Introduction The chapter opens with Abigail Adams managing the family farm while her husband, John, served at the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia. Abigail Adams eagerly awaited word that the Congress had “declared an independency” and admonished her husband to “Remember the Ladies.” While her husband humorously chastised her for her “saucy” suggestion, she seemed to understand very early in the conflict that the events occurring could let loose a dynamic of equality and liberty that would affect the country for generations to come.

The Second Continental Congress, pp. 212-220

In 1775, nearly a month after the fighting at Lexington and Concord, the Second Continental Congress assembled in Philadelphia. It was faced with the contradictory tasks of raising and supplying an army, while also trying to negotiate a reconciliation with England and its unreceptive king.

Assuming Political and Military Authority

The delegates at the Second Continental Congress were well-established political figures in their own colonies. They had to learn to work together despite being of different minds about many political topics. Most of the delegates who attended the Second Continental Congress were not yet prepared for a total break with England. Most eager for independence were the Massachusetts men, whose colony had been stripped of civil government by the Coercive Acts. Delegates from the middle and southern colonies were more inclined toward reconciliation, fearing that fighting for independence would disrupt trade, create civil unrest, and leave the colonies vulnerable to enemies like France and Spain. Despite hopes to contain the conflict, all agreed that a military buildup was necessary to counter the invading British army. Congress created the Continental army, named George Washington of Virginia the commander in chief, and authorized a currency issue of $2 million to pay military expenses. Despite taking on the traditional functions of government, the Second Continental Congress did not declare independence for another year and had no basis to compel compliance from Americans.

Pursuing Both War and Peace

In June 1775, the battle of Bunker Hill took place. It was one of the bloodiest engagements of the entire war, with heavy casualties, especially on the British side. The British won but failed to pursue the Americans back to their headquarters at Cambridge. A week later, George Washington arrived in Cambridge to take command of the Continental army, an undisciplined, ragtag outfit that he sought to transform quickly into a more cohesive fighting force. Meanwhile, the Congress continued to pursue reconciliation with England, with congressional moderates, led by John Dickinson, issuing the Olive Branch Petition to the king. George III rejected the petition, labeling the Americans rebels and traitors, which made it difficult to maintain the fiction that only the king’s ministers were to blame for the conflict.

Thomas Paine and the Case for Independence

It was an English writer newly arrived in America who broke the logjam of public sentiment regarding independence or reconciliation. In his 1776 pamphlet Common Sense, Thomas Paine attacked the monarchy, not just the king’s ministers, and called on Americans to separate from England and establish a republic. Common Sense was read widely, and public opinion shifted rapidly after its publication. On July 2, the congress adopted the Virginia delegation’s resolution of independence. After wrangling over some of the specific grievances, particularly one condemning slavery, a final public draft of the Declaration of Independence was formally signed on July 4, 1776. Independence finally had been launched, but the outcome was far from certain.

The First Year of War, 1775-1776, pp. 220-225

Both sides approached war with caution. The Americans were keenly aware of England’s military might, and the British, after Bunker Hill, had more respect for the rebels’ fighting abilities. Compounding England’s problem of fighting in hostile territory were the logistics of long-distance supply and British desire to regain the allegiance of the colonists, not destroy and conquer them.

The American Military Forces

The American forces had the advantage of being highly motivated to fight and theoretically could mobilize considerable manpower. However, Americans traditionally had relied on militia, which were good for limited engagements but not for long wars requiring military campaigns far from home. To attract potential recruits, the colonies had to resort to cash and land bounties and the draft. Over the course of the war, some 231,000 men spent time in military service, amounting to roughly one-quarter of the white male population over age sixteen. Close to 20,000 women served in the Continental army as cooks, washerwomen, and nurses. Despite Washington’s initial prohibition against black recruits, about 5,000 eventually served in the war as well. Military service helped politicize Americans, making neutrality seem as dangerous as commitment to the cause.

The British Strategy

The American task was relatively simple: to defeat an invading army. Britain’s objective was not so straightforward: to restore loyalist regimes to power in the colonies while not destroying the enemy completely. Counting on substantial pockets of loyalist support in the Carolinas and the middle colonies, the British assumed this goal would not be too difficult to achieve. They initially focused their military campaigns on New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. Strategically, the overall British plan was to divide and conquer—to separate the rebellious colonies from those believed to be still loyal.

Quebec, New York, and New Jersey

In late 1775, an American expedition into Canada succeeded in capturing Montreal but failed to take Quebec. The main action of the first year of the war, however, took place in the summer of 1776, when the British decided to seize heavily loyalist New York as their headquarters. Washington’s outnumbered and inexperienced troops met the British at the Battle of Long Island and were defeated badly. Washington evacuated his troops to Manhattan Island in the dead of a foggy night. Then after stripping Manhattan of ammunition and supplies, he left quickly, moving north to two critical forts on either side of the Hudson River. For two months, the armies engaged in limited skirmishing, but in November, Howe finally captured Fort Washington and Fort Lee, taking thousands of prisoners. Washington retreated quickly across New Jersey into Pennsylvania. Despite his heavy losses, on Christmas night 1776, Washington daringly again crossed the icy Delaware River with a force of 2,400 men and surprised and scattered the Hessians (German mercenaries) holding Trenton. That victory and a subsequent one at Princeton did much to lift patriot morale, but what had really enabled the Continental army to survive this first year was the continued reluctance of British troops to press their advantage when they had the opportunity. Safe in Morristown, in northern New Jersey, Washington settled his troops for the winter and administered mass smallpox inoculations.

The Home Front, pp. 225-232

Battlefield victories alone did not determine the war’s outcome; struggles behind the lines were equally vital. One of the most important issues on the home front was the contest between patriots and loyalists for the hearts and minds of the thousands of Americans who were neutral.

Patriotism at the Local Level

Committees of correspondence, safety, and inspection became the revolution’s most important political agencies at the local level, supporting the war effort in many ways—from the procurement of arms and men to the rounding up and prosecuting of suspected traitors. These committees could sometimes be oppressive in their treatment of loyalists. Also at the local level, increasing numbers of white women not only assumed many traditional male roles but also, in the process, became politicized.

The Loyalists

Between 20 and 30 percent of the American population remained loyal to the British monarchy in 1776. Their motivations varied. Some were royal officeholders; others were merchants whose businesses were linked to the imperial system; still others were cultural, ethnic (most notably Native Americans and African slaves), and religious groups that had no reason to believe they would fare better under an independent American government than they had under the British. Loyalist strongholds thus could be found everywhere, although the largest pockets were in the middle colonies and in the South.

Who Is a Traitor?

In June 1775, the First Continental Congress passed a resolution declaring loyalists to be traitors. Over the course of the war, hounded by patriots in their communities and harassed by legislative and judicial actions, many loyalists found their position intolerable. For women, the position was less clear because there was no consensus on whether women had the political will to decide to be loyalists or not, particularly if they were married. Thousands of loyalists eventually fled the country, seeking sanctuary in England or Canada. The British military strategy depended on using loyalists to hold occupied territory, but in many colonies that strategy was implemented poorly and ended in disaster when the British decided to withdraw and left loyalists in the hands of their enemies.

Financial Instability and Corruption

One of the nation’s biggest problems was finding ways to finance the war. The Continental Congress printed money, but its value fell rapidly. One way to pay for the war was through borrowing hard money from wealthy men, who were given certificates of debt in return. Congress also resorted to paying soldiers with promises of land. As the war progressed, prices rose to exorbitant levels, and a brisk black market in prohibited imports emerged. In vain, the congress tried to stem the inflationary spiral by instituting price controls.

The Campaigns of 1777-1779: The North and West, pp. 233-238

Although Washington skillfully had avoided outright defeat in the first year of the campaign, the Continental army would face a tough challenge as the British implemented their strategy to isolate New England by controlling the Hudson River. While the Americans sustained some important victories in this period, such as the victory of Saratoga, the involvement of Indians and the continuing strength of the British meant that the American government needed extra help, which finally came in a formal alliance with France.

Burgoyne’s Army and the Battle of Saratoga

The commander of the British army in Canada, General John Burgoyne, was directed to capture Albany. Proceeding down the upper Hudson with his enormous and slow-moving army, he stopped first to seize Fort Ticonderoga, which had been abandoned by American troops when they saw the size and firepower of his army. The British immediately gave chase but lost a crucial month cutting through the thick forest to the north of Albany. The British strategy called for General Howe to move up the Hudson from New York City and join forces with Burgoyne in Albany. But Howe changed his mind and instead attacked Philadelphia, which he took with relative ease. A third group of troops was supposed to move east from the Great Lakes down the Mohawk River, but they were held back in a bloody exchange with Americans at Fort Stanwix. This left Burgoyne to fight the Americans in the north alone. After two costly engagements at Saratoga, New York, food supplies dwindling, and his men demoralized, Burgoyne officially surrendered to General Horatio Gates on October 17, 1777, giving the Continental army its first decisive victory over a major British force. The British offered a negotiated settlement, but the Americans refused. During the winter after Saratoga (1777-78), spirits ran high, but finances and supplies ran perilously low. Washington’s army at Valley Forge witnessed some of the worst privations of the entire war due to corrupt suppliers and greedy farmers, who preferred to sell grain to the British—who could pay in hard currency—rather than to their own army.

The War in the West: Indian Country

In 1778, although fighting between British and patriot armies had paused along the Atlantic coast, war in the western interior increased in intensity. In 1779, a year after bloody raids were carried out by American militiamen on one side and loyalists and their Indian allies on the other, George Washington sent 4,500 soldiers to destroy all of the Iroquoian villages in central New York. The soldiers destroyed forty Iroquois villages and slaughtered some of those unable to flee. By 1779, most Indians had concluded that they could not remain neutral. However, Indians who attempted to ally themselves with the Americans discovered that American commanders often could not distinguish between allied and enemy Indians. A group of Delaware and Shawnee Indians negotiated a treaty with Americans at Fort Pitt, promising support in exchange for supplies. However, the promised goods did not arrive, and American militiamen captured and killed friendly Indian leaders. In some places, pervasive anti-Indian campaigns emerged. In western North Carolina and Kentucky (today’s Tennessee and Illinois), patriot militias destroyed Cherokee villages, and Indians friendly to Britain tried to drive out new white settlements. Patriot raids on the frontier drove Indians from their homes and shocked British onlookers. By 1780, most Indians in the West had chosen the British side. Although a few allied with the Americans in the hopes of preventing attacks by white settlers, the American patriot conduct of the war in the West made it clear that Indians could expect little protection should Britain lose.

The French Alliance

As a result of the American victory at Saratoga, in February 1778 the Americans and the French drafted a formal alliance against England. The treaty offered the United States full diplomatic recognition and complete military, commercial, and financial support until independence was won. France, as a monarchy, was concerned about the alliance with the antimonarchical revolutionaries but wanted desperately to defeat England. The French navy arrived off the coast of Virginia in 1778. For the first few months the alliance did not bring any dramatic victories, although it would become vital by 1781.

The Southern Strategy and the End of the War, pp. 238-244

Despite the desire of many of his ministers and military commanders to abandon the war, George III was determined to crush the rebellion and pushed his generals into formulating a new strategy for victory.

Georgia and South Carolina

The British shifted their efforts to the south for a number of reasons. Loyalist sentiment was considered to be strongest in the southern colonies, and planters’ nervousness about the war’s impact on trade and their slave populations meant that they might be more amenable to coming over to the British side. Also important was the colonies’ economic value to the empire. During the first few years of the campaign, the southern strategy seemed to be working, as first Georgia in 1778 and then South Carolina in 1780 fell to the British. The new British strategy succeeded in 1780, partly as a result of information about American troop movements and supplies secretly furnished to General Henry Clinton by Benedict Arnold. Arnold had been one of the war’s early heroes, but now, feeling betrayed by his own government, he conspired with British agents to turn over the patriot stronghold at West Point on the Hudson River. The scheme was exposed and foiled. News of his behavior galvanized the American public, giving Americans a scapegoat on which to heap their own concerns.

The Other Southern War: Guerrillas

In the southern backcountry, the conflict assumed a new dimension of fighting: guerrilla warfare. In hit-and-run attacks, partisan bands from both sides attacked opponents and anybody claiming to be neutral. The war in the backcountry proved that there was not enough loyalist support in the South to allow the British to hold reconquered territory as the army moved north.

Surrender at Yorktown

In 1781, the British general Cornwallis moved into North Carolina, hoping to prevent the colony from providing patriot guerrillas in South Carolina with arms and men. Although he was not successful, he decided to move into Virginia, capturing Williamsburg and Charlottesville and ultimately making his way to Yorktown. The fortunes of war turned in the rebels’ favor with the arrival of the French navy. While French ships sealed off any retreat by sea, Washington surrounded Cornwallis on land. After a short siege, Cornwallis surrendered on October 19, 1781.

The Losers and the Winners

Although the surrender at Yorktown marked the official end of the war, it would be two more years before a peace treaty was signed. It took time for both sides to acknowledge that the end finally had arrived, and neither wanted to withdraw from the field until the other side had as well. The American diplomats Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and John Jay, who negotiated the peace treaty, secured favorable terms: official recognition of American independence and of the United States and transfer of all territory east of the Mississippi River, between Canada and Florida, to the new nation. The Treaty of Paris did not recognize Indians as players in the war and turned over land to the United States as though it were uninhabited. Many tribes saw the outcome of the war as a disaster. With the treaty finally signed, the British began their evacuation of New York—in New York City, more than 27,000 soldiers and 30,000 loyalists sailed on hundreds of ships for England in late fall 1783.

Conclusion: Why the British Lost

Many factors contributed to the British defeat. It was hard for the British to supply their army, especially since they did not want to ravage the countryside. At the same time, the British failed to back the loyalists and use their energies effectively. The French alliance and military support throughout were crucial to the American victory. Finally, after abdicating civil power in the colonies in 1775 and 1776, the British were never able to regain it.

Introduction

The chapter begins with an account of loyalist governor Thomas Hutchinson. As governor of Massachusetts, Hutchinson presided over Boston’s most turbulent years, witnessing the Sugar Act, the Stamp Act, the Townshend duties, and the Tea Act, all of which preceded and helped to precipitate the American Revolution. Unlike many Americans, though, he did not condemn the British government for abridging colonists’ traditional English liberties in the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War.

The Seven Years’ War, 1754-1763, pp. 174-182

From the late seventeenth to the late eighteenth centuries, whenever England and France fought wars for European domination, their respective colonists in North America were affected. In the 1750s, tensions heightened in the Ohio Valley, land contested by Virginians, Pennsylvanians, the French in Canada, and native Indian tribes. The result was the Seven Years’ War, which spread in 1756 to encompass much of Europe, the Caribbean, and even India. The immense costs of war—in money, in deaths, in desires for revenge by losers and even winners—laid the groundwork for the crisis between British leaders and American colonists in the 1760s.

French-English Rivalry in the Ohio Country

In 1753, the French moved south with the objective of building a solid, fortified defense to protect their trading relationship with Indians from Pennsylvania traders. Virginia as well as France claimed the territory, and a group of powerful Virginia planters organized the Ohio Company, obtaining a royal grant to a large tract of land in the Ohio Valley. The Virginia governor sent the young and inexperienced George Washington to warn the French to leave the region. Washington was then given the difficult task of driving the French away without appearing to be the aggressor and without starting a larger war. Events were soon beyond Washington’s control. Washington’s colonial soldiers and allied Indians from the Mingo tribe engaged a small encampment of French troops in the Ohio Country. Against Washington’s wishes, the Mingos killed some wounded French soldiers. That act turned Washington into the aggressor and provoked French retaliation. Washington tried to defend a hastily built structure dubbed “Fort Necessity” with a force of several hundred Virginia militiamen, but Washington had been abandoned by the Mingos, who felt he was a dictatorial leader. French troops overwhelmed Fort Necessity and sent Washington back to Virginia to tell the British that France intended to defend its claims in the Ohio Valley.

The Albany Congress and Intercolonial Defense

The British knew that they would need both help from the colonists and Indian neutrality to win the war with the French. Twenty-four delegates from seven colonies met in Albany, New York, to discuss the feasibility of a united colonial effort to deal more effectively with the French threat. Also present were Iroquois of the Six Nations, a political confederacy of six large tribes inhabiting the central and western parts of what is now the state of New York. A prime impetus for the Albany Congress was to appease disgruntled Mohawk Indians and repair trade relations with them in order to enlist their help—or at least their neutrality—against the French threat. Led by Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Hutchinson, the Albany Congress proposed the Albany Plan of Union, a document that proposed to provide for colonial defense by instituting a unified but limited government over all the colonies. The Albany Plan humbly reaffirmed Parliament’s authority; this was not a bid for enlarged autonomy of the colonies. However, neither the colonies nor Parliament liked the idea. Instead, the British authorities chose to centralize dealings with the Indians by appointing in 1755 two superintendents of Indian affairs, one for the northern and another for the southern colonies, each with exclusive powers to negotiate treaties, trade, and land sales. At this very early point in the Seven Years’ War, the Iroquois Nations from western New York concluded that the French military presence around the Great Lakes and in the frontier west would help discourage the westward push of Anglo-Americans, and therefore chose to side with the French.

The War and Its Consequences

In 1755, the British hoped for a quick victory by throwing armies at the French in three strategic places. General Edward Braddock was sent from England to attack the French at Fort Duquesne and drive them from the Ohio Valley. The first two years of the conflict went badly for England, but the tide began to turn in 1757 as Prime Minister William Pitt committed a huge number of troops and much money to the war effort. The decisive English victory came in 1759, when the British defeated the French forces holding the city of Quebec. The loss of Quebec demoralized the French army, and although the war was over in North America within a year’s time, it continued in the Caribbean, Europe, and even India. As a result of England’s eventual victory, all of North America east of the Mississippi River now belonged to Great Britain. However, the Treaty of Paris allowed France to retain its islands in the Caribbean, and French territory west of the Mississippi River was transferred to Spain. Indians lost more than the colonists, since their lands were assigned to English rule, and they lost the ability to play the European opponents off against each other. Americans were unhappy that England credited its own soldiers for the victory, disparaging colonial contributions and condemning continued American trade with the French. The enormous expense of the war caused by Pitt’s no-holds-barred military strategy cast another huge shadow over the victory for both the British and the Americans.

British Leadership, Indians, and the Proclamation of 1763

King George III came to the throne at the age of twenty-two in the middle of the Seven Years’ War. He trusted only his tutor, the Earl of Bute, who was an outsider to London’s power circles. Bute was installed as head of George’s cabinet ministers, from which position he decided to keep an expensive standing army in America. This was due largely to fighting between Indians and colonists. Indians, who refused to accept defeat along with their French allies, began attacking British forts. In 1763, the Ottowa chief Pontiac attacked a British garrison; this was followed by many other such attacks, in which the Ottowa tribe was joined by other tribes from surrounding regions. British and colonial troops quelled Pontiac’s uprising, and, in an effort to maintain control of the situation, the British issued the Proclamation of 1763. This established a line drawn from Canada to Georgia, along the Appalachian Mountains, to the west of which colonists were forbidden to settle and beyond which all territory was reserved for the Indians. It also limited trade with Indians to traders licensed by colonial governors, and it forbade private sales of Indian land. Settlers and land speculators alike were incensed at this restriction on westward movement. Indian tribes, though they were dealt with cautiously, would continue to feel the pressure of westward Anglo migration.

The Sugar and Stamp Acts, 1763-1765, pp. 183-191

Over the course of the 1760s, the new king, George III, and his revolving door of ministers attempted to formulate policies that would address the problem of the huge British war debt. These interventions would be met with increasing consternation on the part of Americans.

Grenville’s Sugar Act

It fell to Bute’s successor as prime minister, George Grenville, to formulate policies to deal with the war debt. Grenville discovered that customs officers’ salaries were four times as great as the revenue they collected, a discrepancy due in large part to bribery and smuggling. Americans were particularly unwilling to pay a high duty on French molasses, which they used to make rum. Grenville devised the Revenue Act of 1764, or “Sugar Act,” which lowered the molasses duty but increased the penalties for smuggling, allowing British naval crews to board and examine ships and to send smugglers to a vice-admiralty court in Halifax, Nova Scotia. While the British viewed these measures as appropriate and necessary for administering the colonies, the colonists found this increased British interference in their affairs disturbing and unwelcome.

The Stamp Act

Continued evasion prevented the Revenue Act of 1764 from becoming the moneymaker Grenville had envisioned. Thus, in 1765, he secured passage of the Stamp Act, which led to conflict over Parliament’s right to tax the colonies at all. The Stamp Act was simple: Americans were to pay a tax on all printed or official papers, with a special stamp being embossed on all such documents to show that the tax had been paid. Unlike the Sugar Act, which levied a tax as part of a trade regulation, the new tax was intended simply to raise money. Anticipating opposition, he stipulated that all stamp distributors be from the colonies to avoid the problem of hostility to British enforcers. He was warned by Thomas Hutchinson that because colonists had not paid taxes before, they could reasonably conclude that Parliament had conceded the right to tax to local legislatures. English tradition held that taxes were a gift of the people to their rulers, approved by their representatives. However, Grenville believed that colonists were virtually represented in Parliament, while Americans argued that they were represented only in their own legislative bodies.

Resistance Strategies and Crowd Politics

Colonial reaction to the Stamp Act assumed various forms. In Virginia’s House of Burgesses, Patrick Henry submitted a series of resolutions—the Virginia Resolves—two of which intimated strongly that neither king nor Parliament had the right to legislate for the colonies. Local communities also responded to the Stamp Act’s passage. In the summer of 1765, the Boston Sons of Liberty—a group formed under politician Samuel Adams—engaged in demonstrations, while mobs destroyed the future stamp office and inflicted other increasingly violent forms of intimidation on those suspected of supporting the tax. By November 1, 1765, the day the act took effect, no Bostonian was foolish enough to become a distributor and enforce the act. It seemed that the colonists, at least temporarily, had won the day. Hutchinson remained as lieutenant governor, however, and within five years he would agree to become the royal governor.

Liberty and Property

Soon groups calling themselves the Sons of Liberty were protesting the Stamp Act in almost every colony. In the fall of 1765, nine colonies sent representatives to a Stamp Act Congress in New York to discuss possible united colonial opposition to the act. They were extremely cautious in addressing the issue of parliamentary sovereignty but claimed that taxes were “free gifts of the people” that only the people’s representatives could give. They dismissed virtual representation. Up to 1765, the majority of colonists accepted Parliament’s status as a government that represented them for legislative purposes. However, they saw the right to own property as a special kind of liberty requiring security against greedy rulers who might try to strip them of their property. This fear led the colonists to conclude that only a governing body in which they directly were represented could tax them. They believed the Stamp Act violated this principle of liberty and property, and some began to speak and write of a conspiracy among British leaders to enslave them. English politicians and merchants were concerned about trade disruption and pressed for the repeal of the Stamp Act. By late 1765, Grenville was replaced by the Marquess of Rockingham, who pushed for repeal. The Stamp Act finally was rescinded in March 1766. However, George III and Parliament were determined to uphold parliamentary sovereignty and thus simultaneously issued the Declaratory Act. In asserting Parliament’s right to legislate for the colonies “in all cases whatsoever,” the act upheld Parliament’s power to tax.

The Townshend Acts and Economic Retaliation, 1767-1770, pp. 191-195

The Marquess of Rockingham was replaced by William Pitt in the summer of 1766. Pitt appointed Charles Townshend to be the empire’s chief financial minister, making it his job to deal with the war debt and the continuing cost of stationing the British army in America. Unfortunately, Townshend’s simple plan to raise revenue quickly in the colonies turned into a major political and economic blunder. In 1768 and 1769, the American colonies were agitated by boycotts of British goods and demonstrations against British policies; Boston led the uproar.

The Townshend Duties

Townshend proposed a tax in the form of a navigation act establishing new duties on tea, glass, lead, paper, and painters’ colors. Townshend assumed that duties levied on trade would be more acceptable than internal taxes, but, although the duties were not burdensome, the fact that they were intended solely to raise money grated on colonists. The duties also provided that some of the money generated would go to paying royal governors’ salaries in order to end their dependence on state legislatures. Then Townshend came down hard on the New York assembly when it refused to implement the 1765 Quartering Act, mandating that colonists furnish shelter and provisions for British soldiers. Americans began to worry that their representative legislative government was not secure. Protest was spearheaded by Massachusetts, which issued a circular letter for all the colonies to endorse protesting the Townshend duties. In Great Britain, Lord Hillsborough denounced Massachusetts’s circular letter and ordered the dissolution of the Massachusetts assembly.

Nonconsumption and the Daughters of Liberty

Boston retaliated against the British by organizing a consumer boycott of all British-made goods. All the colonies eventually established similar policies, called nonconsumption agreements, and then nonimportation agreements, which barred British imports entirely. These strategies were difficult to enforce because merchants were concerned about their financial impact. In late 1768, however, Boston merchants agreed to suspend trade, and other major cities followed suit. As keepers of their households, women played an important role in nonconsumption, and home manufacture like the spinning of cloth became symbolic of American patriotism. In 1768-1770, newspapers reported on spinning matches or bees in some sixty New England towns, in which women came together in public to make yarn. This surge of public spinning infused traditional women’s work with new political purpose. Yet, unlike the Sons of Liberty, who marched in streets, burned effigies, and threatened hated officials, Daughters of Liberty manifested their patriotism quietly, in ways marked by piety, industry, and charity. The difference was due in part to cultural ideals of gender, in part to class, and in part to views of how best to challenge authority. Nonconsumption of British goods proved an effective colonial weapon because, as predicted, it hurt British merchants and manufacturers.

Military Occupation and “Massacre” in Boston

In the midst of the uproar over the Townshend duties, the English government sent troops to Boston to help keep the peace. The presence of British troops exacerbated the already hostile relationship between British officials and city inhabitants. Until 1770, things were quiet, but the end of the nonimportation agreements began a new round of controversy in Boston. First, a low-level customs official fired on a crowd and accidentally killed a young boy. Tensions mounted over the weeks that followed, and on March 5, 1770, there was a violent confrontation between troops and Bostonians. When the smoke cleared, five Americans lay dead. This event quickly became known as the Boston Massacre. The Sons of Liberty made sure that the five victims had funerals befitting heroic martyrs. One victim, Crispus Attucks, a sailor and ropemaker in his forties, son of an African man and a Natick Indian woman, was the first African American to die in the American Revolution. Further violence was avoided, and Boston lawyers John Adams and Josiah Quincy defended the British troops, hoping to demonstrate to the empire that most colonists were not lawless but interested in preserving liberty and justice. Adams and Quincy won a full acquittal for the British commander and for all but two of the soldiers.

The Tea Party and the Coercive Acts, 1770-1774, pp. 195-202

Around the time of the Boston Massacre crisis, a new ministry in London, headed by Lord Frederick North, sought to ease tensions and end the boycott of British goods caused by the Townshend duties. In 1770, Lord North repealed all of the Townshend duties except the one on tea, which he hoped would serve as a reminder of parliamentary supremacy. There were two years of relative calm, convincing people that further trouble might be avoided, but renewed struggles over the tea tax in 1773 would eventually lead to war in 1775.

The Calm before the Storm

After the repeal of the Townshend duties, trade boomed and relations with the empire were relatively peaceful. However, the 1772 Gaspée incident and the royal commission of inquiry that followed fed colonial suspicions by suggesting that if suspects were arrested, they would be sent to England to be tried for treason. In the same year, a proposal for paying the salaries of superior court justices out of the tea duty created alarm. In response, the colonial assemblies and many Massachusetts towns established committees of correspondence, which The calm finally was shattered entirely by the Tea Act of 1773, which was designed to relieve the financially strapped East India Company by allowing the company to sell its tea through special government agents directly to the Americans, many of whom purchased and drank cheap smuggled Dutch tea.

Tea in Boston Harbor

Radicals argued that the Tea Act was an insidious trick to make Americans buy dutied tea. Colonists could not use nonimportation to combat the threat because the trade was lucrative, and it was impossible to distinguish dutied tea from smuggled tea once it was brewed. Once again, the Sons of Liberty turned to pressuring agents to resign. In Boston, several ships carrying tea sensed the tension upon their arrival in the harbor, and sought to return to England with the tea rather than attempt to unload it. Governor Hutchinson refused, after a long standoff, to let the ship leave the harbor without paying the tax. In December 1773, a group of the Sons of Liberty, dressed as Indians, boarded the British ships and dumped thousands of pounds of tea into Boston harbor.

The Coercive Acts

Outraged at the colonists’ vandalism and their contempt for British property rights, Lord North persuaded Parliament to issue the Coercive Acts. These acts closed the port of Boston, altered the colony’s charter to increase the powers of the royal governor, allowed royal officials accused of capital crimes to be tried in England, and instituted a new amendment to the Quartering Act that permitted the lodging of soldiers in private households. In effect, these acts placed Boston and the colony of Massachusetts under martial law. Massachusetts colonists were further outraged by the subsequent passage of the Quebec Act, which gave the French Catholic province of Quebec control of the Ohio Valley and the lucrative fur trade. The acts alarmed other colonists, who saw them as a sign of England’s ability to override local government. Via the committees of correspondence, the colonial leaders arranged to meet in Philadelphia in the fall of 1774 to respond to the crisis.

The First Continental Congress

In response to the Coercive Acts, the colonies called for the convening of the First Continental Congress, which met in Philadelphia in the fall of 1774. Men of all political persuasions were there, from radicals to moderates. The congress met for seven weeks and eventually hammered out a declaration of rights asserting that each colonial government had the sole right to legislate for and tax its own people. Delegates also approved the formation of a Continental Association to implement a unified boycott of English trade. These bodies became functioning political bodies despite their lack of formal authority, in large part because they were composed of the same men who had been in the colonial legislatures.

Domestic Insurrections, 1774-1775, pp. 203-206

Before the Second Continental Congress could meet, war broke out in Massachusetts. General Thomas Gage, the military commander and new royal governor, initially thought that he was facing a domestic insurrection that would be quelled easily by a show of force. Americans, however, felt that they were defending themselves from an enslaving government. In the South, slaves took the patriot rhetoric of slavery to mount their own kind of insurrection in the name of liberty.

Lexington and Concord

Thomas Gage believed that the British position was bad; he requested 20,000 troops and also advised that the Coercive Acts be repealed. When English leaders refused to back down, he began organizing troops for a decisive strike against rebel “minutemen” who were gathering in the countryside. In April 1775, his attempt to organize a surprise attack on a suspected ammunition storage site at Concord was ruined when his forces were met by American militiamen at Lexington, five miles east of their destination. The British dispersed the men, went on to Concord, where they found no ammunition, and then exchanged shots with more militiamen at the Old North Bridge. As the British returned to Boston, they were fired on by militia units from both sides of the road in the bloodiest exchange of the day. The war had begun.

Rebelling against Slavery

Besides marking the military beginnings of the American rebellion, the battles at Lexington and Concord also aroused a more profound issue that the rhetoric and ideology of rebellion brought to the forefront: black slavery. Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia, threatened to arm slaves to fight the colonists, and in November of 1775 he issued an offer to able-bodied male slaves, promising freedom to those who would fight. He did not want to start a slave rebellion and, in fact, rejected slaves who did not meet his requirements. By December of 1775, around 2,000 slaves in Virginia had fled to Lord Dunmore, who armed them and called them his “Ethiopian Regiment.” But camp diseases quickly set in: dysentery, typhoid fever, and, worst of all, smallpox. In the northern colonies, too, slaves understood the implications of irate colonists’ rhetoric against Great Britain and seized the moment to press for their own liberation. The challenge was stronger in the South, where the numerical preponderance of slaves caused owners considerable misgivings. By the end of the war, as many as 30,000 slaves had accepted Dunmore’s offer, and as many as 80,000 slaves would escape bondage on their own over the course of the war. Slaves often were treated quite badly by the army, but several thousand persisted through the war and later, under the protection of the British army, left America to start new lives of freedom in Canada’s Nova Scotia or Africa’s Sierra Leone.

Conclusion: How Far Does Liberty Go? pp. 206-207

American resistance to imperial policies grew slowly, but as misunderstandings escalated, so did the level of tension and violence. By the 1770s, the colonists were convinced that Parliament meant to deprive them of their liberties and reduce them to “abject slavery.” To gain support for their cause, patriotic leaders had to infuse the masses with a keen sense of their own rights and liberties; black Americans also picked up on this rhetoric, hoping to free themselves from slavery and oppression. By 1775, with the outbreak of fighting and the specter of slave rebellions, American leaders turned to the king to resolve the question of who had actual authority over the colonies.

The American Promise

A Compact History 3rd Edition Vol 1: To 1877

Introduction

This chapter begins with a portrait of Benjamin Franklin’s early life in Boston and his arrival in Philadelphia. Franklin’s experience reveals much about the everyday lives of ordinary people in eighteenth-century North American colonies. His story also illustrates some of the major changes taking place in the eighteenth century, as social and economic forces continued to emphasize the differences among the colonies at the same time that cultural and political developments began to unify them. In contrast to the British colonies‘ vigorous economic growth and political maturation, the Spanish and French colonies in North America remained thinly populated outposts of European empires interested principally in maintaining a toehold in the vast North American territories they claimed.

A Growing Population and Expanding Economy in British North America, pp. 104—105

The most important fact about eighteenth-century colonial America is its remarkable population growth. The number of colonists rose throughout the century, from 250,000 in 1700 to more than 2 million by 1770. Simultaneously, the ethnic and religious profile of the thirteen colonies diversified substantially, owing to increasing immigration from places other than England. The availability of cheap, abundant land, the concomitant surplus of food, and ample work opportunities engendered a social and economic environment that allowed the majority of free colonists to prosper to a degree unusual in the eighteenth century.

New England: From Puritan Settlers to Yankee Traders, pp. 105-108

Although New England’s population increased sixfold during the eighteenth century, its growth lagged behind that of the other colonies. The main reasons were New England’s higher ratio of settlers to land and Puritan communities’ reputation for hostility to non-Puritan religions. But Puritan orthodoxy was on the wane, and the growth of a vibrant commercial network in New England meant that trade became a faith that often competed with Puritan traditions.

Natural Increase and Land Distribution

Natural increase was most responsible for the growth of New England’s population during the eighteenth century, much as it had been during the previous century, owing to high marriage rates and large family size. The growing population of New England sought new land by expanding their holdings west and north, increasingly pressing up against the lands of hostile Indian neighbors. The French (and Catholic) colony of Quebec also menaced the English (and Protestant) colonies of New England. By the eighteenth century, the effects of partible inheritance were being felt as well; inheritable plots of land had been so subdivided by generations of heirs that many sons moved away from their hometowns in search of more land or a more assured means of subsistence. Also, beginning in the eighteenth century, the colonial governments of Massachusetts and Connecticut, in need of revenue, stopped the practice of granting land to towns and instead began selling it directly to individuals. These new landowners tended to settle on individual farms rather than congregate in towns or villages as seventeenth-century settlers had done. As a result, the influence of churches and towns over individuals’ behavior began to decline.

Farms, Fish, and Trade

The scarcity of land in New England resulted in agricultural diversification. Farmers grew a variety of crops rather than one major crop for the market. Although New England was not a good place to become wealthy, farmers were at the base of a diversified commercial economy. Continuing as they had since the seventeenth century, New Englanders made their fortunes at sea. Their main commodity was codfish, most of which was exported to markets in southern Europe or the West Indies. The merchants were the link at the hub of trade between local folk and the international market. By the middle of the century, a wealthy merchant aristocracy emerged in New England, the richest and most successful of whom lived in Boston. At the same time, a small percentage of people in the region lived in abject poverty, but compared to the poverty in England, the colonists were better off. New England also remained the most English and most homogeneous of all the colonial areas.

The Middle Colonies: Immigrants, Wheat, and Work, pp. 108-111

No section of the North American colonies was more diverse ethnically, politically, or religiously than the middle colonies—New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware. This heterogeneity was largely the result of the influx of non-English immigrants—notably Germans and Scots-Irish—whose arrival had by 1770 increased the population of the middle colonies by a factor of ten.

German and Scots-Irish Immigrants

Germans made up the largest group of immigrants from the European continent to the middle colonies. Most German immigrants came from southwestern Germany. A large number were peasants who sought to escape a harsh political and economic environment. However, the majority of these Germans were “middling” folk—neither the poorest nor the better off. Similar motives impelled the Scots-Irish, who considerably outnumbered German immigrants in the New World. The label “Scots-Irish,” like “Pennsylvania Dutch,” was a misnomer because the Scots-Irish actually came from northern Ireland, Scotland, and northern England. Most were poor farm laborers or tenant farmers who were exploited by greedy landlords or compelled to flee to the colonies by droughts, crop failures, high food prices, and rising rents. The process of immigration was miserable and expensive. Many Germans and Scots-Irish, particularly young males who migrated alone, paid for their passage by becoming “redemptioners,” similar to indentured servants. The Germans worshipped in Lutheran or German Reformed churches, whereas the Scots-Irish were usually Presbyterians.

Pennsylvania: “The Best Poor [White] Man’s Country“

Immigrants came to the middle colonies for the perceived economic opportunities. Because of a scarcity of labor, hired workers could earn high wages. Most bound servants worked in cities and towns. Masters prized them because they were much cheaper than hired day laborers, and the strictures of bondage were enforced rigorously. African slavery existed in the middle colonies, albeit on a very small scale because only the more affluent white colonists could afford slaves, and there was little use for slave labor on family-operated farms. Slaves were treated far more harshly than white servants. Even when slaves obtained their freedom, white racism often made African Americans the victims of reprisals for white Europeans’ suspicions and anxieties.

Immigrants flocked to the middle colonies because of the availability of land and relatively peaceful frontier relations with Indians. Flour milling was the number one industry, and flour the number one export from the middle colonies, which allowed many middle colonists to enjoy a fairly secure and stable existence. At the center of trade stood Philadelphia, the largest colonial city in North America and second only to London in the British Empire. A wealthy merchant elite, most of them Quakers, ruled the city. Quaker beliefs in industry, thrift, honesty, and sobriety encouraged the accumulation of wealth. The widespread conviction that good things came from work led to the reputation of the middle colonies as “the best poor Man’s Country in the World.”

The Southern Colonies: Land of Slavery, pp. 112-117

For most of the eighteenth century, the southern colonies (Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia) contained more colonists than either the middle colonies or New England. Many European immigrants funneled from the middle colonies into the backcountry or came as indentured servants, but African slaves made the most striking contributions to population growth and southern culture.

The Atlantic Slave Trade and the Growth of Slavery

Involuntary immigrants in the form of African slaves contributed to the burgeoning population in the southern colonies. The Chesapeake colonies of the upper South—Virginia and Maryland—specialized in tobacco cultivation, while the lower South of the south Atlantic coastal region specialized in the production of rice and indigo.

The southern colonies’ black population grew enormously because of a combination of natural increase and the flourishing African slave trade to British North America during the eighteenth century. The account of Olaudah Equiano describes his forced removal from his African village, his sale to western slave traders, and his transport to the New World in horrific detail. Like Equiano, slaves were primarily West Africans who had been kidnapped or captured in war and sold into bondage to other Africans, who in turn sold them to the European slavers who brought them over on slave ships. Perhaps even worse than being sold into lifelong bondage was the ordeal of crossing the Atlantic—the infamous Middle Passage—when on average about 15 percent of a ship’s human cargo died from dehydration, malnutrition, diseases, or other maladies incurred from the filth, pollution, and overcrowding below deck. The slaves were then sold to colonial slave merchants or to southern planters who put them to work on tobacco or rice plantations. Despite a fairly high mortality rate—especially in the first year of slave life in the colonies—the natural increase of slaves during the eighteenth century meant that more slaves were becoming acculturated and that by the 1740s the majority of slaves were native-born.

Slave Labor and African American Culture

Planters extracted as much work as possible from their slaves. Eighteenth-century masters preferred slaves over indentured servants not only because slaves served for life but also because colonial laws did not hinder masters from using force to keep their slaves working and tractable. Although the likelihood of brutal retaliation made most slaves cautious about resisting, rebellion did occur once in the eighteenth century with the 1739 Stono uprising in South Carolina. Its outcome illustrated that slaves, no matter how determined, had no chance of overturning slavery and that open rebellion amounted to suicide because all the power resided with slave owners.

Despite these limitations, slaves did what they could to retain their humanity, protect themselves from abuse, and gain a measure of autonomy. On larger plantations in South Carolina, a task system of labor developed that allowed individual slaves who finished their work before the end of the day to use the remainder of the day as they pleased—fishing, hunting, sewing, cooking, or gardening. The concept of kinship, which structured slaves’ relations with each other, created a network of extended family relationships, giving slaves a sense of belonging and their lives meaning and purpose. Slaves also expressed other features of their West African origins by giving their children African names, growing crops familiar to them from Africa, and building houses found typically in Africa.

Tobacco, Rice, and Prosperity

African slave labor increased the prosperity of planters, British merchants, and the monarchy. Rice and indigo—the main staples of Carolina planters—made up three-fourths of the lower South’s exports, with the majority of the crops going to England and the rest to the West Indies. Together with Chesapeake tobacco, these products made the southern colonies the richest in North America. The per capita wealth of free southern whites was three times greater than that of the middle colonists and four times more than that of New Englanders. The wealthiest were the rice grandees of the lower South and the tobacco gentry of the Chesapeake, who owned large estates that were maintained and supported by slaves. The gap in wealth among white southerners caused envy and sometimes tension, but a shared sense of white supremacy mitigated the potential for rebellion or resentment. In both the Chesapeake and the lower South, landholding determined voting rights, and the requirement was set high enough to deny about 40 percent of white men in Virginia the right to vote.

Unifying Experiences, pp. 117-120

While the three colonial groups became increasingly different from each other during the eighteenth century, colonists throughout British North America shared certain unifying economic, religious, and political experiences. Economically, all three regions were agrarian and sold their staples in similar external and internal markets that offered essentially the same array of goods to consumers throughout the colonies. Religiously, the colonists became more secular during the eighteenth century, and politically they became aware that, despite having thirteen different local governments, they all owed allegiance to the same king and Parliament and shared a distinctive identity as British colonists.

Commerce and Consumption

Colonial products stimulated the development of mass markets throughout the Atlantic world and helped to establish an important feature of the eighteenth-century commercial revolution: Ordinary people, not just the wealthy elite, bought not only essentials for basic survival but also things they desired. The Atlantic commerce that took colonial goods to English markets brought the desired consumer goods back to the colonies. Most English exports went to the vast European market, where potential customers outnumbered those in the colonies by more than one hundred to one; however, English exports to North America became increasingly important, multiplying by a factor of eight between 1700 and 1770. The consumption of English exports created a material uniformity among all colonial classes and made the colonists look and feel more British, even though they lived three thousand miles away. It also accustomed them to defining their own wishes and acting on them.

Religion, Enlightenment, and Revival

It was possible to find virtually every form of Protestant Christianity in the colonies and even Catholicism in Maryland. But churches argued over fine points of doctrine, convincing many colonists that toleration of religious differences was desirable. Other colonists became deists. Influenced by the Enlightenment, a European intellectual movement, a new climate developed, characterized by an optimistic view of human nature and a belief that the universe was an orderly and functional mechanism. Enlightenment ideas encouraged people to think for themselves and to study the world around them to find ways to improve society. The formation of the American Philosophical Society in 1769 fostered communication among leading colonial thinkers; Benjamin Franklin was its first president. At the same time, Christian ministers were growing increasingly concerned about widespread religious indifference. The Great Awakening, a wave of religious revivals that swept the colonies, fulfilled many people’s need for a strong, emotional religion. Its greatest proponent, Anglican minister George Whitefield, was a riveting speaker who preached sermons to thousands of people in nearly every colony. The Great Awakening did not tend to make permanent converts, but it did convince people that every soul mattered and that men and women could decide whether or not to be saved.

Bonds of the British Empire, pp. 120-126

Compared to the eighteenth-century colonies of Spain and France, the settlements in British North America were culturally diverse, well populated, and economically successful. Colonists in British North America had fewer cultural bonds with each other than did the smaller, more homogenous settlements of Spain and France because Britain’s open immigration policies encouraged peoples of various nations and faiths to settle in America. British colonists, however, did share some important experiences that created a common framework of political and economic expectations. The Navigation Acts established rules for trade that linked the colonies to the markets of the British empire and limited their contact with merchants representing Britain’s rivals. The British military protected colonists from foreign enemies who, when acting with Indian allies, threatened the colonists’ survival.

Defending the Borderlands of Empire: Indians and French and Spanish Outposts

In the eighteenth century, Native Americans and European settlers had a complicated relationship. By the 1700s, trade between colonists and Indians had become essential to the economies of both peoples. Native Americans desired European manufactured goods like spun cloth and guns, while Europeans wanted the animal furs that Indians were adept at procuring. Traders representing rival empires competed for furs. This competition enabled Native Americans to play one empire off against another in order to preserve their autonomy. In return, colonial merchants weakened Indian solidarity by encouraging tribes to compete against each other for the best trade deals. This world of shifting alliances along an insecure border made violence an ever-present possibility. For example, in 1715, the French assisted the Yamasee and Creek Indians in their attack on colonial settlements in South Carolina. The Cherokees decided to befriend the English to harm their traditional rivals, the Creeks, and to strengthen their relationship with British traders. British colonists looked to the imperial army for protection against such attacks and for help in securing the fur trade.

In the mid-eighteenth century, Spain increased its presence in California to block incursions by the Russian Empire. Between 1769 and 1774, Spanish soldiers and missionaries built several missions and forts along the California coast that extended as far north as Monterey. These missions brought terrible consequences for the Indians. Disease and mistreatment killed many, while survivors suffered enslavement and rape at the hands of their conquerors.

Colonial Politics in the British Empire

The colonists generally accepted British authority when it came to trade on the high seas and international issues, but they objected to British interference in the internal affairs of their respective colonies. Britain tried to administer the colonies through royal governors, men appointed by the crown to head the government of each colony. These governors, most of whom came from England, had little connection with the colonists, and they had few resources, like patronage jobs, to win friends while in office. Governors ruled in cooperation with assemblies of delegates elected by the colonists. Assemblies increased their power over time. By 1720, most assemblies initiated local laws and spent money. Assembly delegates usually held their offices for longer periods than did royal governors, and they understood how to use their power to advance colonial interests when those interests came into conflict with the interests of the crown. The limits placed on governors combined with the skills of colonial assemblies and their distance from England enabled assemblies to gain the upper hand in disputes with royally appointed governors. Eighteenth-century politics instilled in colonists a common set of ideas about government. They applied British ideas of representative government to promote their own interests and understood that the British government had limited say over what happened inside the colonies.

Conclusion: The Dual Identity of British North American Colonists, p. 127

The eighteenth-century colonists were a diverse group of people. Large numbers of slaves and indentured servants worked and lived under the dominion of their free neighbors. Europeans who settled in the British colonies came from several nations and practiced a variety of faiths. These colonists had a distinctive dual identity as American colonists and as British subjects that would soon create conflict and controversy for them. By 1776, the thirteen colonies would be forced to decide whether they were American or British. Europeans living in French and Spanish colonies were fewer in number and had not experienced the social and political changes that occurred in the British settlements. Colonists of the other major empires did not face the same test of loyalty between colony and home country that confronted British Americans.

The American Promise

A Compact History 3rd Edition Vol 1: To 1877

Introduction

Chapter Four begins with a discussion of Roger Williams, a critic of the Puritan leaders who ran the Massachusetts Bay Colony during the seventeenth century. Williams, a well-educated English Puritan minister who came to Massachusetts to preach, criticized how Puritans worshipped and the way they governed their colony. English Puritans traveled to America to provide a model of Christian community that would be a guide to their fellow Englishmen. Williams thought the Massachusetts experiment failed to live up to its ideals. He criticized Puritans for abusing Indians, coveting riches, and persecuting Christians who disagreed with their doctrine. In return, Puritan leaders denounced Williams and banished him from Massachusetts. Williams fled south to found the colony of Rhode Island, on the principle of liberty of conscience. Williams’s dissent from Puritan orthodoxy showed that faith mattered intensely to seventeenth-century colonists. It also revealed tensions inside of Massachusetts that would cool Puritan zeal by 1700, a time when all the North American colonies had become more integrated into the English Empire.

Puritan Origins: The English Reformation, pp. 105-106

The English Reformation began less so as a result of doctrinal revolts and more so because of a political dispute between the king and the pope. In 1534, King Henry VIII, angered by the power and interference of the Catholic Church, broke England’s ties with Rome and established himself as head of his nation’s Christian faith. Henry made relatively few other changes in his “new” church, which remained very Catholic in theology and worship. Many English Protestants clamored for reforms that would “purify” the church of its Catholic trappings; these Protestants came to be called Puritans. The fate of Protestantism waxed and waned under the monarchs who succeeded Henry VIII. The survival of English Protestantism was still in doubt when Elizabeth I came to the throne (in 1558) and attempted to consolidate a position midway between the extremes of Catholicism and Puritanism. Puritan agitation for further reform of the church continued during the reigns of Elizabeth’s successors— James I and Charles I— neither of whom were receptive to Puritan ideas. Indeed, both monarchs’ anti-Puritan policies made many Puritans believe that if they were to be free to live and worship in peace, they would have to leave England. For example, King Charles I’s dissolution of Parliament (in 1629) caused great anxiety among English Puritans who, now without political representation, could not defend themselves legally against Charles’s anti-Puritan policies.

Puritans and the Settlement of New England, pp. 80-84

The sixteenth-century religious and political turmoil engendered by the English Reformation led many Puritans to emigrate to New England. The colonies they established were shaped by their faith and desire to create a new society that conformed to their interpretation of God’s plan for humankind.

The Pilgrims and Plymouth Colony

Plymouth colony was settled by the Pilgrims, Separatist Puritans who had emigrated to escape persecution in England. They moved first to Holland, in 1608, but by 1620 they found they could not live and worship there as they had hoped. Believing that America was a place where they might protect their children’s piety and preserve their community, the Separatists obtained permission to settle in the extensive lands granted to the Virginia Company. They left for the New World aboard the Mayflower in August 1620, landing off-course at Cape Cod in present-day Massachusetts in November. To provide order, security, and legitimacy for the new colony, the Pilgrims created their own government by consent, drawing up the Mayflower Compact. They also elected William Bradford as their governor. Although survival was difficult in the early years, the Pilgrims were fortunate in their Wampanoag Indian friends, who showed them how to cultivate corn. After the first harvest in the fall of 1621, the settlers invited the Wampanoags to celebrate a thanksgiving feast. Plymouth remained a small colony, attracting few immigrants, but that did not bother the Pilgrims, who wanted to live quietly and simply according to their faith.

The Founding of Massachusetts Bay Colony

Shortly before Charles I dissolved Parliament in 1629, a number of Puritans formed the Massachusetts Bay Company and were granted a charter for colonization in New England. In 1630, this group sailed for the New World with elected governor John Winthrop to lead them and a key provision in their charter that would allow them self-government in Massachusetts. Aboard the ship Arbella, Winthrop delivered a sermon to his followers about the significance of their journey and their duty as settlers to follow a righteous path and to adhere strictly to God’s laws. He and his followers established settlements around Boston in 1630, and despite early hardships, the Massachusetts Bay Colony enjoyed a steady stream of migration during its first decade. Unlike the Virginia colonists, most immigrants to New England were farmers or tradesmen of middle-class origin who paid their own passage to Massachusetts and came as part of a family. The immigrants’ family ties reinforced their religious beliefs through the interlocking institutions of family, church, and community.

The Evolution of New England Society, pp. 85-92

New Englanders did not scatter across the land like their Chesapeake counterparts but instead settled in numerous small towns located either on the coast or along a river, ensuring access to water. The townspeople’s strong piety, sustained by the institutions of local government, enforced remarkable religious and social conformity in these communities, although tensions and changes would later test and even splinter that conformity.

Church, Covenant, and Conformity

The word of God—not elaborate ceremony—was the focus of Puritan services. And Puritans considered “church” to be not the building in which they worshipped but the men and women who entered into a solemn covenant with each other and with God to lead a holy and righteous life. Since Puritans were Calvinists, they believed Christians must discipline their behavior to conform strictly to their religious ideas. Calvinism also preached the doctrine of predestination, whereby individuals were either saved or damned according to God’s predetermined choice. The Puritan covenant required the disciplining of the entire community; church members were to observe the behavior of other members and report any transgressions to church elders, whose job it was to punish violators of the community’s covenant. The church had no direct role in civil government; Puritans believed that government was ultimately subordinate to the church. As much as possible, they sought to make public life conform to their view of God’s law, expecting strict observance of the Sabbath, refusing to celebrate Christmas and Easter, and censuring games of chance, music, and dancing, among other things.

Government by Puritans for Puritanism

The Puritans created a civil government that was governed by Puritans for Puritanism. The leading officials in the towns of the Massachusetts Bay Colony were the “freemen,” who had to be male church members. Freemen had the right to vote for governor, deputy governor, and other colonial officials. When the number of freemen in the Massachusetts Bay Colony became too large to meet conveniently, each town agreed to send two deputies to the General Court to act as the colony’s legislative body. All the other men were designated “inhabitants” and could vote and take part in their local town’s government. At the town meetings, almost every man—whatever his status—could speak up, a level of popular participation unprecedented in the seventeenth century. Town governments distributed land among their inhabitants, with each family generally given between fifty and one hundred acres, which meant New England had a more equitable distribution of land than that in the Chesapeake. The physical layout of towns enabled colonists to keep an eye on their neighbors’ activities and enforce godly behavior. Routes between towns were often hardly more than footpaths.

The Splintering of Puritanism

Puritanism’s emphasis on individual Bible study soon resulted in dissension among some of the faithful who believed in a different interpretation of God’s word and so adhered to different visions of godliness. The two most important dissidents in early Massachusetts Bay were Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson. One of the most vocal and devout Puritans to emigrate to America in the seventeenth century, Hutchinson was a well-educated, well-spoken woman in the Massachusetts Bay Colony whose in-home discussions of the previous week’s sermons were initially well received. In time, however, increasing numbers of both men and women came to listen to her, and the meetings alarmed her nearest neighbor, the former governor of the colony, John Winthrop. Fearing that she was subverting the good order of the colony, Winthrop and others brought forth charges of heresy against her, and she was excommunicated from the Boston church. She and her family were banished, first to Rhode Island and then to present-day New York, where she and most of her family were slain by Indians. Another prominent minister who clashed with Winthrop was Thomas Hooker, who argued that all those leading godly lives should be admitted to church membership, whether or not they had experienced conversion.

Religious Controversies and Economic Changes

When the Puritan Revolution began in England and religious dissenters came to dominate the English government, the stream of immigrants to New England dwindled to a trickle, creating hard times for the colonists. New England’s rocky soil and harsh winters made the growing and export of crops such as tobacco and rice impossible. Instead, a fur trade with the Indians and a timber industry developed, but the most important export was fish, which found ready markets abroad. The fish trade also stimulated colonial shipbuilding and trained generations of fishermen and sailors, and it contributed to the growth of trade networks and a merchant class. Despite the slowing of immigration, New England’s population boomed during the seventeenth century, owing to high marriage and birth rates and a healthy climate relatively free of disease, but there was also a slackening of piety that was of growing concern. As the children of the original founders began to have children themselves, Puritan leaders worried about their falling away from the faith. Thus, in 1662, they drew up the Halfway Covenant, by which unconverted children of saints could become “halfway” church members. The Puritans also had to contend with the arrival of new religious groups, most notably the Quakers, whose views were very different from their own. The Salem witch trials of 1692 demonstrated the erosion of religious confidence and assurance felt by many Puritans.

The Founding of the Middle Colonies, pp. 92-95

The English colonies of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania originated as proprietary colonies. Before the 1670s, few Europeans settled in the area. The most important European outpost in the region north of the Chesapeake and south of New England was the relatively small Dutch colony of New Netherland. By 1700, however, the English monarchy had seized New Netherland, renamed it New York, and encouraged the creation of a Quaker colony led by William Penn.

From New Netherland to New York

The Dutch settled New York after the voyages of Henry Hudson in 1609. The colony became the property of the Dutch West India Company, which struggled to govern the settlement and sent officials who set policies many colonists deeply resented. New Netherland was Dutch in little more than ownership because few immigrants came from Holland, and the population remained small. It was a linguistically and religiously diverse colony. Immigrants from Sweden, France, Germany, Holland, and many other countries made up sizable minorities in the colony, and these people felt no loyalty to the Dutch West India Company. When England sent a fleet to take New Netherland in 1664, the Dutch colony fell and New Netherland became New York. Although he had no right to the land, Charles II of England gave the colony as part of an enormous land grant to his brother James, the Duke of York.

New Jersey and Pennsylvania

New York’s creation led indirectly to the founding of two other middle colonies: New Jersey and Pennsylvania. New Jersey first belonged to the Duke of York, but he gave it to two friends who became the colony’s proprietors. Conflicts between these men and some preexisting settlers led one of the proprietors to sell his interest to two Quakers. These Quaker proprietors themselves had a conflict and called in English Quaker William Penn—a prominent public figure from an eminent English family—who arbitrated an agreement whereby New Jersey was able to maintain its proprietary government. Penn became interested in establishing a colony in the New World to provide a safe haven for Quakers, an unpopular and persecuted sect whose members were imprisoned and executed in great numbers. Penn intended to settle Pennsylvania as a society based on Quaker principles. The Quakers believed that all individuals could communicate directly with God. They refused to accept hierarchical status or deference to those of rank and title since, in God’s eyes, all humans were equal. They also permitted women to assume positions of religious leadership. In 1681, Charles II, eager to rid England of this troublesome religious minority, made Penn the proprietor of the new colony called Pennsylvania.

Toleration and Diversity in Pennsylvania

Between 1682 and 1685, almost eight thousand immigrants came to Pennsylvania, most of them members of the Society of Friends, or Quakers. Quaker ideals showed in the fair Indian policy and the tolerance of religious diversity in the new colony. Pennsylvania and its capital, Philadelphia, soon rivaled New York as a center of commerce, exporting flour and other foodstuffs to the West Indies and importing textiles and manufactured goods. As the colony’s proprietor, Penn had extensive power, but he proposed a more representative government in which property owners could vote for a council and an elected assembly, both of which were subject to an appointed governor’s veto. Penn believed that the form of government mattered less than the people in it, but Quakers found points of disagreement. There were many struggles in the assembly, and in 1701, a new Charter of Privileges gave the assembly extensive new powers.

The Colonies and the British Empire, pp. 95–98

Until the 1660s, the English crown largely ignored the colonies. By the 1660s, however, the king had recognized that profits could be realized by regulating colonial trade, and he moved to consolidate royal control over colonial governments.

Royal Regulation of Colonial Trade

The Navigation Acts of 1650, 1651, 1660, and 1663 were the heart of England’s system of regulation. They restricted trade within the empire to English (including American) ships and enumerated certain colonial goods—such as tobacco—that could be shipped only to England or to other English colonies. The Navigation Acts interfered more with Chesapeake exports than with the commerce of New England and the middle colonies, whose principal exports—fish, lumber, and flour—were not enumerated and could legally be sent directly to their most important markets in the West Indies. By the end of the seventeenth century, colonial trade flowed in and out of channels defined and regulated by the British Empire.

King Philip’s War and the Consolidation of Royal Authority

The monarchy took steps to exercise greater control over colonial governments. The middle colonies, Maryland, and South Carolina were all proprietary colonies closely linked to the crown, and Virginia had been a royal colony since 1624. The monarchy now directed its efforts toward the New England colonies, which had developed their own distinctively independent Puritan governments. A devastating war with the Indians (King Philip’s War, 1675—1676) created the pretext for a royal investigation of whether New England adhered to English laws. This resulted in the crown’s decision to revoke the Massachusetts Bay Company’s charter and to incorporate all the colonies stretching from Maine to Maryland into one entity called the Dominion of New England, appointing Sir Edmund Andros as royal governor. When news reached America of James II’s ouster in the Glorious Revolution, a rebellion broke out in Boston, and Andros and his followers were arrested. However, the days of Puritan independence and complete self-rule were over.

Conclusion: An English Model of Colonization in North America, pp. 98–99

At the close of the seventeenth century, the English New World colonies were firmly established. The English empire in North America was quite different from its Spanish counterpart. The settlers relied on agriculture and trade rather than mining precious metals. Religious, political, social, and economic diversity could be seen throughout the settled areas, and free white males enjoyed an unusual degree of political influence for that time. Over the following half century, the colonies would experience surprising changes.

After defeat of the Spanish Armanda in 1588, English confidence in their military’s ability to defeat Spain gave King James I the courage to seek Spain-like profits in North America (Roark 55). In 1606 he granted the Virginia Company of London the first English charter to colonize North America, initiating the first wave of Europeans to North American shores. Twenty-three years later his son, King Charles I, granted a royal charter to a joint stock company founded by a group of Puritan merchants to colonize New England. The charter included a special provision that allowed the company to have its government in the colony instead of England (Roark 55). Two years later, in 1631, King Charles I granted ownership of 6.5 million acres surrounding the Chesapeake Bay to his friend, George Calvert, who hoped to establish a refuge for Catholics. The first two colonies began as royal charters granted to joint stock companies and the last as a proprietorship. However all three colonies came under royal control and English rule as a result of the Indian conflicts and the Glorious Revolution. The policy of salutary neglect added to the wealth of the British Empire in the beginning but eventually led up to the American Revolution.

Jamestown was founded by the Virginia Company of London, a joint stock company, a year after King James I granted the charter in 1606. This charter gave shareholders the authority to rule over the colony through a company appointed governor. The Virginia Company created the House of Burgesses, a representative assembly, in 1618. The first such assembly in colonial America it was intended to encourage those who wanted more freedom to migrate to Virginia. However, the company included a stipulation requiring laws passed by the House of Burgess to be approved by the company first (”London Company”).

Jamestown became the first permanent English settlement in the western hemisphere and was originally founded as a trading outpost. In the beginning Jamestown struggled to survive and ultimately failed as a trading venture. The Virginia Company expected to reap the same rewards as the Spaniards did a century before. They sent skilled craftsman, silk dressers, metal smiths, and caviar makers in anticipation of finding gold, silkworms, and roe (Reilly). Jamestown failed as business venture because that the Indians had no valuable products to exchange for English goods, and because the crops the Company hoped to provide them with a profit wasn’t there. No farmers or laborers were aboard the first ships that arrived, in their place were gentleman and servants who never labored nor farmed in their lives and believed that such work was beneath them (Reilly).

With the no one willing to plant seeds and maintain the fields, crops simply were not planted and food quickly began to run out. The early settlers soon faced starvation and disease soon began to spread among them. The colonists were rescued by the Algonquian Indians in September of 1607(”United States History”). They traded corn with the colonists for English goods. When this wasn’t enough to satisfy them the colonists sent Captain John Smith to bargain with the Indians. The friction between the Indians and the colonists festered when the Indians refused to trade food with them and Captain Smith was sent to raid their villages and steal their foodstuffs. Captain Smith was able to keep thirty-eight of the original settlers alive until the next shipment of food and colonist arrived from England four months later.

The salvation of Jamestown came with the discovery that tobacco grew well there. They decided to grow tobacco because in the early 1600s tobacco was in short supply, and was very expensive to buy. They realized that growing it would be highly profitable. Tobacco changed the culture of the colony and settlers rushed out to claim lands along navigable rivers so ships could reach them and allow them to bring their crops to market. They didn’t form towns or large communities like the Puritans did in New England because tobacco needed plenty of room to grow, and by 1624 two thousand pounds of tobacco were being shipped yearly to England. Growing tobacco became the beat of the drum that the colony danced to. It became the driving force of life in the colony and everything was planned around its cultivation, harvesting, and preparation (Reilly).

Seventeen years after the colony was founded the monarchy recognized the potential to increase its wealth through the tobacco trade and used the mortality rate of the colonists as an excuse to charge the Virginian Company with mismanagement and dissolved its charter. The colony came under the control of the royal government, and allowed the local government’s House of Burgess to survive the changeover. As the supply of tobacco surpassed the demand, Virginians had to grow more and more tobacco to earn the same amount of money. They need two important things in order do so; they needed more land and laborers. Both of these needs were met with the influx of indentured servants seeking to stake out their futures in America (”United States History “).

In 1629, King Charles I granted a royal charter to a joint stock company founded by a group of Puritan merchants and gentleman called the Massachusetts Bay Company. The company chose John Winthrop to lead a group of Non-Separatist English Puritans to the new world (Roark 80). In the spring of 1630, Winthrop guided one thousand men, women, and children on eleven ships to America (Reilly). The charters given to the Massachusetts Bay Company and the Virginia Company of London’s were identical with one exception. The Massachusetts Bay Company’s charter contained a unique provision that permitted the Company to locate their governing body in the colony rather than England, and were the first company under a royal charter to do so (Roark 80).

In America, the settlers transformed the General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Company into a colonial legislature. In the General Court of the Company each shareholder had a vote; in the colonial legislature each qualified settler was given a vote. However, the right to vote and to hold office was limited to men who were Puritan church members; as a result this prevented women and non-puritans from participation in the political process of the colony (Reilly). Winthrop also created representative institutions within each town, and the Puritans established Congregationalism as the state-supported religion, which effectively barred members of other faiths from conducting services (Reilly).

New England settlements and economy were very different than Virginias. The Puritans, as a component of their religious views, came to the colony with the understanding that they would live in villages or towns. The Puritans believed they should live in groups so that Christian virtues could be practiced (Reilly). Puritans practiced the “open field system” of farming with the intention of spreading the risk of losing crops in a drought or flood among its settlers. This system was not a very efficient way to farm due to the allocation of small strips of land, and was geared more toward local consumption than as cash crops (Reilly). Farming never took off like it did in Virginia; the soil in New England tended to be exceptionally rocky and the growing season was short: the winters came early and spring arrived late.

They grew enough to feed their families and to stay out of debt. Settlers supported themselves by growing crops they could sell to new arrivals to the colony, but when immigration to the colony began to slow down New Englanders had to find another way to earn a living, and so they built their economy on distilling rum, fishing, and shipbuilding, and were not restricted on where they could send their goods like in Virginia (Reilly).

The colonist in New England did not encounter the kind of hostility with Indians as the Jamestown settlers did when they arrived to America. Mainly because ten years before the Puritans arrived an epidemic nearly wiped the Indians out (Roark 80). Indians that the colonists did encounter were relatively peaceful and the New Englanders tended to treat the Indians more kindly than the southern colonies.

However, the growth of the European population in New England meant more land was required and so the agreement struck between the Indians and the colonists tended to be encroached upon. By 1675, the tension between the Indians and the colonists reached a fever pitch and war erupted. Battles followed resulting in the destruction of thirteen colonial settlements, thousands of lives lost on both sides, (Roark 97) and the birth of anti Indian attitudes among the North American colonist (Reilly). The war between the Indians and the English came to be known as King Phillips War. King Phillip was the name the Puritans gave to the Wampanoag chief Metacomet.

In 1676, in the wake of King Phillips war, the King of England, looking for an excuse to take control of New England, dispatched an agent to investigate whether English Laws were being abided by the colonists (Roark 97). As a result the Massachusetts charter was revoked in 1684 converting New England into a Royals colony and essentially ending the Puritan form of government (Roark 97).In 1686 Massachusetts and colonies north of Maryland were incorporated into the “Dominion of New England” and governed by Sir Edmund Andros. The Dominion of New England nullified land titles and threatened property-owners with the possibility they could lose their land. The Dominion of New England also replaced church membership with property ownership as the prerequisite for voting in colony elections (Roark 97-98).

In 1631 King Charles’ friend, George Calvert (aka Lord Baltimore), was granted ownership of 6.5 million acres of land surrounding the Chesapeake Bay. George Calvert (Reilly) wanted to create a safe haven for Catholics who were suffering discrimination in England (Roark 64). However George Calvert died that year and his son, Cecilius Calvert, inherited the charter and his father’s aristocratic title as Lord Baltimore (Reilly).On March 25, 1634; one-hundred and fifty settlers arrived to establish the colony of Maryland which was named after King Charles’ wife Henrietta Maria (Reilly). The population of the colony grew slowly over the next twenty something years but attracted more Protestant settlers than Catholics (Roark 64).

According to the charter granted by the King, Baltimore owned Maryland as a private estate and could hold or dispose of the lands as he saw fit (Roark 64). As Maryland’s proprietor Baltimore had the authority to create churches, name ministers, and appoint public officials. The charter also gave settlers the right to have a representative assembly but did not clearly specify its powers (Roark 64). Members of the assembly argued that they had power to initiate legislation and Baltimore reluctantly agreed. Maryland’s government, politics, and society were almost identical to Virginias. Maryland’s cash crop was Tobacco and their economic way of life mimicked their Virginian neighbor (Reilly).

The English Parliaments’ move to depose James II, a zealous catholic, and reassert Protestant influence in the English empire came to be known as the “Glorious Revolution.” The aftermath of the Glorious Revolution had a ripple effect that was felt by every English colony in North America, and although relatively non violent in England, had an adverse impact on British rule in the colonies. It gave New England colonist justification to throw the deposed James’ officials in jail, destroy the Dominion of New England, re-established the Puritan form of government and restored all land titles. In Maryland John Coode led Protestants to overthrow the colony’s Pro-Catholic government (Roark 98) fearing they wouldn’t recognize the new Protestant King. Lord Baltimore’s proprietary government and the Coode’s rebellion ended in 1692 when King William III sent his representative to rule.

England’s policy of Salutary Neglect intended to keep the American colonies obedient to England by allowing the enforcement of the Navigation Acts to be relaxed. During the periods of salutary neglect, American colonies nearly evolved into an independent political and economic system. The upside is that it made Britain a very wealthy and powerful nation and when England attempted to rein in the colonist it backfired and in the end led to the American Revolution (”History of Colonial America”).

Virginia, Maryland, and Massachusetts Bay colonies all began for different reasons. For Virginia colony it was to make a profit and find wealth, for Massachusetts Bay it was to set an example for England to follow, and for Maryland it was to create a refuge for Catholics facing religious persecution. All three struggled in their own ways to survive and adapted to their environments. The years passed and the colonies began to thrive and produce products and build wealth. The British Empire looking for excuses to gain control did so when the opportunities presented themselves. The Glorious Revolution in England had a profound effect on the British rule in the colonies and temporarily returned control back to the colonists. Salutary neglect unintentionally planted the seeds of rebellion by it lack of enforcement of Laws which gave the colonies the opportunity to develop an independent identity from England.

Works Cited

“American Revolution “Microsoft Encarta 2007. 16 ed. CD-ROM. Redmond: Microsoft Corporation
“London Company.” Microsoft Encarta 2007. 16 ed. CD-ROM. Redmond: Microsoft Corporation
“History of Colonial America.”Microsoft Encarta 2007. 16 ed. CD-ROM. Redmond: Microsoft Corporation

Reilly, Gretchen Ann. “American History before 1870.” Podcast. Dr. Gretchen Ann Reilly. iTunes. August 2007. Temple College Temple, TX, 2006. <http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=212324647>
Roark, James L., et al. The American Promise: A Compact History, Third Edition. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2007.

“United States History.” Microsoft Encarta 2007. 16 ed. CD-ROM. Redmond: Microsoft Corporation