Gregory Bodenhamer The founding of Maryland. Maryland was the first proprietary colony, based on a grant to Cecilius Calvert, Lord Baltimore, who named the land for Queen Henrietta Maria, wife of Charles I. Lord Baltimore planned for Maryland to serve as a haven for English Catholics who suffered political and religious discrimination in England, but few Catholics actually settled in the colony. Protestants were attracted by the inexpensive land that Baltimore offered to help him pay his debts. Baltimore granted his friends the large estates, which resembled medieval manors and paved the way for the plantation system.

The founding of Maryland. Maryland was the first proprietary colony, based on a grant to Cecilius Calvert, Lord Baltimore, who named the land for Queen Henrietta Maria, wife of Charles I. Lord Baltimore planned for Maryland to serve as a haven for English Catholics who suffered political and religious discrimination in England, but few Catholics actually settled in the colony. Protestants were attracted by the inexpensive land that Baltimore offered to help him pay his debts. Baltimore granted his friends the large estates, which resembled medieval manors and paved the way for the plantation system.

At first, relations between Maryland's Catholics and Protestants seemed amicable. For a time they even shared the same chapel. In 1649, under Baltimore's urging, the colonial assembly passed the Act of Religious Toleration, the first law in the colonies granting freedom of worship, albeit only for Christians. By 1654, however, with Maryland's Protestants in the majority, the act was repealed. A near civil war broke out and order was not restored until 1658, when Lord Baltimore was returned to power. Religious squabbles continued for years in the Maryland colony.

Chesapeake society and economy. Tobacco was the mainstay of the Virginia and Maryland economies. Plantations were established by riverbanks for the good soil and to ensure ease of transportation. Because wealthy planters built their own wharves on the Chesapeake to ship their crop to England, town development was slow. To cultivate tobacco, planters brought in large numbers of English workers, mostly young men who came as indentured servants. More than 110,000 had arrived in the Chesapeake region by 1700. Each indentured servant meant more land for his sponsor under the headright system, which had the effect of squeezing out small-scale farming.

While New England was a land of towns and villages surrounded by small farms, Virginia and Maryland were characterized by large plantations and little urban development. The emphasis on indentured labor meant that relatively few women settled in the Chesapeake colonies. This fact, combined with the high mortality rate from disease—malaria, dysentery, and typhoid—slowed population growth considerably. The one common link between New England and the Chesapeake was the treatment of the Indians.

Fluctuations in Chesapeake tobacco prices caused a prolonged economic depression from 1660 into the early 1700s. Sadly, disillusioned colonists took out their frustrations on the local Indians. In April 1676, Nathaniel Bacon, a relative of Virginia Governor William Berkeley, led three hundred settlers against peaceful local tribes, killing them all. When Bacon's force grew to twelve hundred men, he decided to drive all Indians out of the colony. Fortunately, Governor Berkeley decided that Bacon's actions were excessive and recalled him, but Bacon's army then rebelled against the colonial government and burned Jamestown. Bacon went so far as to promise freedom to servants and slaves of Berkeley's supporters, but he died suddenly, and his movement fell apart. Bacon's Rebellion illustrated the tensions between white and Indian, planter and slave, and have and have-not in the colony, tensions made worse by an economic depression that must have seemed without end.

Indentured servants and slaves. The Chesapeake region offered little economic opportunity to indentured servants who had completed their term of obligation. Even with the small amount of capital needed for tobacco cultivation, former indentured servants at best became subsistence farmers, a class ripe for such calls to rebellion as those proposed by Nathaniel Bacon. As the number of new indentured laborers declined because of limited chances for advancement and reports of harsh treatment, they were replaced by African slaves.

Early in the seventeenth century, the status of slave and indentured servant was quite similar. After 1660, the Chesapeake colonies enforced laws that defined slavery as a lifelong and inheritable condition based on race. This made slaves profitable because planters could rely not only on their labor but that of their children as well. The slave population, which numbered about four thousand in Virginia and Maryland in 1675, grew significantly to the end of the century.

Restoration Colonies

English settlement of North America was seriously curtailed by the conflict between king and Parliament that led to the English Civil War and the rule of Oliver Cromwell (1649–60). Once the monarchy was restored under Charles II, however, colonization resumed. The Restoration Colonies were all proprietorships granted by Charles to men who had helped him reclaim the throne.

The Carolinas. The Carolinas (from the Latin version of Charles, Carolus), which originally included the land from the southern border of Virginia to Spanish Florida, were given to eight proprietors in 1663. Settlers from Virginia came into the northern part of the territory in the 1650s, bringing with them the tobacco culture. Small-scale farming and the export of lumber and pitch (tar), much in demand by English shipbuilders, were the basis of the economy. North Carolina became a separate colony in 1691. In the south, where the proprietors focused their interest, things took a different turn. Rice became the staple crop by the 1690s. Because its production was extremely labor intensive, African slaves were imported to drain the swamps and work the fields. The reliance on slaves is not surprising. Not only was the supply of indentured servants limited, but many of the early settlers came from the English colonies in the Caribbean, most notably Barbados, where slavery was well established.

Like many Restoration Colonies, South Carolina attracted diverse religious and ethnic groups. In addition to colonists from Barbados, who were mostly Anglicans, there were German Lutherans, Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, Welsh Baptists, and Spanish Jews. This mix did not promote stability. Relations with the Indians often turned violent as whites enslaved native tribes as well as blacks. The inability of the proprietors to maintain order led to South Carolina's becoming a royal colony in 1729.

From New Netherland to New York. The Dutch established two trading posts in 1614: one on Manhattan Island and one to the north on the Hudson River at Albany's present location. A decade later, the newly formed Dutch West India Company set up the first permanent settlements, the most important of which was New Amsterdam on Manhattan; it became the capital of New Netherland. Although the fur trade stimulated Dutch expansion into Delaware and the Hudson River Valley, farming was considered vital to making the colony self-sufficient. Under the patroon system, individuals who brought fifty settlers along with livestock and farm implements to the colony received large tracts of land.

Administration of New Netherland was in the hands of governors appointed by the Dutch West India Company. The colonists had little loyalty to these often corrupt and dictatorial officials, and when the English fleet appeared off Manhattan in 1664, no resistance was offered. This was not a sign that the Dutch welcomed English takeover, however. The two countries had been engaged in a series of wars for commercial supremacy; in fact, the Dutch won the colony back briefly during the Third Anglo-Dutch War in 1673. Nevertheless, New York, renamed for its new proprietor, James, Duke of York, became an English royal colony in 1685.

New Jersey. New Jersey was based on land grants made in 1664 by the Duke of York to Sir John Berkeley and Sir George Carteret, two of his favorite supporters. Small farming settlements that were in fact religious and ethnic enclaves of Anglicans, Puritans, Dutch Calvinists, Scottish Presbyterians, Swedish Lutherans, and Quakers predominated. The colony was divided into West and East Jersey by the proprietors in 1676 and was not reunited until 1702, when it reverted to direct royal control.

Pennsylvania and Delaware. William Penn received his proprietorship from Charles II in 1681, quite possibly as repayment of the debt the royal treasury owed his father. A member of the Society of Friends, or Quakers, he saw the grant as an opportunity to create a colony in North America—a “Peaceable Kingdom”—as a religious experiment.

The Quakers were looked upon with some suspicion in England because of their religious beliefs, but the sect thrived in spite of official persecution. They were pacifists, preached to the poor, refused to take oaths or tip their hats or bow to their social superiors, and gave women a role in the church. To encourage settlement, Penn actively promoted the attractions of Pennsylvania, not the least of which were religious toleration and good relations with the Indians based on Quaker pacifism and his willingness to buy rather than take Indian lands. The strategy worked, and the colony's population ballooned to more than eight thousand by 1700.

The first important settlement in Delaware was founded in 1638 by the New Sweden Company, a joint-stock company with Swedish and Dutch investors. But this Swedish outpost in the New World was short-lived. The colony first passed to the Dutch (1655), who could trace their claims to Henry Hudson's voyage, and then to England (1664). In 1682, Delaware was made part of William Penn's proprietorship and remained under the political control of the governor of Pennsylvania until the American Revolution.

Georgia, the last English colony. Georgia (named for George II) was carved out of territory originally part of South Carolina as a buffer against the Spanish in Florida and as a place where the poor of Europe could get a new start. The trustees to whom the land was granted, most important James Oglethorpe, envisioned a colony of prosperous small farmers and imposed regulations to bring this about. The land was given away, but no one could own more than five hundred acres, and the sale of land to other colonists or the bequeathing of farms to women heirs was prohibited. Slavery was also banned. While the trustees brought over anyone willing to work, making Georgia England's most cosmopolitan colony with German, Swiss, Austrian, Italian, and Jewish settlers, strong opposition to the land-holding restrictions inevitably arose. All limitations were abolished by 1759, by which time Georgia was already a royal colony.

Colonial Society and Economy

Although the colonists enjoyed a good deal of political autonomy through their elected assemblies (for example, the Virginia House of Burgesses and the Maryland House of Delegates), the colonies were part of the English imperial system. The Navigation Acts, first enacted by Parliament in 1660, regulated trade by requiring that goods be shipped on English ships with predominantly English crews and that certain commodities, called enumerated articles, be shipped to only England or its colonies. The laws reflected the economic policy known as mercantilism, which held that colonies exist for the benefit of the mother country as a source of raw materials and a market for its manufactured goods. On the international scene, the colonies could not escape the great power rivalry between England and France. Each of the wars fought between the two countries in Europe had its counterpart in North America.

By 1750, more than one million people, representing a population increase of significant proportions, were living in the thirteen colonies along the Atlantic coast. Disease, which had threatened the survival of many of the early settlements, was much reduced. Infant mortality rates in the colonies were much lower than those in England, and life expectancy was considerably higher. Women married earlier, giving them the opportunity to have more children, and large families were the norm. It was not uncommon at all for a woman to have eight children and more than forty grandchildren. Natural increase, the excess of live births over deaths, was important to the population growth, but ongoing European immigration was a factor as well. Whether refugees from war (the Germans, for example) or victims of persecution or economic conditions in their homelands (the Irish and Scotch-Irish), the new arrivals added to the ethnic and religious mosaic of eighteenth-century America. The largest ethnic group to arrive—the African slaves—came in chains.

The expansion of slavery. At midcentury, just under a quarter million blacks lived in the colonies, almost twenty times the number in 1700. The slave numbers increased, as had the white population, through a combination of immigration, albeit forced, and natural increase. As the supply of indentured servants diminished, in part because work opportunities had improved in England, the supply of slaves either imported directly from Africa or transshipped from the West Indies was increased. Charleston, South Carolina, and Newport, Rhode Island, were important points of entry. Competition from Brazilian and Caribbean planters kept the price of male field hands high, however, and the planters' North American counterparts responded by buying women and encouraging slave families.

The overwhelming majority of slaves lived in the southern colonies, but there was regional variation in distribution. In the Chesapeake area, slaveholding was far from universal, and many of the plantations had fewer than twenty slaves. A typical South Carolina planter, on the other hand, might own as many as fifty slaves to work in the rice fields. In some districts of the sparsely populated South Carolina colony, blacks outnumbered whites by as much as eight to one, and they were able to retain their African culture more than slaves who were taken to Virginia or Maryland. Although a mainstay of the southern economy, slavery was not unknown in the northern colonies. Slaves made up twenty percent of the population of New York in 1746, for example. Working as domestics, assistants to craftsmen, or stevedores in the port cities, they lived in their master's home, as did indentured servants and apprentices.

The slaves' resistance to their situation was often passive, involving feigning illness, breaking equipment, and generally disrupting the routine of the plantation, but it occasionally did turn violent. Given the demographics, it is not surprising that the largest colonial slave revolt—the Stono Rebellion—took place in South Carolina. In 1739, about one hundred fugitive slaves killed twenty whites on their way to Florida and were killed themselves when captured. The rebellion sparked other slave revolts over the next few years.

Colonial agriculture. The overwhelming majority of colonists were farmers. New England's rocky soil and short growing season along with the practice of dividing already small farms among siblings led families to a barely subsistent living. The crops they grew—barley, wheat, and oats—were the same as those grown in England, so they had little export value compared with the staples of the southern plantations. Many New Englanders left farming to fish or produce lumber, tar, and pitch that could be exchanged for English manufactured goods. In the Middle Colonies, richer land and a better climate created a small surplus. Corn, wheat, and livestock were shipped primarily to the West Indies from the growing commercial centers of Philadelphia and New York. Tobacco remained the most important cash crop around Chesapeake Bay, but the volatility of tobacco prices encouraged planters to diversify. Cereal grains, flax, and cattle became important to the economies of Virginia and Maryland in the eighteenth century. Rice cultivation expanded in South Carolina and Georgia, and indigo was added around 1740. The indigo plant was used to make a blue dye much in demand by the English textile industry.

Population growth put pressure on the limited supply of land in the north, while the best land in the south was already in the hands of planters. With opportunities for newcomers limited in the settled coastal areas, many German and Scotch-Irish immigrants pushed into the interior, where available land was more abundant. Filtering into the backcountry of Pennsylvania, Virginia, and the Carolinas, they established farms on the frontier and grew just enough food to keep themselves going.

Colonial trade and industry. The colonies were part of an Atlantic trading network that linked them with England, Africa, and the West Indies. The pattern of commerce, not too accurately called the Triangular Trade, involved the exchange of products from colonial farms, plantations, fisheries, and forests with England for manufactured goods and the West Indies for slaves, molasses, and sugar. In New England, molasses and sugar were distilled into rum, which was used to buy African slaves. Southern Europe was also a valuable market for colonial foodstuffs.

Colonial industry was closely associated with trade. A significant percentage of Atlantic shipping was on vessels built in the colonies, and shipbuilding stimulated other crafts, such as the sewing of sails, milling of lumber, and manufacturing of naval stores. Mercantile theory encouraged the colonies to provide raw materials for England's industrializing economy; pig iron and coal became important exports. Concurrently, restrictions were placed on finished goods. For example, Parliament, concerned about possible competition from colonial hatters, prohibited the export of hats from one colony to another and limited the number of apprentices in each hatmaker's shop.

The social structure of the colonies. At the bottom of the social ladder were slaves and indentured servants; successful planters in the south and wealthy merchants in the north were the colonial elite. In the Chesapeake area, the signs of prosperity were visible in brick and mortar. The rather modest houses of even the most prosperous farmers of the seventeenth century had given way to spacious mansions in the eighteenth century. South Carolina planters often owned townhouses in Charleston and would probably have gone to someplace like Newport to escape the heat in summer. Both in their lifestyles and social pursuits (such as horse racing), the southern gentry emulated the English country squire.

Large landholders were not confined just to the southern colonies. The descendants of the Dutch patroons and the men who received lands from the English royal governors controlled estates in the middle colonies. Their farms were worked by tenant farmers, who received a share of the crop for their labor. In the northern cities, wealth was increasingly concentrated in the hands of the merchants; below them was the middle class of skilled craftsmen and shopkeepers. Craftsmen learned their trade as apprentices and became journeymen when their term of apprenticeship (as long as seven years) was completed. Even as wage earners, the journeymen often still lived with their former master and ate at his table. Saving enough money to go into business for himself was the dream of every journeyman.

Among the urban poor were the unskilled laborers, stevedores, and crew members of the fishing and whaling fleets. Economic recessions were common in the colonies during the eighteenth century, and they affected workers in the cities most. When the supply of labor outstripped demand, wages fell and the level of unemployment rose.

By and large, women in the colonies assumed traditional roles; they took care of their home and brought up their children. On small farms throughout the colonies and in the backcountry, they also worked the fields and cared for livestock alongside their husbands and children. Urban women, freed from such domestic chores as spinning and candle making (cloth and candles could be purchased in the cities), had somewhat more leisure time, and they might help their husbands in their shop or tavern. Although women gave up their property rights when they married, single women and widows could inherit property under English law. It was not uncommon for a woman to manage her husband's business after his death. Midwifery, which required years of training, was the one profession open to women.

Enlightenment and Religious Revival

Compared to England's literacy rate, that in the colonies was quite high. But while about half the colonists could read, their appetite for books rarely went beyond the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, an almanac, and a volume of Shakespeare's plays. The better-educated elites among them were attuned to the new ideas that flowed into the port cities along with the products of English factories and the immigrants, including the ideas of the Enlightenment. Drawing on the Scientific Revolution, which had demonstrated that the physical world was governed by natural laws, men such as English philosopher John Locke argued that similar laws applied to human affairs and were discoverable through reason. Proponents of the Enlightenment also examined religion through the prism of reason. Rational Christianity, at its extreme, argued that God created the universe, established the laws of nature that made it work, and then did not interfere with the mechanism. This conception of God as a watchmaker is known as deism.

Benjamin Franklin. The Enlightenment in America was best represented by Benjamin Franklin, who clearly believed that the human condition could be improved through science. He founded the American Philosophical Society, the first truly scientific society in the colonies, and his academy grew into the University of Pennsylvania, the only college established in the eighteenth century that had no ties to a religious denomination. Franklin's new wood stove (1742) improved heating and ventilation in colonial homes, and his experiments with electricity led to the invention of the lightning rod (1752). Although a deist himself, Franklin was curious about the religious revival that swept through the colonies from the 1740s into the 1770s.

The Great Awakening and its impact. The Great Awakening grew out of the sense that religion was becoming an increasingly unimportant part of people's lives. In practical terms, this may well have been true. In Virginia, the most populous colony, the supply of ministers compared to the potential number of congregants was small, and churches in the backcountry were rare. The religious revival's leading figures were the Congregationalist minister Jonathan Edwards and the English evangelist George Whitefield, both dynamic preachers. Edwards was renowned for his “fire and brimstone” sermons that warned sinners about the fate God had in store for them if they did not repent. On numerous trips to the colonies beginning in 1738, Whitefield brought his message about the need for each individual to experience a “new birth” on the path to personal salvation (what today's fundamentalist Christians call being “born again”).

In sharp contrast to the Enlightenment, the Great Awakening took on the proportions of a mass movement. Tens of thousands of people came to hear Whitefield preach as he moved from town to town, often holding meetings in the open or under tents, and he became a household name throughout the colonies. Moreover, the Great Awakening appealed to the heart, not the head. One of the reasons for its success was the emotion and drama that the revivalists brought to religion. The highlight of many of the services was the ecstatic personal testimony of those who had experienced a “new birth.”