit nor the desire for a

religious refuge. The founders of Georgia, led by General James

Oglethorpe, were driven primarily by military and philanthropic

motives. They wanted to erect a military barrier against the Spanish

lands on the southern border of English America; and they wanted to

provide a refuge for the impoverished, a place where English men and

women without prospects at home could begin a new life.

The need for a military buffer between South Carolina and the

Spanish settlements in Florida was growing urgent in the first years

of the eighteenth century. There had been tensions between the

Spanish and the English in

50 ~ THE UNFINISHED NATION=09RI=09THE

ENGLISH "rRANSPLANTATlONS=09~=09SI

North America ever since the founding of Jamestown. And when

hostilities broke out in Europe between Spain and England in I70I

(known in England as Queen Anne's War and on the Continent as the

War of the Spanish Succession), fighting renewed in America as well.

That war ended in I7I3, but another European conflict with

repercussions for the New World was continually expected.

Oglethorpe, a hero of Queen Anne's War, was very much aware of=

the military advantages of an English colony south of the Carolinas.

Yet his interest in the settlement was primarily philanthropic. As

head of a parliamentary committee investigating English prisons, he

was moved by the plight of honest debtors rotting in confinement.

Such prisoners, and other poor people in danger of succumbing to a

similar fate, could, he believed, become the farmer-soldiers of the

new colony in America.

A I732 charter from King George II transferred the land between the

Savannah and Altamaha rivers to Oglethorpe and his fellow trustees.

Oglethorpe himself led the first colonial expedition to Georgia, which

built a fortified town at the mouth of the Savannah River in I733 and

later constructed additional forts south of the Altamaha. The trustees

organized the colony in part to make it militarily defensible. They

limited the size of landholdings to make the settlement compact and

easily defended against Spanish and Indian attacks. Blacks=D1free or

slave=D1were excluded; rum was prohibited; Roman Catholics were

excluded; and trade with the Indians was strictly regulated=D1all to

limit the possibility of wartime insurrection or collusion with future

enemies. In the end, only a few debtors were released from jail and

sent to Georgia; but the trustees brought hundreds of needy tradesmen

and artisans from England and Scotland and many religious refugees

from Switzerland and Germany.

The strict rules governing life in the new colony helped stifle its

development and create dissent in its earlyyears. Settlers in Georgia

needed a work force, and almost from the start they began demanding

the right to buy slaves. Some opposed the restrictions on the size of

individual property holdings. Many resented the nearly absolute

political power of Oglethorpe and the trustees. As a result,

newcomers to the region generally preferred to settle in South

Carolina, where there were fewer restrictive laws. Eventually the

trustees removed the limitation on individual landholding and later

the ban on slavery and the prohibition of rum. In I 75 I, they returned

control of the colony to the king, who immediately permitted the

election of a representative assembly. Georgia continued to grow=

more slowly than the other southern colonies, but it now developed

along lines roughly similar to those of South Carolina.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF EMPIRE

The English colonies in America had originated as quite separate

projects, and for the most part they grew up independent of one

another and subject to little more than nominal control from London.

Yet by the mid-seventeenth century, the growing commercial success

of the colonial ventures was producing pressure in England for a more

rational, uniform structure to the empire.

The Drive for Reorganization

Reorganization, its advocates claimed, was necessary to ensure

the success t of the mercantile system, the foundation of the English

economy. For the new possessions truly to promote mercantilist

goals, England decided it would have to exclude foreigners (as Spain

had done) from its colonial trade. t But in that decision were the

seeds of conflict, because many American colonists had developed a

profitable trade with the Spanish, Dutch, and French and were likely

to resist interference with it.

The English government began trying to regulate colonial trade in

the I650S, when Parliament passed laws to keep Dutch ships out of

the English colonies. Later Parliament passed three important

Navigation Acts. The first of them, in I660, closed the colonies to all

trade except that carried in by English ships and required that tobacco

and other items be exported fTom ~; the colonies only to England or to

an English possession. The second act, in I663, required that all goods

sent from Europe to the colonies pass through England on the way,

where they would be subject to English taxation. The third act, in

I673, imposed duties on the coastal trade among the English colonies,

and it provided for the appointment of customs of ficials to enforce

the Navigation Acts. These acts, with later amendments and

additions, formed the legal basis of England's mercantile system in

America for a century.

Tbe Dominion of Ne7v England

Before the Navigation Acts, all the =A3olonial governments (except that

of rginia, a "royal colony" with a governor appointed by the king)

had operated largely independently of the crown, with governors

chosen by the proprietors or by the colonists themselves and with

powerful representative assemblies. Officials in London recognized

that to increase their control ,~ over their colonies they would

have to create an instrument separate from

52 ~ 1 THE UNFlNlSHED NATloN

the independent-minded colonial governments, which were unlikely to

enforce the new laws.

In I675~ the king created a new body, the Lords of Trade, to

make recommendations for imperial reform. Following their advice,

he moved in I679 to increase his control over Massachusetts, the

most defiant of the colonies. He stripped it of its authority over New

Hampshire and chartered a separate, royal colony there whose

governor he would himself appoint. He also began seeking legal

grounds for revoking the colony's corporate charter and making

Massachusetts itself a royal colony. He soon became convinced that he

had found such grounds in the defiance of the Navigation Acts and the

Lords of Trade by the Massachusetts General Court, which insisted

that Parliament had no power to legislate for the colony. In I684 the

king finally succeeded in revoking the Massachusetts charter.

Charles II's brother,James II, who succeeded him to the throne in

I685~ went further. He created a single Dominion of New England,

which combined the government of Massachusetts with the

governments of the rest of the New England colonies and later with

those of New York and New Jersey as well. He eliminated the existing

assemblies within the new Dominion and appointed a single governor,

Sir Edmund Andros, to supervise the entire region from Boston.

Andros's rigid enforcement of the Navigation Acts and his brusque

dismissal of the colonists' claims to the "rights of Englishmen" made

him quickly and thoroughly unpopular.

The "GloriousRevolution"

James II was not only losing friends in America; he was making

powerful enemies in England by attempting to exercise autocratic

control over Parliament and the courts and by appointing his fellow

Catholics to high office. By I688~ his popular support had all but

vanished, and Parliament invited his Protestant daughter Mary and her

husband, William of Orange, ruler of the Netherlands, to assume the

throne. James II (perhaps remembering what had happened to his

father, Charles I) offered no resistance and fled to France. As a result

of this bloodless coup, which the English called "the Glorious

Revolution," William and Mary became joint sovereign

When Bostonians heard of the overthrow of James II, they moved

quickly to unseat his unpopular viceroy in New England. Andros was

arrested and imprisoned. The new sovereigns in England accepted the

toppling of Andros, quickly abolished the Dominion of New England,

and restored separate colonial governments. They did not, however,

re-create them as they had been. In 1691~ they combined

Massachusetts with Ply-

THE ENGLISH TFcANSPLANTATlONS=09~=0953

mouth and made it a royal colony. The new charter restored the

General Court, but it gave the crown the right to appoint the governor.

It also replaced church membership with property ownership as the

basis for voting and officeholding.

Andros had been governing New York through a lieutenant

governor, Captain Francis Nicholson, who enjoyed the support of the

wealthy merchants and fur traders of the province. Other, less

favored colonists=D1farmers, mechanics, small traders, and

shopkeepers=D1had a long accumulation of grievances against Nicholson

and his allies. The leadership of the New York dissidents fell toJacob

Leisler, a German immigrant and a prosperous merchant. He had

married into a prominent Dutch family but had never won acceptance

as one of the colony's ruling class. In May I 689~ when news of the

Glorious Revolution in England and the fall of Andros in Boston

reached New York, Leisler raised a militia, captured the city fort,

drove Nicholson into exile, and proclaimed himself the new head of

government in New York. For two years, he tried in vain to stabilize

his power in the colony amid fierce factional rivalry. In I69I~ when

William and Mary appointed a new governor, Leisler briefly resisted.

He soon yielded, but his hesitation allowed his many political enemies

to charge him with treason. He was convicted and executed. Fierce

rivalry between what became known as the "Leislerians" and the

"anti-Leislerians" dominated the politics of the factious colony for

many years thereafter.

In Maryland, many people erroneously assumed when they heard news

of the Glorious Revolution that their proprietor, the Catholic Lord

Baltimore who was living in England, had sided with the

CatholicJames II and opposed William and Mary. So in I689~ an old

opponent of the proprietor's government, the Protestant John Coode,

led a revolt that drove out Lord Baltimore's of ficials and petitioned

the crown for a charter as a royal colony. In I69I~ William and Mary

complied, stripping the proprietor of his authority. The colonial

assembly established the Church of England as the colony's official

religion and excluded Catholics from public office. Maryland became a

proprietary colony again in I 7 I 5, but only after the fifth Lord

Baltimore joined the Anglican church.

Thus the Glorious Revolution of I688 in England touched off

revolutions, mostly bloodless ones, in several colonies. Under the new

king and queen, the representative assemblies that had been abolished

were revived, and the scheme for colonial unification from above was

abandoned. But the Glorious Revolution in America was not, as many

Americans later came to believe, a clear demonstration of American

resolve to govern itself or a clear ViCtory for colonial self-rule. In

New York and Maryland, in particular, the

54 ~ THE UNFI~ISHED NATION

uprisings had more to do with local factional and religious divisions

than with any larger vision of the nature of the empire. And while the

insurgencies did succeed in eliminating the short-lived Dominion of

New England, their ultimate results were governments that actually

increased the crown's potential authority. As the first century of

English settlement in America came to its end, the colonists were

becoming more a part of the imperial system than ever before.

CHAPTER THREE

Life in Provincial America

The Colonial Population . The Colonial Economy

Patterns of Society The Colonial Mind

.

~ S THE EXTENT of settlement in North America grew, and as the

economies of the colonies began to flourish, several distinctive ways

of life emerged. The new American societies differed considerably

from the society that most had attempted to re-create in the New

World=D1 the society of England. They differed as well from one

another. Indeed, the pattern of society in some areas of North

Arnerica seemed to resemble that of others scarcely at all.

Americans would eventually decide that they had enough in common to

enable them to join together and form a single nation. But regional

differences would continue to shape their society throughout their

history.

THE COLONIAL POPULATION

After uncertain beginnings at Jamestown and Plymouth, the non-

Indian population of English North America grew rapidly and

substantially, through continued immigration and through natural

increase, until by the late seventeenth century European and African

immigrants outnumbered the natives along the Atlantic coast.

A few of the early settlers were members of the English upper

classes, but for the most part the early colonial population was

decidedly unaristocratic. It included some members of the emerging

English middle class, businessmen who migrated to America for

religious or commercial reasons or both. But the dominant element

was English laborers. Some came independently~ such as the religious

dissenters in early New England, who Came as families, paid their

own way, and settled on their own land. But in

S6 ~ THE UNFINISHED NATION

the Chesapeake, at least three-fourths of the immigrants in the

seventeenth century arrived as indentured servants.

Inde77tured Servitude

The system of temporary servitude developed out of practices in

England. Young men and women bound themselves to masters for fixed

terms of servitude (usually four to five years) in exchange for

passage to America, food, and shelter. Upon completion of their

service, male indentures were supposed to receive clothing, tools, and

occasionally land; in reality, however, many left service with nothing.

Roughly one-fourth of the indentures in the Chesapeake were women,

most of whom worked as domestic servants and could expect to marry

when their terms of servitude expired, since men greatly outnumbered

women in the region.

Most indentured servants came to the colonies voluntarily, but

some did not. Beginning as early as I6I7, the English government

occasionally dumped shiploads of convicts in America to be sold into

servitude. The government also transported prisoners taken in battles

with the Scots and the Irish in the I650S, as well as orphans,

vagrants, and paupers. Other involuntary immigrants were victims of

kidnapping, or "impressment," by unscrupulous investors and

promoters.

By the late seventeenth century, the indentured servant population

had become one of the largest elements of the population and was

creating serious social problems. Some former indentures managed to

establish themselves successfully as farmers, tradespeople, or

artisans. Some women married propertied men. Others (mostly males)

found themselves without land, without employment, without

families, and without prospects; and there grew up in some areas,

particularly the Chesapeake, a large floating population of young

single men=D1such as those who supported Bacon's Rebellion=D1who

served as a potential (and at times actual) source of social unrest.

Even those free laborers who did find employment or land for

themselves and settled down with families often did not stay put for

very long. Many families simply pulled up stakes and moved to other,

more promising locations every few years.

Beginning in the I 670S, a decrease in the birth rate and an

improvement in economic conditions in England reduced the pressures

on laboring men and women to emigrate, and the flow of indentured

servants declined. Those who did travel to America as indentured

servants generally avoided the Southern colonies, where working

conditions were arduous and prospects for advancement were slim. In

the Chesapeake, thcrefore, landowners were

GOTTLIEB MITTLEBERGER

An Indentured Servant's Voyage from

Germany to America

BOTH IN ROTTERDAM and in Amsterdam the people are packed densely,

like herrings so to say, in the large sea-vessels.... During the voyage

there is on board these ships terrible misery, stench, fumes, horror,

vomiting, many kinds of sea-sickness, fever, dysentery, headache,

heat, constipation, boils, scurvy, cancer, mouthrot, and the like, all of

which come from old and sharply

~=09salted food and meat, also from very bad and foul

water,

so that many die miserably.... Many sigh and cry, "Oh, that I were at

home again, and if I had to lie in my pigsty!" . . . Many hundred people

necessarily die and perish in such misery, and must be cast into the

sea, which

drives their relatives . . . to such despair that it is almost impossible

to

pacify and console them....

When the ships have landed at Philadelphia after their long

voyage, no one is permitted to leave them except those who pay for

their passage or can give good security; the others, who cannot pay,

must remain on board the ships till they are purchased, and are

released from the ships by their purchasers. The sick always fare the

worst, for the healthy are naturally preferred and purchased first; and

so the sick and wretched must often remain on board in front of the

city for 2 or 3 weeks, and frequently die. . . . Many parents must sell

and trade away their children like so many head of cattle.... It often

happens that such parents and children, after leaving the ship, do not

see each other again for many years, perhaps no more in their lives.

S8 ~ THE UNFINISHED NATION=09~

=09LIFE IN PROVINCLAL=20

AMERICA=09~=0959

beginning to rely much more heavily on African slaYery as their

principal source of labor.

Bi~th and Death

Although immigration remained for a time the greatest source of

population increase, the most important long-range factor in the

growth of the colonial population was its ability to reproduce itself.

Marked improvement in the reproduction rate began in New England

and the mid-Atlantic colonies in the second half of the seventeenth

century, and after the I650S natural increase became the most

important source of population growth in those areas. The New

England population more than quadrupled through reproduction alone in

the second half of the seventeenth century. That was not just because

families were having large numbers of children. It was also because

life expectancy in New England was unusually high, both in

comparison to that of other colonies and in comparison to that of

England.

Conditions improved much more slowly in the South. The high

mortality rates in the Chesapeake region did not begin to decline to

the levels of those elsewhere until the mid-eighteenth century.

Throughout the seventeenth century, the average life expectancy for

men in the region was just over forty years, and for women slightly

less. (In New England, life expectancy was up to thirty years longer.)

One in four children died in infancy, and half died before the age of

twenty. Children who survived infancy often lost one or both of their

parents before reaching maturity. Wldows, widowers, and orphans

thus formed a substantial proportion of the Chesapeake population.

Only after settlers developed immunity to local diseases (particularly

malaria) did life expectancy increase significantly. Population growth

was substantial in the region, but it was largely a result =97f

immigration.

The natural increases in the population in the seventeenth century

were in large part a result of a steady improvement in the balance

between men and women in the colonies. In the early years of

settlement, more than three-quarters of the white population of the

Chesapeake consisted of men. And even in New England, which from

the beginning had attracted more families (and thus more women)

than the Southern colonies, 60 percent of the inhabitants were male

in I650. Gradually, however, more women began to arrive in the

colonies; and increasing birth rates, which of course produced roughly

equal numbers of males and females, contributed to shifting the sex

ratio as well. By the late seventeenth century, the proportion of

males to females in all the colonies was becoming more balanced.

Women and Families in the Colonies

The importance of reproduction in the labor-scarce society of

seventeenthcentury America had significant effects on both the

status and the life cycles of women. The high sex ratio meant that

few women remained unmarried for long. The average European woman

in America married for the first time at twenty or twenty-one years

of age, considerably earlier than in England.

In the Chesapeake, the extraordinarily high mortality rate made

the traditional patriarchal family structure of England=D1by which

husbands and . fathers exercised firm, even dictatorial control over

the lives of their wives and children=D1difficult to maintain. Because

so few families remained intact

=A5~ for long, rigid patterns of familial authority were constantly

undermined and semal mores grew more flexible than in England

or other parts of America.

Because of the large numbers of indentured servants who were

forbidr den to marry until their terms of service expired, premarital

semal relationships were frequent. Over a third of Chesapeake

marriages occurred with the bride already pregnant. Bastard children

were usually taken from their mothers and bound out as indentured

servants at a young age.

Women in the Chesapeake could anticipate a life consumed with

childbearing. The average wife experienced pregnancies every two

years. Those who lived long enough bore an average of eight children

apiece (up ~ to five of whom typically died in infancy or early

childhood) . Since childbirth i~ was one of the most frequent causes

of female death, relatively few women survived to see all their

children grow to maturity.

But Southern white women did enjoy certain advantages. Because men

were plentiful and women scarce, females had considerable latitude

in choosing husbands. Because women generally married at a much

younger age than men, they also tended to outlive their husbands.

Widows were generally left with several children and with

responsibility for managing a farm or plantation, a circumstance of

enormous hardship but one that also gave them significant economic

power. Widows seldom remained unmarried for long, however. And

since many widows married men who were themselves widowers,

complex combinations of households were frequent.

By the early eighteenth century, the demographic character of the

Chesapeake was beginning to change, and with it the nature and

structure of the typical family. Life expectancy was increasing, and

indentured servitude was in decline. Natural reproduction was

becoming the principal source of white population growth. The sex

ratio was becoming more equal. One result of these changes was that

life for white people in the region became

60 ~ THE UNFINISHED NATION

less perilous and less arduous. Another result was that women lost

some of the power that their small numbers had once given them. As

families grew more stable, traditional patterns of male authority

revived. By the mideighteenth century, Southern families were

becoming highly patriarchal.

In New England, where many more immigrants arrived with

family members and where death rates declined far more quickly,

family structure was much more stable than in the Chesapeake and

hence much more traditional. Because the sex ratio was less

imbalanced, most men could expect to marry. But women remained in

the minority. As in the Chesapeake, they married young, began

producing children early, and continued to do so well into their

thirties. In contrast to the situation in the South, however, Northern

children were more likely to survive (the average family raised six to

eight children to maturity), and their families were more likely to

remain intact. Fewer New England women became widows, and those

who did generally lost their husbands later in life. Hence women were

less often cast in roles independent of their husbands. Young women,

moreover, had less control over the conditions of marriage, both

because there were fewer unmarried men vying for them and because

their fathers were more likely to be alive and able to exercise control

over their choices.

The longer lives in New England meant that parents continued to

influence their children's lives far longer than did parents in the

South. They did not often actually "arrange" marriages for their

children, but few sons and daughters could choose a spouse entirely

independently of their parents' wishes. Men tended to rely on their

fathers for land to cultivate=D1generally a prerequisite for beginning

families of their own. Women needed dowries from their parents if

they were to hope to attract desirable husbands. Stricter parental

supervision of children meant, too, that fewer women became

pregnant before marriage than was the case in the South (although

even in Puritan New England, the premarital pregnancy rate was as

high as 20 percent in some communities).

Puritanism placed a high value on the family, which was not only the

principal economic unit but the principal religious unit within every

community. In one sense, then, women played important roles within

the family because the position of wife and mother was highly valued

in Puritan culture. At the same time, however, Puritanism served to

reinforce the idea of nearly absolute male authority and the

assumption of female weakness and inferiority. Women were expected

to be modest and submissive. A wife was expected to devote herself

almost entirely to serving the needs of her husband. Yet however

subservient they may have been, women were vital to

~

the family economy. They were continuously engaged in tasks crucial

to the functioning of the farm=D1gardening, raising poultry, tending

cattle, spinning, and weaving, as well as cooking, cleaning, and

washing.

Family life in the Chesapeake colonies grew more patriarchal in

the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. New England

families were growing somewhat less so. As settlement spread

beyond the early Puritan centers, as the authority of the church began

gradually to decline, and as sons began increasingly to chafe under the

control of their fathers, family life became somewhat more fluid, and

the rigid division of authority between generations and between the

sexes that had characterized seventeenthcentury communities became

less universal.

The Beginnings of Slavery in English North America

The demand for black servants to supplement the scarce Southern

labor supply existed almost from the first moments of settlement.

The supply of African laborers, however, remained relatively

restricted during much of the seventeenth century because the

Atlantic slave trade did not serve the English colonies in America

then. Gradually, however, a substantial commerce in slaves grew up

within the Americas, particularly between the Caribbean islands and

the Southern colonies of English America. By the late seventeenth

century, the supply of black workers in North America was becoming

plentiful.

As the commerce in slaves grew more extensive and more

sophisticated, it also grew more horrible. Before it ended in the

nineteenth century, it was responsible for the forced immigration of

as many as I I million Africans to North and South America and the

Caribbean. Indeed, until the late eighteenth century, the number of

African immigrants to the Americas was higher than that of

Europeans. In the flourishing slave marts on the African coast, native

chieftains made large numbers of blacks available by capturing

members of enemy tribes in battle and bringing them out of the

forests and to the ports. The terrified victims were then packed into

the dark, filthy holds of ships for the horrors of the "middle

passage"=D1the long journey to America, during which the black

prisoners were kept chained in the bowels of the slave ships and

supplied with only minimal food and water. Women were often

victims of rape and other semal abuse. Those who died en route, and

many did, were simply thrown overboard. Slave traders tried to cram

as many Africans as possible into their ships to ensure that enough

would survive to yield a profit at journey's end. Upon arrival in the

New World, slaves were auctioned off to white landowners and transported,

frightened and bewildered, to their new homes.

North America was a less important destination for African

slaves than were such other parts of the New World as the islands of

the Caribbean and Brazil; fewer than 5 percent of the Africans

imported to the Americas arrived first in the English colonies. At

first, those blacks who were transported to what became the United

States came not directly from Africa but from the West Indies. Not

until the I670S did traders start importing blacks directly from

Africa to North America. Even then the flow remained small for a

time, mainly because a single group, the Royal African Company of

England, monopolized the trade and kept prices high and supplies low.

A turning point in the history of the black population in North America

was I 697, the year the Royal African Company's monopolywas broken.

With

the trade now open to competition, prices fell and the number of

blacks greatly increased. By I 700, about 2 5 ,ooo black slaves lived in

English North America. That was only IO percent of the total non

Indian population. But because blacks were so heavily concentrated in

a few Southern colonies, they were already beginning to outnumber

whites in some areas. There were perhaps twice as many black men as

black women in most areas, but in some places the African-American=

population grew by natural increase nevertheless. In the Chesapeak

more new slaves were being born than were being imported from

Africa. In South Carolina, by contrast, the arduous conditions of rice

cultivation ensured that the black population would barely be able to

sustain itself through natural increase until much later.

By I760, the number of Africans in the colonies had increased to

approximately a quarter of a million. A few (I6,000 in I763) lived in

New England; slightly more (29,000) lived in the middle colonies. The

vast majority, however, continued to live in the South. By then blacks

had almost wholly replaced white indentured servants as the basis of

the Southern work y=C1 force.

For a time, the legal and social status of the African laborers

remained somewhat fluid. In some areas=D1South Carolina, for example,

where the number of black arrivals swelled more quickly than

anywhere else=D1whites and blacks worked together at first on terms

of relative equality. Some blacks were treated much like white hired

servants, and some were freed after a ~; fixed term of servitude. A

few blacks themselves became landowners, and some apparently

owned slaves of their own. By the late seventeenth century, however,

a rigid distinction was emerging between blacks and whites. White

workers could not be bound to a master indefinitely, but there was no

legal requirement that masters free black workers after a term of

service. Gradually, the assumption spread that blacks would remain in

service permanently and that black children would inherit their

parents' bondage. White beliefs about the inferiority of the black race

reinforced the growing rigidity of the system. That slavery was

developing in a society that was already multiracial also had an

impact on its evolution. Whites had long ago defined themselves as a

superior race in their relations with the native Indian population; the

idea of subordinating an inferior race was, therefore, already part of

European thinking by the time substantial numbers of Africans

appeared in their midst.

The system of permanent servitude=D1American slavery=D1became legal

in the early eighteenth century when colonial assemblies began to

pass "slave codes~~ granting almost absolute authority to white

masters over their slaves. One factor only determined whether a

person was subject to the slave codes:

color. In the colonial societies of Spanish America, people of mixed

race were granted a different (and higher) status than pure Africans.

English America recognized no such distinctions. Any African

ancestry was enough to classify a person as black.

Later Immigration

The most distinctive and enduring feature of the American population

was that it brought together peoples of many different races, ethnic

groups, and nationalities. North America was home to a substantial

population of natives, to a growing number of English immigrants, to

forcibly imported Africans, and to substantial non-English groups

from Europe. When the flow of immigrants from England began to

decline in the early eighteenth century, large numbers of whites

continued to immigrate to North America from France, Germany,

Switzerland, Ireland, Scotland, and Scandinavia.

The earliest of these non-English European immigrants were the

French Calvinists, or Huguenots, escaping religious persecution in

Roman Catholic France. A total of about 300,ooo left France, a few of

them for the English colonies of North America, after the Edict of

Nantes, which had guaranteed them substantial liberties, was revoked

in I695. Many German Protestants suffered similarly from the

arbitrary religious policies of their rulers, and all Germans suffered

from the frequent wars between their principalities and France.

Because of its proximity to France, the Rhineland of southwestern

Germany, known as the Palatinate, was exposed to frequent invasion,

which sent more than I2,000 Germans fleeing to England early in the

eighteenth century; approximately 3,ooo of them found their way to

America. Most settled in Pennsylvania, where they ultimately became

known to English settlers as the "Pennsylvania Dutch," (a corruption

of the German term for their nationality, Deutscb). Other,

German immigrants headed to Pennsylvania as well, among them the

Moravians and Mennonites, whose religious views were similar to

those of the Quakers.

The most numerous of the newcomers were the so-called

ScotchIrish=D1Scotch Presbyterians who had settled in northern Ireland

(in the county of Ulster) in the early seventeenth century. Most of the

Scotch-Irish in America pushed out to the edges of European

settlement and occupied land without much regard for who actually

claimed to own it, whether absentee whites, Indians, or the colonial

governments. They were as ruthless in their displacement and

suppression of the Indians as they had been with the native Irish

Catholics in Ireland.

There were also immigrants from Scotland itself and from southern

66 ~ THE UNFINISHED NATION

Ireland. Scottish Highlanders, some of them Roman Catholics,

immigrated to North Carolina above all. Scottish Presbyterian

Lowlanders, fleeing high rents and unemployment, left for America in

large numbers shortly before the American Revolution. The Irish

migrated steadily over a long period and by the time of the Revolution

were almost as numerous as the Scots. Many of them had by then

abandoned their Roman Catholic religion and much of their ethnic

identity.

By I775~ the non-Indian population of the colonies was over 2

million=D1a nearly tenfold increase since the beginning of the century.

Throughout the colonial period, the population nearly doubled every

twenty-five years. Its continuing and increasing ethnic diversity

became one of many factors dividing colonial society from the society

of England.

THE COLONIAL ECONOMY

Farming dominated almost all areas of European and African

settlement in North America throughout the seventeenth and

eighteenth centuries. Even so, the economies of the different regions

varied markedly from one another.

The Soutbe~n Economy

A strong European demand for tobacco enabled some planters in the

Chesapeake (Maryland and ~lrginia) to grow enormously wealthy and

at times allowed the region as a whole to prosper. But throughout the

seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, production of tobacco

frequently exceeded demand, and as a result the price of the crop

could suffer severe declines. The result was a boom-and-bust cycle in

the Chesapeake economy, with the first major bust occurring in I640.

l~Iost of the Chesapeake planters believed that the way to

protect themselves from the instability of the market was to grow

more tobacco. That only made the overproduction problem worse. It

also encouraged those planters who could afford to do so to expand

their landholdings, enlarge their fields, and acquire additional

laborers. After I700, tobacco plantations employing several dozen

slaves or more were common.

South Carolina and Georgia relied on rice production, since the

lowlying coastline with its many tidal rivers made it possible to

build rice paddies that could be flooded and drained. Rice cultivation

was arduous work=D1performed standing knee deep in malarial

swamps=D1a task so difficult and unhealthy that white laborers

generally refused to perform it. Hence planters

in South Carolina and Georgia were far more dependent on slaves than

were their Northern counterparts. African workers were adept at rice

cultivation, in part because some of them had come from rice-

producing regionS of west Africa and in part because they were

generally more accustomed to the hot and humid climate than were

the Europeans.

Because of their dependence on large-scale cash crops, the

Southern colonies developed less of a commercial or industrial

economy than the colonies of the North. The trading in tobacco and

rice was handled largely by merchants based in London and, later, in

the Northern colonies. Few cities of more than modest size developed

in the South. A pattern was established that would characterize the

Southern economy, and differentiate it from that of other regions, for

more than two centuries.

68 I HE UNFINISHED NATION

Tbe Nortbern Economy

In the North, as in the South, agriculture continued to dominate, but it

was agriculture of a more diverse kind. In addition to farming, there

gradually emerged an important commercial sector of the economy.

One reason that agriculture did not remain the exclusive

economic pursuit of the North was that conditions for farming were

less favorable than in the South. In northern New England, in

particular, colder weather and hard, rocky soil made it difficult for

colonists to develop the kind of large-scale commercial farming

system that Southerners were creating. Most New Englanders did not

produce a staple crop that could become a major export item; they

planted largely to meet the needs of their own families. Conditions

for agriculture were better in southern New England and the middle

colonies, where the soil was fertile and the weather more temperate.

New York, Pennsylvania, and the Connecticut River valley were the

chief suppliers of wheat to much of New England and to parts of the

South.

Beginning with a failed effort to establish an ironworks in Saugus,

Massachusetts, in the mid-seventeenth century, colonists in New

England and the middle colonies embarked on industrial ventures as

well. Almost every colonist engaged in a certain amount of industry

at home. Occasionally these home industries provided families with

goods they could trade or sell. Beyond these domestic efforts,

craftsmen and artisans established themselves in colonial towns as

cobblers, blacksmiths, riflemakers, cabinetmakers, silversmiths, and

printers. In some areas, entrepreneurs harnessed water power to run

small mills for grinding grain, processing cloth, or milling lumber.

And in several places, large-scale shipbuilding operations began to

flourish.

The largest industrial enterprise anywhere in English North America

was the ironworks of the German ironmaster Peter Hasenclever in

northern New Jersey. Founded in I764 with British capital, it

employed several hundred laborers, many of them imported from

ironworks in Germany. There were other, smaller ironmaking

enterprises in every northern colony (with particular concentrations

in Massachusetts, NewJersey, and Pennsylvania), and there were

ironworks as well in several of the southern colonies. But these and

other growing industries did not become the basis for the kind of

explosive industrial growth that Great Britain experienced in the late

eighteenth century=D1in part because parliamentary regulations such as

the Iron Act of I 750 restricted colonists from engaging in metal

processing and stifled the development of a steel industry in America.

Similar prohibitions reduced the manufacture of woolens, hats, and

other ~oods. But the most

LIFE IN PROVINCIAL AMERICA ~ 69

important obstacles to industrialization in America were an

inadequate labor supply, a small domestic market, and inadequate

transportation facili'L ties and energy supplies.

More important than manufacturing to the economy of the

Northern colonies were extractive industries, which exploited the

natural resources of the continent. By the mid-seventeenth century,

the flourishing fur trade of earlier years was in decline; the supply of

fur-bearing animals along the Atlantic seaboard had been nearly

exhausted, and the interior fur trade was largely in the hands of the

Algonquins and their French allies. More important now were

lumbering, mining, and fishing, particularly in the waters off the New

England coast. These industries provided commodities that could be

exported to England in exchange for manufactured goods. And they

helped, therefore, to produce the most distinctive feature of the ;

Northern economy=D1a thriving commercial class.

Tbe Rise of Commerce

Perhaps the most remarkable feature of colonial commerce in the

seventeenth century was that it was able to survive at all. American

merchants faced such bewildering and intimidating obstacles, and

lacked so many of t he basic institutions of trade, that they managed

to stay afloat only with great diffficulty. There was no commonly

accepted money. The colonies had almost no gold or silver, and their

paper currency was not acceptable as payment for goods from abroad.

For many years, colonial merchants had to rely on barter or on money

substitutes such as beaver skins.

A second obstacle was lack of information about supply and

demand. Traders had no way of knowing what they would find in

foreign ports; vessels sometimes stayed at sea for years, journeying=

from one port to another, trading one commodity for another,

attempting to find some way to turn a profit. There were, moreover,

an enormous number of small, fiercely competitive companies, which

made the problem of rationalizing the system even more acute.

Nevertheless, commerce in the colonies survived and grew. There was

an elaborate coastal trade, through which the colonies did business

with one another and with the West Indies. The mainland colonies

traded rum, agricultural products, meat, and fish. The islands offered

sugar, molasses, and at times slaves in return. There was also trade

with England, continental Europe, and the west coast of Africa. This

commerce has often been described~ somewhat inaccurately, as the

"triangular trade," suggesting a neat process by which merchants

carried rum and other ~oods from New

England to Africa, exchanged their merchandise for slaves, whom they

then transported to the West Indies (hence the term "middle passage"

for the dread journey=D1it was the second of the three legs of the

voyage), and then exchanged the slaves for sugar and molasses, which

they shipped back to New England to be distilled into rum. In fact, the

so-called ''triangular" trade in rum, slaves, and sugar was a maze of

highly diverse trade routes.

Out of this risky trade emerged a group of adventurous

entrepreneurs who by the mid-eighteenth century were beginning to

constitute a distinct merchant class concentrated in the port cities

of the North. The British Navigation Acts protected them from foreign

competition in the colonies. They had ready access to the market in

England for such colonial products as furs, timber, and American-

built ships. But they also developed markets illegally outside the

British Empire=D1in the French, Spanish, and Dutch West Indies, where

prices were often higher than in the British colonies.

During the eighteenth century, the colonial commercial system began

to stabilize. But the trading sector of the American economy remained

open to newcomers, largely because it=D1and the society on which it

was based was expanding so rapidly.

| ~=09LIFE IN PROVINCLAL AMERICA ~ 7 I

PATTERNS OF SOCIETY

Although there were sharp social distinctions in the colonies, the

welldefined and deeply entrenched class system of England failed to

reproduce itself in America. In England, land was scarce and the

population large, and the relatively few landowners had enormous

power over the landless. In

I America, in contrast, land was abundant and people were scarce.

Aristocra-

'~ cies emerged there, to be sure; but they tended to rely less on

landownership than on control of a substantial work force, and

they were generally less secure and less powerful than their

English counterparts. More than in England, there were

opportunities in America for social mobility=D1both up and down.

There were also new forms of community in America, and they

varied greatly from one region to another.

Tbe Plantation

The plantation system of the American South illustrated clearly the

way in which colonial communities evolved in response to local

conditions. The first plantations emerged in the tobacco-growing

areas of ~Irginia and Maryland. Some of the early planters hoped to

re-create in America the entrenched, landholding aristocracy of

England, and in a few cases=D1notably in the great Maryland estates

granted by Lord Baltimore to his relatives and friends=D1a semblance of

such an aristocracy did emerge. On the whole, however, seventeenth-

century colonial plantations were rough and relatively small estates.

In the early days in ~Tlrginia, they were little more than crude

clearings where landowners and indentured servants worked side by

side in conditions so harsh that death was an everyday occurrence.

Even in later years, when the death rate declined and the landholdings

became more established, plantation work forces seldom exceeded

thirty people. Most landowners lived in rough cabins or houses, with

their servants or slaves nearby.

The economy of the plantation was a precarious one. Planters

could not control their markets, so even the largest of them were

constantly at risk. When prices fell=D1as tobacco prices did, for

example, in the I660S=D1 they faced the prospect of ruin. The plantation

economy created many new wealthy landowners, but it also destroyed

many.

Because plantations were often far from cities and towns, they

tended to become self-contained communities. Wealthier planters

often created mething approaching a full town on their plantations.

Smaller planters lived more mo~le~tlv h.lt still in a relativelv self-

sufficient world. On the

72 ~ THEUNFlNlsHEDNATloN

larger estates, plantation mistresses, unlike the wives of small

farmers, had servants to perform ordinary household chores, thus

freeing up time they could devote to their husbands and children. But

many also had to tolerate sexual liaisons between their husbands or

sons and black women of the slave community.

Even though the fortunes of planters could rise and fall quickly,

there were always particularly wealthy landowners who exercised

great social and economic influence. A great landowner controlled not

only the lives of those who worked his own plantation but the

livelihood of poorer neighbors who could not compete with him and

thus depended on him to market their crops and supply them with

credit. Some whites were unable to own their land and rented their

farms from wealthy planters. Such independent farmers, working with

few or no slaves to help them, formed the majority of the Southern

agrarian population; but the planters dominated the Southern agrarian

economy.

The enslaved African-Americans, of course, lived very differently. On

the smaller farms with only a handful of slaves, it was not always

possible for a rigid separation to develop between whites and blacks.

But over three-fourths of all blacks lived on plantations of at least

ten slaves; nearly half lived in communities of fifty slaves or more.

And in these places they began to develop a society and culture of

their own. Although whites seldom encouraged formal marriages

among slaves, blacks themselves developed a strong and elaborate

family structure. Slaves attempted to construct nuclear families, and

they managed at times to build stable households. But families were

always precarious, because any member could be sold at any time to

another planter, even to one in another colony. As a result, blacks

placed special emphasis on extended kinship networks and created

surrogate "relatives" for people separated entirely from their own

families. There was also a distinctive slave religion, which blended

Christianity with African folklore and which became a central

element in the emergence of an independent black culture.

Nevertheless, black society was subject to constant intrusions from

and interaction with white society. Black house servants, for

example, were isolated from their own community and were under

constant surveillance from whites. Black women were subject to the

usually unwanted sexual advances from owners and overseers and

hence to bearing mulatto children, who were rarely recognized by

their white fathers but were generally accepted as members of the

slave community. On some plantations, black workers were treated

with kindness and sometimes responded with genuine

devotion. On others, they encountered physical brutality and

occasionally even sadism, against which they were virtually

powerless.

There were several slave rebellions during the colonial period.

The most important was the Stono Rebellion in South Carolina in I 7

39, during which about IOO blacks rose up, seized weapons, killed

several whites, and attempted to escape south to Florida. The uprising

was quickly crushed, and most participants were executed. A more

frequent form of resistance was simply running away, but that

provided no real solution either. There was nowhere to go. And so for

most slaves, resistance took the form of subtle, and often undetected,

defiance or evasion of their masters' wishes.

t Most slaves, male and female, worked as field hands (with the

women ~ shouldering the additional burdens of cooking and child

rearing). But on E the larger plantations that aspired to genuine self-

sufficiency, some slaves learned trades and crafts: blacksmithing,

carpentry, shoemaking, spinning, weaving, sewing, midwifery, and

others. These skilled crafts workers were at times hired out to other

planters. Some set up their own establishments in towns or cities and

shared their profits with their owners. A few were able t to buy their

freedom. There was a small free black population living in Southern

cities by the time of the Revolution.

Tbe Puritan Community

The characteristic social unit in New England was not the isolated

farm but the town. In the early years of colonization, each new

settlement drew up a "covenant" binding all residents together in a

religious and social unit. The structure of the towns reflected the

spirit of the covenant. Colonists laid out a village, with houses and a

meetinghouse arranged around a central pasture, or "common." Thus

families generally lived with their neighbors close by, reinforcing the

strong sense of community. They divided up the outlying fields and

woodlands among the residents; the size and location of a family~s

field depended on the family's numbers, wealth, and social station.

Once a town was established, residents held a yearly "town

meeting" to decide important questions and to choose a group of

"selectmen," who ran the town's affairs. Participation in the meeting=

was generally restricted to adult males who were members of the

church. Only those who could give evidence of grace, of being among

the elect (the "visible saints") assured of salvation~ were admitted

to full membership, although other residents of the tOwn were

required to attend church services.

New Englanders did not adopt the English system of

primogeniture=D1 the passing of all property to the firstborn son.

Instead, a father divided up his land among all his sons. His control of

this inheritance gave him great power over the family. Often a son=

would reach his late twenties before his father would allow him to

move into his own household and work his own land. Even then, sons

would usually continue to live in close proximity to their fathers.

Young women were generally more mobile than their brothers, since

they did not stand to inherit land.

The early Puritan community was, in short, a tightly knit organism.

The town as a whole was bound together by the initial covenant, by

the centralized layout of the village, by the power of the church, and

by the town meeting. The familywas held together by the rigid

patriarchal structure that limited opportunities for younger members

(males in particular) to strike out on =C0heir own. Yet as the years

passed and the communities grew, this communal structure

experienced strains. This was partly because of the increasing

commercialization of New England society, which introduced new

forces and new tensions into the communities of the region. It was

also partly because of population growth. As towns grew larger,

residents tended to cultivate lands farther and farther from the

community center and, by necessity, to live at increasing distances

from the church. Often, groups of outlying residents would apply for

permission to build a church of their own, usually the first step

toward creation of a wholly new town. Such applications could cause

bitter quarrels between the original townspeople and those who

proposed to break away.

The control of land by fathers also created strains. In the first

generations, fathers generally controlled enough land to satisfy the

needs of all their sons. After several generations, however, when such

lands were being subdivided for the third or fourth time, there was

often too little to go around, particularly in communities surrounded

by other towns, with no room to expand outward. The result was that

in many communities, groups of younger residents broke off and

moved elsewhere=D1at times far away=D1to form towns of their own.

But it was only against the strict standards of the first years of

settlement, and the even stricter standards of Puritan expectation

that New England towns were unraveling. Measured against most

contemporary communities in England or other parts of America, the

Puritan town remained remarkably communal.

The tensions building in Puritan communities could produce bizarre

and disastrous events. One example was the widespread hysteria in

the I680S and I690S over accusations of witchcraft (the human

exercise of Satanic

LIFE IN PROVINCIAL AMERICA 75

pOwers) in New England. The most famous outbreak (although by no

means the only one) was in Salem, Massachusetts, where adolescent

girls began to exhibit strange behavior and leveled charges of

witchcraft against several West Indian servants steeped in voodoo

lore. Hysteria spread throughout the town, and hundreds of people

(most of them women) were accused of witchcraft. Nineteen

residents of Salem were put to death before the trials finally ended

in I69~; the girls who had been the original accusers later recanted

and admitted that their story had been fabricated.

The Salem experience was not unique. Accusations of witchcraft

spread through many New England towns in the early I690S (and

indeed had emerged regularly in Puritan society for many years

before). Research into the background of accused witches reveals that

most were middle-aged women, often widowed, with few or no

children. Accused witches were, moreover, generally of low social

position, were often involved in domestic conflicts, had frequently

been accused of other crimes, and were considered abrasive by their

neighbors. Many "witches" were women who were not

LIFE IN PROVINCIAL AMERICA ~ 77

76 ~ THE UNFINISHED NATION

securely lodged within a patriarchal family structure and who seemed

to defy the passive norms Puritan society had created for them. That

suggests that tensions over gender roles played a substantial role in

generating the crisis. The witchcraft controversies were also a

reflection of the highly religious character of New England societies.

New Englanders believed in the power of Satan and his ability to

assert his power in the world. Belief in witchcraft was not a

marginal superstition, rejected by the mainstream. It was a common

feature of Puritan religious conviction.

Cities

Even the largest colonial community was scarcely bigger than a

modern small town. Yet by the standards of the eighteenth century,

cities did exist in America. In the I 770S the two largest ports

Philadelphia and New York=D1 had populations of 28,000 and 25,000,

respectively, which made them larger than most English urban

centers. Boston (I6,000), Charles Town (later

Charleston),SouthCarolina(I2,ooo),andNewport,RhodeIsland(II,ooo),

were also substantial communities by the standards of the day.

Colonial cities served as trading centers for the farmers of their

regions and as marts for international commerce. Their leaders were

generally merchants who had acquired substantial estates. Sharp

class divisions may not often have emerged in the cities, but more

than in any other area of colonial life (except of course in the

relationship between masters and slaves) social distinctions were

real and visible in urban areas.

Cities were the centers of much of what industry there was in the

colonies, such as the distilleries for turning imported molasses into

exportable rum. They were the locations of the most advanced schools

and sophisticated cultural activities and of shops where imported

goods could be bought. In addition, they were communities with urban

social problems: crime, vice, pollution, traffic. Unlike smaller towns,

cities needed to set up constables' of fices and fire departments and

develop systems for supporting the urban poor, whose numbers

became especially large in times of economic crisis=D1to which cities

were particularly vulnerable.

Finally, cities became places where new ideas could circulate and be

discussed. There were newspapers, books, and other publications from

abroad, and hence new intellectual influences. The taverns and

coffeehouses of cities provided forums in which people could gather

and debate the issues of the day. That is one reason why the

Revolutionary crisis, when it began to build in the I760S and I770S,

manifested itself first in the cities.

THE COLONIAL MIND

Intellectual life in colonial America revolved around the conflict

between

~ the traditional outlook of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,

with its

E~ emphasis on a personal God deeply involved in individual lives, and

the new spirit of the Enlightenment, which was sweeping both

Europe and America and which stressed the importance of science

and human reason. The old views placed a high value on a stern

moral code in which intellect was less important than faith. The

Enlightenment suggested that people had substantial control over

their own lives and societies.

The Pattern of Religions

Religious toleration flourished in America to a degree unmatched in

any European nation, not because Americans deliberately sought to

produce it, but because conditions virtually required it. Settlers in

America brought with them so many different religious practices that

it proved impossible to impose a single religious code on any large

area.

The experience of the Church of England illustrated how

diffficult the establishment of a common religion would be in the

colonies. By law, Anglicanism was established as the official faith in

~lrginia, Maryland, New York, the Carolinas, and Georgia. In these

colonies everyone, regardless of belief or afffiliation, was supposed

to be taxed for the support of the church. Except in ~Irginia and

Maryland, however, the laws establishing the Church of England as the

offficial colonial religion were largely ignored. Missionaries of the

Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, founded in I70I to spread

the Anglican faith, had some success in Massachusetts and

Connecticut. But Anglicanism never succeeded in becoming a dominant

religious force in America.

Even in New England, where the Puritans had originally believed that

they were all part of a single faith, there was a growing tendency in

the eighteenth century for different congregations to affiliate with

different denominations~ especially Congregationalism and

Presbyterianism. In parts of New York and New Jersey, Dutch settlers

had established their own Calvinist denomination, Dutch Reformed,

which survived after the colonies became part of the British Empire.

The American Baptists (of whom Roger Williams is considered the

first) were also originally Calvinistic in their theology, but a great

variety of Baptist sects emerged. They shared the belief that

rebaptism, usually by total immersion, was necessary when believers

reached maturity. But while some Baptists remained Calvinists,

believers in predestination, others came to believe in salvation by

*ee will.

Protestants extended toleration to one another more readily than

they did to Roman Catholics. Many Protestants feared and hated the

pope. New Englanders, in particular, viewed their Catholic neighbors

in New France (Canada) not only as commercial and military rivals but

as agents of Rome bent on frustrating their own divine mission. In

most of the English colonies, however, Roman Catholics were too few

to cause serious conflict. They were most numerous in Maryland, and

even there they numbered no more than 3 ,ooo. Perhaps for that reason

they suffered their worst persecution in that colony. After the

overthrow of the original proprietors in I69I, Catholics in Maryland

not only lost their political rights but were forbidden to hold

religious services except in private houses.

Jews in provincial America totaled no more than about 2,000 at any

time. The largest community lived in New York City. Smaller groups

settled in Newport and Charleston, and there were scattered Jewish

families in all the colonies. Nowhere could they vote or hold offfice.

Only in Rhode Island could they practice their religion openly.

By the beginning of the eighteenth century, some Americans were

growing troubled by the apparent decline in religious piety in their

society. With so many diverse sects existing side by side, some

people were tempted to doubt whether any particular denomination,

even their own, possessed a monopoly of truth. The movement of the

population westward and the wide scattering of settlements had

caused many communities to lose touch with organized religion. The

rise of commercial prosperity created a secular outlook in urban

areas. The progress of science and free thought in Europe=D1and the

importation of Enlightenment ideas to America=D1caused at least some

colonists to doubt traditional religious belief.

Concerns about declining piety surfaced as early as the I660S in New

England, where the Puritan oligarchy warned of a deterioration in the

power of the church. Sabbath after Sabbath, ministers preached

sermons of despair (known as "jeremiads"), deploring the signs of

waning piety. By the standards of other societies or other eras, the

Puritan faith remained remarkably strong. But New Englanders

measured their faith by their own standards, and to them the

"declension" of religious piety seemed a serious problem.

The Great~wakening

By the early eighteenth century, similar concerns were emerging in

other regions and among members of other faiths. Ever,vwhere,

colonists were =82 coming to believe, religious piety was in decline and

opportunities for spiritual regeneration were dwindling. The result

was the first great American revival: the Great Awakening.

The Great Awakening began in earnest in the I 730s, reached its

climax in the I 740s, and brought a new spirit of religious fervor that

many believed was reversing the trend away from piety. The revival

had particular appeal to women (who constituted the majority of

converts) and to younger sons ~, of the third or fourth generation of

settlers=D1those who stood to inherit the least land and who faced the

most uncertain futures. The rhetoric of the revival emphasized the

potential for every person to break away from the constraints of the

past and start anew in his or her relationship to God=D1 which seemed

to reflect the desire of many people to break away from their

families or communities and start a new life in the world.

Powerful evangelists from England helped spread the revival. John and

Charles Wesley, the founders of Methodism, visited Georgia and other

colonies in the I 7 30s. George Whitefield, a powerful open-air

preacher and for a time an associate of the Wesleys, made several

evangelizing tours through the colonies and drew tremendous crowds.

But the evangelizers from abroad were less important to American

revivalism in the long run than the colonial ministers attempting to

restore religious fervor in America. The outstanding preacher of the

Great Awakening was the New England E Congregationalist Jonathan

Edwards=D1a deeply orthodox Puritan but a highly original theologian.

>From his pulpit in Northampton, Massachusetts, Edwards attacked the

new doctrines of easy salvation for all. He preached anew the

traditional Puritan ideas of the absolute sovereignty of God,

predestination, and salvation by God's grace alone. His vivid

descriptions of hell could terrify his listeners.

ir=09The Great Awakening led to the division of existing

congregations

(between "New Light" revivalists and traditionalists) and to the

founding of

new ones. It also affected areas of society outside the churches.

Some of the

revivalists denounced book learning as a hindrance to salvation, and

some

communities repudiated secular education altogether. But other

evangelists

saw education as a means of furthering religion, and they founded or

led

schools for the training of New Light ministers.

Education

~any colonists placed a high value on education, despite the

difficulties they

confronted in gaining access to it. Some families tried to teach their

children

to read and write at home, although the heavy burden of work in most

THE UNFINISHED NATION LIFE

IN PROVINCLAL AMERICA

agricultural households limited the time available for schooling. In

Massachusetts, a I647 law required that every town support a public

school; and while many communities failed to comply, a modest

network of institutions emerged as a result. The Quakers and other

sects operated church schools; and in some communities, widows or

unmarried women conducted "dame schools" by holding private classes

in their homes. In cities, master craftsmen set up evening schools for

their apprentices.

White male Americans, at least, achieved a high degree of

literacy in the eighteenth century. By the time of the Revolution, well

over half of all white men could read and write, a rate substantially

higher than that in most European countries. The literacy rate for

women lagged behind the rate for men until the nineteenth century;

and while opportunities for education beyond the primary level were

scarce for men, they were almost nonexistent for women.

Nevertheless, the literacy rate for females was also substantially

higher than that of their European counterparts.

African-Americans, most of whom were enslaved, had virtually no

access to education. Occasionally a master or mistress would teach

slave children to read and write; but as the slave system became

more firmly

A DAME SCHOOL PRIMER More than the residents of any other region of

North America (and far more than those of most of Europe), the New

England colonists strove to educate their children and achieved

perhaps the

highest level of literacy in the world. Throughout the region, young

children attended institutions known as "dame schools" (because the

teachers

were almost always women) and leamed from primers such as this

one.

entrenched, strong social (and ultimately legal) sanctions developed

to discourage such efforts, lest literacy encourage slaves to question

their stations. Indians, too, remained largely outside the white

educational system=D1to a large degree by choice: most tribes preferred

to educate their children in their own way. But some white

missionaries and philanthropists established schools for Native

Americans and helped create a small but significant population of

Indians literate in spoken and written English.

Nowhere was the intermingling of traditional religiosity and the

new spirit of the Enlightenment clearer than in the colleges and

universities of colonial America. Of the six colleges in operation by

I763, all but two were founded by religious groups primarily for the

training of preachers. Yet in almost all, the influences of the new

scientific, rational approach to knowledge could be felt.

Harvard, the first American college, was established in I 636 by

Puritan theologians who wanted to create a training center for

ministers. (The college was named for a Charlestown minister, John

Harvard, who had left his library and half his estate to the college).

Decades later, in I 693, ~flliam and Mary College (named for the

English king and queen) was established in Urflliamsburg, ~Irginia, by

Anglicans; like Harvard, it was conceived as an academy to train

clergymen. And in I 70I, conservative Congregationalists, dissatisfied

with the growing religious liberalism of Harvard, founded Yale (named

for one of its first benefactors, Elihu Yale) in New Haven, Connecticut.

Out of the Great Awakening emerged the College of New Jersey,

founded in I746 and known later as Princeton (after the town in which

it was located); one of its first presidents was Jonathan Edwards.

Despite the religious basis of these colleges, most of them offered

curricula that included not only theology but logic, ethics, physics,

geometry, astronomy, rhetoric, Latin, Hebrew, and Greek. King's

College, founded in New York in I754 and later renamed Columbia, was

specifically devoted to the spread of secular knowledge; it had no

theological faculty and was interdenominational from the start. The

Academy and College of Philadelphia, which became the University of

Pennsylvania, was from its birth in I755 a completely secular

institution, founded by a group of laymen under the inspiration of

Benjamin Franklin.

After I700, most colonial leaders received their entire education in

America (rather than attending university in England, as had once been

the case) But the advantages of higher education were not widely

shared. Women, blacks, and In~lians were excluded from all colleges

and universities And among white men, only those from relatively

affluent families

could afford to attend.

82 ~ THE UNFINISHED NATION

Concepts of Law and Politics

In law and politics, as in other parts of their lives, Americans in the

seventeenth and eighteenth centuries believed that they were re-

creating in the New World the practices and institutions of the Old.

But as in other areas, they in fact created something very different.

Changes in the law in America resulted in part from the scarcity

of English-trained lawyers, who were almost unknown in the colonies

until after I 700. Although the American legal system adopted most of

the essential elements of the English system, including such ancient

rights as trial by jury, significant differences developed in court

procedures, punishments, and the definition of crimes. In England, for

example, a printed attack on a public official, whether true or fals

was considered libelous. At the I734 trial of the New York publisher

John Peter Zenger, who was powerfully defended by the Philadelphia

lawyer Andrew Hamilton, the courts ruled that criticisms of the

government were not libelous if factually true=D1a verdict that

removed some colonial restrictions on the freedom of the press.

More significant for the future of the relationship between the

colonies and England were differences emerging between the

American and British political systems. Because the royal

government=D1in theory the ultimate authority over the colonies=D1was

so far away, Americans created a group of institutions of their own

that gave them a large measure of self-government. In most colonies,

local communities grew accustomed to running their own affairs with

minimal interference from higher authorities. The colonial

assemblies came to exercise many of the powers that Parliament

exercised in England. Provincial governors (appointed by the king after

the I690S) had broad powers on paper, but in fact their influence was

sharply limited. Control over appointments and contracts resided

largely in England or with local colonial leaders. A governor could be

removed any time his patron in England lost favor. And in some cases,

governors were not even familiar with the colonies they were meant

to govern; most governors were Englishmen who came to the colonies

for the first time to assume their offices.

The result of all this was that the focus of politics in the colonies

became a local one, the provincial governments became accustomed to

acting more or less independently of Parliament, and a set of

assumptions and expectations about the rights of the colonists took

hold in America that was not shared by policymakers in England.

These differences caused few problems before the I760S, because the

British did little to exert the authority they believed they possessed.

But when, beginning in I 763, the English government began

attempting to tighten its control over the American colonies, a

historic crisis resulted.

The Origins of Slaver~y

HE DEBATE AMONG historians over how and why white Americans

created a system of slave labor in the seventeenth century

and how and why they determined that African-Americans and no

others should -populate that system=D1has been an unusually lively one.

At its center is a debate over whether slavery was a result of white

racism, or whether racism was a result of slavery.

In I950, Oscar and Mary Handlin published an influential article

comparing slavery to other systems of "unfreedom" in the colonies.

What separated slavery from other conditions of servitude, they

argued, was that it was restricted to people of African descent, that

it was permanent, and that it passed from one generation to the next.

The unique characteristics of slavery, the Handlins argued, were part

of an effort by colonial legislatures to increase the available labor

force. White laborers needed an incentive to come to America; black

laborers, forcibly imported from Africa, did not. The distinction

between the conditions of white workers and the conditions of black

workers was, therefore, based on legal and economic motives, not on

racism.

Winthrop Jordan was one of a number of historians who later

challenged the Handlins' thesis and argued that white racism, more

than econOmiC interests, produced African slavery. In White Over

Black (I968), Jordan argued that Europeans had long viewed people of

color=D1and black Africans in particular=D1as inferior beings appropriate

for serving whites. Those attitudes migrated with white Europeans to

the New World, and white racism shaped the treatment of Africans in

America=D1and the nature of the slave labor system=D1from the

beginning. Even without the economic

(eontinued on nextpage)

84 ~ THE UNFINISHED NAT10N

incentives the Hanlins described, in other words, whites would have

been likely to oppress blacks in the New World.

Peter Wood's Black Majority (I974), a study of seventeenth-

century South Carolina, was one of a number of works that moved the

debate back towards social and economic conditions in the I970S and

after. Wood demonstrated that blacks and whites often worked

together on relatively equal terms in the early years of settlement;

that racism, in other words, did not inevitably shape the relationships

between blacks and whites. But as rice cultivation expanded, it

became more difficult to find white laborers willing to do the

arduous work. The increase in the forcible importation of African

workers, and the creation of a system of permanent bondage, was a

response to this growing demand for labor. It was also a response to

fears among whites that without slavery it would be difficult to

control a labor force brought to America against its will. Edmund

Morgan's ~merican Slavery, ~merican Freedom (I975) argued similarly

that the southern labor system was at first relatively flexible and

later grew more rigid. In colonial ~Irginia, he claimed, white settlers

did not at first intend to create a system of permanent bondage for

blacks or whites. But as the tobacco economy grew and created a high

demand for cheap labor, white landowners began to feel uneasy about

their dependence on a large group of dependent white workers. Such

workers were difficult to recruit and control. Slavery, therefore, was

less a result of racism than of the desire for whites to find a reliable

and stable labor force.

In recent years, the debate over the origins of slavery has become

part of a larger debate over the nature of racism in American (and

world) history. Some scholars continue to argue, as WinthropJordan

did in the I960S, that racism is a powerful, autonomous part of white

culture, which exists independent of other factors. Others argue that

race as a category of distinction among human beings is itself

meaningless; since there are no significant biological or genetic

distinctions separating the races, the belief that there are important

differences is always an invention, or "construction," designed to

serve other needs. Just as historians have argued that eighteenth-

century racism was a product and not a cause of slavery, so other

scholars argue that racism in other times is an ideology created to

justify systems of oppression that serve economic, political, or other

needs.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Empire Under Straln

Origins of Resistance ~ The Struggle for the Continent

Tbe Ne7l~ Imperialism ~ Stiwings of Revolt . Cooperation and War

S LATE AS the I 750S, few Americans objected to their membership in

the British Empire. The imperial system had commercial and political

benefits for the Americans. And it had few costs, because for the

most part, the English government left the colonies alone. By the

midI770S, however, the relationship between the American colonies

and their British rulers had become so strained, so poisoned, so

characterized by suspicion and resentment that the empire was on the

verge of unraveling. And in the spring of I775, the first shots were

fired in a war that would ultimately win America its independence.

How had it happened? And why so quickly?

ORIGINS OF RESISTANCE

In one sense, it had not happened quickly at all. Ever since the first

days of English settlement in North America, the ideas and

institutions of the colonies had been diverging from those in Britain

in countless ways. In another sense, however, the Revolutionary crisis

emerged in response to important and relatively sudden changes in the

administration of the empire. Because in I763, the English government

began to enforce a series of policies toward its colonies that brought

the differences between the two SoCieties into sharp focus.

~4 Looseni7lg of Ties

In the fifty years after the Glorious Revolution, the English

Parliament

(which became the British Parliament after the union of England and

Scotland in I 707) established a growing supremacy over the l~ing.

During the reigns of George I (I7I4-I7Z7) and George II (I727-I760), both of

whom were German-born and unaccustomed to English ways, the

prime minister and his cabinet became the nation's real executives.

They held their positions not by the king's favor but by their ability to

control a majority in Parliament.

These parliamentary leaders were less inclined than the

seventeenthcentury monarchs had been to try to tighten control over

the empire. They depended politically on the great merchants and

landholders, most of whom feared that any such efforts would reduce

the profitability of the colonial trade. As a result, administration of

colonial affairs remained decentralized and inefficient, with no

single office or agency responsible for colonial affairs.

The character of the royal officials in America=D1the governors and

other officers of the royal colonies and (in all the colonies) the naval

officers and collectors of customs=D1contributed further to the

looseness of the imperial system. Some of these officeholders were

able and intelligent; most were not. Many, perhaps most, colonial

officials had used bribery to obtain their offices; many, perhaps most,

accepted bribes once they assumed their offices. Some appointees

remained in England and hired substitutes to take their places in

America.

Resistance to imperial authority centered in the colonial legislatures.

By the I750S the assemblies had become accustomed to levying taxes,

making appropriations, approving appointments, and passing laws for

their respective colonies. The assemblies came to look upon

themselves as little parliaments, each practically as sovereign

within its colony as Parliament itself was in England.

Intercolonial Disunity

Even so, the colonists continued to think of themselves as loyal

English subjects. Many felt stronger ties to England than they did to

one another, so great were the differences among the societies of the

various colonies. Yet for all their differences, the colonies could not

avoid forging connections with one another. As settlement became

almost continuous along the seacoast, people of the different colonies

came into closer contact. The gradual construction of roads, the rise

of trade, and the creation of a colonial postal service also forged

intercolonial ties.

Still, the colonists were reluctant to cooperate even when, in I 7

54, they faced a common threat from their old rivals, the French, and

France's Indian allies. A conference of colonial leaders=D1with

delegates from Pennsylvania, Maryland, New York, and New England

was meeting in Albany in that

year to negotiate a treaty with the Iroquois. The delegates tentatively

approved a plan offered by Benjamin Franklin to set up a "general

government" in America to manage relations with the Indians on

behalf of all the colonies. War with the French and Indians was

already beginning when this Albany Plan was presented to the colonial

assemblies. None approved it.

THE STRUGGLE FOR THE CONTINENT

: The war that raged in North America through the late I 750S and

early I 760S was part of a larger struggle between England and

France for dominance in world trade and naval power. The British

victory in that struggle, known in Europe as the Seven Years' War,

confirmed England's commercial s~lpremacy and cemented its

control of the settled regions of North America.

In America, however, the conflict was also the final stage in a

long struggle among the three principal powers in northeastern North

America: the English, the French, and the Iroquois. For more than a

century prior to the conflict=D1known in America as the French and

Indian War=D1these three groups had maintained a precarious balance of

power. The events of the I750S upset that balance, produced a

prolonged and open conflict, and established a precarious dominance

for the English societies throughout the region. The war also brought

English America into closer contact with British authority than ever

before and raised to the surface some of the underlying tensions in

the colonial relationship.

New France and tbe Iroquois Nation

The French and the English had coexisted relatively peacefully in

North America for nearly a century. But by the I750S, as both English

and French settlements expanded, religious and commercial tensions

began to produce new frictions and new conflicts.

By the end of the seventeenth century, the French Empire in

America compriSed a vast territory. In the I680S~ French explorers

journeyed as far south as the delta of the Mississippi, claimed the

surrounding country for France, and named it Louisiana in honor of

King Louis XI~ Subsequent traders and missionaries wandered

southwest as far as the Rio Grande and west to the Rocky Mountains.

The French had by then revealed the outlines of, and laid claim to, the

whole continental interior.

To secure their hold on these enormous claims, they founded a string

of widely separated communities, strategically located fortresses,

and far-

88 THE UNFINISHED NATION

flung missions and trading posts. Fort Louisbourg, on Cape Breton

Island, guarded the approach to the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Would-be

feudal lords established large estates (seigneu7~ies) along the banks

of the St. Lawrence River. And on a high bluff above the river stood

the fortified city of Quebec, the center of the French Empire in

America. Montreal to the south and Sault Sainte Marie and Detroit to

the west marked the northern boundaries of French settlement. On the

lower Mississippi emerged plantations much like those in the

Southern colonies of English America, worked by black slaves and

owned by "Creoles" (white immigrants of French descent). New

Orleans, founded in I7I8 to service the French plantation economy,

was soon as big as some of the larger cities of the Atlantic seaboard;

Biloxi and Mobile to the east completed the string of French

settlement.

But the French, of course, shared the continental interior with a

large and powerful Indian population. Both the French and the English

were aware that the battle for control of North America would be

determined in part by which group could best win the allegiance of

native tribes=D1as trading partners and, at times, as military allies.

The English=D1with their more advanced commercial economy=D1could

usually offer the Indians better and more plentiful goods. But the

French offered something that was often more important: tolerance.

Unlike the English settlers, who strove constantly to impose their

own social norms on the Indians they encountered, the French settlers

in the interior generally adjusted their own behavior to Indian

patterns. French fur traders frequently married Indian women and

adopted tribal ways; Jesuit missionaries interacted comfortably with

the natives and converted them to Catholicism by the thousands

without challenging most of their social customs. By the mid-

eighteenth century, therefore, the French had better and closer

relations with most of the Indians of the interior than did the English.

The most powerful native group, however, had a different relationship

with the French. The Iroquois Confederacy=D1five Indian nations

(Mohawk, Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, and Oneida) that had formed a

defensive alliance in the fifteenth century=D1had been the most

powerful native presence in the Ohio Valley and a large surTounding

region since the I640S. For nearly a century, neither the French nor

the English raised any serious challenge to Iroquois control of the

region, and the Iroquois maintained their autonomy by avoiding too

close a relationship with either group. They traded successfully with

both the English and the French and astutely played the two groups off

against each other. As a result, they maintained an uneasy balance of

power in the Great Lakes region.

THE EMPIRE UNDER STRAIN ~ 89

Anglo-Frencb Conflicts

As long as England and France remained at peace and as long as the

precarious balance in the North American interior survived, English

and French colonists coexisted without serious difficulty. But after

the Glorious Revolution in England, a series of Anglo-French wars

erupted and continued intermittently in Europe for nearly eighty

years.

The wars had important repercussions in America. King William's

War (I689-I697) produced only a few, indecisive clashes between the

English and the French in northern New England. Queen Anne's War,

which began in I70I and continued for nearly twelve years, generated

more substantial conflicts: border fighting with the Spaniards in the

south as well as with the French and their Indian allies in the north.

The Treaty of Utrecht, which brought the conflict to a close in I 7 I 3,

transferred substantial territory from the French to the English in

North Arnerica, including Acadia (Nova Scotia) and Newfoundland.

Two decades later, disputes over British trading rights in the Spanish

colonies produced a war between England and Spain that soon merged

with a much larger European war, in which England and France lined up

on opposite sides. The English colonists in America were soon drawn

into the struggle, which they called King George's War, and between I

744 and I 748 they engaged in a series of conflicts with the French.

New Englanders captured the French bastion at Louisbourg on Cape

Breton Island; but the peace treaty that finally ended the conflict

forced them to abandon it.

In the aftermath of King George's War, relations among the English,

French, and Iroquois in North America quickly deteriorated. The

Iroquois (in what appears to have been a major blunder) granted

trading concessions in the interior to English merchants for the first

time. The French, fearful (probably correctly) that the English were

using the concessions as a first step toward expansion into French

lands, began in I749 to construct new fortresses in the Ohio Valley.

The English interpreted the French activity as a threat to their

western settlements, protested, and began making military

preparations and building fortresses of their own. The balance of

power that the Iroquois had carefully and successfully maintained for

so long rapidly disintegrated.

For the next five years, tensions between the English and the French

increased. In the summer of I754 the governor of Vlrginia sent a

militia force (under the command of an inexperienced young colonel,

George Washington) into the Ohio Valley to challenge French

expansion. Washington built a crude stockade (Fort Necessity) not far

from Fort Duquesne, the larger

90 - THE UNFINISHED NATION

outpost the French were building on the site of what is now

Pittsburgh. After the Virginians staged an unsuccessful attack on a

French detachment, the French countered with an assault on Fort

Necessity, trapping Washington and his soldiers inside. After a third

of them died in the fighting, Washington surTendered. The clash

marked the beginning of the French and Indian War.

Tbe Great War for tbe Empire

The French and Indian War lasted nearly nine years, and it moved

through three distinct phases. During the first of these phases, from

the Fort Necessity debacle in I 7 54 until the expansion of the war to

Europe in I 756~ it was primarily a local, North American conflict.

The English colonists managed the war mainly on their own, and they

focused largely on defending themselves against raids on their

western settlements by the Indians of the Ohio Valley. Virtually all

the tribes except the Iroquois were now allied with the French; they

had interpreted the defeat of the Virginians at Fort Duquesne as

evidence of British weakness. Even the Iroquois, who were nominally

allied with the British, feared antagonizing the French. They remained

largely passive in the conflict. By late I 75 5 ~ many English settlers

along the frontier had withdrawn to the east of the Allegheny

Mountains to escape the hostilities.

The second phase of the struggle began in I 7 5 6~ when the

governments of France and England formally opened hostilities and a

truly international conflict (the Seven Years' War) began. The fighting

now spread to the West Indies, India, and Europe itself. But the

principal struggle remained the one in North America, where so far

England had suffered nothing but frustration and defeat. Beginning in

I757~ William Pitt, the English secretary of state (and future prime

minister), began to transform the war effort in America by bringing it

for the first time fully under British control. Pitt himself planned

military strategy, appointed commanders, and issued orders to the

colonists. Military recruitment had slowed dramatically in America,

and to replenish the army British commanders began forcibly

enlisting colonists (a practice known as "impressment"). Offficers

also seized supplies from local farmers and tradesmen and compelled

colonists to offer shelter to British troops=D1all generally without

compensation. The Americans resented these new impositions and

firmly resisted them=D1at times, as in a I 75 7 riot in New York City,

violently. By early I 758~ the friction between the British authorities

and the colonists was threatening to bring the war effort to a halt.

Beginning in I758~ therefore, Pitt initiated the third and final phase

of the war by relaxing many of the policies that Americans had found

obnoxious.

THE EMPIRE UNDER ~ T RAIN - 9 I

He agreed to reimburse the colonists for all supplies requisitioned by

the army. He returned control over recruitment to the colonial

assemblies (which resulted in an immediate and dramatic increase in

enlistments). And he dispatched large numbers of additional British

troops to America. Finally, the tide of battle began to turn in

England's favor. The French, who had always been outnumbered by the

British colonists and who, after I 756~ suffered fTom a series of poor

harvests, were unable to sustain their early military successes. By

mid-I758, the British regulars in America (who did the bulk of the

actual fighting) and the colonial militias were seizing one French

stronghold after another. Two brilliant English generals, Jeffrey

Amherst andJames Wolfe, captured the fortress at Louisbourg inJuly I

758; a few months later Fort Duquesne fell without a fight. The next

year, at the end of a siege of Quebec, supposedly impregnable atop its

towering cliff,

the army of General Wolfe struggled up a hidden ravine under cover of

darkness, surprised the larger forces of the Marquis de Montcalm, and

defeated them in a battle in which both commanders were slain. The

dramatic fall of Quebec on September I3~ I759~ marked the beginning

of the end of the American phase of the war. A year later, in

September I 760 the French army formally surrendered to Amherst in

Montreal.

Peace finally came in I763~ with the Peace of Paris. Under its

terms, the French ceded to Great Britain some of their West Indian

islands, most of their colonies in India and Canada, and all other

French territory in North America east of the Mississippi. They ceded

New Orleans and their claims west of the Mississippi to Spain, thus

surrendering all title to the mainland of North America.

The French and Indian War had profound effects on the British Empire

and the American colonies. It greatly expanded England's territorial

claims in the New World. At the same time, the cost of the war

greatly enlarged Britain's debt and substantially increased British

resentment of the Americans. English leaders were contemptuous of

the colonists for what they considered American military ineptitude

during the war; they were angry that the colonists had made so few

financial contributions to a struggle waged largely for American

benefit; they were particularly bitter that some colonial merchants

had been selling food and other goods to the French in the West Indies

throughout the conflict. All these factors combined to persuade many

English leaders that a major reorganization of the empire, giving

London increased authority over the colonies, would be necessary in

the aftermath of the war.

The war had an equally profound but very different effect on the

American colonists. It was an experience that forced them, for the

first time, to act in concert against a common foe. And it seemed to

establish certain precedents. The friction of I 7 56-I 75 7 over

British requisition and impressment policies and the I758 return of

authority to the colonial assemblies seemed to many Americans to

confirm the illegitimacy of English interference in local affairs.

For the Indians of the Ohio Valley, the third major party in the French

and Indian War, the British victory was disastrous. Those tribes that

had allied themselves with the French had earned the enmity of the

victorious English. The Iroquois Confederacy, which had allied itself

with Britain, fared only slightly better. English offficials saw the

passivity of the Iroquois during the war (a result of their effort to

hedge their bets and avoid antagonizing the French) as evidence of

duplicity. In the aftermath of the peace settlement, the Iroquois

alliance with the British quickly unraveled, and the Iroquois

Confederacy itself began to crumble from within. The tribes would

continue to contest the English for control of the Ohio Valley for

another fifty years; but increasingly divided and increasingly

outnumbered, they would seldom again be in a position to deal with

their European rivals on terms of military or political equality.

THE NEW IMPERIALISM

th the treaty of I 763 ~ England found itself truly at peace for the

first time in more than fifty years. Undistracted by war, the British

government could now turn its attention to the organization of its

empire. And after the diffficult experiences of the previous decade,

many English leaders were convinced that the question of imperial

organization could no longer be ignored. Saddled with enormous debts

from the many years of fighting, England was desperately in need of

new revenues from its empire. And responsible for vast new lands in

the New World, the imperial government felt compelled to expand its

involvement in its colonies.

Burdens of Empire

The experience of the French and Indian War, however, suggested that

such increased involvement would not be easy to establish. Not only

had the colonists proved so resistant to British control that Pitt had

been forced to relax his policies in I758~ but the colonial assemblies

had continued after that to respond to British needs slowly and

grudgingly. Unwilling to be

~- taxed by Parliament to support the war effort, the colonists were

generally reluctant to tax themselves as well. Defiance of

imperial trade regulations and other British demands continued.

With the territorial annexations of I 763~ the area of the British

Empire

i; was suddenly twice as great as it had been, and the problems of

goveming it thus became many times more complex. Some

English officials argued that the empire should restrain rapid

settlement and development of the Western territories to avoid

further costly conflicts with the Indians and perhaps even the

French. Restricting settlement would also keep the land

available for hunting and trapping. Others wanted to see the

new territories opened for mmediate development, but they

disagreed among themselves about who

ould control the Western lands. The existing colonial govemments

made

\~~~ fervent~ and often conflicting, claims of jurisdiction. Some

offficials in London wanted control to remain in England and

wanted the territories to

~e considered entirely new colonies, unlinked to the existing

settlements.

THE EMPIRE UNDER STRAIN

At the same time, the government in London was running out of

j options in its effort to deal with its staggering war debt. Landlords

and merchants in England itself were objecting strenuously to tax

increases. And the reluctance of the colonial assemblies to pay

for the war effort had suggested that England could not rely on

any cooperation from them in its search for revenues. Only a

system of taxation administered by London, the leaders of the

empire believed, could effectively meet England's needs.

~3 At this crucial moment in Anglo-American relations, with the

imperial

system in need of redefinition, the government of England was thrown

into

tummoil by the accession to the throne of a new king, George III, who

assumed power in I 760. He brought two particularly unfortunate

qualities

to the office. First, he was determined, unlike his two predecessors,

to

reassert the authority of the monarchy. Pushed by his ambitious

mother, he

.: removed from power the relatively stable coalition of Whigs who

had governed the empire for much of the century and replaced

them with a new coalition of his own, assembled through

patronage and bribes. The new ministries that emerged as a result

of these changes were very unstable, each

. lasting in office an average of only about two years.

The king also had serious intellectual and psychological

limitations. He suffered, apparently, from a rare mental disease that

produced intermittent bouts of insanity. (Indeed, in the last years of

his long reign he was, according to most accounts, a virtual lunatic,

confined to the palace and unable to perfomm any official functions.)

Yet even when George III was lucid and rational, which was most of

the time in the I 760S and I 770S~ he was painfully immature (he had

been only twenty-two when he ascended the throne) and

.~~ insecure. The king's personality, therefore, contributed both to the

instabil-

;~l ity and to the intransigence of the British government during

these critical

~* years.

_~ More directly responsible for the problems that soon emerged with

the colonies, however, was George Grenville, whom the king made

prime minister in I763. Grenville, though a brother-in-law of

William PiK, did

.~ not share Pitt's sympathy with the American point of view. He

agreed instead with the prevailing opinion within Britain that the

colonists had been too

, long indulged and that they should be compelled to obey the laws and

to pay a part of the cost of defending and administering the empire.

Tbe Britisb and the Tribes

th the defeat of the French, frontiersmen from the English

colonies had ~begun immediately to move over the mountains and into

tribal lands in the per Ohio Valley. An alliance of Indian tribes, under

the Ottawa chieftain

96 ~ THE UNFINISHED NATION

Pontiac, struck back. To prevent an escalation of the fighting that

might threaten Western trade, the British government issued a

ruling=D1the Proclamation of I763=D1forbidding settlers to advance

beyond the mountains that divided the Atlantic coast from the

interior.

The Proclamation of I763 gave London, rather than the provincial

governments and their land-hungry constituents, power to control

(and slow) the westward movement of the white population. Slower

Western settlement would limit costly wars with the Indians. It

would also slow the population exodus from the coastal colonies,

where England's most important markets and investments were. And

it would reserve opportunities for land speculation and fur trading for

English rather than colonial entrepreneurs.

Although Native Americans had few illusions about the Proclamation,

which required them to cede land east of the mountains to the white

settlers, many Indian groups supported the agreement as the best

bargain available to them. The Cherokee, in particular, worked

actively to hasten the drawing of the boundary, hoping finally to put

an end to white encroachments. Relations between the Western tribes

and the British improved in at least some areas after the

Proclamation, partly as a result of the work of the Indian

superintendents the British appointed, who were sympathetic to

tribal needs.

In the end, however, the Proclamation of I 763 failed to meet even the

modest expectations of the Indians, because on the crucial point of

the line of settlement, it was almost completely ineffective. White

settlers continued to swarm across the boundary and continued to

claim lands farther and farther into the Ohio Valley. The British

authorities tried repeatedly to establish limits to the expansion. In I

768~ new agreements with the Western tribes created a supposedly

permanent boundary (which, as always, increased the area of white

settlement at the expense of the Indians). But these treaties (signed

respectively at Hard Labor Creek, South Carolina, and Fort Stanwix,

New York) also failed to stop the white advance. Within a few years,

the I768 agreements were replaced with new ones, which pushed the

line of settlement still farther west.

The Colonial Response

The Grenville ministry soon increased its authority in the colonies

more directly. Regular British troops were stationed permanently in

America; and under the Mutiny Act of I 765 the colonists were

required to help provision and maintain the army. Ships of the British

navy patroled American waters to search for smugglers. The customs

service was reorganized and enlarged.

Royal officials were required to take up their colonial posts in person

instead of sending substitutes. Colonial manufacturing was

restricted, so that it would not compete with rapidly expanding

industies in Great Britain. Ii The Sugar Act of I764~ designed in part

to eliminate the illegal sugar trade between the continental colonies

and the French and Spanish West Indies, established new vice-

admiralty courts in America to try accused smugglers=D1thus cutting

them off from sympathetic local juries. The Currency Act of I764

required that the colonial assemblies stop issuing paper money. Most

momentously, the Stamp Act of I765 imposed a tax on every printed

document in the colonies: newspapers, almanacs, pamphlets, deeds,

wills, licenses. British officials were soon collecting more than ten

times as much annual revenue in America as they had been before I

763 . But the new policies created many more problems than they

solved.

It was difficult for the colonists to resist these unpopular

new laws. For I one thing, Americans continued to harbor as many

grievances against one l; another as they did against the authorities

in London. In I 763 ~ for example, ~ a band of Pennsylvania

frontiersmen known as the Paxton Boys descended L on Philadelphia to

demand tax relief and financial support for their defense against

Indians; bloodshed was averted only by concessions frcm the colonial

assembly. In I77I~ a small-scale civil war broke out in North Carolina

when the Regulators, farmers of the Carolina upcountry, organized and

armed themselves to resist the high taxes that local sheriffs

(appointed by the colonial governor) collected. An army of militiamen,

most of them from the eastern counties, crushed the revolt in the

Battle of Alamance. Nine on each side were killed and many others

wounded. Afterward, six Regulators were hanged for treason.

Despite the conflicts, however, the new policies of the British

government began after I763 to create common grievances among

virtually all colonists. For under the Grenville program, as Americans

saw it, all people in all colonies would suffer. Northem merchants

would suffer fTom restraints on their commerce, fTom the closing of

the West to land speculation and fur trading, fTom the restriction of

opportunities for manufacturing, and from the increased burden of

taxation. Southern planters, in debt to English merchants~ would now

have to pay additional taxes and would be unable to ease their debts

by speculating in Western land. Small farmers, the largest group in

the colonies, would suffer from increased taxes and from the

abolition of paper money, which had been the source of most of their

loans.

orkers in towns faced the prospect of narrowing opportunities,

particularly because of the restraints on manufacturing and currency.

The new restric,~ions came, moreover, at the beginning of a postwar

economic depression.

98 ~THE UNFINISHED NATION

The British government had poured money into the colonies to finance

the war, but that flow stopped after I763. Now the authorities in

London proposed to aggravate the problem by taking money out of the

colonies.

In reality, most Americans soon found ways to live with (or

circumvent) the new British laws. The American economy was not

being destroyed. But there was still a deep sense of unease,

particularly in the cities=D1the places most directly affected by

British policies. Periodic and increasingly frequent economic slumps,

the frightening depression of the early I 760S~ the growth of a large

group of unemployed or semiemployed=D1all combined to produce great

distress in some colonial cities, and particularly in Boston, the city

suffering the worst economic problems.

Whatever the economic burdens of the imperial program, colonists

considered the political burdens worse. Americans were accustomed

(and deeply attached) to wide latitude in self-government. The key to

it, they believed, was the right of the colonial assemblies to control

appropriations for the costs of governmentwithin the colonies. By

attempting to circumvent the colonial assemblies and raise extensive

revenues directly from the public, the British government was

challenging the basis of colonial political power.

STIRRINGS OF REVOLT

By the mid-I760s, therefore, a hardening of positions had begun in

both England and America that would bring the colonies into

increasing conflict with the mother country. The result was a

progression of events that, more rapidly than anyone could have

imagined, destroyed the English empire in America.

The Stamp ~ct Crisis

Grenville could not have devised a better method for antagonizing and

unifying the colonies than the Stamp Act of I 765 if he had tried.

Unlike the Sugar Act of a year earlier, which affected only a few New

England merchants, the tax on printed documents fell on all

Americans. The actual economic burdens of the Stamp Act were

relatively light, but the precedent it seemed to set was ominous. In

the past, taxes and duties on colonial trade had always been presented

as measures to regulate commerce, not raise money. The Stamp Act,

however, was a direct attempt by England to raise revenue in the

colonies without the consent of the colonial assemblies. If

~

THE EMPIRE UNDER STRAIN - 99

Americans accepted this new tax without resistance, the door would

be open for more burdensome taxation in the future.

Few colonists believed that they could do anything more than

grumble until the ~Irginia House of Burgesses sounded a "trumpet of

sedition" that aroused Americans to action almost everywhere.

Foremost among the Virginia malcontents was Patrick Henry, who

made a dramatic speech to the House in May I765~ concluding with a

vague prediction that if present policies were not revised, George III,

like earlier tyrants, might lose his head. There were shocked cries of

"Treason!" and, according to one witness, an immediate apology from

Henry (although many years later he was quoted as having made the

defiant reply: "If this be treason, make the most of it"). Henry

introduced a set of resolutions declaring that Americans possessed

the same rights as the English, especially the right to be taxed only

by their own representatives; that ~rlrginians should pay no taxes

except those voted by the ~TIrginia assembly; and that anyone

advocating the right of Parliament to tax Virginians should be deemed

an enemy of the colony. The House of Burgesses defeated some of

Henry's resolutions, but all of them were printed and circulated as the

''~Irginia Resolves."

In Massachusetts at about the same time, James Otis persuaded his

fellow members of the colonial assembly to call an intercolonial

congress to take action against the new tax. And in October I765~ the

Stamp Act Congress, as it was called, met in New York with delegates

from nine colonies and petitioned the king and Parliament. Their

petition denied that the colonies could rightfully be taxed except

through their own provincial assemblies.

Meanwhile, in several colonial cities mobs began taking the law into

their own hands. During the summer of I 765 serious riots broke out

up and down the coast, the largest of them in Boston. Men belonging to

the newly organized Sons of Liberty terrorized stamp agents and

burned stamps. The agentS~ themselves Americans, hastily resigned.

In Boston, the mob also attacked such pro-British "aristocrats" as the

lieutenant governor, Thomas Hutchinson (who had privately opposed

passage of the Stamp Act but who felt obliged to support it once it

became law). Hutchinson's elegant house was pillaged and virtually

destroyed.

At last the crisis subsided, largely because England backed down. The

authorities in London were less affected by the political protests

than by economic pressure. Many New Englanders had stopped buying

English g oods to protest the Sugar Act of I764. Now the colonial

boycott spread, =92 and the Sons of Liberty intimidated reluctant

colonists to participate in it.

IOO ~ 1 HE UNFINISHED NATION

The merchants of England, feeling the loss of much of their colonial

market, begged Parliament to repeal the unpopular law. On March I8~ I

766~ the Stamp Act was repealed at the urging of the new prime

minister, the Marquis of Rockingham. To satisfy his strong and

vociferous opponents, Rockingham also pushed through the

Declaratory Act, which confirmed parliamentary authority over the

colonies "in all cases whatsoever." In their rejoicing over the repeal,

most Americans paid little attention to this sweeping declaration of

Parliament's power, but the Declaratory Act was clear evidence of

how large a gulf had emerged between the English and American views

of the imperial relationship.

Tbe To7vnshend Program

The Rockingham government's policy of appeasement met substantial

opposition in England. English landlords, a powerful political force,

feared that not taxing the colonies would result in imposing new

taxes on them. The king finally dismissed the Rockingham ministry,

and replaced it with a new government led by the aging but still

powerful U7l11iam Pitt (now Lord Chatham). Chatham had been a

critic of the Stamp Act and had a reputation in America as a friend of

the colonists. Once in office, however, he was so hobbled by gout and

at times so incapacitated by mental illness that the actual leadership

of his administration fell to the chancellor of the exchequer, Charles

Townshend (pronounced "Townsend").

Townshend had to deal with imperial problems and colonial

grievances left over from the Grenville ministry. ~Ith the Stamp Act

repealed, the greatest American grievance involved the Mutiny (or

Quartering) Act of I765~ which required the colonists to provide

quarters and supplies for the British troops in America. The colonists

did not object to quartering or supplying the troops; but they resented

that these contributions were now mandatory, and they considered

them another form of taxation without their consent. The

Massachusetts and New York assemblies refused to vote the mandated

supplies to the troops.

To enforce the law and to try again to raise revenues in the colonies,

Townshend steered two measures through Parliament in I767. First,

the New York Assembly was disbanded until the colonists agreed to

obey the Mutiny Act. (By singling out New York, Townshend thought he

would avoid Grenville's mistake of arousing all the colonies at once.)

Second, new taxes (known as the Townshend Duties) were levied on

various goods imported to

THE EMPIRE UNDER STRAIN ~ IOI

the colonies from England=D1lead, paint, paper, and tea. Townshend

reasoned that since these were taxes purely on "external"

transactions (imports from overseas) as opposed to the internal

transactions the Stamp Act had taxed, the colonists could not object.

But the distinction between external and internal taxation meant

little to the colonists. The purpose of the new duties, they claimed,

was the same as that of the Stamp Act: to raise revenue from the

colonists without their consent. And the suspension of the New York

Assembly aroused the resentment of all the colonies. They considered

this assault on the rights of one provincial government a threat on all

of them.

The Massachusetts Assembly took the lead in opposing the new

measures by circulating a letter to all the colonial governments

urging them to stand up against every tax imposed by Parliament. At

first, the document evoked little response outside Massachusetts.

Then Lord Hillsborough, secretary of state for the colonies in London,

warned that assemblies endorsing the Massachusetts letter would be

dissolved. Massachusetts defiantly reafffirmed its support for the

circular, and the other colonies supported Massachusetts.

Besides persuading Parliament to levy import duties and suspend the

New York Assembly, Townshend took steps to enforce commercial

regulations in the colonies more effectively. The most important of

these steps was the establishment of a board of customs

commissioners in America to stop the rampant corruption in the

colonial customs houses. To some extent the plan worked. The new

commissioners virtually ended smuggling in Boston, where they

established their headquarters, although smugglers continued to carry

on a busy trade in other colonial seaports.

The Boston merchants=D1accustomed to loose enforcement ofthe

Navigation Acts and aggrieved now that the new commission was

diverting the lucrative smuggling trade elsewhere=D1took the lead in

organizing another boycott. Merchants in Philadelphia and New York

joined them in a nonimportation agreement in I768~ and later some

Southern merchants and planters also agreed to cooperate. The

colonists boycotted British goods that were subject to the Townshend

Duties; and throughout the colonies, American homespun and other

domestic products became suddenly fashionable, while English

luxuries fell from favor.

Late in I 767~ Charles Townshend died=D1before the consequences of

his i~-conceived program had become fully apparent. In March I 770~

the new prime minister, Lord North, hoping to break the

nonimportation agreement and divide the colonists, repealed all the

Townshend Duties excent the

I02 ~ THE UNFINISHED NATION

Tbe Boston Massacre

Before news of the repeal reached America, an event in Massachusetts

had electrified colonial opinion. The harassment of the new customs

commissioners in Boston had grown so intense that the British

government had placed four regiments of regular troops in the city=D1a

constant affront to the colonists' sense of independence. Everywhere

they went, Bostonians encountered British "redcoats," some of whom

were arrogant, coarse, or provocative. Many poorly paid British

soldiers wanted jobs in their off-duty hours, and they thus competed

with local workers in an already tight market. Clashes between them

were frequent.

On the night of March 5, I770~ a few days after a particularly

intense skirmish between workers at a ship-rigging factory and

British soldiers who were trying to find jobs there, a mob of

dockworkers, "liberty boys," and others began pelting the sentries at

the customs house with rocks and

1 HE I~MPIRE UNDER ~ITRAIN - 103

snowballs. Hastily, Captain Thomas Preston of the British regiment

lined up several of his men in front of the building to protect it. There

was some scuffling; one of the soldiers was knocked down; and in the

midst of it all, apparently, several British soldiers fired into the

crowd, killing five people (among them a mulatto sailor, Crispus

Attucks).

This murky incident, almost certainly the result of panic and

confusion, was quickly transformed by local resistance leaders into

the "Boston Massacre"=D1a graphic symbol of British oppression and

brutality. The victims became popular martyrs; the event became the

subject of such lurid (and inaccurate) accounts as the widely

circulated pamphlet Innocent Blood C'~ying to Godfrom the Streets of

Boston. A famous engraving by Paul Revere portrayed the massacre as

a carefully organized, calculated assault on a peaceful crowd. The

British soldiers, tried before a jury of Bostonians, were found guilty

only of manslaughter and given token punishment. But colonial

pamphlets and newspapers convinced many Americans that the

soldiers were guilty of official murder. Year after year, resistance

leaders marked the anniversary of the massacre with demonstrations

and speeches.

The leading figure in fomenting public outrage over the Boston

Massacre was Samuel Adams, the most effective radical in the

colonies. He spoke frequently at Boston town meetings; and as one

unpopular English policy followed another, his message attracted

increasing support. England, he argued, had become a morass of sin

and corruption; only in America did public virtue survive. In I772~ he

proposed the creation of a "committee of correspondence" in Boston to

publicize the grievances against England throughout the colony, and he

became its first head. Other colonies followed Massachusetts's lead,

and a loose inter-colonial network of political organizations was

soon established that kept the spirit of dissent alive through the

The Philosophy of Revolt

Although a superficial calm settled on the colonies for approximately

three years after the Boston Massacre, the crises of the I760S had

helped arouse enduring ideological excitement and had produced

instruments for publiCizing colonial grievances. Gradually a political

outlook took hold in America that would ultimately serve to justify

revolt.

The ideas that would support the Revolution emerged from

many - SourCes. Some were indigenous to America, drawn from

religious (particuf~~,, larly Puritan) sources or from the political

experiences of the colonies. But |~~ese native ideas were enriched and

enlarged by the importation of powerful

arguments from abroad. Of most importance, perhaps, were the

"radical" ideas of those in Great Britain who stood in opposition to

their government. Some were Scots, who viewed the English state as

tyrannical. Others were embittered "countryWhigs," who felt excluded

from power and considered the existing system corrupt and

oppressive. Drawing from some of the great philosophical minds of

earlier generations=D1most notably John Locke=D1 these English

dissidents framed a powerful argument against their government.

Central to this emerging ideology was a new concept of what

govemment should be. Because humans were inherently corrupt and

selfish, govemment was necessary to protect individuals from the

evil in one another. But because any government was run by

corruptible people, it needed safeguards against abuses of power. Iri

the eyes of most English and American people, the English

constitution was the best system ever devised to meet these

necessities. By distributing power among the three elements of

society=D1the monarchy, the aristocracy, and the common people=D1the

English political system ensured that no individual or group could

exercise authority unchecked by another. Yet by the mid-seventeenth

century, dissidents in both England and America had become convinced

that the constitution was in danger. A single center of power=D1the

king and his ministers=D1was emerging, and the system was becoming a

corrupt and dangerous t~Tanny.

Such arguments found little sympathy in most of England. The English

constitution was not a written document; nor was it a fixed set of

unchangeable rules. It was a general sense of the "way things are

done," and most people in England were willing to accept evolutionary

changes in it. Americans, by contrast, drew from their experience

with colonial charters, in which the shape and powers of government

were permanently inscribed on paper. They resisted the idea of a

flexible, changing set of basic principles. Many colonists argued that

the English constitution should itself be written down, to prevent

fallible politicians from tampering with its essence.

Part of that essence, Americans believed, was their right to be taxed

only with their own consent. When Townshend levied his external

duties, the Philadelphia lawyer John Dickinson published a widely

circulated pamphlet, Letters of a Pennsylvania Farmer, which argued

that even external taxation was legal only when designed to regulate

trade and not to raise a revenue. Gradually, most Americans ceased to

accept even that distinction, and they finally took an unqualified

stand: "No taxation without representation." Whatever the nature of a

tax=D1whether intemal or external, whether designed to raise revenue

or to control trade=D1it could not be levied without the consent of the

colonists themselves.

This clamor about "representation" made little sense to the English.

~3 According to the prevailing English theory, members of Parliament

did not represent individuals or particular geographical areas.

Instead, each member rcpresented the interests of the whole

nation and indeed the whole empire,

- no matter where the member happened to come from. The many

unenfranchised boroughs of England, the whole of Ireland, and the

colonies thouJ~ sands of miles away=D1all were thus represented in the

Parliament at London, even though they elected no representatives of

their own. This was the theory of "virtual" representation. But

Americans, drawing from their experiences with their town meetings

and their colonial assemblies, believed in "actual" representation.

Every community was entitled to its own representative, elected by

the people of that community and directly responsible to them. Since

they had none of their own representatives in Parliament, it followed

that they were not represented there. According to the emerging

American view of the empire, the colonial assemblies played the

same role within the colonies=D1had the same powers, enjoyed the

same rights=D1that Parliament did within England. The empire, the

Americans argued, was a sort of federation of commonwealths, each

with its own legislative body, all tied together by common loyalty to

the king.

What may have made the conflict between England and America

ultimately insoluble was a fundamental difference of opinion over the

nature of sovereignty. By arguing that Parliament had the right to

legislate for England and for the empire as a whole, but that only the

provincial assemblies could legislate for the individual colonies,

Americans were in effect arguing for a division of sovereignty.

Parliament would be sovereign in some matters; the assemblies

would be sovereign in others. To the British, such an argument was

absurd. In any system of government there must be a single, ultimate

authority. And since the empire was, in their view, a single, undivided

unit, there could be only one authority within it: the English

government of king and Parliament. Ultimately, that presented the

colonists with a stark choice: between complete subordination to

England and complete independence from it. Slowly, cautiously, they

began moving toward independence.

The Tea Excitement

The apparent calm in America in the first years of the I770S masked

a growing sense of frustration and resentment in response to the

continued and increasingly heavy-handed enforcement of the

Navigation Acts. Poput lar anger was visible in occasional acts of

rebellion. At one point, colonists

I06 ~ THE UNFINISHED NATION

seized a British revenue ship on the lower Delaware River. And in

I772, angry residents of Rhode Island boarded the British schooner

Gasp=8Ee, set it afire, and sank it in Narragansett Bay.

What finally revived the Revolutionary fervor of the I760S,

however, was a new act of Parliament=D1one that the English

government had expected to be relatively uncontroversial. It involved

the business of selling tea. In I773~ Britain's East India Company

(which possessed an official monopoly on trade with the Far East)

was sitting on large stocks of tea that it could not sell in England. It

was on the verge of bankruptcy. In an effort to save it, the

government passed the Tea Act of I 77 3, which gave the company the

right to export its merchandise directly to the colonies without

paying any of the regular taxes that were imposed on the colonial

merchants, who had traditionally served as the middiemen in such

transactions. Wlth these privileges, the company could undersell

American merchants and monopolize the colonial tea trade.

The act proved inflammatory for several reasons. First, it angered

influential colonial merchants, who feared being replaced and

bankrupted by a powerful monopoly. More important, however, the Tea

Act revived American passions about the issue of taxation without

representation. The law provided no new tax on tea. But the original

Townshend duty on the commodity=D1the only one of the original duties

that had not been repealed=D1survived. Itwas the EastIndia Company's

exemption from that dut~ that put the colonial merchants at such a

grave disadvantage in competition with the company. Lord North

assumed that most colonists would welcome the new law because it

would reduce the price of tea to consumers by removing the

middlemen. But resistance leaders in America resented the

monopolistic privileges of the company and, more important, argued

that the law in effect represented an unconstitutional tax. The

colonists responded by boycotting tea.

Unlike earlier protests, most of which had involved relatively small

numbers of people, the tea boycott mobilized large segments of the

population. It also helped link the colonies together in a common

experience of mass popular protest. Particularly important to the

movement were the activities of colonial women, who were among

the principal consumers of tea and now became the leaders of the

effort to boycott it. The Daughters of Liberty=D1a women's patriotic

organization which, like the Sons of Liberty, was committed to

agitating against British policies, proclaimed "that rather than

Freedom, we'll part with our Tea."

In the last weeks of I 7 7 3, with strong popular support, leaders in

various colonies made plans to prevent the East India Company from

landing its

IHE EMPIRE UNDER STRAIN=09I07

~~ Cargoes in colonial ports. In Philadelphia and New York,

determined colo-

: nists kept the tea from leaving the company's ships; and in

Charleston, they

., stored it away in a public warehouse. In Boston, after failing to turn

three ships away from the harbor, local patriots staged a

spectacular drama. On the evening of December I6, I773, three

companies of fifty men each, masquerading as Mohawks, passed

through a crowd of spectators, went aboard the three ships, broke

open the tea chests, and heaved them into the harbor. As the

electrifying news of the Boston "tea party" spread, other seaports

staged similar acts of resistance of their own.

Parliament retaliated in four acts of I774, closing the port of

Boston, drastically reducing the powers of self-government in

Massachusetts, permitting royal officers to be tried in other colonies

or in England when

~;! accused of crimes, and providing for the quartering of troops by

the colonists. These Coercive Acts=D1or, as they were more widely

known in America, "Intolerable Acts"=D1were followed by the

Quebec Act, which was unrelated to them but also provocative to

English Americans. The law extended the boundaries of Quebec to

include the French communities between the Ohio and

Mississippi rivers. It also granted political rights to Roman

Catholics and recognized the legality of the Roman Catholic

church within the enlarged

k province. Many Americans feared that a plot was afoot in London to

subject Americans to the authority of the pope. Those interested in

Western lands, moreover, believed that the act would hinder

westward expansion.

The Coercive Acts, far from isolating Massachusetts, made it a

martyr in the eyes of residents of other colonies and sparked new

resistance up and down the coast. Colonial legislatures passed a

series of resolves supporting

~, Massachusetts. Women's groups throughout the colonies mobilized

to extend the boycotts of British goods and to create substitutes

for the tea,

~i textiles, and other commodities they were shunning. In Edenton,

North

'N' Carolina, fifty-one women signed an agreement in October I774

declaring their "sincere adherence" to the anti-British

resolutions of their provincial assembly and proclaiming their

duty to do "every thing as far as lies in our power" to support the

"publick good."

Revolutions do not simply happen. They must be organized and led.

Beginning in I 765, colonial leaders developed a variety of

organizations for nverting popular discontent into action

organizations that in time ; rrned the basis for an independent

government.

08 ~ THE UNFINISHED NATION

Ne~u Sources of Authority

The passage of authority from the royal government to the colonists

themselves began on the local level. In colony after colony, local

institutions responded to the resistance movement by simply seizing

authority on their own. At times, entirely new institutions emerged

and began to perform some of the functions of government.

The most effective of these new groups were the committees of

corre-

spondence that Adams had inaugurated in Massachusetts in I772.

~Irginia

later established the first intercolonial committees of

correspondence, which made possible continuous cooperation among

the colonies. And rginia took the greatest step of all toward united

action in I 774. After the royal governor dissolved the assembly, a

rump session met in the Raleigh Tavern at Williamsburg, declared

that the Intolerable Acts menaced the liberties of every colony, and

issued a call for a Continental Congress.

The First Battles of the Revolution

=A5=D1 Paul Revere's ride, ni~ht of April 18, 1775

William Dawes's ride April 18

1 775

Arnerican forces 31' American

British forces=0931! British victory=09~~ Rodd

Delegates from all thirteen colonies except Georgia were

present when, in September I774~ the First Continental Congress

convened in Philadelphia. They made five major decisions. First, in a

close vote, they rejected a plan for a colonial union under British

authority. Second, they endorsed a statement of grievances that

reflected the influence of moderates by seeming to concede

Parliament's right to regulate colonial trade and by addressing the

king as "Most Gracious Sovereign," but it also included a more extreme

demand for the repeal OI all oppressive legislation passed since I 763

. Third, they approved a series of resolutions from a Massachusetts

convention recommending that military preparations be made for

defense against possible attack by the British troops in Boston.

Fourth, they agreed to a series of boycotts that they hoped would stop

all trade with Great Britain, and they formed a "Continental

Association" to see that these agreements were enforced. And fifth,

the delegates agreed to meet again the following spring, indicating

that they saw the Continental Congress as a continuing

organization.

During the winter, the Parliament in London debated proposals

for conciliating the colonists. Lord North finally won approval early in

I775 for a series of measures known as the Conciliatory Propositions.

Parliament proposed that the colonies, instead of being taxed directly

by Parliament, would tax themselves at Parliament's demand.

this offer, Lord North hoped to divide the American moderates, whom

he believed represented the views of the majority, from the

extremist minority. But his offer was too little and too late. It did

not reach America until after the first shots of war had been fired.

Lexington and Concord

For months, the farmers and townspeople of Massachusetts had been

gathering arms and ammunition and training as "minutemen,"

preparing to fight on a minute's notice. The Continental Congress had

approved preparationS for a defensive war, and the citizen-soldiers

only waited for an aggreSSive move by the British regulars in Boston.

In Boston, General Thomas Gage, commanding the British

garrison, considered his army too small to do anything without

reinforcements. He resiSted the advice of less cautious officers, who

assured him that the Americans would never dare actually to fight,

that they would back down quickly before any show of British force.

When General Gage received orders to arrest the rebel leaders Sam

Adams and John Hancock, known to be in the vicinity of Lexington, he

still hesitated. But when he heard that the

THE EMPIRE UNDER STRAl~ ~ I I I

The first shots=D1the "shots heard round the world," as Americans

later called them=D1had been fired. But who had fired them first?

According to one of the minutemen at Lexington, the British

commander, Major Thomas Pitcairn, had shouted to the colonists on

his arrival, "Disperse, ye rebels!" When they ignored him, he ordered

his troops to fire. British officers and soldiers claimed that the

minutemen had fired first and that only after seeing the flash of

American guns had they begun to shoot. Whatever the truth, the rebels

succeeded in circulating their account well ahead of the British ,

version, adorning it with tales of British atrocities. The effect was

to rally ~ to the rebel cause thousands of colonists, North and South,

who previously | had had little enthusiasm for it.

k It was not immediately clear to the British, and even to many

Americans, that the skirmishes at Lexington and Concord were the

first battles of a war. But whether they recognized it at the time

or not, the War for Independence had begun.

minutemen had stored a large supply of gunpowder in Concord

(eighteen miles from Boston), he decided to act. On the night of April

I8~ I775~ he sent a detachment of about I~OOO men out from Boston

on the road to Lexington and Concord. He hoped to surprise the

colonials and seize the illegal supplies without bloodshed.

But patriots in Boston were watching the British movements

closelv; and during the night two horsemen, William Dawes and Paul

Revere, were dispatched to warn the villages and farms. When the

redcoats arrived in Lexington the next day, several dozen minutemen

awaited them on the town common. Shots were fired and minutemen

fell; eight of them were killed and ten more were wounded. Advancing

to Concord, the British discovered that the Americans had hastily

removed most of the powder supply, but the redcoats burned what was

left of it. All along the road from Concord back to Boston, the British

were harassed by the gunfire of farmers hiding behind trees, rocks,

and stone walls. By the end of the day, the British had lost almost

three times as many men as the Americans.

THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION=09I I 3

CHAPTER FIVE

The American Revolution

The States United ~ The Warfor Independence ~ War and Society

The Creation of State Governments ~ The Search for a National

Government

~ WO S'rRUGGLES OCCURRED simultaneously during the seven years of

war that began in April of I 77 5 . One was the military

conflict with Great Britain. The second was a political conflict

within America.

The military conflict was, by the standards of later wars, a

relatively modest one. Battle deaths on the American side totaled

fewer than 5~000. By the standards of its own day, however, it was

an unusually savage conflict, pitting not only army against army but

the civilian population against a powerful external force. The shift of

the war from a traditional, conventional struggle to a new kind of

conflict=D1a revolutionary war for liberation=D1is what made it possible

for the United States to defeat the more powerful British.

At the same time, Americans were wrestling with the great political

questions that the conflict necessarily produced: first, whether to

demand independence from Britain; then, how to structure the new

nation they had proclaimed. Only the first of these questions had been

resolved by the time of the British surrender at Yorktown in I 78 I .

THE STATES UNITED

Although many Americans had been expecting a military conflict with

Britain for months, even years, the actual beginning of hostilities in

I775 found the colonies generally unprepared. A still-unformed nation

faced the task of mobilizing for war against the world's greatest

armed power. Americans faced that task deeply divided about what

they were fighting for.

Defining~merican War~ims

k Three weeks after the battles of Lexington and Concord, when the

Second Continental Congress met in Philadelphia, delegates from

every colony except Georgia (which was not represented until the

following autumn) agreed to support the war. But they disagreed

about its purpose. At one extreme was a group led by the Adams

cousins aohn and Samuel), Richard Henry Lee of ~Tlrginia, and

others, who already favored independence; at

~- the other extreme was a group led by such moderates as John

Dickinson of

~ Pennsylvania, who hoped for a quick reconciliation with Great

Britain.

E~ Most of the delegates tried to find some middle ground between

these positions. They voted for one last appeal to the king: the so-

called Olive Branch Petition. Then, onJuly 6~ I775, they adopted a

Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms. It

proclaimed that the British government had left the American

people with only two alternatives: "unconditional submission to

the tyranny of irritated ministers or resistance by force."

Most Americans still believed they were fighting not for

independence but for a redress of grievances within the British

Empire. During the first

~Fr~~ year of fighting, however, many of them began to change their

minds. The costs of the war=D1human and financial=D1were so

high that the original war aims began to seem too modest to

justify them. What lingering affection they retained for the

mother country greatly diminished when the British

~, began trying to recruit Indians, black slaves, and German

mercenaries (the hated "Hessians") against them. When the

British government rejected the Olive Branch Petition and

instead enacted the Prohibitory Act, which closed

F the colonial ports (through a naval blockade) to all overseas trade

and made

1~ no concessions to American demands except an offer to pardon

repentant rebels, many colonists concluded that independence

was the only remaining ption.

An impassioned pamphlet crystalli~ed these feelings inJanuary

I776: Common Sense, by Thomas Paine, who had emigrated from

England to America less than two years before. Paine wanted to

persuade Americans

~ that no reconciliation with Britain was possible. He wanted to turn

the anger

!~ of Americans away from particular parliamentary measures and

toward what

~ he considered the root of the problem=D1the English constitution

itself. It

,1 Was simple common sense for Americans to break completely with

a political system that could produce so corrupt a monarch as

George III and could inflict such brutality on its own people.

Common Sense sold more than IOO~OOO copies in only a few

months. To

I I4 ~ THE UNFINISHED NATION=09~~=09THE

AMERICAN REVOLUTION=09~=09I I

5

many of its readers it was a revelation. Although sentiment for

independence was still far fTom unanimous, the first months of I 776

saw a rapid growth of support for the idea.

Tbe Decision for Independence

In the meantime, the Continental Congress in Philadelphia was moving

toward a complete break with England. It opened American ports to

the ships of all nations except Great Britain, began negotiating with

other nations, and recommended to the colonies that they establish

governments independent of the empire, as in fact most already were

doing.

At the beginning of the summer, finally, Congress appointed a

committee to draft a formal declaration of independence. And on July

2, I776, it adopted a resolution: "That these United Colonies are, and,

of right, ought to be, free and independent states; that they are

absolved from all allegiance to the British crown, and that all

political connexion between them and the state of Great Britain is,

and ought to be, totally dissolved." Two days later, onJuly 4, Congress

approved the Declaration of Independence itself, which provided

formal justifications for the actions the delegates had taken two

days earlier.

The Declaration was largely the work of Thomas Jefferson, a

thirtythree-year-old Virginian, although it was substantially revised

by other delegates. (Among other changes, Congress struck out a

passage condemning the slave trade to placate Southern slaveowners.)

The final document was in two parts. In the first, Jefferson restated

the familiar contract theory of John Locke: the theory that

governments were formed to protect what Jefferson called "life,

liberty and the pursuit of happiness." In the second part, he listed the

alleged crimes of the king, who, with the backing of Parliament, had

violated his contract with the colonists and thus had forfeited all

claim to their loyalty. Little of whatJefferson wrote was new to the

document's readers; the power of the Declaration lay in the eloquence

with which it expressed beliefs already widespread in America.

Having asserted their independence, the individual colonies now began

to call themselves states=D1a reflection of their belief that each

province was now a sovereign entity. By I78I, most states had

produced written constitutions for themselves that established

republican governments. At the national level, however, the process

was more uncertain and less immediately successful. For a time,

Americans were not sure whether they even wanted a real national

~overnment; virtually everyone considered the indirequired a certain

amount of central direction. In November I777, finally, Congress

adopted a plan for union. The document was known as the Articles of

Confederation, and it confirmed the weak, decentralized system

already in operation. (See pp. I36-I37.)

Mobilizing for War

Organi~ing the war effort was a formidable task for the frail

Congress and the new state governments. They had to find the money

to pay for the war, and they had to raise and equip an army to fight it.

Financing the war was particularly difficult, because Congress

lacked the authority and the states generally lacked the inclination to

impose taxes on the public. Hard currency (gold and silver) had always

been scarce in America. And when Congress requisitioned money from

the state governments, none contributed more than a small part of its

expected share. Congress had little success borrowing from the

public, since few Americans could afford to buy bonds and those who

could preferred to invest in more profitable ventures, such as

privateering. So there was no alternative in the end but to issue paper

money. Continental currency came from the printing presses in

enormous batches, and the states printed currencies of their own. The

result, predictably, was soaring inflation. Many American farmers and

merchants began to prefer doing business with the British, who could

pay for goods in gold or silver coin. (That was one reason why George

Washington's troops suffered from food shortages at Valley Forge in

the winter of I777-I778; many Philadelphia merchants would not

accept the paper money the army offered them.) Congress was unable

to stop the inflation, and ultimately it was able to finance the war

only by borrowing from other nations.

Raising and equipping the army was little easier. After the first surge

of patriotism in I775, only a small proportion of eligible men were

willing to volunteer. States had to pay bounties or use a draft to

recruit the needed men. At first, militiamen remained under the

control of their respective states. But Congress recognized the need

for a centralized military command, and it created a Continental army

with a single commander in chief: George Washington. A forty-three-

year-old Virginia planter-aristocrat who had commanded colonial

forces during the French and Indian War, Washington had considerable

military experience and was an early advocate of independence; he

was admired, respected, and trusted by nearly all Patriots.

O=09He took command of the new army in June I 775.

vidual colonies (now states) the real centers of authority. Yet

fighting a war L~~,,=09 Washington was not without shortcomings as a milit

ary commander.

I I6 ~ THE UNFINISHED NATION

Indeed, he lost more battles than he won. But whatever his faults and

failures, he was indisputably a great war leader. With the aid of

foreign military experts such as the Marquis de Lafayette from France

and the Baron von Steuben from Prussia, he built a force that

prevailed against the mightiest power in the world. Even more

important, perhaps, Washington's steadiness, courage, and dedication

to his cause provided the army=D1and the people=D1with a symbol of

stability around which they could rally.

THE WAR FOR INDEPENDENCE

On the surface, all the advantages in the military struggle between

America and Great Britain appeared to lie with the British. They had

the greatest navy and the best-equipped army in the world. They had

the resources of an empire. They had a coherent structure of

command. The Americans, by contrast, were struggling to create an

army and a government at the same time that they were trying to

fight a war. Yet the United States had advantages too. Americans were

fighting on their own ground. They were

ore committed to the conflict than the British. And beginning in

I777 they were receiving substantial aid from abroad.

But the American victory was not simply the result of these

advantages, or even of the spirit and resourcefulness of the people

and the army. It was a result, too, of a series of blunders and

miscalculations by the British in the early stages of the fighting,

when England could (and probably should) have won. And it was,

finally, a result of the transformation of the war=D1through three

distinct phases=D1into a new kind of conflict that the British military,

for all its strength, was unable to win.

THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION ~ I I 7

Tbe First Phase: New En~la~d

For the first year of the conflict from the spring of I 775 to the

spring of I776=D1the British were not entir ly sure that they were

fighting a war. Many English authorities thought that British forces

were simply quelling pockets of rebellion in the contentious area

around Boston.

American forces besieged the British army in Boston (under the

command of General Thomas Gage) after the redcoats withdrew from

Lexington and Concord. In the Battle of Bunker Hill (actually fought on

Breed's 11) onJune I 7~ I 775~ the Patriots suffered severe

casualties and withdrew. t they inflicted even greater losses on the

enemy (indeed, the heaviest ualties the British were to suffer in the

entire war) and continued the ge. Early in I776, the British decided

that Boston was a poor place from ich to fight. It was in the center of

the most anti-British part of America, ~l it was also tactically

indefensible, easily isolated and besieged. And so, March I7~ I776

the redcoats left Boston for Halifax with hundreds of ~yalist

refugees.

In the meantime, a band of Patriots to the south, at Moore's Creek

idge in North Carolina, crushed an uprising of Loyalists (Americans

still al to England and its king) on February 27, I776, and discouraged

a itish plan to invade the Southern states. And to the north, the

Americans gan an invasion of Canada=D1hoping to remove the British

threat and to n the Canadians to their cause. Generals Benedict Arnold

and Richard ontgomery threatened Quebec in late I 775 and early I

776. Montgomery lS killed in the assault on the city; and although a

wounded Arnold kept the siege for a time, the Quebec campaign ended

in failure. Canada did t become the fourteenth state.

By the spring of I 7 76~ it had become clear to the British that the

conflict as not just a local phenomenon in the area around Boston. The

American .mpaigns in Canada, the agitation in the South, and the

growing evidence

THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

A M E R I C A N V O I C E S

JOSEPH P. MARTIN

A Soldier's View of the Battle of Long Island

Tbe Second Phase: The Mid-~tlantic Region

It was during the next phase of the war, which lasted from I776 until

early I778~ that the British were in the best position to win. Indeed,

had it not been for a series of blunders and misfortunes, they probably

would have crushed the rebellion then.

The British regrouped quickly after their retreat from Boston.

During the summer of I776~ in the weeks immediately following the

Declaration of Independence, hundreds of British ships and 32,ooo

British soldiers arrived in New York, under the command of William

Howe. Howe wanted to avoid an armed conflict with the Americans

and hoped simply to awe them into submission. He offered Congress a

choice between surrender with royal pardon and a battle against

overwhelming odds.

.1 mllrh

[T]HE REGIMENT WAS ordered to Long Island, the British having landed

in force there . . . I went to the top of the house where I had a full

view of that part of the island . . . The horrors of battle there

presented themselves to my mind in all their hideousness.... We were

soon ordered to our regimental parade, from which, as soon as the

regiment was formed, we were marched off for the ferry. At the

lower end of the street were placed several casks of sea-bread . . .

nearly hard enough for musket flints. As my good luck would have it,

there was a momentary halt made; I improved the opportunity thus

offered me, as every good soldier should upon all important occasions,

to get as many of the biscuit as I possibly could....

Our officers . . . pressed forward to the creek, where a large

party of Americans and British were engaged. By the time we arrived,

the enemy had driven our men into the creek . . . where such as could

swim got across. Those that could not swim, and could not procure

anything to buoy them up, sunk.... There was in this action a regiment

of Maryland troops (volunteers), all young gentlemen. When they came

out of the water and mud, looking like water rats, it was a truly

pitiful sight. Many of them were killed in the pond, and more were

drowned. Some of us went into the water . . . and took out a number of

corpses and a great many arms that were sunk in the pond and creek.

I20 ~ lHE UNFlNlSHEDNATloN

To oppose Howe's great array, Washington could muster only

about I9~000 inadequately armed and poorly trained soldiers, and no

navy at all. Yet the Americans instantly rejected Howe's offer and

chose continued war=D1which meant inevitably a succession of defeats.

The British pushed the Patriot forces offLong Island, forced them to

abandon Manhattan, and then drove them in slow retreat over the

plains of New Jersey, across the Delaware River, and into

Pennsylvania.

The British settled down for the winter in northern and central New

Jersey, with an outpost of Hessians at Trenton on the Delaware River.

But Washington did not sit still. On Christmas night I 776~ he

daringly recrossed the icy river, surprised and scattered the

Hessians, and occupied Trenton. Then he advanced to Princeton and

drove a force of redcoats from their base in the college there. But

Washington was unable to hold either Princeton or Trenton and finally

took refuge for the rest of the winter in the hills around Morristown.

As the campaign of I776 came to an end, the Americans could console

themselves with the thought that they had won two minor victories,

that their main army was still intact, and that the invaders were no

nearer than before to the decisive triumph that Howe had so

confidently anticipated. But the British retained their heavy

advantages in men and supplies.

For the campaigns of I 777 the British devised a strategy that, if

Howe had stuck to it, might have cut the United States in two and

prepared the way for final victory by Great Britain. Howe would move

from New York up the Hudson to Albany, while another force would

come down from Canada to meet him. John Burgoyne secured command

of this northern force and prepared a two-pronged attack to the south

along both the Mohawk and the upper Hudson approaches to Albany.

But after setting the plan in motion, Howe inexplicably abandoned his

part of it. Instead of moving north to meet Burgoyne, he went south

and attacked Philadelphia, in the hope that capturing the rebel capital

would discourage the Patriots, rally the Loyalists, and bring the war

to a speedy conclusion. He moved most of his forces by sea from New

York to the head of the Chesapeake Bay, brushed Washington aside at

the Battle of Brandywine Creek on September I I ~ and proceeded

north to Philadelphia, which he took with little resistance. After

launching an unsuccessful Patriot attack on October 4 at Germantown

(just outside Philadelphia), Washington went into winter quarters at

Valley Forge. The Continental Congress reassembled at York,

Pennsylvania.

Howe's move to Philadelphia left Burgoyne to carry out the campaign

in the north alone. Burgoyne sent Colonel Barry St. Leger up the St.

I~awrence River toward T.ak_e On_tario an_d th_e M_oh_awk, w. hile

he h.im.self

advanced directly down the upper Hudson Valley. At first, all went

well. Burgoyne easily seized Fort Ticonderoga and its large store of

powder and supplies; Congress was so dismayed by the loss that it

removed General Philip Schuyler from command of American forces in

the north and replaced him with Horatio Gates.

By the time Gates took over, Burgoyne had already experienced

two staggering defeats. In one of them=D1at Oriskany, New York, on

August ~Patriots held off a force of Indians and Tories commanded by

St. Leger. That gave Benedict Arnold time to close off the Mohawk

Valley to St. Leger~s advance. In the other battle=D1at Bennington,

Vermont, on August I~New England militiamen mauled a detachment

that Burgoyne had sent to seek supplies. Short of materials, with all=20

help cut off, Burgoyne fought several costly engagements and then

withdrew to Saratoga, where Gates surrounded him. On October I7

I777~ Burgoyne surrendered=D1an event that became a major turning

point in the war.

The campaign in upstate New York was not just a British defeat. It

was a setback for the ambitious efforts of several Iroquois leaders.

Althou~h the

I 2 2 ~ THE UNFINISHED NATION

Iroquois Confederacy had declared its neutrality in the Revolutionary

War in I 776~ not all of its members were content to remain passive.

Among those who worked to expand the Indian role in the war were a

Mohawk brother and sister, Joseph and Mary Brant. The Brants

persuaded their own tribe to contribute to the British cause and

attracted the support of the Seneca and Cayuga as well.

The alliance had unhappy consequences for the Iroquois. It

further divided their already weakened Confederacy; only three of the

Iroquois nations supported the British. Then, a year after their defeat

at Oriskany, Indians joined British troops in a series of raids on

outlying white settlements in upstate New York. Patriot forces under

the command of General John Sullivan harshly retaliated, wreaking

such destruction on Indian settlements that large groups of Iroquois

fled north into Canada to seek refuge. Many never returned.

Se~uring~idfrom ~broad

The leaders of the American effort knew that victory would not be

likely without aid from abroad. And their most promising ally, they

realized, was France, still smarting from its defeat by the British in

I763. The astute French foreign minister, the Count de Vergennes,

understood that France had much to gain from seeing Britain lose a

crucial part of its empire.

>From the beginning, therefore, there was interest in an alliance

on both the American and the French sides. At first, France provided

the United States with badly needed supplies but remained reluctant

to grant formal diplomatic recognition to the United States. After the

Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Franklin himself went to

F~ance to lobby for aid and diplomatic recognition. Franklin and his

cause became popular among the French, but Vergennes wanted some

evidence that the Americans had a real chance of winning before he

would agree to open French intervention. That evidence soon appeared

in the form of reports of the British defeat at Saratoga.

That news arrived in London and Paris in early December I777. In

London, the news persuaded Lord North to make a new peace offer:

complete home rule within the empire for Americans if they would

quit the war. That worried Vergennes, who feared the Americans

might accept the offer and thus destroy France's opportunity to

weaken Britain. Prompted by Franklin, he decided that French

assistance might persuade the Americans to continue the struggle.

And on February 6~ I778~ he reached agreement with American

di~lomats on formal reco~nition of the United States as a

THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION ~ I 2 3

overeign nation and on the groundwork for greatly expanded French

~assistanCe to the American war effort.

The entrance of France into the war made it an international conflict.

~-- In the course of the next two years, France, Spain, and the

Netherlands all tlrifted into another general war with Great

Britain in Europe. That con~ibuted indirectly to the ultimate

American victory by complicating England's task. All three

nations contributed directly by offering financial and material

assistance. But France was America's indispensable ally. It

furnished the new nation with most of its money and munitions,

and it provided a navy and an expeditionary force that were vital

to the final, successful phase of the revolutionary conflict.

The Final Pbase: The Soutb

The failure of the British to crush the Continental army in the mid-

Atlantic states, combined with the stunning American victory at

Saratoga, transformed the war and ushered it into a new and final

phase. This last phase of the military struggle in America was

fundamentally different from either of the first two. After the defeat

at Saratoga and the intervention of the French, the British government

placed new limits on its commitment to the conflict. Instead of

mounting a full-scale military struggle against the American army,

the British tried to enlist the support of those elements of the

American population=D1a majority, they continued to believe=D1who were

still loyal to the crown; they worked, in other words, to undermine

the Revolution from within. Since Loyalist sentiment was thought to

be strongest in the South, and since the English also hoped slaves

would rally to their cause, the main focus of the British effort

shifted there.

The new strategy was a dismal failure. British forces spent

three years (from I778 to I78I) moving through the South, fighting

small battles and large, and attempting to neutralize the territory

through which they traveled. But they had badly overestimated the

extent of Loyalist sentiment. Even where Loyalists were most

numerous, they were often afraid to help the British because they

feared reprisals from the Patriots around them. There were also

logistical problems. Patriot forces could move at will throughout the

region, living off the resources of the countryside, blending in with

the civilian population, and leaving the British unable to distinguish

friend from foe. The British, by contrast, suffered all the

disadvantages of an army in hostile territory.

It was this phase of the conflict that made the war "revolutionary"

not

I 3~ ~ THE UNFINISHED NATION

The War Economy

The Revolution also produced important changes in the structure of

the American economy. After more than a century of dependence on

the British imperial system, American commerce suddenly found

itself on its own. English ships no longer protected American vessels,

but tried to drive them from the seas. British imperial ports

including those in England ItSelf=D1 were closed to American uade. But

this disruption in traditional economic patterns served in the long run

to strengthen the American economy. The end of imperial restrictions

on American shipping opened up enormous new areas of trade to the

nation. Colonial merchants had been violating British regulations for

years, but the rules of empire had nevertheless served to inhibit

American exploration of many markets. Now, enterprising merchants

in New England and elsewhere began to develop new commerce in the

Caribbean and South America. By the mid- I 780S, American

merchants were developing an important uade with the Orient. There

was also a substantial increase in trade among the American states.

When English imports to America were cut off=D1first by the

prewar boycott, then by the war itself=D1there were desperate efforts

throughout the states to stimulate domestic manufacturing of certain

necessities. No great industrial expansion resulted, but there was a

modest increase in production and an even greater increase in

expectations. Having broken politically with the British Empire,

citizens of the new nation began to dream of breaking economically

with it too=D1of developing a strong economy to rival that o the Old

World.

THE CREATION OF STATE

GOVERNMENTS

At the same time that Americans were struggling to win their

independence on the battlefield, they were also struggling to create

new insututions o

overnment to replace the British system they had repudiated. That

struggle continued for more than fifteen years, but its most

important phase occurred during the war itself, at the state level.

The formation of state governments began early in I776. At

first, the new state constitutions reflected primarily the fear of

bloated executive power thathad done so much to produce the

breakwith England. Gradually, however, Americans became equally

concerned about the instability of a

government too responsive to popular will. In a second phase of state

1 HE AMERICAN KEVOLUTION ~ I 3 3

Constitution writing, therefore, they gave renewed attention to the

idea of balance in government.

Tbe ~ssumptions of Republicanism

If Arnericans agreed on nothing else when they began to build new

governments for themselves, they agreed that those governments

would be republican. To them, that meant a political system in which

all power came from the people, rather than from some supreme

authority (such as a king). The success of any government, therefore,

depended on the nature of its citizenry. If the population consisted of

sturdy, independent property owners imbued with civic virtue, then

the republic could survive. If it consisted of a few powerful

aristocrats and a great mass of dependent workers, then it would be

in danger. From the beginning, therefore, the ideal of the small

freeholder (the independent landowner) was basic to American

political ideology.

Another crucial part of that ideology was the concept of equality. The

Declaration of Independence had given voice to that idea in its most

ringing phrase: All men are created equal." It was a belief that stood

in direct

contrast to the old European assumption of an inherited aristocracy.

The innate talents and energies of individuals, not their positions at

birth, would

determine their roles in society. Some people would inevitably be

wealthier and more powerful than others. But all people would have to

earn their

success. There would be no equality of condition, but there would be

equality of opportunity.

In reality, of course, the United States was never a nation in

which all citizens were independent property holders. From the

beginning, there was

a sizable dependent labor force=D1the white members of which were

allowed many of the privileges of citizenship, the black members of

which were

allowed virtually none. American women remained both politically and

economically subordinate. Native Americans were systematically

exploited

and displaced. Nor was there ever full equality of opportunity.

American Society was more open and more fluid than that of most

European nations but wealth and privilege were often passed from one

generation to another. l he condition of a person's birth was almost

always a crucial determinant of success.

Nevertheless, in embracing the assumptions of republicanism,

Americans were adopting a powerful, even revolutionary ideology, and

their experiment in statecraft became a model for many other

countries It made the United States for a time the most admired and

I 34 ~ THE UNFINISHED NATION

The First State Constitutions

Two states, Connecticut and Rhode Island, did not write new

constitutions. They already had governments that were republican in

all but name, and they simply deleted references to England and the

king from their charters and adopted them as constitutions. The other

eleven states, however, produced new documents.

The first and perhaps most basic decision was that the

constitutions were to be written down. In England, the constitution

was simply a vague understanding about the nature of government.

Americans believed that the vagueness had produced corruption, so

they insisted that the structures of their own governments be clearly

recorded so no one could pervert them. The second decision was that

the power of the executive, which Americans believed had grown

bloated in England, must be limited. Pennsylvania eliminated the

executive altogether. Most other states inserted provisions limiting

the power of the governor over appointments, reducing or eliminating

his right to veto bills, and preventing him from dismissing the

legislature. Most important, every state forbade the governor or any

other executive officer from holding a seat in the legislature, thus

ensuring that, unlike in England, the two branches of government

would remain wholly separate.

But the new constitutions did not move all the way toward direct

popular rule. In Georgia and Pennsylvania, the legislature consisted of

one popularly elected house. But in every other state, there was an

upper and a lower chamber; and in most cases, the upper chamber was

designed to represent the "higher orders" of society. There were

property requirements for voters=D1some modest, some substantial=D1in

all states.

The initial phase of constitution writing proc=8Eeded rapidly. Ten

states completed the process before the end of I776. Georgia and New

York finished by the end of I 777. Massachusetts did not finally adopt

a constitution until I780, by which time the construction of state

governments had moved into a new phase.

Revising State Governments

By the late I770S, Americans were growing concerned about the

apparent factiousness and instability of their new state governments,

which were having trouble accomplishing anything at all. Many

believed the problem was one of too much democracy. As a result,

most of the states began to revise their constitutions to limit

popular power. Massachusetts was the first to act on the new

concerns. By waiting until I 780 to ratify its first constitu-

~~ rHE AMERICAN REVOLUTION ~ I 3 5

~

ion, Massachusetts allowed these changing ideas to shape its

government;

and the state produced a constitution that served as a model for

others.

~,~ Two changes in particular characteri~ed the Massachusetts and

later

constitutions. The first was a change in the process of constitution

writing itself. Most of the first documents had been written by state

legislatures and

thus could easily be amended (or violated) by them. By I 780,

sentiment was growing to find a way to protect the constitutions

from those who had

written them, to make it difficult to change the documents once they

were approved. The solution was the constitutional convention: a

special assem-

bly of the people that would meet only for the purpose of writing the

constitution and that would never (except under extraordinary

circum-

stances) meet again. The constitution would be the product of the

popular will; but once approved, it would be protected from the whims

of public

opinion and the political moods of the legislature.

The second change was a significant strengthening of the

executive, a

reaction to what many believed was the instability of the original

state governments that had weak governors. The I780 Massachusetts

consti~u-

tion made the governor one of the strongest in any state. He was to

be elected

directly by the people; he was to have a fixed salary (in other words,

he would not be dependent on the good will of the legislature each

year for his wages); he would have significant appointment powers

and a veto over legislation. Other states followed. Those with weak or

nonexistent upper houses strengthened or created them. Most

increased the powers of the governor. Pennsylvania, which had had no

executive at all at first, now produced a strong one. By the late

I780S, almost every state had either revised its constitution or

drawn up an entirely new one in an effort to produce stability in

government.

Toleration and Slavery

The new states moved far in the direction of complete religious

freedom. l\~ost Americans continued to believe that religion should

play some role in government, but they did not wish to give special

privileges to any particular denomination. The privileges that

churches had once enjoyed were now ~~ largely stripped away. New

York and the Southern states stopped subsidiz,~.irlg the Church of

England, and the New England states stripped the -~ Congregational

church of many of its privileges. Boldest of all was ~Irginia.

I786, it enacted a Statute of Religious Liberty, written by Thomas

~Jefferson~ which called for the complete separation of church and

state.

More difficult to resolve was the question of slavery. In areas

where

I 36 ~ 1 HE UNFINISHED NATION

THE

AMERICAN REVOLUTION

slavery was already weak=D1in New England, where there had never

been many slaves, and in Pennsylvania, where the Quakers opposed

slavery=D1it was abolished. Even in the South, there were some

pressures to amend the institution; every state but South Carolina and

Georgia prohibited further importation of slaves from abroad, and

South Carolina banned the slave trade during the war. ~Irginia passed

a law encouraging the freeing of slaves (manumission). Nevertheless,

slavery survived in all the Southern and border states. There were

several reasons: racist assumptions among whites about the

inferiority of blacks; the enormous economic investments many white

southerners had in their slaves; and the inability of even such men as

Washington andJefferson, who had deep moral misgivings about

slavery, to envision any alternative to it. If slavery were abolished,

what would happen to the black people in America? Few whites

believed blacks could be integrated into American society as equals.

In maintaining slavery, Jefferson once remarked, Americans were

holding a "wolf by the ears." However unappealing it was to hold on to

it, letting go would be even worse.

THE SEARCH FOR

A NATIONAL GOVERNMENT

Americans were much quicker to agree on state institutions than they

were on their national government. At first, most believed that the

central government should remain a relatively weak and unimportant

force and that each state would be virtually a sovereign nation. Such

beliefs reflected the assumption that were a republican government

to attempt to administer too large and diverse a nation, it would

founder. It was in response to such ideas that the Articles of

Confederation emerged.

The Confederation

The Articles of Confederation, which the Continental Congress had

adopted in I777~ provided for a national government much like the one

already in place. Congress would remain the central=D1indeed the only

institution of national authority. Its powers would expand to give it

authority to conduct wars and foreign relations and to appropriate,

borrow, and issue money. But it would not have power to regulate

trade, draft troops, or levy taxes directly on the people. For troops

and taxes it would have to make formal requests to the state

legislatures, which could refuse them. There was to be no separate

executive; the "president of the United States" would be

._

erely the presiding officer at the sessions of Congress. Each state

would=3D haVe a single vote in Congress, and at least nine of the states

would have to~ pprove any important measure. All thirteen state

legislatures would haveto approve before the Articles could be

ratified or amended.

The ratification process revealed broad disgreements over the plan.

The small states had insisted on equal state representation, but the

larger=3D~ states wanted representation to be based on population. The

smaller states~ prevailed on that issue. More important, the states

claiming Western lands ~ wished to keep them, but the rest of the

states demanded that all such territory be turned over to the

Confederation government. When New York and ~lrginia agreed to give

up their Western claims, Maryland (the only state still holding out)

approved the Articles of Confederation. They went

into effect in I 78 I .

The Confederation, which existed from I78I until I789, was not

the complete failure that subsequent accounts often describe. But it

was far from a success. Lacking adequate powers to deal with

interstate issues or to enforce _ its will on the states, and lacking

sufficient stature in the eyes of the world to be able to negotiate

effectively, it suffered a series of damaging setbacks.

Diplomatic Failures

5~~~ Evidence of the low esteem in which the rest of the world held

the~Confederation was its difficulty in persuading Great

Britain (and to a lesser ~ extent Spain) to live up to the terms

of the peace treaty of I 783.

The British had promised to evacuate American soil, but British

forces continued to occupy a string of frontier posts along the Great

Lakes within the United States. Nor did the British honor their

agreement to make restitution to slaveowners whose slaves the

British army had confiscated. There were also disputes over the

Northeastern boundary of the new nation ~and over the border

between the United States and Florida, which Britain had ceded back

to Spain in the treaty. There were other diplomatic problems.

American commerce, freed from imperial regulations, was expanding

~in new directions, but most American trade remained within the

British Empire. Americans wanted full access to British markets;

England, however, ~placed sharp postwar restrictions on that access.

In I784, Congress sentJohn Adams as minister to London to resolve

these differences, but Adams made no headway with the English, who

could ever be sure whether he represented a single nation or thirteen

different nes. Throughout the I 780S, the British government refused

even to return ~he courtesy of sending a minister to the American

capital.

I 3 8 ~ THE UNFINISHED NATION

In dealing with the Spanish government, the Confederation

demonstrated similar weakness. Its diplomats agreed to a treaty with

Spain in I 786 that accepted the American interpretation of the

Florida boundary in return for American recognition of Spanish

possessions in North America and an agreement that the United States

would limit its right to navigate the Mississippi for twenty years. But

the Southern states, incensed at the idea of giving up their access to

the Mississippi, blocked ratification.

The Confederation and tbe North~uest

The Confederation's most important accomplishment was its

resolution of some of the controvergies involving the Western lands

although even this was a partial and ambiguous achievement.

When the Revolution began, only a few thousand whites had lived

west of the Appalachian divide; by I790 their numbers had increased

to I20,000. The Confederation had to find a way to include these new

settlements in the political structure of the new nation. The Western

settlers were already often in conflict with the established centers

of the East over Indian policies, trade provisions, and taxes. And

Congress faced the additional diffficulty of competing with state

governments for jurisdiction over the trans-Appalachian region. The

landed states began to yield their claims to the Confederation in I 78

I, and by I 784 the states had ceded enough land to the Confederation

to permit Congress to begin making policy for the national domain.

The Ordinance of I784, based on a proposal by Thomas Jefferson,

divided the Western territory into ten self-governing districts, each

of which could petition Congress for statehood when its population

equaled the number of free inhabitants of the smallest existing state.

Then, in the Ordinance of 1785, Congress created a system for

surveying and selling the Western lands. The territory north of the

Ohio River was to be surveyed and marked off into neat rectangular

townships. In every township four sections were to be set aside for

the United States; the revenue from the sale of one of the others was

to support creation of a public school. Sections were to be sold at

auction for no less than one dollar an acre.

The original ordinances proved highly favorable to land speculators

and less so to ordinary settlers, many of whom could not afford the

price of the land. Congress compounded the problem by selling much of

the best land to the Ohio and Scioto companies before making it

available to anyone else. Criticism of these policies led to the

passage in I 787 of another law governing Westem settlement

legislation that became known as the "Northwest Ordinance." The

1787 Ordinance abandoned the ten districts established in

I40 ~ THE UNFINISHED NATION

THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION=

~ III

I 784 and created a single Northwest Territory out of the lands north

of the Ohio; the territory might subsequently be divided into between

three and five territories. It also specified a population of 60,000 as

a minimum for statehood, guaranteed freedom of religion and the

right to trial by jury to residents of the Northwest, and prohibited

slaverv throu~hout the territor.

~

The Western lands south of the Ohio River received less

attention f .~congress~ and development was more chaotic there. The

region became Kentucky and Tennessee developed rapidly in the late I

7 70S, ar_=3D the I 780S speculators and settlers began setting up

governments and as~ ~for recognition as states. The Confederation

Congress was never j.successfully to resolve the conflicting claims

in that region.

Indians and tbe Western Lands

~On paper at least, the Western land policies of the Confederation

crea ~system that brought order and stability to the process of white

settler~ ~in the Northwest. But in reality, order and stability came

slowly and at ~cost, because much of the land the Confederation was

neatly subdivi~ ~and offering for sale consisted of territory claimed

by the Indians of ~i region.

Congress tried to resolve that problem in I784, I785, and I78

~persuading Iroquois, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Cherokee leaders to

treaties ceding substantial Western lands in the North and South to

United States. But those agreements proved ineffective. In I786, the

l~qership of the Iroquois Confederacy repudiated the treatv it had

signed~ years earlier and threatened to attackwhite settlements in

the disputed lac Other tribes had never really accepted the treaties

affecting them continued to resist white movement into their lands.

Violence between whites and Indians on the Northwest frol reached

a crescendo in the early I790S. In I790 and again in I79I,~ Miami, led

by the famed warrior Little Turtle, defeated United States fo in two

major battles near what is now the western border of Ohio; in-

~secondofthosebattles,onNovember4, I79I,63owhiteAmericansdi~

~fighting at the Wabash River (the greatest military victory Indians

had or would ever achieve in their battles with whites). Efforts to

negotia ~~settlement foundered on the Miami insistence that no

treaty was pos~ ~unless it forbade white settlement west of the

Ohio River. Negotiation~ not resume until after General Anthony

Wayne led 4,000 soldiers inta Ohio Valley in I 794 and defeated the

Indians in the Battle of Fallen Timl ~, A year later, the Miami signed

the Treaty of Greenville, ceding sub~ ~tial new lands to the United

States (which was now operating under ~Constitution of I789) in

exchange for a formal acknowledgment of ~~claim to that portion of

their territory they retained. This was the first ~the new federal

government recognized the sovereignty of Indian nati

~n doing so, the United States was affirming that Indian lands could

be only by the tribes themselves. That hard-won assurance, however,

proved a frail protection against the pressure for white expansion

westward in later years.

Debts, Taxes, and Da7~iel Shays

The postwar depression, which lasted from I784 to I787, increased

the perennial American problem of an inadequate money supply, a

problem that bore particularly heavily on debtors. In dealing with the

serious problem of debts, Congress most clearly demonstrated its

weakness.

The Confederation itself had an enormous outstanding debt and few

means with which to pay it. It had sold bonds during the war that

were due to be repaid; it owed money to its Revolutionary soldiers; it

substantial debts abroad. But it had no power to tax. It could only

m requiSitions of the states, and it received only about one-sixth

of the mo it requisitioned=D1barely enough to meet the

government's ordinary ope ing expenses, too little to pay the

debts. The fragile new nation was fa with the prospect of

defaulting on its obligations.

This alarming prospect brought to the fore a group of leaders would

play a crucial role in the shaping of the republic for several deca

Committed nationalists, they sought ways to increase the powers of

central government and to permit it to meet its financial obligations.

Morris, the head of the Confederation's treasury; Alexander

Hamilton, young prot; James Madison of Virginia; and others called

for a "co nental impost" percent duty on imported goods, to be

leviedCongress and used to fund the debt.

But the scheme met with substantial opposition. Many Americ

feared that the impost plan would concentrate too much financial

powe_ the hands of Morris and his allies in Philadelphia. Congress

failed to appr~ the impost in I78I and again in I783. Angry and

discouraged, the natii alists largely withdrew from any active

involvement in the Confederatil

The states themselves generally relied on increased taxation to pay

tl. own debts. But poor farmers, already burdened by debt and now

burde~ again by new taxes on their lands, considered such policies

unfair, c~ tyrannical. They demanded that the state governments issue

paper curre to increase the money supply and make it easier for them

to meet t_ obligations. Resentment was especially high among

farmers in New gland, who felt that the states were squeezing them

to enrich already wea~ bondholders in Boston and other towns.

Debtors who failed to pay t taxes found their mortgages foreclosed

and their property seized; someti

they found themselves in jail.

Throughout the late I 780S, therefore, mobs of distressed

farmers ri periodically in various parts of New England. They caused

the most ser trouble in Massachusetts. Dissidents in the Connecticut

Valley and~ Berkshire Hills, many of them Revolutionary veterans,

rallied be~~ Daniel Shays, a former captain in the Continental army.

Shays issued ,b of demands that included paper money, tax relief, a

moratorium on d~ ~ the removal of the state capital from Boston to

the interior, and the aboli =82 of imprisonment for debt. During the

summer of I786, the Shay~ concentrated on preventing the collection

of debts, private or public, used force to keep courts from sitting and

sheriffs from selling confisc.property.

In Boston, members of the legislature, including Samuel

Adams, denounced Shays and his men as rebels and traitors.

When winter came, the rebels advanced on Springfield hoping to

seize weapons from the arsenal there. An army of state militiamen,

financed by a loan from wealthy merchants who feared a new

revolution, set out from Boston to confront them. InJanuary I787, this

army met Shays's band and dispersed his ragged troops.

As a military enterprise, Shays's Rebellion was a failure. But it had

important consequences for the future of the United States. In

Massachusetts, it resulted in a few immediate gains for the

discontented groups. Shays and his lieutenants, at first sentenced to

death, were later pardoned; and Massachusetts offered the protesters

some tax relief and a postponement of debt payments. More

significantly, however, the rebellion added urgency to a movement

already gathering support throughout the new nation=D1the movement to

produce a new, national constitution.

The American Revolution

HE LONGSTANDING DEBATE over the origins of the American

Revolution has tended to reflect two broad schools of interpretation.

One sees the Revolution largely as a political and intellectual

event and

argues that the revolt against Britain was part of a defense of

ideals andprinciples. The other views the Revolution as a social and

economic phe nomenon and contends that material interests were at the heart of

the rebellion.

The Revolutionary generation itself portrayed the conflict as a

struggle over ideals, and this interpretation prevailed through most

of the nineteenth century. But in the early twentieth century,

historians influenced by the reform currents of the progressive era

began to identify social and economic forces that they believed had

contributed to the rebellion. Carl Becker, for example, wrote in a I

909 study of New York that two questions had shaped the Revolution:

"The first was the question of home rule; the second was the question

. . . of who should rule at home." The colonists were not only fighting

the British; they were also engaged in a kind of civil war, a contest

for power between radicals and conservatives that led to the

"democratization of American politics and society."

Other "progressive" historians elaborated on Becker's thesis.J.

Franklin Jameson, writing in I926, argued, "Many economic desires,

many social aspirations, were set free by the political struggle, many

aspects of society profoundly altered by the forces thus let loose."

Arthur M. Schlesinger maintained in a I 9I 7 book that colonial

merchants, motivated by their own interest in escaping the

restrictive policies of British mercantilism, aroused American

resistance in the I760S and I770S.

Beginning in the I950S, a new generation of scholars began to reem-

phasize the role of ideology and de-emphasize the role of economic

interests. Robert E. Brown (in I955) and Edmund S. Morgan (in I956)

both argued that most eighteenth-century Americans shared common

political principles and that the social and economic conflicts the

progressives had identified were not severe. The rhetoric of the

Revolution, they suggested, was not propaganda but a real reflection

of the ideas of the colonists. Bernard Bailyn, in The Ideological

Origins of the ~merican Revolution (I967), demonstrated the complex

roots of the ideas behind the Revolution and argued that this carefully

constructed political stance was not a disguise for economic

interests but a genuine ideology, rooted in deeply held convictions

about rights and power, that itself motivated the colonists to act. The

Revolution, he claimed, "was above all else an ideological,

constitutional, political struggle and not primarily a controversy

between social groups undertaken to force changes in the organization

of the society or the economy."

By the late I960S, however, a group of younger historians=D1many

of them influenced by the New Left=D1were challenging the ideological

interpretation again by illuminating social and economic tensions

within colonial society that they claimed helped shape the

Revolutionary struggle. Jesse Lemisch and Dirk Hoerder pointed to the

actions of mobs in colonial cities as evidence of popular resentment

of both American and British elites. They noted, for example, that

Revolutionary crowds were likely to attack all symbols of wealth and

power, whether British or American; that they displayed a range of

class-based grievances not rooted in elite ideologies. Joseph Ernst

reemphasized the significance of economic pressures on colonial

merchants and tradesmen. Gary Nash, in The Urban Crucible (I979),

emphasized the role of growing economic distress in colonial cities

in creating a climate in which Revolutionary sentiment could flourish.

Edward Countryman and Rhys Isaac both pointed to changes in the

nature of colonial society and culture, and in the relationship between

classes in eighteenth-century America, as a crucial prerequisite for

the growth of the Revolutionary movement. Many of these newer

social interpretations of the Revolution do not argue that the

rebellion was a class conflict or that economic interests inevitably

determined a person's stance toward the struggle. They argue, rather,

that the relationship between interests and ideology must be a part of

any workable explanation of the conflict.

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Matthew E. Jerde

ri088146@udlapvms.pue.udlap.mx

Universidad de las Americas - Puebla

Departamento de Relaciones Internacionales

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