Colonial Society, How Did Old World Life and Culture Change in the Wilderness?

Moving Toward Independence

Two powerful ingredients combined to transform immigrants to Colonial America. These ingredients were:

1. A different physical environment• Most of the population of the British colonies

existed on a narrow strip of coast between the Appalachian Mountain and the sea.

• A few hundred people had settled beyond the coast, but most of the land was still a vast forest.

• American farmsteads were usually made of timber and surrounded by scraggly wooden fences.

• Roads were tracks through the forests and travel was tedious, uncomfortable.

• Inns were scarce and poor quality.

• In the 1770s, only five American towns had more than 10,000 people – Boston, Newport, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston.

2. Diversity Among the Europeans

• The population mix in the American colonies was very diverse. There were Germans, French, Dutch, Swedes, English and Scotch-Irish.

• Most groups kept their identity generation after generation.

• Ethnic groups were often intolerant of the other.

Native Americans

• Native American-European contacts affected both sides profoundly.

• Early new England settlers learned Indian farming techniques and learned much about food plants and herbs from them.

• The Native Americans learned to need the colonists’ muskets, cloth, iron implements, and other goods.

• The Indians became entangled in the colonial economy, especially the fur trade.

• Indian-white relations were usually marred by hostility and violence.

• Indians and whites had a competing view of land ownership.

• The Indians were armed for the first time with guns, and Indian-white wars were devastating for both sides.

Colonial Blacks

• In 1760 about 325,000 of the approximately 1.6 million people in British North America were black.

• About 12,000 of these blacks lived in New England, 25,000 lived in the Middle Colonies, and the remainder in the southern colonies.

• A few thousand of these were “free people of color.”

Regions

New England, Middle Colonies, the South

• Most of New England was divided into small communities of about 500 people. New England “towns” were composed of a central village and adjacent fields and woods.

• These towns were orderly, compact, settlements with community decisions made at a monthly town meeting.

Middle Colonies- New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania

• In the Middle Colonies families lived on detached farms that separated them from their neighbors by vast stretches of forest.

• In these Middle Colonies commerce helped create a sprinkling of small cities except for Maryland and Virginia.

• Although they were different than New England towns, communities in Maryland and Virginia had the same solidarity.

Government

• British Americans brought the political ideas, customs, and practices of England with them to the New World.

• Each colony had a chief executive, the equivalent of the English monarch.

• Although the framework of the colonial governments resembled Great Britain, political power was widely diffused in the colonies.

• Membership in the upper houses of the colonial legislatures were composed of landed gentlemen, prosperous lawyers and rich merchants. It was not hereditary as it was in the English House of Lords.

• A relatively broad electorate chose the colonial lower houses.

• Slaves, indentured servants, and women could not vote but property owning males could.

• By the time of the American Revolution, America no longer was a carbon copy of Europe and Americans were not just transplanted Europeans.

• One of the factors in this change was the mix of ethnic components in America, including Indians and Blacks.

• The special political and social environment of the New World produced a distinctive citizen.

• The abundance of land in relation to the population produced better health, larger families, and eventually a large electorate and a more democratic political system.

• A more scattered population and less elitist social structure created a more simple medical and legal profession in America.

• The arts were pushed toward greater practicality in America.

• The European majority deliberately inhibited the contributions of Blacks and Indians.

• At the end of the Colonial period the culture of the elite began to move closer to that of Britain’s. The professions, the arts, and political life had begun to assume the characteristics of Great Britain.

• By 1775, America in many ways was becoming an offshoot of Britain, there were enough differences to keep the two societies separate and distinct.

• British and American differences would soon produce a crisis that would cut the “motherland” connection and create a separate American nation.

Moving Toward Independence

Why Did the Colonists Revolt?

The Colonial Economy• Agriculture. On the eve of the Revolution

about 80 percent of the Colonial population worked in agriculture and agriculture created most of the wealth produced in the colonies.

• American colonists were not especially talented farmers, but there was such an abundance of land to support them that it didn’t affect their output.

• New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania were the “bread” colonies.

• Maryland and Virginia produced tobacco as well as grain.

• Rice was grown in the South Carolina lowlands and indigo was also grown in South Carolina and Georgia and was a profitable industry.

• The southern colonies also exported tar, pitch, resin, and turpentine.

Fishing and Whaling

• Cod fishing became an important part of the Massachusetts economy and the trade in dried fish represented a large part of the Bay Colony’s total exports.

• The northern colonies also participated in whaling to produce whale oil from whale blubber and spermaceti, a waxy substance from the heads of sperm whales which was used to make fine candles.

Colonial Industry

• About five percent of the colonial work force were full time craftsmen, working as artisans in cities, towns, and villages. There were coopers, wheelwrights, cordwainers or shoemakers, blacksmiths and tanners and carpenters.

• Thousands of rural colonists produced goods at home for sale.

• Colonial industries included iron making, shipbuilding and milling.

Commerce

• Besides agriculture, commerce or trade was the most importance part of the colonial economy.

The Economic and Political Results of Empire Before 1763

• The Navigation Acts restricted the imperial trade to subjects of the King, but also affored the American colonists the protection of the British Army and navy.

• The British paid bounties to encourage the colonies to produce items that did not compete with the English economy.

• On the whole, the American experience in the mercantile system was positive before 1763.

• Before 1763, Americans also had little reason to complain of British political oppression.

• The French and Indian War, 1756-1763, was a turning point in British relations with its North American colonies.

• The Proclamation of 1763 alienated many of the colonists.

• Laws like the Stamp Act, the Townshend Acts, and incidents like the Boston Massacre widened the political, social, and economic gap between the colonies and Britain.

• The Gaspee Incident, the Tea Act, and the Intolerable Acts in 1772, 1773, and 1774 hastened the move toward a final break with Britain.

• The First Continental Congress met at Philadelphia in September 1774. It was a milestone because it demonstrated American solidarity, and resolve.

• The First Continental Congress was the first step toward political Union for America, breaking through selfish localism.

Lexington and Concord-Wrangling into War

• British forces under General Gage arrived in Lexington, Massachusetts on April 19, 1775 and found 70 Patriot Minutemen waiting for them. At the end of the skirmish the British occupied Lexington Common.

• The British soldiers next marched to Concord and destroyed some Patriot supplies. Colonial militia attacked them on every side as they marched the 21 miles back to their base at Charlestown.

• Over a century and more of British rule, British North Americans developed a distinctive society and culture and did not think of themselves as transplanted Europeans.

• The colonies matured both economically and politically during this time.

• By 1763, British North America had the population, material resources, and political self confidence to challenge and defy Great Britain.

• The colonial cooperation with the British in the French and Indian War widened the political and economic gap between Great Britain and her colonies.

• The Tory ministers of King George badly misjudged the British North American colonies. Treating them as disobedient children made the Revolutionary War inevitable.

• The King and his ministers imposed measures that threatened many colonial occupational and economic groups.

• The punitive measures of King George and his ministers deeply disturbed the elite merchants, lawyers and planters in the colonies, many of whom were loyalists, and ultimately alienated them.

• The actions of the King and his ministers upset many thousands of ordinary people who feared that England was trying to enslave them and force them to become Anglicans.

• There were economic, religious, and political factors that motivated the British North American Colonists to seek independence from a country that most of them loved.

• The Colonists had a common fear: the fear of oppression and a fierce commitment to self determination. These two characteristics were pivotal in fighting and winning the American Revolution.