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Power Point Review for the 18th Century (Not all-inclusive)

■ , “What then is this new man? This American?” – Hector St. Jean de Crevecoeur in Letters from an American Farmer

– SEE REVIEW QUESTIONS At THE END OF THE SLIDE SHOW--

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18th Century America: ThemesAnglo-American Identity –Better to be British in Americathan British in Britain -- “Who is this new man – this American?”

■ 1) Prosperity, population growth, diversity (Pennsylvania: The best poor man’s country.”) New England, Middle and southern colonies.

■ 2) Centrality of slavery to the colonial economy■ (Slavery was important in both North and South; a key to the colonial economies of both sections; By 1770, 20% of NYC population was

black;250,000 Africans brought in the slave trade in the 18th century.)

■ 3) Erosion of deference; Questioning authority• The Enlightenment: Ben Franklin (Electricity and lightning; authority in reason, not social status)• The Great Awakening: 1st colonial mass movement -- George Whitefield (taught Americans to question authority)• Immigration of Scotch-Irish and Germans into the back country; The Regulators in the Carolinas (Scotch-Irish and Germans vs.

Assemblies.

■ 4) Imperial System after 1700: Theory was mercantilism but practically speaking was Salutary Neglect, Colonial autonomy, and the rise of the Colonial Assemblies. (Assemblies had the power of the purse – to tax and to appropriate money – paid the salaries of the governors)

• Americans liked being British. They admired the British Constitution, the grandeur of the city of London, and the economic, political, and military power of the Empire. But they were appalled at the unequal distribution of wealth in England that left a majority landless and in poverty, and they were scandalized by the corruption endemic to British politics as seen in patronage and the “rotten borough” system.

■ 5) Little inter-colonial Unity: Colonies had little contact with each other; more with Britain than with each other.• The Failure of the Albany Plan of Union (that proposed an Inter-colonial Council that would have the power to tax in order to raise

money for defense; Ben Franklin urged colonies to approve the Plan of Union with his famous cartoon ”Serpent cartoon” (see, http://claver.gprep.org/fac/serpent_cartoon_from_franklin-join oor die.htmin the Pennsylvania Gazette entitled, “Join or Die”; Assemblies would not relinquish any power to tax)

■ 7) Climactic War for Empire: The French Vanquished, 1754-63• Indians and the balance of Power – The Iroquois Confederation (Six Nations) and Native Americans in Ohio Valley• The French and Indian War (French eliminated from the Continent)• Americans had Great Expectations for greater equality in the Empire

• 18th century themes explained at http://claver.gprep.org/fac/sjochs/18th century themes spelled out-2015.htm

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English Colonies, 1700

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English Colonies, 1754

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Prosperity: Social mobility and increasing prosperity characterized the American colonies in the 18th century, though life remained very tough for the small percentage of the population that constituted the urban poor. Approximately 90-95% of Americans, however, lived on farms.

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Edward Hicks’s paintings depicting Pennsylvania as a “peaceable kingdom” and as the American bread basket – “The best poor man’s country in the world.” The “Middle Colonies” (New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania) were prosperous and diverse in population.

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Philadelphia: The Largest City in British America

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Colonial trading patterns: Triangular Trade and Navigation ActsAfter 1700, under the policy of “salutary” or “benign neglect,” the British paid little attention to the administration of the American colonies. The colonists obeyed the Acts that benefited them (enumerated commodities such as tobacco had to be sold in England) and ignored those that hurt them (they smuggled molasses and sugar from the French and Dutch colonies in the Caribbean.). Both Britain and the American colonies flourished. Ships from New England carried salted cod fish and lumber from New England and flour produced from the wheat of Pennsylvania, to the British slave islands in the West Indies. In a “consumer revolution,” Americans doubled their per-capita purchases of British manufactured goods.

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WOMEN IN THE 18th CenturyMales headed families in a system known as “patriarchy.” The Great Awakening, however, stressed the crucial importance of women in the family as crucial moral guardians and teachers, thus emphasizing a woman’s own sphere of expertise within the family. During the Great Awakening, women took on the role of “lay exhorters” during open field revivals, one of the reasons why “Old Lights” in society viewed the Awakening as a great social danger.

The role of women in the 18th century was absolutely crucial to settled life and development. A crucial division of labor existed on farms (and remember that approximately 95% of the population lived on farms.) Men on farms raised the raw materials: wool from sheep, grain, etc. Women “processed" the raw materials (ie. wheat into flour and then into bread; wool into yarn and then into clothing, etc.) The presence of women was crucial for a settled, healthy and prosperous life. (A few women, such as Betsy Ross (seamstress) of Philadelphia and Eliza Lucas Pinckney (plantation owner in South Carolina that specialized in indigo) even ran their own businesses.

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The Ubiquity of Slavery, North and South■ By the mid 18th century, slaves constituted about 20% of the entire population of the

American colonies.■ New England and the mid-Atlantic colonies began their economic ascent because the

regions harvested fish and grain and shipped it to the West Indies to feed slaves.■ Enslaved blacks made up nearly one-fifth the population of New York City, many working on

the docks or as domestics.■ Thousands of acres of land in Connecticut, New York, and tiny Rhode Island held

plantations that used slave labor.■ Rhode Island was America’s leader in the transatlantic slave trade, launching nearly 1000

voyages to Africa and carrying at least 100,000 captives back across the Atlantic: ”molasses, for rum, for slaves.”

■ The vast majority of slaves worked in the South growing tobacco and rice.■ The largest slave uprising, known as the Stono Rebellion, took place in 1739 in South

Carolina.

Portrait of a black man by John Singleton Copley, 1777/1778http://www.dia.org/the_collection/overview/viewobject.asp?objectid=41297

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Urban Slavery

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Enslaved Africans in the 18th century

Painting of a wedding in the slave quarters

Africans developed both overt (Stono Rebellion, 1739; maroon communities of runaways) and covert means (feigning illness, breaking tools, pilfering from storehouses, running away, maintaining vestiges of African culture – see painting above) to resist the dehumanizing aspects of slavery.

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Ben Franklin: “Self-made man and the American embodiment of the Enlightenment in America

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Ben Franklin: Enlightenment Scientist

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Ben Franklin: Taming Lightning

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The 18th Century: Erosion of Deference:

■ The Great Awakening: Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield (Teaching Americans to question authority)

■ Immigration: Scotch Irish and German into the backcountry (Regulators in the Carolinas challenge the coastal elite who dominated the colonial legislature.)

■ The American Enlightenment (Ben Franklin stressed the primacy of reason over authority.)

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Population increase – Immigration of Germans (200,000) and Scotch-Irish (250,000) into the back country of Pa., Virginia, North and South Carolina

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The Great Wagon Road

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Life in the Backcountry

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Political RepresentationBoth North and South Carolina colonial legislatures were dominated by coastal planters who refused to grant settlers beyond the coast political representation proportional to their percentage of the population. In addition, the legislature refused even to establish courts, parishes and other legal institutions in the back country.

The RegulatorsIn response to lack of law and order and political representation, two protest movements evolved, one in North Carolina and one in South Carolina. These movements were called the Regulation (Regulators). Local government was very corrupt in the backcountry. The Regulation movements aimed to set things straight, often taking the law into their own hands by acting as vigilantes against criminals, hence the term mountain justice. The legislature turned deaf ears towards the backcountry. (See the document by Rev. Woodmason that we studied in class.)

In 1770, Regulators in North Carolina marched on the assembly and were defeated at the Battle of Alamance.

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Back country people challenge deference

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The Great Awakening, 1730s to the 1760s –Teaching Americans to question authority.Jonathan Edwards, theologian and powerful preacher --“Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” – and America’s first cultural hero and leader of the first American mass movement, George Whitefield, “God’s Divine Dramatist.”

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■ Whitefield was a former actor who used his acting skills to great effect – body movements, hand gestures, voice modulation, story telling. During his revivals he used emotional, simple language that emphasized man’s depravity, and God’s saving grace as experienced in the conversion experience. He criticized ministers for their cold, erudite sermons – for being “dead-hearted.” He was a master of publicity and advertised his revivals by sending newspapers accounts of earlier ones. Crowds were so large (and some ministers so angry that they refused to allow him to speak in their churches) that he preached in open fields. During these revivals people were mixed together irrespective of their social class and women and blacks, and poor white males would stand up and “exhort the crowd.” The implication was equality. The experience of the revival as well as of people choosing to leave their old churches for “new light” churches taught them to question established authority and eroded the spirit of deference.

George Whitefield became the best known and best loved man in America

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During the 1st Great Awakening slaves were Christianized

Emotional Methodist service in Philadelphia

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Adult baptism was one of the central tenets of the Baptists, who won many converts – both black and white – in the South. Initially, the Baptists, who stressed simplicity, emotional preaching and conversion, and separation of church and state, also opposed slavery.

Adult baptism was one of the central tenets of the Baptists, who won many converts – both black and white – in the South. Initially, the Baptists, who stressed simplicity, emotional preaching and conversion, and separation of church and state, also opposed slavery.

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■ Whitefield’s Field Pulpit and Burial Poem by Phyllis W

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Whitefield’s field pulpit and Phyllis Wheatley’s poem written on the occasion of Whitefield’s death in 1770. Whitefield had become the most revered figure in America, as witness the Revolutionary soldiers opening his coffin to clip off parts of his clothing.

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The Great Awakening split churches into “Old Light” and “New Light “ (ie. “New Light” Presbyterians, “New Light Congregationalists,” etc.) and also led to the establishment of new colleges, including Dartmouth, Princeton, and Brown. The growing number of denominations helped lead to greater religious pluralism and toleration and eventually after the American Revolution to the “disestablishment” of churches. During the colonial period, the Congregational church was the established (tax-supported) church in most of the New England colonies, while the Anglican Church was established in New York, Maryland, and the southern colonies.

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During the Awakening, Princeton, Brown, Rutgers, and Dartmouth were founded as “New Light” colleges by the “awakeners.”

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Anglo-American WorldAmericans liked being British. They admired the British Constitution, the grandeur of the city of London, and the economic, political, and military power of the Empire. But they were appalled at the unequal distribution of wealth in England that left a majority landless and in poverty, and they were scandalized by the corruption endemic to British politics. They were proud to members of the freest empire in history, but believed that it was better to be British in America. In America, where land was plentiful, common people had better economic opportunity and greater political rights such as voting. (80% owned enough land to vote.)

William Hogarth’s depiction of English voting mirrored the reservations that Americans had about politics in the mother country. The man in the foreground, obviously incapacitated by drink is being told how to vote by the man standing and whispering in his ear. The King’s ministers used bribery extensively in the “rotten boroughs” to get their candidates elected to Parliament, and used patronage (offices and salaries) to induce MPs in Parliament to vote for measures that the King’s ministers supported.

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Colonial Government■ American colonial governments roughly mirrored the

British Constitution (King, Parliament (House of Lords, House of Commons) and reflected the colonists’ belief that they were “free born Englishmen entitled to the rights thereof.”

■ Governor (appointed in most colonies by the King and possessing the power to veto laws, command the militia, appoint judges, make land grants, etc.)

■ Legislature (bi-cameral in every colony except Pennsylvania which had a unicameral (one house) legislature).

– Upper House (Council) appointed by the Governor– Lower House (Assembly) elected by

property-owning white males, it controlled the “power of the purse.”

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The Rise of the AssembliesThe “Power of the Purse”: To tax and to appropriate (The assembly paid the salary of the governor.) According to John Locke, property equaled liberty and taxation involved government taking property (and thus liberty), so taxation had to be guarded jealously by the Assemblies.

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The War that Made America:The French and Indian War (1754-63) (& Years War in Europe)

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The Climactic War for Empire, 1754-63

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Caption for previous Map

This war involved the British, American colonists, French, and Native Americans. Two groups of Indians played crucial roles: The six nation Iroquois League and the Indians of the Ohio Valley such as the Shawnee, Miami, and Delaware that had been displaced by the Iroquois and sought to maintain their independence from them by allying with the French.

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Albany Plan of Union -- 1754

Read page 133 in the Textbook for the Albany Plan of Union

Franklin put the cartoon in his newspaper, The Pennsylvania Gazette to encourage acceptance of his plan. The colonial legislatures, however, rejected it because it would have involved their giving up a portion of their power to tax.

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William Pitt, the architect of British victory after 1757, concentrated British forces in North America, spent as much as necessary, and requested rather than demanded militia and money from the assemblies and offered to reimburse them in gold and silver at the end of the war. “Only one man can save this country,” he declared, and American colonists certainly believed that as seen in the porcelain commemorating their hero.

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The fall of Quebec, 1759

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Results of the French and Indian War, 1763

Americans celebrated the British-American victory in the French and Indian War and declared their pride in being members of the greatest and freest empire in history.

The French and Indian War eliminated France from the mainland of North America and in the process made the American colonies less dependant on Britain for protection.

It resulted in a great public debt for the BritishIt proved disastrous for Native Americans who could no longer play

the British against the French as a way of securing supplies and their independence

It stirred great expectations in Americans for prosperity, settlement in the Ohio Valley, reduced taxes from their assemblies because of the war’s end, and greater equality in the Empire. The frustration of these great expectations helped to create a crisis of Empire shortly after the conclusion of the war.

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18th Century America: ThemesAnglo-American Identity –Better to be English in America“Who is this new man – this American?”

■ 1) Prosperity, population growth, diversity (Pennsylvania: The best poor man’s country.”)

■ 2) The centrality of slavery to the colonial economy■ (Slavery was important in both North and South; a key to the colonial economies of both sections; By 1770, 20% of NYC

population was black;250,000 Africans brought in the slave trade in the 18th century.)

■ 3) Erosion of deference and learning to Question authority• The Enlightenment: Ben Franklin (Electricity and lightning; authority in reason, not social status)• The Great Awakening: George Whitefield (taught Americans to question authority)• Immigration of Scotch-Irish and Germans into the back country; The Regulators in the Carolinas (Scotch-Irish

and Germans vs. Assemblies.

■ 4) Imperial System after 1700: Salutary Neglect, Colonial autonomy, and the rise of the Colonial Assemblies. (Assemblies had the power of the purse – to tax and to appropriate money – paid the salaries of the governors)

• Americans liked being British. They admired the British Constitution, the grandeur of the city of London, and the economic, political, and military power of the Empire. But they were appalled at the unequal distribution of wealth in England that left a majority landless and in poverty, and they were scandalized by the corruption endemic to British politics as seen in patronage and the “rotten borough” system.

■ 5) Little inter-colonial Unity:• The Failure of the Albany Plan of Union (Inter-colonial Council that would have the power to tax in order to

raise money for defense; Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette cartoon`: “Unite or Die”; Assemblies would not relinquish any power to tax)

■ 7) Climactic War for Empire: The French Vanquished, 1754-63• Indians and the balance of Power – The Iroquois Confederation (Six Nations)• The French and Indian War (French eliminated from the Continent)• Americans had Great Expectations for greater equality in the Empire

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Review Questions: use your notes, handouts, and the previous PowerPoint slides.■ 18th Century■ 1. What was Ben Franklin's Albany Plan of Union? What happened to it?■ 2. What key themes played throughout the first 50 years of the 18th century?■ 3. What was the Great Awakening? ■ 4. Who was Jonathan Edwards and why was he important? ■ 5. Who was George Whitefield? Explain his success? What was the anecdote about the American

Revolutionary soldiers and what did it illustrate? Who was Phyllis Wheatley?■ 6. Explain how the Great Awakening laid the foundation for the later American revolution.■ 7. What were some characteristics of revivals associated with the Awakening? What was the implied

message of the revivals?■ 8. How did the Awakeners (New Lights") differ from the more established Old Light churches? Whjat impact

did the Awakening have on religion in America and on American colleges?■ 9. What was the Enlightenment? How did it contribute to an erosion of deference?■ 10. Who was the great figure of the Enlightenment in America? Give concrete examples of his

achievements.■ 11. What patterns of immigration developed in the 18th century?■ 12. Explain the conflict between the back country and the coast as seen in the Regulators of the Carolinas.■ 13. Explain the Triangular trade patterns that grew up.■ 14. Explain the economic importance of slavery to the colonial economy, north and south. ■ 15. What were the Acts of Trade and Navigation? Give some examples of what they required. ■ 16. Why was British policy towards the colonies best described as "salutary neglect?"■ 17. The role of women in the 18th century. Patriarchy in families; Men on farms raised the raw materials:

wool from sheep, grain, etc. and women "manufactured" the raw materials (ie. wheat into flour and then into bread; wool into yarn and then into clothing, etc. The presence of women was crucial for a settled, healthy and prosperous life.

■ 18. What did Americans think of being British? Why?■ 19. Explain American ambivalence (admired-disliked) with regards Britain: socially and economically, and

politically.■ 20. How did Americans view British politics in the first half of the 18th century?■ 21. In terms of political participation, how did America differ from England?■ 22. What key factors explained the emergence of the colonial assemblies as the most powerful element of

colonial government in the first half of the 18th century?■ 23. How did Americans view property and its relation to liberty?■ 24. The dates of the French and Indian War.■ 25. The importance of George Washington, Albany Plan of Union; policies of William Pitt;; the fall of

Quebec.■ 26. The provisions of the Peace of Paris, 1763 and their results.■ 27. By 1763, had Americans developed a distinctive identity of their own?