Colonial America

by Richard Middleton, Anne Lombard

  The assembly quickly accepted Penn's concessions, though the pattern of Pennsylvanian politics did not change. The proprietary family still controlled the executive branch and the granting of all land, which were the issues behind the next dispute with the assembly.

  In a separate proviso Penn indicated that the three Delaware counties could separate from Pennsylvania. They would keep the same governor and privileges, the only difference being that their representatives would meet at Newcastle to frame their own laws. Delaware's inhabitants quickly seized this option, since most of them disliked the Quakers. Nor was their departure in November 1702 opposed, since they had been overrepresented in the assembly. One element of contention was thus removed, though Delaware itself remained in an anomalous position, since its separation was never formally recognized by the Crown.

  Penn's legacy for his colony included continued peaceful relations with the native inhabitants. Indeed, Pennsylvania (along with its neighbors, Delaware and New Jersey) was unusual among the English colonies in that before the mid-1700s it was spared the violent confrontations between settlers and Native American inhabitants that nearly tore so many of the other colonies apart. This was due in part to the Quakers' good luck in having arrived relatively late in the process of colonizing North America.

  Penn also contributed to the colony's good relations with the Indians by consistently following his policy of purchasing land before claiming it for the colony. In this he undoubtedly learned from the experience of other colonizers that it was prudent to do so. During the 1690s Penn once again tried to purchase land for trade reasons, this time from the Iroquois in the Susquehanna River region. New York claimed it had already acquired the land as a gift from the Iroquois. However, Penn persisted, and in 1701, after the Iroquois had become disenchanted with their two-and-a-half-decade-long relationship with New York, they agreed to sell the Susquehanna Valley land to Penn.

  It would be misleading to suggest that Penn's policies towards the Indians were purely benevolent. The Lenapes (Delawares), interpreted the sale of their land differently than the English, and expected continuing payments in exchange for allowing settlers to build farms along the Delaware River. Penn's decision to invite refugees from other tribes, including the Nanticokes and the Conoys from Maryland and the Shawnees from South Carolina, to resettle in the region did not necessarily benefit the Lenapes. However, the evidence makes clear that Penn and the original Quaker leaders of the colony were sincerely committed to maintaining peaceful relationships with the local Indians. These relationships persisted for as long as Penn was alive.

  Historians have extolled the Quakers for their commitment to principles that we now admire. First, they alone believed in religious toleration at this time, as a consequence of which they welcomed other groups, making Pennsylvania the first province to offer refuge to the oppressed. The Quakers also believed in simplicity of manners and in human equality, holding that God created all human beings in his image. Only the Quakers attempted to treat the Indians as equals, while this same egalitarianism was leading them to denounce slavery as well. It also led them to be more equitable than any contemporary English society in their treatment of women. Moreover, only in Pennsylvania was charity distributed without the recipient being expected to acknowledge shame. Finally their pragmatism made the Quakers exponents of technology, helping to launch the technologically innovative society that Americans would later develop.19

  With so much that is praiseworthy about the Quakers, it has sometimes seemed incongruous that they were unable to conduct their political affairs in the spirit of friendship and peace for which they are so well known. But their very contentiousness, produced in part by the anti-authoritarian spirit of the Quaker religion, helped to produce a political system that was in many ways the most democratic in all of the English colonies. With the 1701 Charter of Liberties, Penn gave up his ideal of a benign, deferential society and pragmatically agreed to a model of government in which ordinary people would have considerable power. The unicameral legislature discouraged the creation of a political elite based on wealth. The assembly also had substantial powers to operate without interference from either the proprietor or the Crown. Pennsylvania's political system, in its early years, was unusually responsive to popular pressure.

  While Penn was making his final dispositions for Pennsylvania, another province in which he had once had an interest was also undergoing change. The situation in East and West New Jersey was becoming increasingly confused as one group of proprietors sold its interest to another. Because these changes made the titles to their land uncertain, in 1700 some 200 inhabitants of East New Jersey appealed to the Crown for redress and charged the proprietors with failing to defend the colonies. The Board of Trade took note of their petition, not least because the old suspicion resurfaced that the acts of trade were being ignored. Edward Randolph, the old nemesis of Massachusetts, compiled a long list of misdemeanors that became the basis for recommendations that all the proprietary colonies be taken over by the Crown. After a series of negotiations, the proprietors agreed to surrender their governmental powers to both East and West New Jersey in return for keeping their land rights in 1702.

  To help unify the province, Queen Anne, William III's successor, ordered that the council should comprise six men from the east and six from the west, with the assembly alternating between Perth Amboy and Burlington. Freeholders who held 100 acres of land would qualify for the vote. Although New Jersey was to have the same governor as New York until 1738, it was now a full-fledged royal colony.

  1. Although secondary accounts of the Salem episode often assert that the afflicted girls engaged as a group in fortune-telling, a recent examination of the primary sources shows that only one unnamed girl tried fortune-telling, an event which contemporaries thought to have no bearing on the girls' subsequent afflictions. Mary Beth Norton, In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 (New York, 2002), 23.

  2. For Tituba's role in the early stages of the event, see Elaine G. Breslaw, Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem: Devilish Indians and Puritan Fantasies (New York, 1996). An assize court met periodically to hear serious criminal cases that could not be handled by the regular quarterly county court sessions.

  3. Courts of oyer and terminer were convened specially for extraordinary or unusually serious criminal prosecutions.

  4. For the emphasis on the Indian wars, see Mary Beth Norton, In the Devil's Snare (2002), as well as Richard Godbeer, The Devil's Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England (New York, 1992).

  5. The emphasis on the stresses of the times, particularly the loss of the charter and the revolt against Andros, was most famously offered by Perry Miller, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Cambridge, Mass., 1953). For the failure of the judiciary, see Peter Charles Hoffer, The Salem Witchcraft Trials: A Legal History (Lawrence, 1997).

  6. The charge of fraud was first hinted at by Thomas Brattle, a Boston merchant, in an open letter on October 8, 1692. It was later taken up by Thomas Hutchinson in his History of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts-Bay, Vol. 2 (Boston, 1768). For a similar, more recent interpretation, see Bernard Rosenthal, Salem Story: Reading the Witch Trials of 1692 (Cambridge, 1993). Apart from hysteria, there are two other medical interpretations. One is that the accusers had contracted ergot poisoning after eating contaminated rye bread, which caused them to hallucinate. Another is that the accusers were suffering from encephalitis, or inflammation of the brain, caused by a virus. However, the ergot interpretation fails to explain why the afflicted were the only sufferers, not the population at large. For this interpretation, see Linda Caporeal, “Ergotism: Satan Loosed in Salem,” Science, 192 (1976), 21–6. It was promptly rebutted by Nicholas P. Spanos and Jack Gottlieb, “Ergotism and the Salem Village Witch Trials,” Science, 194 (1976), 1390–4. The possibility of encephalitis is advanced by Laurie Winn Carlson, A Fever in Salem (Chicago, 2000).

  7. For an interpretation of the trials based o
n gender, see Carol F. Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England (New York, 1987). The seventeenth-century belief that women were morally weaker is discussed by Elizabeth Reis, Damned Women: Sinners and Witches in Puritan New England (Ithaca, 1997).

  8. For the thesis concerning the location of the accusers and accused, see Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft (Cambridge, Mass., 1974). Recent questions about the evidence are explored in Richard Latner, “Salem Witchcraft, Factionalism, and Social Change Reconsidered: Were Salem's Witch-Hunters Modernization's Failures?” William and Mary Quarterly, 65 (2008), 423–48, and Benjamin Ray, “The Geography of Witchcraft Accusations in 1692 Salem Village,” William and Mary Quarterly, 65 (2008), 449–78.

  9. See Chapter 8, part 3.

  10. For further information on French policies towards their allies, see Chapter 15, sections 3 and 4.

  11. Accounts of the attack on Deerfield include Richard I. Melvoin, New England Outpost: War and Society in Colonial Deerfield (New York, 1989), John Demos, The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America (New York, 1994), and Evan Haefeli and Kevin Sweeney, Captors and Captives: The 1704 French and Indian Raid on Deerfield (Amherst, 2003). Demos describes the attempts of the Williams family to reclaim Eunice over a period of almost 70 years. Although contemporary whites were astonished by the readiness of European captives and sometimes runaways to accept the Indian way of life, historians have shown that the Indians' more egalitarian way of life could be very attractive to escaped servants, army deserters, and young women. Haefeli and Sweeney explain the reasons for and meaning of the raid for its varied Indian, French, and English participants.

  12. In reality, only one of the Indians was a sachem, let alone a king or emperor in the European sense. See Eric Hinderaker, “The ‘Four Indian Kings’ and the Imaginative Construction of the First British Empire,” William and Mary Quarterly, 53 (1996), 487–526.

  13. The centrality of these issues to Carolina politics in the 1680s and 1690s is covered in Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670–1717 (New Haven, 2002).

  14. Accounts of the war's causes have varied. Recently discovered evidence shows that the Yamasees themselves went to war because they were convinced the English planned to attack them. See William L. Ramsay, “‘Something Cloudy in Their Looks’: The Origins of the Yamasee War Reconsidered,” Journal of American History, 90 (2003), 44–75.

  15. This was the last time that Indians were enslaved in any significant numbers.

  16. The exception was Lord Carteret who gave up his governmental but not his property rights.

  17. See, for example, Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York, 1955).

  18. For the full text see W. Keith Kavenagh, Foundations of Colonial America: A Documentary History (New York, 1973), Vol. 2, 1160–4.

  19. Daniel J. Boorstin in The Americans: The Colonial Experience (New York, 1958) argues that the Quakers were inflexible doctrinaires. For a more sympathetic account, see Frederick B. Tolles, Quakers and the Atlantic Culture (New York, 1960). For a more recent, generally neutral analysis, see Richard S. Dunn and Mary Maples Dunn, eds, The World of William Penn (Philadelphia, 1986). For a summary of the consensus view on the Quakers in Pennsylvania, see Ned C. Landsman, “The Middle Colonies: New Opportunities for Settlement, 1660–1700,” in Nicholas Canny, ed., The Origins of Empire: British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century (New York, 1998), 351–74.

  Part III

  The Eighteenth-Century Provinces in a Changing Continent

  Map 10 Eastern North America, 1715–1760.

  Chapter 10

  The Economy and Labor System in British North America

  1690 Paper money is first issued in the colonies by Massachusetts.

  1693 Rice culture is introduced into South Carolina.

  1699 Parliament bans the export of colonial woolens.

  1704 Parliament grants bounties for the production of naval stores.

  1707 Parliament regulates the silver content of colonial coinage.

  1718 Parliament passes the Transportation of Convicts Act.

  1720 The South Sea Bubble causes financial panic in Britain.

  1723 The Pennsylvania loan office issues its first notes.

  1725 Pennsylvania passes the Flour Inspection Act.

  1730 Virginia passes the Tobacco Inspection Act.

  1732 Parliament passes the Hat Act.

  1733 Parliament passes the Molasses Act.

  1735 The first poorhouse is established in Boston.

  1740 The Land and Silver banks are established in Massachusetts. Commercial wheat cultivation begins in the Chesapeake.

  1741 Indigo cultivation is introduced into South Carolina.

  1748 Maryland passes the Tobacco Inspection Act.

  1750 The Iron Act prohibits rolling and slitting mills.

  1751 The New England Currency Act is passed.

  1755 Paper money is first issued in Virginia.

  1 The British Atlantic Economy

  Money makes the world go round, it is popularly said. This aphorism was certainly true of the British North American colonial world, which was dominated by the need to make a living. The possession, creation, and spending of wealth determined people's goals, tastes, and living standards, as well as shaping their identities. For this reason the colonial economy is considered before the family, gender identity, religion, and culture.

  In order to understand the economic development of particular regions in the British North American colonies, it is first necessary to understand the broader transatlantic commercial system of which they and (after 1707) Great Britain1 were a part. As colonial promoters like Hakluyt had predicted, the creation of colonies in the seventeenth century had provided a destination for England's poor and unemployed and produced revenues for the Crown. Moreover the colonies had become inextricably linked to the mother country through trade, though this trading system had developed in ways that Hakluyt could not have foreseen.

  Over the course of the seventeenth century, between 300,000 and 400,000 Englishmen left England to settle in North America and the Caribbean.2 The vast majority of them were poor, as Hakluyt had suggested they would be. They were also primarily young and male. This large exodus of marriageable young men had a predictable impact on the fertility rate in England. The shortage of young men combined with poor economic conditions contributed to a decline in marriages and a decline in English population growth after 1650.3 This demographic shift helped to solve the terrible crisis of unemployment which had fuelled out-migration in the first place. Thus by 1700 poor, unskilled English youths were less likely to move to the colonies since they could find paid work at home. In turn the relative scarcity of labor in England drove up real wages (wages measured by their purchasing power), so that by the 1680s ordinary people had small amounts of disposable income for the first time in English history.

  Economic historians have suggested that even though the extent of people's new purchasing power was not great, it made a difference to England's economy. Wages rose at a time when new products from the colonies were becoming available for sale in England, and ordinary Englishmen and -women responded by changing their buying habits and becoming consumers of colonial staple commodities. The development of a market for tobacco offers an example. When English merchants first began to import tobacco early in the seventeenth century, smoking tobacco became a fashionable activity among English gentlemen and merchants. Because tobacco commanded a high price, though, it was only a luxury commodity. Ordinary people could not afford it. Then over the course of the seventeenth century, as the spread of tobacco production caused the price to fall, ordinary English laborers discovered for themselves the joys of nicotine addiction and demand for tobacco grew exponentially. In response to the new demand, imports of tobacco from the American colonies into England expanded from one million
pounds in 1640 to 28 million pounds in 1700.4

  The development of a market for sugar followed a similar trajectory. When first introduced into English markets, sugar was a luxury consumed only by the rich. As production became more efficient and the price of sugar fell, the English population developed a new taste for sweetness. Sugar exports from the West Indian colonies (mostly Barbados and Jamaica) rose from 8,000 tons in 1663 to 25,000 tons in 1700. During the eighteenth century, demand for sugar rose even faster as British consumers developed a taste for imported tea (and to a lesser extent coffee and chocolate) sweetened with sugar from the West Indies, and consumed as much of it as could be produced.5

  Historians see this change in consumption patterns as part of a larger phenomenon called the “consumer revolution,” which represented a new type of human behavior not seen in peasant societies. In the past, consumption of non-necessities had been limited to the rich. However around the end of the seventeenth century ordinary English people began to aspire to enjoy novel or exotic products that could make their lives more comfortable (or at least more stimulating). Widespread desire for novelty fuelled demand for tobacco, sugar, tea, calicoes from India, and tableware from China, producing new patterns of spending, especially among the middling sort but even among poor laborers.6

  English consumers' new ability and willingness to spend money on colonial products in turn spurred other kinds of trade, much of it channeled in particular ways by the English navigation laws, or the mercantilist system. Indeed the navigation laws would encourage additional commercial connections and economic activity which the original theorists of mercantilism could hardly have foreseen. English traders who carried tobacco from the Chesapeake to London then re-exported it to continental Europe. Merchants who brought sugar from the West Indies to England then carried English manufactured goods to sell to planters on their return voyages. By 1700 English merchants had replaced the Dutch as the world's premier slave-traders, carrying slaves by the thousands from West Africa to the West Indies (and increasingly to the North American mainland).7 Products not covered by the Navigation Acts, such as fish and furs from Newfoundland or Maine, could be taken straight to European ports, where they could be traded for commodities like wine. Lumber and livestock from New England and grain from Pennsylvania could be shipped to both the British and the French West Indies, and exchanged for sugar, which could be distilled into rum and sold within the colonies. Because the navigation laws had provided incentives for English investors to build more ships, the number of ships available for global trading voyages more than doubled between 1650 and 1700. This reduced the cost of shipping goods (and lowered their prices). The increase in the size of the merchant marine expanded the number of vessels available to the king's navy, making it possible for the English government to drive out its competitors in the global trade. By the end of the seventeenth century, Britain had displaced Holland as the financial and commercial leader of Europe and was also experiencing the beginnings of the phenomenon known as the Industrial Revolution.