Chapter 3: Society and Culture in Provincial America

American History: A Survey

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Bacon’s Rebellion is most associated with which early colony?

A. Virginia

B. Maryland

C. Massachusetts

D. Pennsylvania

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The Colonies as Regions (differences in resources, immigrant groups, and economic systems, etc)

Northern colonies (New England): Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, (Maine was part of Massachusetts, Vermont belonged to New York at the time).

Middle colonies: New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey

Chesapeake colonies: Virginia, (Maryland and Delaware shared traits of both the Middle and Chesapeake colonies) and North Carolina

Southern colonies: South Carolina and Georgia (and the West Indies)

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The Colonies as Regions (differences in resources, immigrant groups, and economic systems, etc)

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The Early Population

Early New England Early Chesapeake

Bulk of the population of early New England were men and women of modest means who arranged their own passage and established themselves immediately on their own land

Bulk of the population of the early Chesapeake (and a majority of the southern and mid-Atlantic colonies) arrived as indentured servants

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Women and Families

Women in New England Women in the Chesapeake

Married young

Stable family structure

Northern children likely to survive

Usually lived to see their children grow to maturity

Status of women defined in part by religious belief

Married young

Unstable family structure

Higher mortality rate

More hardships

But more power and a greater level of freedom

(Women lost these as the sex ratio became more equal)

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Colonial Economies

Southern Economy Northern Economy

Tobacco and rice cultivation (plantation system)

This early dependence on large-scale cash crops caused Southern colonies to develop less of a commercial or industrial economy than the colonies of the North

Few cities developed

More varied than those of the southern colonies

Other economic activities emerged because the topography made farming difficult

Lumbering and fishing

A thriving commercial class

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Environmental Variations Contribute to Regional Differences: The New England Wilderness Transformed

White pine for ship masts, oak for barrel staves, hickory for farm tools (New England forest at the time of colonial settlement was an open, park-like terrain due to Indians accustomed to burning the underbrush in the spring and fall to attract deer)

Corn and beans planted together so that beans twined up the corn stalks, these shaded the ground where the pumpkins and squash were planted (limited insect damage and enhanced yields), used fish as fertilizer

Cattle, pigs, goats, and oxen roamed the woods, disrupting Indian-colonial relations

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Environmental Variations Contribute to Regional Differences: New England: Marketing the Forest

Colonists and settlements are financed by companies. In return, colonists are expected to extract natural resources and return them to the mother country. Mercantilism, or long-distance trade, was the earliest form of capitalism that developed, and it began to link the continents together.

The economic system that developed in New England was part of an emerging capitalist system that linked nature, labor, and capital, turning natural resources into commodities to be traded on the market. The commodification of nature occurred as part of the so-called triangular trade, involving Europe as a source of manufacturing and management, Africa as a source of slaves, and the New World as a source of natural resources.

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Environmental Variations Contribute to Regional Differences: Cash Crops in the Chesapeake and Southern Colonies

Tobacco cultivation – though it saved the colonists – was hard on both soils and the forests that replenished them. After three or four years, new land had to be cleared. But land was plentiful and the tobacco market was going strong. The only barrier to wealth was finding workers for the laborious processes of planting, cultivating, pruning, harvesting, and curing tobacco.

Indentured servants wanted to get in on the game but were too poor to pay for passage across the Atlantic. Opportunities for indentured servants to graduate into planter-hood soon dried up as population increased and the more successful planters began locking up vast tracts of the remaining fresh lands. Also, the rising planter class discovered a new source of cheaper labor, African slaves. Southerners depended on slave bodies and slave knowledge for cultivation of not only tobacco in Virginia, but also of rice in South Carolina and Georgia, and sugar in Barbados.

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New England: Puritan Belief and Values

The early history of the region is intimately connected to the religious movement known as “Puritanism.”

Puritan New England: A tightly knit society (towns bound together by the power of the church and the town meeting).

Puritan beliefs and values: Passion for righteousness, each Puritan congregation governed itself, desire to establish a “community,” rather than a colony, through a covenant with God, Protestant work ethic (idleness is a sin, Patriarchal family (family played a critical role in the community, women played a subordinate role)

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Half-Way Covenant Once in control of the agencies of authority, puritans used this

power to attempt to impose a culture of discipline on the societies they governed and to insure that their puritan states would promote and protect true religion. Settlers in New England were inclined to accept puritan cultural values during the early decades of settlement.

Half-Way Covenant: (1662) this new arrangement modified the “covenant,” or the agreement between the church and its adherents, conferring partial membership rights in the once-exclusive Puritan congregations. The Half-Way Covenant weakened the distinction between the “elect” and others, and dramatized the difficulty of maintaining at fever pitch the religious devotion of the founding generation.

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Salem Witch Trials (1690s)

Tensions over gender roles played a substantial role in generating the crisis

The Salem witch trials reflected the widening social stratification of New England, as well as the fear of many religious traditionalists that the Puritan heritage was being eclipsed by Yankee commercialism.

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Legacies of Puritanism In the 20th century, historians have attempted to link

Puritanism to broader movements in the shaping of modern American history, suggesting that the psychological effects of predestination theology fostered an ethic that fueled economic growth in England and America, thus linking Puritanism and capitalism.

No 19th century writer wrote more about the puritan tradition than Nathaniel Hawthorne, the descendant of one of the judges in the Salem witch trials of 1692. The Scarlet Letter (1850) is arguably the book from which most contemporary understandings of seventeenth-century New England have been drawn.

It is no surprise that when the playwright Arthur Miller wanted to portray a repressive and persecuting society as a way of commenting on the McCarthyism of the 1950s, he chose to place his play, The Crucible, in 1692 Salem.

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Which of the following statements was not true of the Tidewater in colonial Virginia?

A. It was located on the James and Rappahannock Rivers

B. Many of the wealthiest Virginian plantations were located in this region

C. Many poorer farmers and former indentured servants were forced to locate in the Tidewater

D. It was east of the Piedmont region and the Appalachians

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The “Atlantic World”

As transatlantic commerce expanded, American port cities grew in size and complexity.

Membership in the British empire had many advantages for the colonists. Most Americans did not complain about British regulation of their trade because commerce enriched the colonies as well as the mother country and lax enforcement of the Navigation Acts allowed smuggling to flourish. Also, the Royal Navy protected American shipping.

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Anglicization

Anglicization: for much of the 1700s, the American upper class (or elites) in the British colonies, rather than thinking of themselves as distinctively American, tried to become more and more English. Wealthy Americans tried to model their lives on British etiquette and behavior. They tried to send their sons to the best schools in England, and retained English customs.

In 1750, about 40 merchants controlled more than 50 of Philadelphia’s trade. Like the Chesapeake gentry, urban merchants imitated the British upper classes, importing architectural design books from England and building Georgian-style mansions to display their wealth.

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Factors Promoting Anglicization

growth of political communities based on English models

development of commercial ties and legal structures

emergence of a trans-Atlantic print culture

Protestant evangelism and the spread of Enlightenment ideas

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The Colonial Mind

Old Outlook (1600s) New Outlook (1700s)

Traditional outlook on life

Emphasis on a personal God

Stern moral code

Intellect is less important than faith

New outlook on life

Emphasis on Enlightenment thinking, stressing the importance of science and human reason

People have control over their own lives and the world can be explained along rational scientific lines

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The Enlightenment

Enlightenment: Philosophers of the European Enlightenment used empirical research and scientific reasoning to study all aspects of life, including social institutions and human behavior.

English philosopher John Locke advanced the revolutionary theory that political authority was not given by God to monarchs. Instead, it derived from social compacts that people made to preserve their natural rights to life, liberty, and property. In Locke’s view, the people should have the power to change government policies – or even their form of government.

The Enlightenment foreshadowed the great contributions to republican political theory by American intellectuals of the Revolutionary era: John Adams, James Madison, and Thomas Jefferson.

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Characteristic Ideas of Enlightenment Thinkers

People are capable of perfecting human society by applying the rules of reason

John Locke maintained that natural law ordained a government resting on the consent of the governed and respecting the inherent rights of all

God created the world but left it to function according to the laws of nature.

The objective of the Enlightenment was to liberate the natural laws which would then apply themselves equally and thus create a new order with harmony and balance

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Benjamin Franklin

Self-educated Benjamin Franklin exemplified the Enlightenment spirit and made him the best-known American in the eighteenth-century world. He popularized the practical outlook of the Enlightenment in Poor Richard’s Almanack.

He founded the Junto, a club for weekly discussion of political and economic debates, which eventually became the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia.

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Arminianism and Deism

Arminianism: reason alone was capable of establishing the essentials of religion.

Deism: a belief that God essentially withdrew after creating the world, leaving it to function according to scientific laws without divine intervention.

Belief in miracles and the innate sinfulness of mankind were viewed by Arminians, Deists, and others as outdated superstitions that should be abandoned in the modern age.

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Reasons for the Decline of Piety (piety: devotion to religion)

Rise of denominationalism

Population shifting westward, causing communities to lose touch with organized religion

Colonial culture was growing increasingly secular (not sacred) and materialistic

Enlightenment thought allowed some to adopt a more rational and skeptical view of the world

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The Great Awakening, 1730s-1740s

Great Awakening: (1730s) also known as the First Great Awakening, a religious revival ignited by Jonathan Edwards, who preached the folly of believing in salvation through good works and affirmed the need for complete dependence on God’s grace. Sinners needed a “new birth” in which they became devout Christians.

George Whitefield, a great orator and evangelical preacher who helped spark the awakening and soon inspired imitators.

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George Whitefield Preaching

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Old Lights vs. New Lights

While the Great Awakening began in New England, its message was spread to the other colonies.

Congregations split into factions headed by Old Lights (traditionalists) and New Lights (revivalists), and new churches proliferated – Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, and others.

Jonathan Edwards: the first and foremost New Light preacher.

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Significance of the Great Awakening

The Great Awakening was the first spontaneous mass movement of the American people, breaking down sectional boundaries and denominational line. It contributed to the growing sense that Americans were a single people, united by shared experiences.

A few preachers explicitly condemned slavery, and the revivals brought numerous slaves into the Christian fold. Some blacks began preaching themselves.

The Great Awakening broadened the range of religious alternatives available to Americans and encouraged many colonists to trust their own views rather than those of established elites.

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The Zenger case is significant for

A) making sedition illegal.

B) establishing freedom of the press.

C) guaranteeing backcountry residents equal representation in colonial governments.

D) ensuring taxation through proper representation.

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The chief significance of the Great Awakening was that it

A. Provided Jonathan Edwards with an opportunity to preach

B. Was the first genuine unified movement of the American colonists

C. Revived intolerance

D. Created new interest in the churches

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